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The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work
A guide for individuals and organizations navigating the complex and often ambiguous Future of Work
We stand at an inflection point where technology can be leveraged to unleash human potential, or it can pit humans against machines. Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts have brought us to this place in order to construct this comprehensive and approachable guide to the future of work.
Blending insights from interviews with hundreds of executives with insights on professional and cultural identity, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes the world of work has undergone and posits the solution: create new systems that detach identity from work and connect it to purpose. This purpose, the authors suggest, will motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of identity throughout the workforce. Only then can we embrace a new approach to work that places learning and adaptability at its center.
Designed to be a comprehensive, yet quick, read with 75 graphic illustrations that translate complex information into actionable steps, The Adaptation Advantage will help leaders at all levels and across industry recognize that:
The Future of Work for both individuals and organizations is steeped in rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. To successfully learn and adapt, we have to be willing to let go of both "the way we have always done it" and "who we think we are" Leaders must become comfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity to become champions of human potential With an insightful foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman, The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work is an important resource for all leaders looking to help people develop the resilient, adaptive identities necessary to flourish in the rapidly changing workplace.
We stand at an inflection point where technology can be leveraged to unleash human potential, or it can pit humans against machines. Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have dedicated the last 5 years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts have brought us to this place in order to construct this comprehensive and approachable guide to the future of work.
Blending insights from interviews with hundreds of executives with insights on professional and cultural identity, The Adaptation Advantage explains the profound changes the world of work has undergone and posits the solution: create new systems that detach identity from work and connect it to purpose. This purpose, the authors suggest, will motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of identity throughout the workforce. Only then can we embrace a new approach to work that places learning and adaptability at its center.
Designed to be a comprehensive, yet quick, read with 75 graphic illustrations that translate complex information into actionable steps, The Adaptation Advantage will help leaders at all levels and across industry recognize that:
The Future of Work for both individuals and organizations is steeped in rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation. To successfully learn and adapt, we have to be willing to let go of both "the way we have always done it" and "who we think we are" Leaders must become comfortable with vulnerability and ambiguity to become champions of human potential With an insightful foreword by New York Times columnist and best-selling author Thomas L. Friedman, The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work is an important resource for all leaders looking to help people develop the resilient, adaptive identities necessary to flourish in the rapidly changing workplace.
208 pages, Paperback
Published April 14, 2020
97 people are currently reading
534 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 12, 2021
Truly enjoyed this book. My lovely wife had recommended it. I found so many nice ideas and concepts applicable to my job and teams at work.
January 14, 2022
This is one of the best non-fiction, leadership books I have ever read. It is the mentality that I have had since I first started my career without realizing it. Rather than relying on fancy degrees and prior experience, it is important to gauge the adaptability of individuals and provide them with the opportunities to succeed. Automation is all around us, but it won't take away human functionality. Great read!
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October 31, 2022The Adaptation Advantage (2020) explores how to navigate the future of work – without worrying about the robots taking over. It provides actionable insights on how to tap into uniquely human attributes like adaptation to excel.
FULL SCRIBE https://shrib.com/#Sophia22gY4YE
Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever. At the current crossroads, you face a choice: to dig in or adopt a new mindset. In this week’s reading recommendation, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley explain how you can come out on top of the technical, business and cultural shifts affecting the workplace by detaching your identity from your job title and connecting it to your sense of purpose.
Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley are leading voices in the Future of Work movement and have been collaborating on the nature of work, culture and innovation since 2015. HEATHER E. MCGOWAN (www.heathermcgowan.com) is an in-demand, internationally known speaker and Future of Work Strategist. She assists corporate clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in rethinking their business models, teams, and organizational structures to become resilient in changing markets. CHRIS SHIPLEY (www.cshipley.com) spent thirty years entrenched in the technology industry as a journalist and technology analyst, observing and predicting business and social transformations brought about by digital innovation. She advises companies on positioning, business modeling, and innovation practices, and serves on the boards of several startups and advisory panels.
---
Learn how to embrace adaptability in the workplace.
One second. And what happened?
Well, among other things, Visa processed 1,700 transactions; Amazon robots packed 17 packages; Twitter users posted 9,000 tweets; and people searched 76,000 things on Google. Oh, and 2.8 million emails were sent as well.
It’s hard to imagine the sheer scale of it all.
Stuff is changing fast these days. And if all this happens in a single second, imagine what happens in a day, a week, a year.
One of the many consequences of “things happening” is that the world of work is evolving at a pace that will make your head spin. You know this already – the media’s constantly declaring that robots are taking over our workspaces and coming after our jobs.
And it looks like we have a pretty good reason to be afraid – before too long, we’ll be out of work, sitting at home with nothing to do . . .
But, according to Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley, authors of The Adaptation Advantage, perhaps the opposite is true. Instead of believing we’re in competition with tech, we can use technology to our advantage, benefitting from the additional time that tech saves us in order to continue evolving. And this is our big advantage: our capacity to adapt.
---
Things are changing fast at the moment – and you’re already adapting.
Not to freak you out or anything, but if you think things are changing fast now . . . just you wait!
The rate of change is increasing exponentially. Which means that right now is actually the slowest rate of change you’ll ever experience.
Here’s just one example of the huge-scale changes that are underway.
When you think of the biggest populations on Earth, you probably think of China and India. But what about social media populations?
There are 2.2 billion Facebook users, compared to China’s 1.34 billion people. And 1.9 billion YouTubers, compared to 1.23 billion Indians.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also beat India when it comes to population size. And these are communities that have sprung up over just a few decades.
And there are other changes too. Demographically, huge shifts are taking place in the Western world in terms of race, religion, gender identity, aging populations. While attitudes towards issues like racism and sexual harassment have changed almost overnight. So it’s hard to imagine where exactly we’ll be in a decade’s time.
And when it comes to changes in the workplace, there’s, of course, the impact of technology, but that’s been going on for a while now. Computers have been changing the workplace for decades. So have smart digital assistants – like PalmPilot which launched wayback in 1996.
And there’s a good reason for this change: machines are genuinely better than humans at routine and well-defined tasks. That is just a fact.
But this doesn’t mean we’re about to lose our jobs to robots, in fact, we might say the opposite is true. Think about all the ways that technology already helps you in your work. Most of us use phones or laptops daily, we stay connected with people all over the world. You might use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to outsource work, platforms that help you break down big tasks into smaller, more manageable units – also known as the atomization of work.
Meanwhile, tech is also behind the automation of many work processes, from batch-sending emails to automatically updating calendars. We use tech in some cases to enhance human capabilities, a concept called augmentation. Just think of surgical robots helping doctors in ER – or of GPS systems allowing drivers to navigate their city quickly.
So, yes – tech is rapidly changing the workplace. But we are accommodating it. And it’s helping us. Thanks to these three A’s – atomization, automation and augmentation – tech is far from stealing our jobs, it’s actually giving us back precious moments which we can re-invest in ourselves; from learning new skills to re-prioritizing romantic relationships.
---
We need to stop defining ourselves by “what” we do.
So, how do you capitalize on this additional time? How do you figure out what to do with it? What to achieve in your personal life and career?
A good trick is to begin by shifting that question from “what exactly do you want to do?”, to “why exactly do you want to do it?”
How often have you been asked, “What do you do for a living?” And, be honest, how often have you asked the question yourself?
The exchange is ubiquitous. Chances are, when you meet someone, this is one of the first things you talk about. In fact, we define ourselves by our work – and we expect people to have clearly defined careers like “lawyer” or “doctor.”
We even encourage this attitude in young people. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up – and subtly nudge them in sensible directions when they tell us they’d like to grow up to be “a unicorn.” We also ask students what they want to major in; even in those incredibly formative years, we’re expecting them to specialize.
The narratives we tell ourselves about our careers are limiting. They drive people down particular paths that may not suit them and reinforce stereotypes – just think, for example, how few women have traditionally gone into scientific fields.
And these narratives do something else as well. They shield us from the most important truth about the world of work today: we cannot just do one thing any more! The world of work is changing incredibly fast and we have no option other than to adapt.
So, instead of thinking about a career in terms of a “What” question, think of it in terms of an evolving “Why” question.
Along the course of your career, you’ll experience setbacks – everyone does. Even the mighty Steve Jobs was famously fired from his own company, Apple. But as he reflected afterward, getting fired turned out to be a huge positive. Jobs found himself starting again. He tapped into a rich, new stream of creativity, founding Pixar and achieving huge success in a new industry – before triumphantly returning to Apple and steering the company to enormous global success.
---
We all need to develop an agile mindset and tap into what makes us unique as humans.
So how do you put your adaptation advantage into practice?
In short, it comes down to being agile – and to do this, you need to be constantly learning.
You’ll need to learn on an individual level, but also on the level of your business. There are four stages in the learning process that form a kind of S-curve on a graph: explore, experiment, execute, and expand.
In the first stage, you’re exploring what you or your company needs to improve. Maybe sales are sluggish; maybe your product is out of date. Then you start to experiment with new ideas – that’s when the curve of the S starts to shoot up in the middle. The execute stage puts the best of your new ideas into practice, and the expand phase optimizes them as you continue to learn about performance.
This isn’t just a one-off process; it’s something you need to repeat over and over, as and when your business requires it. Explore, experiment, execute, expand. And this is where agility comes into the equation. As other variable change you need to be able to keep moving – to keep embracing new projects, or new approaches to old projects.
Now, you may find yourself panicking at this stage. Maybe you’re wondering whether all of this continual, agile learning is also going to involve devoting time to picking up a bunch of brand-new skills, like engineering or coding. But thankfully, these aren’t the kind of skills that are going to be most useful to you on your journey.
According to the Institute for the Future, the skills that we need most of all, in fact relate to social intelligence and thinking in novel and adaptive ways. The World Economic Forum similarly values creativity and emotional intelligence above so many other skills. In a nutshell, social skills are key. They’re critical – maybe even more important than the tech skills we tend to want to prioritize, like STEM subjects in education: science, technology, engineering, and math. All across the world, it’s assumed that these hard, scientific skills are the ones we need in our new digital age. But according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2019 survey, 77 percent of CEOs said they couldn’t find workers with the uniquely human skills they needed: skills like creativity, problem solving, leadership, and – it’s in the title – adaptability.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tech is getting ever more effective at carrying out well-defined, mathematical tasks. But it’s still largely useless when it comes to things like creativity. These are our skills, they are our opportunity, with our non-machine brains, to excel.
---
The new world of work will require different things from its leaders.
So, who is going to be taking the lead in this bold new world of work?
Not the robots, that’s for sure! As we’ve learnt, leadership requires a uniquely human skill set.
But not everyone is a born leader. And in fact, many people have alarming tendencies when given positions of power. An amazing experiment from 2015 proved the point well. Dr. Dacher Kelter from the University of California, put groups of three people together to collaborate on a routine task. He randomly put one of the three people in charge and left them together in a room with nothing else but a tray of four chocolate chip cookies – four cookies between three people.
Dr. Kelter observed something interesting: in each study group, every single time, the person to take the extra cookie was – surprise, surprise – the leader. And according to Dr. Kelter, they enjoyed themselves – gleefully covering themselves in crumbs as their subordinates looked on.
If we look to history, as well as science, it becomes clear, there’s something inherently corrupting about power. So, how do we take steps to prevent bad leadership? We have to devote time to learning good leadership skills.
According to the author there are two key components to good leadership: first, you must model the way, next, you enable others to act.
Modeling the way is leadership in the truest sense: it’s being unafraid to go first, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and making sure your employees trust you. Given how much change is required in the workplace these days, leaders need to act with confidence when taking leaps of faith; this will help their employees to trust them.
Enabling other people to act, meanwhile, is about leaders trusting other people. Things aren’t just complicated these days; they’re complex – there’s an element of unpredictability. So a single leader is probably not going to be able to understand every part of their company’s work in detail. Leaders need to be OK with their employees knowing more than they do on certain topics. Leaders also need to create a work environment that allows other people to thrive, with an emphasis on wellness, respect, and psychological safety. Leading, quite simply, is not all about the bottom line any more – it’s about creating a great place for other people to work.
One last aspect of good leadership in a fast changing world: you need to know when to pivot. It sounds crazy, but it’s often the most profitable companies that find themselves at the greatest risk these days. Because when we get too comfortable, we forget the advantages of adaptation and we get stuck in old habits.
---
An adaptive organization is one that puts culture and capacity first.
We’re going to end by asking the question, what makes a successful organization? One traditional view is that organizations exist purely to serve their shareholders – that’s the view famously put forward by Milton Friedman in 1970. Friedman’s belief was incredibly influential for many years. But these days? Not so much.
Instead of focusing so relentlessly on the financials, it’s possible to look at organizations across two key areas: culture and capacity.
We’ve already touched on culture. It’s the atmosphere that leaders help to create within a company. A healthy company culture is likely to lead to prosperous and innovative work. Think of culture as your company’s heart.
Capacity, on the other side, is your organization’s brain. It’s how able you are to respond to challenges and opportunities – how well you cope as things change. There are practical concerns, like how much product you can make and which markets you can reach – but it’s also about your company’s mental capacity to handle change.
This is a more radical suggestion than it sounds at first. The goal of your organization isn’t value creation. It’s increased capacity – the ability to do more of what you do, even as things around you change.
The products that you’re creating, become an expression of your culture and proof of your capacity. They’re not the point of your company in and of themselves – not in a world where you might have to pivot at any moment and start making something else.
Recruiting for this adaptive organization is therefore extremely important. Let’s start with how not to recruit: by using job descriptions and resumes. That is far too old-fashioned. Because what an employee has to do today might not be what they’ll have to do tomorrow.
Imagine your company suddenly pivots to produce a new type of product out of necessity. Meanwhile, your employees continue doing exactly what their job description specifies. It doesn’t work.
Instead of a job description, offer potential employees a description of the company plus a description of your ideal candidate. Recruiting purely for specific talents isn’t quite right either – instead you should be aiming for people who are a good cultural fit, with a similar – but not too similar – sense of purpose.
In other words, diversity is also a key component – in every sense. Neurodiversity is hugely important, as well as employing people across different age ranges and from different backgrounds. Everyone can, and should, be learning from everyone else.
After all, that’s the advantage of being unique – take that, robots!
---
Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever.
The world is undergoing three “climate changes” – in the environment, in the market and in technology – which are forcing people to become more adept at adapting. Jobs change so quickly that your current job may not exist in 18 to 24 months. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will likely transform 100 percent of jobs in 10 years. The world is on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which cyber and biological systems will combine to create a completely digital economy. Change is now happening faster than ever in human history. As New York Times writer Thomas Friedman puts it: “Later is over.” To avert catastrophe for the next generation, humans must adapt, now.
Yes, the robots are coming – but they’re not here to take away all our jobs. In fact, the three a’s: atomization (the ability to split large tasks into smaller ones), automation (the ability to do things automatically, like send bulk-emails and update team calendars) and augmentation (using tech to enhance human capabilities) all these things are actually freeing up time and giving us more opportunity to tap into the skills that make us uniquely human – to work in ways that are truly suited to us. Leaders, for instance, can work on their emotional intelligence and social skills, while employees can devote time to creativity and innovation. As the world of work changes ever more rapidly, adaptation, the ability to pivot and change tack, is key. If you can harness this agility-mindset you’ll be able to create products that are a reflection of your company culture and proof of your capacity, rather than necessarily being the main-event. Ultimately, capacity and culture are the two main areas organizations need to focus on – It’s no longer just about the bottom line.
And to give you just one last piece of actionable advice. If you’re feeling nervous about the fast-pace of change, take some time to reflect on one of the hardest lessons you’ve learned.
Steve Jobs isn’t the only person whose worst career moment turned out to be his best. In fact, things that initially feel like bad news often have a way of benefitting us in the longer term. This is because we’re forced to adapt and go beyond what we initially thought was the limit of our capacity. So, think about the hardest experiences you’ve faced so far in your career, take a moment to write down the answers to these questions: What did you learn from the experience? How did you adapt? You’ll probably discover that you’re already much more agile than you thought, so, hold onto that, and before you begin to worry about not being skilled enough in tech or science, take a deep breath and remind yourself of your uniquely human skill set. This is what is really going to give you the edge in life.
FULL SCRIBE https://shrib.com/#Sophia22gY4YE
Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever. At the current crossroads, you face a choice: to dig in or adopt a new mindset. In this week’s reading recommendation, Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley explain how you can come out on top of the technical, business and cultural shifts affecting the workplace by detaching your identity from your job title and connecting it to your sense of purpose.
Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley are leading voices in the Future of Work movement and have been collaborating on the nature of work, culture and innovation since 2015. HEATHER E. MCGOWAN (www.heathermcgowan.com) is an in-demand, internationally known speaker and Future of Work Strategist. She assists corporate clients ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies in rethinking their business models, teams, and organizational structures to become resilient in changing markets. CHRIS SHIPLEY (www.cshipley.com) spent thirty years entrenched in the technology industry as a journalist and technology analyst, observing and predicting business and social transformations brought about by digital innovation. She advises companies on positioning, business modeling, and innovation practices, and serves on the boards of several startups and advisory panels.
---
Learn how to embrace adaptability in the workplace.
One second. And what happened?
Well, among other things, Visa processed 1,700 transactions; Amazon robots packed 17 packages; Twitter users posted 9,000 tweets; and people searched 76,000 things on Google. Oh, and 2.8 million emails were sent as well.
It’s hard to imagine the sheer scale of it all.
Stuff is changing fast these days. And if all this happens in a single second, imagine what happens in a day, a week, a year.
One of the many consequences of “things happening” is that the world of work is evolving at a pace that will make your head spin. You know this already – the media’s constantly declaring that robots are taking over our workspaces and coming after our jobs.
And it looks like we have a pretty good reason to be afraid – before too long, we’ll be out of work, sitting at home with nothing to do . . .
But, according to Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley, authors of The Adaptation Advantage, perhaps the opposite is true. Instead of believing we’re in competition with tech, we can use technology to our advantage, benefitting from the additional time that tech saves us in order to continue evolving. And this is our big advantage: our capacity to adapt.
---
Things are changing fast at the moment – and you’re already adapting.
Not to freak you out or anything, but if you think things are changing fast now . . . just you wait!
The rate of change is increasing exponentially. Which means that right now is actually the slowest rate of change you’ll ever experience.
Here’s just one example of the huge-scale changes that are underway.
When you think of the biggest populations on Earth, you probably think of China and India. But what about social media populations?
There are 2.2 billion Facebook users, compared to China’s 1.34 billion people. And 1.9 billion YouTubers, compared to 1.23 billion Indians.
WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger also beat India when it comes to population size. And these are communities that have sprung up over just a few decades.
And there are other changes too. Demographically, huge shifts are taking place in the Western world in terms of race, religion, gender identity, aging populations. While attitudes towards issues like racism and sexual harassment have changed almost overnight. So it’s hard to imagine where exactly we’ll be in a decade’s time.
And when it comes to changes in the workplace, there’s, of course, the impact of technology, but that’s been going on for a while now. Computers have been changing the workplace for decades. So have smart digital assistants – like PalmPilot which launched wayback in 1996.
And there’s a good reason for this change: machines are genuinely better than humans at routine and well-defined tasks. That is just a fact.
But this doesn’t mean we’re about to lose our jobs to robots, in fact, we might say the opposite is true. Think about all the ways that technology already helps you in your work. Most of us use phones or laptops daily, we stay connected with people all over the world. You might use platforms like Upwork or Fiverr to outsource work, platforms that help you break down big tasks into smaller, more manageable units – also known as the atomization of work.
Meanwhile, tech is also behind the automation of many work processes, from batch-sending emails to automatically updating calendars. We use tech in some cases to enhance human capabilities, a concept called augmentation. Just think of surgical robots helping doctors in ER – or of GPS systems allowing drivers to navigate their city quickly.
So, yes – tech is rapidly changing the workplace. But we are accommodating it. And it’s helping us. Thanks to these three A’s – atomization, automation and augmentation – tech is far from stealing our jobs, it’s actually giving us back precious moments which we can re-invest in ourselves; from learning new skills to re-prioritizing romantic relationships.
---
We need to stop defining ourselves by “what” we do.
So, how do you capitalize on this additional time? How do you figure out what to do with it? What to achieve in your personal life and career?
A good trick is to begin by shifting that question from “what exactly do you want to do?”, to “why exactly do you want to do it?”
How often have you been asked, “What do you do for a living?” And, be honest, how often have you asked the question yourself?
The exchange is ubiquitous. Chances are, when you meet someone, this is one of the first things you talk about. In fact, we define ourselves by our work – and we expect people to have clearly defined careers like “lawyer” or “doctor.”
We even encourage this attitude in young people. We ask children what they want to be when they grow up – and subtly nudge them in sensible directions when they tell us they’d like to grow up to be “a unicorn.” We also ask students what they want to major in; even in those incredibly formative years, we’re expecting them to specialize.
The narratives we tell ourselves about our careers are limiting. They drive people down particular paths that may not suit them and reinforce stereotypes – just think, for example, how few women have traditionally gone into scientific fields.
And these narratives do something else as well. They shield us from the most important truth about the world of work today: we cannot just do one thing any more! The world of work is changing incredibly fast and we have no option other than to adapt.
So, instead of thinking about a career in terms of a “What” question, think of it in terms of an evolving “Why” question.
Along the course of your career, you’ll experience setbacks – everyone does. Even the mighty Steve Jobs was famously fired from his own company, Apple. But as he reflected afterward, getting fired turned out to be a huge positive. Jobs found himself starting again. He tapped into a rich, new stream of creativity, founding Pixar and achieving huge success in a new industry – before triumphantly returning to Apple and steering the company to enormous global success.
---
We all need to develop an agile mindset and tap into what makes us unique as humans.
So how do you put your adaptation advantage into practice?
In short, it comes down to being agile – and to do this, you need to be constantly learning.
You’ll need to learn on an individual level, but also on the level of your business. There are four stages in the learning process that form a kind of S-curve on a graph: explore, experiment, execute, and expand.
In the first stage, you’re exploring what you or your company needs to improve. Maybe sales are sluggish; maybe your product is out of date. Then you start to experiment with new ideas – that’s when the curve of the S starts to shoot up in the middle. The execute stage puts the best of your new ideas into practice, and the expand phase optimizes them as you continue to learn about performance.
This isn’t just a one-off process; it’s something you need to repeat over and over, as and when your business requires it. Explore, experiment, execute, expand. And this is where agility comes into the equation. As other variable change you need to be able to keep moving – to keep embracing new projects, or new approaches to old projects.
Now, you may find yourself panicking at this stage. Maybe you’re wondering whether all of this continual, agile learning is also going to involve devoting time to picking up a bunch of brand-new skills, like engineering or coding. But thankfully, these aren’t the kind of skills that are going to be most useful to you on your journey.
According to the Institute for the Future, the skills that we need most of all, in fact relate to social intelligence and thinking in novel and adaptive ways. The World Economic Forum similarly values creativity and emotional intelligence above so many other skills. In a nutshell, social skills are key. They’re critical – maybe even more important than the tech skills we tend to want to prioritize, like STEM subjects in education: science, technology, engineering, and math. All across the world, it’s assumed that these hard, scientific skills are the ones we need in our new digital age. But according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2019 survey, 77 percent of CEOs said they couldn’t find workers with the uniquely human skills they needed: skills like creativity, problem solving, leadership, and – it’s in the title – adaptability.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Tech is getting ever more effective at carrying out well-defined, mathematical tasks. But it’s still largely useless when it comes to things like creativity. These are our skills, they are our opportunity, with our non-machine brains, to excel.
---
The new world of work will require different things from its leaders.
So, who is going to be taking the lead in this bold new world of work?
Not the robots, that’s for sure! As we’ve learnt, leadership requires a uniquely human skill set.
But not everyone is a born leader. And in fact, many people have alarming tendencies when given positions of power. An amazing experiment from 2015 proved the point well. Dr. Dacher Kelter from the University of California, put groups of three people together to collaborate on a routine task. He randomly put one of the three people in charge and left them together in a room with nothing else but a tray of four chocolate chip cookies – four cookies between three people.
Dr. Kelter observed something interesting: in each study group, every single time, the person to take the extra cookie was – surprise, surprise – the leader. And according to Dr. Kelter, they enjoyed themselves – gleefully covering themselves in crumbs as their subordinates looked on.
If we look to history, as well as science, it becomes clear, there’s something inherently corrupting about power. So, how do we take steps to prevent bad leadership? We have to devote time to learning good leadership skills.
According to the author there are two key components to good leadership: first, you must model the way, next, you enable others to act.
Modeling the way is leadership in the truest sense: it’s being unafraid to go first, allowing yourself to be vulnerable and making sure your employees trust you. Given how much change is required in the workplace these days, leaders need to act with confidence when taking leaps of faith; this will help their employees to trust them.
Enabling other people to act, meanwhile, is about leaders trusting other people. Things aren’t just complicated these days; they’re complex – there’s an element of unpredictability. So a single leader is probably not going to be able to understand every part of their company’s work in detail. Leaders need to be OK with their employees knowing more than they do on certain topics. Leaders also need to create a work environment that allows other people to thrive, with an emphasis on wellness, respect, and psychological safety. Leading, quite simply, is not all about the bottom line any more – it’s about creating a great place for other people to work.
One last aspect of good leadership in a fast changing world: you need to know when to pivot. It sounds crazy, but it’s often the most profitable companies that find themselves at the greatest risk these days. Because when we get too comfortable, we forget the advantages of adaptation and we get stuck in old habits.
---
An adaptive organization is one that puts culture and capacity first.
We’re going to end by asking the question, what makes a successful organization? One traditional view is that organizations exist purely to serve their shareholders – that’s the view famously put forward by Milton Friedman in 1970. Friedman’s belief was incredibly influential for many years. But these days? Not so much.
Instead of focusing so relentlessly on the financials, it’s possible to look at organizations across two key areas: culture and capacity.
We’ve already touched on culture. It’s the atmosphere that leaders help to create within a company. A healthy company culture is likely to lead to prosperous and innovative work. Think of culture as your company’s heart.
Capacity, on the other side, is your organization’s brain. It’s how able you are to respond to challenges and opportunities – how well you cope as things change. There are practical concerns, like how much product you can make and which markets you can reach – but it’s also about your company’s mental capacity to handle change.
This is a more radical suggestion than it sounds at first. The goal of your organization isn’t value creation. It’s increased capacity – the ability to do more of what you do, even as things around you change.
The products that you’re creating, become an expression of your culture and proof of your capacity. They’re not the point of your company in and of themselves – not in a world where you might have to pivot at any moment and start making something else.
Recruiting for this adaptive organization is therefore extremely important. Let’s start with how not to recruit: by using job descriptions and resumes. That is far too old-fashioned. Because what an employee has to do today might not be what they’ll have to do tomorrow.
Imagine your company suddenly pivots to produce a new type of product out of necessity. Meanwhile, your employees continue doing exactly what their job description specifies. It doesn’t work.
Instead of a job description, offer potential employees a description of the company plus a description of your ideal candidate. Recruiting purely for specific talents isn’t quite right either – instead you should be aiming for people who are a good cultural fit, with a similar – but not too similar – sense of purpose.
In other words, diversity is also a key component – in every sense. Neurodiversity is hugely important, as well as employing people across different age ranges and from different backgrounds. Everyone can, and should, be learning from everyone else.
After all, that’s the advantage of being unique – take that, robots!
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Technology is transforming the world of work faster than ever.
The world is undergoing three “climate changes” – in the environment, in the market and in technology – which are forcing people to become more adept at adapting. Jobs change so quickly that your current job may not exist in 18 to 24 months. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty believes that artificial intelligence (AI) will likely transform 100 percent of jobs in 10 years. The world is on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which cyber and biological systems will combine to create a completely digital economy. Change is now happening faster than ever in human history. As New York Times writer Thomas Friedman puts it: “Later is over.” To avert catastrophe for the next generation, humans must adapt, now.
Yes, the robots are coming – but they’re not here to take away all our jobs. In fact, the three a’s: atomization (the ability to split large tasks into smaller ones), automation (the ability to do things automatically, like send bulk-emails and update team calendars) and augmentation (using tech to enhance human capabilities) all these things are actually freeing up time and giving us more opportunity to tap into the skills that make us uniquely human – to work in ways that are truly suited to us. Leaders, for instance, can work on their emotional intelligence and social skills, while employees can devote time to creativity and innovation. As the world of work changes ever more rapidly, adaptation, the ability to pivot and change tack, is key. If you can harness this agility-mindset you’ll be able to create products that are a reflection of your company culture and proof of your capacity, rather than necessarily being the main-event. Ultimately, capacity and culture are the two main areas organizations need to focus on – It’s no longer just about the bottom line.
And to give you just one last piece of actionable advice. If you’re feeling nervous about the fast-pace of change, take some time to reflect on one of the hardest lessons you’ve learned.
Steve Jobs isn’t the only person whose worst career moment turned out to be his best. In fact, things that initially feel like bad news often have a way of benefitting us in the longer term. This is because we’re forced to adapt and go beyond what we initially thought was the limit of our capacity. So, think about the hardest experiences you’ve faced so far in your career, take a moment to write down the answers to these questions: What did you learn from the experience? How did you adapt? You’ll probably discover that you’re already much more agile than you thought, so, hold onto that, and before you begin to worry about not being skilled enough in tech or science, take a deep breath and remind yourself of your uniquely human skill set. This is what is really going to give you the edge in life.
February 25, 2021
The Adaptation Advantage posits the solution to immense change: new ways to think about careers that detach our sense of pride and personal identity from our job title and connect it to our sense of purpose. The new, best question is - Where do you find purpose? Activating purpose, the authors suggest, will inherently motivate learning, engagement, empowerment, and lead to new forms of pride and identity throughout the workforce. Making this transition requires leaders who can attract and motivate cognitively diverse teams fueled by a strong sense of purpose in an environment of psychological safety.
I enjoyed the story of the Sony Walkman, introduced to the market in 1979. For the next 30 years, Sony continuously innovated the product line, altering styles and media from cassettes to compact discs to keep pace with fashion and technology innovation, ultimately selling 385 million units before discontinuing the Walkman brand in 2010. By contrast, Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and sold virtually the same volume—390 million units—before ending most production in 2014. What killed the iPod? The iPhone. Apple killed its iPod cash cow in 2007 at the peak of iPod sales. The lesson here: If we disrupt ourselves at our peak, we’ll be well prepared to surf the next wave of innovation, and we’ll own the timing of our transformation.
To become scalable learners, we need to become adept at drinking in new information as it flows by. Now, rather than learning how to work, we ought to work in order to learn. Pay attention to what interests you; that is the fuel source for your lifelong learning and the basis for your adaptation advantage. The ability to learn and adapt continuously requires both an agile learning mindset and a resilient and adaptive identity. It is nearly impossible to learn and adapt if your core identity is under threat. Learning, and more specifically unlearning, requires a comfort with vulnerability, an ease with ambiguity, an acceptance of not knowing, and, most importantly, an openness to failure.
Note the section around leading in continuous change and the leadership attributes discussed. I appreciate this summary: Modeling Vulnerability, Learning from Failure, and Providing the Psychological Safety that Builds Trusting Teams.
Companies are nothing more than culture and capacity. Culture is either intentional or accidental. An intentional culture is a deliberate construction of organizational leaders, created in collaboration with all those who are led. An accidental culture is an environment that emerges without intention from a collection of experiences. Accidental cultures are almost always toxic. Intentional culture begins with organization’s leadership. Frankly, it is organizational leadership. So, where do you start to build a great culture?
Author and leadership guru Simon Sinek reminds us that transformational leaders of all kinds set clear targets. From Martin Luther King Jr. 's leading the civil rights movement to the Wright Brothers’ chasing the dream of flight, great leaders craft a big vision and give their people a reason to follow them. We join our efforts with great leaders because we share a sense of purpose and live by common values. As Sinek would say, “Start with Why.” The center of every great culture is a clear sense of purpose.
Culture alone is not enough for effective adaptation. To get there, you must also nurture culture’s partner, capacity. This is where you need to connect the two concepts for effective leadership. If culture is the heart of a company, capacity is its brain. Simply put, capacity is an organization’s ability to respond to opportunity.
The authors say, “It will always be easier to look back and remember than it will be to look forward and imagine.”
They reference Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner from one of my favorite books, The Leadership Challenge. Model the Way and Enable Others to Act! Read it!
I enjoyed the story of the Sony Walkman, introduced to the market in 1979. For the next 30 years, Sony continuously innovated the product line, altering styles and media from cassettes to compact discs to keep pace with fashion and technology innovation, ultimately selling 385 million units before discontinuing the Walkman brand in 2010. By contrast, Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and sold virtually the same volume—390 million units—before ending most production in 2014. What killed the iPod? The iPhone. Apple killed its iPod cash cow in 2007 at the peak of iPod sales. The lesson here: If we disrupt ourselves at our peak, we’ll be well prepared to surf the next wave of innovation, and we’ll own the timing of our transformation.
To become scalable learners, we need to become adept at drinking in new information as it flows by. Now, rather than learning how to work, we ought to work in order to learn. Pay attention to what interests you; that is the fuel source for your lifelong learning and the basis for your adaptation advantage. The ability to learn and adapt continuously requires both an agile learning mindset and a resilient and adaptive identity. It is nearly impossible to learn and adapt if your core identity is under threat. Learning, and more specifically unlearning, requires a comfort with vulnerability, an ease with ambiguity, an acceptance of not knowing, and, most importantly, an openness to failure.
Note the section around leading in continuous change and the leadership attributes discussed. I appreciate this summary: Modeling Vulnerability, Learning from Failure, and Providing the Psychological Safety that Builds Trusting Teams.
Companies are nothing more than culture and capacity. Culture is either intentional or accidental. An intentional culture is a deliberate construction of organizational leaders, created in collaboration with all those who are led. An accidental culture is an environment that emerges without intention from a collection of experiences. Accidental cultures are almost always toxic. Intentional culture begins with organization’s leadership. Frankly, it is organizational leadership. So, where do you start to build a great culture?
Author and leadership guru Simon Sinek reminds us that transformational leaders of all kinds set clear targets. From Martin Luther King Jr. 's leading the civil rights movement to the Wright Brothers’ chasing the dream of flight, great leaders craft a big vision and give their people a reason to follow them. We join our efforts with great leaders because we share a sense of purpose and live by common values. As Sinek would say, “Start with Why.” The center of every great culture is a clear sense of purpose.
Culture alone is not enough for effective adaptation. To get there, you must also nurture culture’s partner, capacity. This is where you need to connect the two concepts for effective leadership. If culture is the heart of a company, capacity is its brain. Simply put, capacity is an organization’s ability to respond to opportunity.
The authors say, “It will always be easier to look back and remember than it will be to look forward and imagine.”
They reference Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner from one of my favorite books, The Leadership Challenge. Model the Way and Enable Others to Act! Read it!
October 31, 2022
The futuristic society. The workplace 2.0. The new technocratic world where everyone is a social leader and coach and whatnot. These ideas are based on loose assumptions and speculation. It's based on wishful globalist thinking and actual companies who implement these interventions do not do well in the long term. It's too paper house reality.
May 19, 2021
These leadership/management type books can be a slog or feel derivative. I feel like there is a much lower success rate on them then say novels. This one was overall pretty good — the writing moved along nicely, it wasn’t too academic, and it gave me some fresh perspectives on how to approach organizational dynamics and especially hiring (which is very timely for me).
There were times it felt a little repetitive and also situations where I felt the authors used a single study or anecdote to support their position, so there wasn’t enough backup or documentation. It also feels very geared toward start up/tech type environments and less applicable to industries like mine (water utility). For example, the authors don’t value reliability and encourage risk taking that can result in failure. That’s great in many circumstances but not when you are responsible for the water supply for 600,000+ people. The stakes of failure are just too high.
There were times it felt a little repetitive and also situations where I felt the authors used a single study or anecdote to support their position, so there wasn’t enough backup or documentation. It also feels very geared toward start up/tech type environments and less applicable to industries like mine (water utility). For example, the authors don’t value reliability and encourage risk taking that can result in failure. That’s great in many circumstances but not when you are responsible for the water supply for 600,000+ people. The stakes of failure are just too high.
January 4, 2021
Aimed at target audience of set-in-their-ways management. The concepts come through and I agree with the authors. Loved hearing the cognitive diversity piece, one of those I needed to hear repeated so I can go out and use it, the hen and stonecutter metaphors are also good portable takeaways. Job descriptions to be aspirational, about the company, about how the ideal candidate will act. That's great, but would be useful to see this applied to jobs from the majority of openings: service jobs, not the creative work hoped for for everyone in the future. What else needs to change in job descriptions to support this new work tour concept? Would have liked detail. There is a big gap between saying, yes these 21st c skills are needed and let's hire for them. As the prime example, would have been good to have more practical tips about how to advocate for, hire, and protect helpful contrarians. How do we create psychological safe space for failure? The case was made but examples or additional reading would be helpful so readers have next steps. Appreciated the jab at STEM and the hard facts on skills. Essentially, this is a book for leadership and I'd love to see resources for leaders to act on these ideas. (Note read in audiobook, may have missed an appendix or something).
November 20, 2024
This book is repetitive, so I feel that it is best read in tiny chunks over a longer period of time. It’s also one of those books that feels like it could be a blog post series instead of a book, but that’s nothing new for this genre.
Overall, the authors have a decent thesis, with some applicable and practical advice for people in all areas of business. I shared the book with a friend who works in HR… And briefly summarized the concepts in 2 to 4 sentences for the rest of my friends who I thought would be Interested in some regard. This book is not complicated.
Overall, the authors have a decent thesis, with some applicable and practical advice for people in all areas of business. I shared the book with a friend who works in HR… And briefly summarized the concepts in 2 to 4 sentences for the rest of my friends who I thought would be Interested in some regard. This book is not complicated.
July 6, 2022
There is some good material in this book - I especially identified with the section shifting focus away from "what your job title is." I have never read a book with so many extraneous and useless diagrams. Seriously, there is a diagram for everything. It started to make me laugh about 1/3 of the way in. Not only are the diagrams confusing, they aren't even referenced in the text. I just started to skip them.
March 22, 2024
“Navigating a world of rapid learning, unlearning, and adaptation requires that we become comfortable with ambiguity and vulnerability, allowing us to become champions of human potential in learning tours filled with unknowns.”
― Heather McGowan, The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work
― Heather McGowan, The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work
January 5, 2021
Definitely recommend for anyone learning about org transformation, and especially digital transformation. That being said, the editor could have scrubbed this one more time (e.g., several typos, repetitive sections, and some broken logic).
January 16, 2022
If you want to survive the future and generate income you need to read this book. Knowing Heather McGowan has been an honor, and seeing her put her thoughts to words is exceptional. You will be ready for the future of work if you can change as suggested in this book.
June 24, 2024
A very relevant and timely read! It is very hopeful about the future of work and makes some excellent points about the need to nurture curiosity, wonder, and innovation. What resonated with me was the belief in human potential and the driving need to adapt so we can reach that potential.
September 29, 2025
Grabbed this book at the National Library Lee Kong Chian Reference Library building asperead Part I Adapting at the speed of Change. Chapter 1 "The World Is Fast: Technology Is Changing Everything and Planting Opportunity Everywhere"
January 2, 2021
An excellent overview of leadership potential and priorities. Very worthwhile.
July 20, 2021
Great basic thesis and well researched with evidence...but redundant
March 12, 2023
Really makes you think about the future of work and what it means for your career path.
January 19, 2025
what the hell do these charts and diagrams even mean??
January 9, 2026
Well supported and common sense approach on how to refocus and redirect your career.
December 29, 2023
Why (Not) to read this book (Target Audience)
This book creates a profound sense of urgency for continuous learning. The idea of Automated, Atomized, and Augmented Capabilities is spot on. As our jobs keep moving, we also need to keep moving our capabilities. This by deepening our crucial capabilities to replace our Automated and Atomized Capabilities. Not just storing knowledge but streaming knowledge and developing learning agility.
How this book changed my daily live (Takeaways)
1. Automation is impacting Cognitive Labor
2. The world is filled with a ubiquity of information and connectivity
3. X-shaped thinking
a. Disciplinary
b. Multi-Disciplinary
c. Trans Disciplinary
4. Your job is moving, and if you are not moving with it, it may be moving away from you
a. - Atomization
b. - Automation
c. + Deepen Skills
d. + Expand Skills
Spoiler Alerts (Highlights)
Once, we were “educated” early in our lives enough to get us on a 40-year career ladder that we climbed until we retired and then, by design, soon after died. Today, considerable leaps in human longevity have stretched that career phase out a decade or longer.
A single dose of “education”—a process that infers an end state of being “educated”—isn't sufficient for a career arc that looks more like a spiral. Instead, we need to swap education for learning, a continuous state of discovery and reinvention. Work, then, leverages that learning and the work itself becomes another form of learning.
In truth, we are all works in progress and we need to imagine, or rather reimagine, work. In order to do that, though, we're going to have to confront who we think we are, at least professionally, so that we can reimagine, and reimagine again, and again, who we are in the context of a changing future of work.
This book creates a profound sense of urgency for continuous learning. The idea of Automated, Atomized, and Augmented Capabilities is spot on. As our jobs keep moving, we also need to keep moving our capabilities. This by deepening our crucial capabilities to replace our Automated and Atomized Capabilities. Not just storing knowledge but streaming knowledge and developing learning agility.
How this book changed my daily live (Takeaways)
1. Automation is impacting Cognitive Labor
2. The world is filled with a ubiquity of information and connectivity
3. X-shaped thinking
a. Disciplinary
b. Multi-Disciplinary
c. Trans Disciplinary
4. Your job is moving, and if you are not moving with it, it may be moving away from you
a. - Atomization
b. - Automation
c. + Deepen Skills
d. + Expand Skills
Spoiler Alerts (Highlights)
Once, we were “educated” early in our lives enough to get us on a 40-year career ladder that we climbed until we retired and then, by design, soon after died. Today, considerable leaps in human longevity have stretched that career phase out a decade or longer.
A single dose of “education”—a process that infers an end state of being “educated”—isn't sufficient for a career arc that looks more like a spiral. Instead, we need to swap education for learning, a continuous state of discovery and reinvention. Work, then, leverages that learning and the work itself becomes another form of learning.
In truth, we are all works in progress and we need to imagine, or rather reimagine, work. In order to do that, though, we're going to have to confront who we think we are, at least professionally, so that we can reimagine, and reimagine again, and again, who we are in the context of a changing future of work.
October 31, 2022
Ultimately, capacity and culture are the two main areas organizations need to focus on – It’s no longer just about the bottom line.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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