Change Yourself First

Staying Adaptive and Curious in a World that Won't Slow Down

Last week, after I published my article on how change—down to our very change models—is fundamentally changing, I had a chance to sit down and discuss what it looks like when change outpaces the playbooks with my friend Tan Wilson on her podcast, Tan’s Two Cents.

We yelled “PIVOT” a couple times. Kids of the ‘90s, we can’t help it.

But that was the main thing—breaking down why the old change models we were trained on have broken down, describing what pivot-ready talent systems actually look like in practice, and how to tell if an organization is really adaptive or just, you know, good at using buzzwords.

And in that discussion, Tan got me talking and thinking about what we can do to be more change-ready and change-resilient as individuals and as leaders. How do we not only guide our organizations and our people through change, but make sure that we’re capable of thriving in living change ourselves?

Sounds like a good discussion for us to have here, doesn’t it?

Let’s decode it. 🚀

Getting and Staying Adaptive

In a world that won’t slow down…

At this point, with everything that’s going on in technology, the economy, and our current geopolitical insanity, I think we can all accept that change is not slowing down. Nor is it going to.

What’s less clear is how all of us are supposed to live and work inside that seemingly exhausting reality without burning ourselves out, becoming cynical and angry, or simply numbing out and going through the motions.

I see a lot of tactical advice given to deal with change—learn a new tool, adopt a new framework, attend another training. Lately, it’s starting to shift toward mindset—be resilient, be flexible, be curious.

I totally agree with the mindset piece, but these aren’t slogans. They’re skills. And they have to be tackled like skills—with practice, structure, and intention.

With change becoming a constant living part of our environment and not an event, adaptability can’t be something we summon only when an event calls for it. It has to be something we build into how we work, think, and learn every day.

So let’s talk about what that means for us as human beings.

---

And if you missed it, read up on how change is changing…

---

First off, there is more to resilience than just endurance.

We often associate resilience with just being tough. Push harder, work longer, absorb more, just keep swimming, just keep swimming.

Your energy is finite. Your reservoir will eventually empty.

Real adaptability is the ability to keep yourself oriented as conditions shift. To notice what’s changing, interpret what it means, and respond constructively without losing your way in the process, even if you do need to change direction.

If endurance were the answer, burnout wouldn’t be rising among some of the most capable, conscientious professionals we have. So let’s maybe focus less on just enduring and more about how we adjust.

The Most Critical Skill Beneath Adaptability is Sensemaking

We don’t talk enough about sensemaking. It sounds like just another corporate buzzword. But it’s a critical skill in this environment.

Sensemaking is our ability to:

• distinguish signal from noise

• understand what actually changed and what didn’t

• connect new information to prior experience

• form and adapt our patterns

• avoid overreacting to every disruption

Without sensemaking, we don’t stop to see what changes—we just know the kaleidoscope has turned and we have a different picture, even if only a few pieces have actually moved. When we do stop to make sense of it, change becomes navigable.

Highly adaptive people don’t know more facts than everyone else. They’re just better at interpreting what’s happening and deciding where to invest their attention and shift their course.

A simple personal practice could consist of four questions:

• What changed this week?

• What does it actually impact?

• What should I mark for later investigation?

• What deserves an immediate response, and what doesn’t?

Sensemaking leverages curiosity and keeps you from whiplashing to control, which you may not have. People who default to control tend to cling to what they already know. They narrow their focus and stop asking questions, because asking questions feels risky and introduces still more unknowns.

But curiosity is one of the most stabilizing forces in uncertainty. It opens cognitive flexibility and keeps learning active instead of reactive—and lets us investigate what pieces of the kaleidoscope actually are in motion and what they do rather than just seeing an entire picture shifting.

Curious people explore what might be true now rather than trying to defend a fixed mental model. They maintain a posture of inquiry.

• What am I noticing?

• What might explain this?

• What don’t I understand yet?

This doesn’t mean we’re chasing every new idea or trend as curious people, but we’re watching them and seeing what they do.

Learning and Re-Learning

One of the quiet challenges of constant change is that many of us have been brought up in environments that rewarded mastery and certainty. You studied, you trained, you became “the expert.”

Adaptive environments don’t reward static expertise. Nothing is static.

Instead, they reward learning velocity.

Expertise, mastery, and study can be conducive to learning velocity, though. In combat operations, the more we understand the battlefield we’re operating in, the more options we have. In leadership, the more we understand the environment, the more we understand the potential impact as things shift. We just need to be ready to let go of concepts when they have shifted.

Learning velocity means learning in smaller increments, closer to the work, both socially and individually, and experimenting.

One of the things those of us in senior levels of leadership need to guard against is becoming less willing to experiment. I watch my son and his friends try everything—kids are fearless—and can’t help but think sometimes that wow, that would really hurt if I tried it and fell. But at the same time, I watch them practicing new languages with the same fearlessness, learning new mechanical and academic skills, all of it. And somehow, we’ve convinced ourselves that that will hurt if we try it, too.

We can’t be afraid of falling or failing. As I tell my team routinely, innovation is like Battleship—sometimes you don’t hit the battleship, but that’s not failure. You’re putting a mark in the board of where it isn’t.

To be adaptive, we have to experiment. We have to try.

And we have to manage our cognitive load. This kind of mental openness can be taxing. New tools, new processes, new expectations, new language—this all consumes mental bandwidth.

I mean, take the simplest example of change. Our neighborhood recently got a new schedule for trash and recycling pick-up. Everything moved from Wednesday to recycling on Thursday and trash on Friday. Not a big deal, right? It’s not a big deal until I totally forget and then see one of the trucks coming by to pick things up early when I’m out for my morning run or walking the dog and damn it, I didn’t have to think about it before, but now I have to remember a whole new schedule?

That’s just one little thing. It compiles.

Paying attention to cognitive load means:

• Keeping tabs on how much new information you’re absorbing

• Taking into account how many decisions you’re making

• Being aware of how much ambiguity you’re dealing with

• Understanding when you’re exhausted versus just challenged

Seriously, research estimates that the average adult makes 35,000 decisions a day. That’s the reason that by the time you and your spouse are asking each other “what’s for dinner?” nobody really wants to make a decision. It’s even worse if these are new decisions fueled by new information that you really have to chew on.

I’ve written here a lot about building in working rest, and that’s critical here. Switch tasks that use different mental muscles. Alternate deep focus with lighter synthesis. And step back when you need to sketch, map, and reflect. It’s not laziness or indulgence—it’s brain maintenance.

You also have to combat the idea that to be flexible, you have to be always on or always available. Your adaptability suffers when you never disengage. Reflection, insight, and learning require space.

As an adaptive professional, you need to set intentional boundaries. Be clear about what is urgent versus what is important, protect time for thinking, and make sure you can peel back from doing when you need time to reflect, reassess, and reorient.

As a surfer, I learned quickly when the wave rolls you, especially when it’s dark or cloudy water, you can’t start swimming right away—stop and be still until you see the direction the bubbles are going. Then swim.

This is the same.

Adaptability is a Practice, Not a Job or a Trait

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change, the answer is not to harden yourself or tune out, or to assume that you don’t have this magic “adaptability” or “resilience” characteristic other people somehow have. You just need to train it.

That means practicing:

• how you assess and make sense of what is happening

• how you invest in curiosity and time to experiment

• how you make time for smaller, closer bouts of learning

• how you manage your cognitive and emotional load

• how you create space for reflection

• how you stay oriented even when things are chaotic

Build habits into your schedule (and if you’re like me, that means putting them on the calendar so you’re not trying to remember them or make time for them). Regular reflection, learning time, productivity breaks, shift in focus. Make these things one less decision you’re trying to make.

The world is in motion, which means you will be, too. The trick is learning how to figure out what has moved and where it is moving so that you can move with it, and learning how to give yourself rest and space amid constant motion.

This isn’t about hustling more. It is a little bit about increasing your endurance, but that takes practice. And it is definitely about creating skills and habits for orienting yourself, staying open and curious, learning, and recovering.

Change isn’t going to slow down, but you don’t have to speed up endlessly to survive it, or thrive in it. You just have to learn how to roll with and ride the wave.