FRAMEWORK

Adaptive cycles framework

Corporate Strategy

You can become more flexible, resilient, and innovative

When organizations, teams, and individuals use adaptive cycles to pursue their imperatives, they face complexity without being overwhelmed.

While pursuing any business challenge, unforeseen issues and new information emerge from lived experience. We can either:

Ignore it and press on with the original plan while looking for ways to confirm our initial bias, often to our peril
Look at the complexity head-on, incorporate our learning, and explore the next path

The best leaders have the humility to learn from experience and the courage to adapt.

The stages of adaptive cycles in business

There are four stages of interconnected activities that make up adaptive cycles in business.

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Leaders take a humble look at what’s in front them before taking action by bringing diverse people and perspectives together.

They use their collective knowledge to imagine and reexamine the possible paths and outcomes ahead. This includes seeking and reading signals internally and externally to find what might shape their decisions and influence their actions.

Examples include:

Entrepreneurs who identify an unmet need that might lead to a new business
Employees who find better ways to do the work that revolutionizes their role
Executives who notice trends indicating an adjacency, transformation, or divestiture to create growth

Leaders help their people balance thinking widely with creating strategic focus on where to act first.

They create focus to convert those options into viable, iterative, and incremental strategies that promise to realize the desired value. This is where we see the possibility for growth and start building momentum.

Exploring a business model change that would accelerate bringing a product to market
Shifting management focus from strict governance to leading with design
Identifying a “throw-away” product to test customer appetite for a more ambitious idea
Expanding a service into a marketplace platform

Leaders help people craft what they believe is needed to be successful in their environment.

This involves adapting, creating, or adopting solutions –Perhaps it’s a product, service or platform. Maybe a new or improved process, a talent shift, or a revised organization structure. Even a system, a tool, or a revolutionary technology. The most impactful solutions are often a combination of all of the above.

The adaptive cycle in nature and business

Just as in nature, adaptive cycles have no beginning or end. You must recognize the stage you’re in and the tactics it takes to succeed.

In a forest, a smattering of trees evolves based on their surroundings and each other. They enter a growth period and soon equilibrium. Eventually, the system becomes unstable due to too many plants and insufficient nutrients and must create a new cycle to adapt.

Adaptability in business is just as important as in nature. Shocks occur, industry structures shift, and imperatives become increasingly complex to address. Companies become brittle without continued investment in stimulating adaptability. Industry juggernauts have fallen out of first place in the markets when they cling to their past success and fail to adapt to the changing environment. They enter the fragility trap.

Discover the value of adaptive cycles with Pariveda

With adaptive cycles, you can uncover the opportunities you’ve been missing, better balance your complex priorities and scale your individual and organizational problem-solving up or down. From people to product problems, adaptive cycles help you find equilibrium and pave the way to achieve your highest potential through constant innovation and infinite perspectives.