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.
Swipe To View
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
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.
Stay up to date with the latest business and technology insights from Pariveda
Maximize your data’s value to help build a data-focused, data-first organization
Adapt and empower your people to learn while implementing a new strategy
Let’s create something great together
INSIGHTS
Article
Article
Perspectives
Article
Perspectives
