The second panel, moderated by Ann McKenna, professor of engineering and director of the Polytechnic School in the Arizona State University Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, looked at the constituent skills and attributes of adaptability at four levels: individual, interpersonal, team, and organizational. The characteristics of adaptability at each level are somewhat different, the panelists observed, but there are commonalities across all four, such as the role of motivation.
INDIVIDUAL ADAPTABILITY
Adaptability is a change in behavior as the environment changes that improves outcomes, said Christian Schunn, senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center and professor of psychology, learning sciences and policy, and intelligent systems at the University of Pittsburgh. “We don’t talk about adaptability if the environment is not changing, and we don’t talk about adaptability if you change in a way that doesn’t improve outcomes.”
All living things are fundamentally changeable systems, in a process analogous with biological evolution. Even infants learning to crawl or climb adapt to new environments or new constraints. Adaptation can be slow and typically includes a time lag, both when environments change and when they revert to what they were before (Schunn et al. 2001), but people adapt whether or not they are aware of environmental changes. They may “have no idea that things are different, even pretty drastic changes, and yet their body does things differently over time. That’s the foundational biological nature of continuous learning.”
That said, people who are aware of a changing environment tend to adapt more quickly. “If we are aware of it, we are looking out for change, we are seeing something differently, we shift more quickly.” If people have been in a fixed environment for a long time, they typically adapt more slowly than if the environment has changed more recently.
Some people generally adapt more quickly than others and, as a consequence, succeed more often in dynamic and interpersonal tasks (Schunn and Reder 2001). This is true even when experiments control for typical individual differences in cognitive abilities, said Schunn. “The degree to which you tend to adapt quickly drives performance overall to a pretty high extent.”
A tradeoff exists between exploiting known resources and exploring the environment. Should a person keep doing the same thing, which has worked well so far, or spend time exploring other ways of doing things that might work less well today but will lead to improvements later? In a completely unchanging environment, the former is the best approach. In a changing environment, exploration allows the development of expertise that may prove useful.
The frontal lobes of the brain are involved in fast adaptations, Schunn explained. When “something is different from what was going on before, that’s when the frontal lobes come online, and we force ourselves to do something different from what our muscle memory is telling us to do.” Damage to the frontal lobes can severely impair adaptation—as measured, for example, by pattern matching tests—even when people know that they should be adapting (Ridderinkhof et al. 2002). The frontal lobes are the last to develop during childhood and adolescence and are the first to decline with age, though interventions such as even small amounts of exercise can slow this process (Colcombe et al. 2006).
Finally, Schunn observed that motivation is a strong factor in adaptation. People who are constantly looking for ways to improve their performance are more likely to be adaptable (van Vianen et al. 2012). Those who want no more than to prevent a decline in performance tend to be less open to innovations (Hansen 2010). “If somebody comes in with a new idea, it’s those who are trying to improve who are going to be receptive to that.” This is especially the case for people who believe that they can take an idea and improve upon it, as opposed to people who are so humble that they believe they could not do better. “They have control over change, are curious about change, and are confident in their changes.”
INTERPERSONAL ADAPTABILITY
Ernest Wilson, founding director of the Center for Third Space Thinking and professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, placed the idea of adaptability in a broader context of interpersonal and interactive skills, thereby providing a “liaison” between individual adaptability and team adaptability. Adaptability is essential in an environment marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It requires attention to positive opportunities as well as negative risks; it also requires that changes be anticipated and not just reacted to. It should be distinguished from responsiveness, flexibility, resilience, and agility.
Adaptability is driven by one’s own initiative and not externally imposed by the demands of one’s organization or supervisor, or by an external unexpected event, Wilson said. In some cases, it requires significant changes in behaviors, cognitive skills, and attitudes; in other cases it requires just minor adjustments. In addition, investments in human capital can alter an employee’s capacity to contribute to an organization’s medium- and long-term success.
Wilson has been involved in a five-year research project on five skills: cultural competence, intellectual curiosity, empathy, 360-degree thinking, and adaptability. Each of the first four skills interacts with and can be leveraged to enhance adaptability. Together, these constitute an educational space that is not that of engineering or business but instead “a third space,” he said, “a different way of thinking about the world.”
He defined cultural competence as the ability to think, act, and move across multiple boundaries and act effectively. It could be a different country, organization, or unit in the same company or institution. For example, marketing and legal departments have different cultures with their own vocabularies, norms, and appropriate behaviors toward managers, peers, and subordinates. Substantial and sustainable adaptability is impossible if one is ignorant of the culture in which one seeks to adapt, he said. “Cultural competence and adaptability can be seen as mutually reinforcing.”
Intellectual curiosity is represented by a hunger to learn and acquire new knowledge for its own sake. It probably cannot be taught from scratch, but everyone can improve their level of intellectual curiosity and their willingness to risk and experiment in order to learn. “The successful adaptor will be more curious about pretty much every aspect of her
own job as well as positions that are adjacent to hers up and down the value chain and with coworkers,” said Wilson.
Empathy denotes the ability to see the world not only from one’s own perspective but from the perspective of others in or outside an organization. This ability to look beyond one’s own perspective is critical for adaptability. Learning the formal written rules and requirements of organizational culture is essential but insufficient, Wilson clarified: the superior employee is willing, and even eager, to see the world from the perspective of colleagues and customers.
Wilson defined 360-degree thinking as the ability “to see the big picture, to connect the dots, to think holistically.” It intersects with adaptability because every position in an organization is part of the larger whole. Successful adaptors will be able to see their relationships with others in the institution, whether in informal or formal settings. They will be able to recognize that changes are taking place and, as Schunn observed, more readily adapt to those changes.
The Center for Third Space Thinking has been teaching these five skills to executives, graduate students, undergraduates, and others. Especially in the early stages of a career, adaptability and intellectual curiosity are important as employees learn about and adapt to the organization in which they are working. Later, 360-degree thinking is an especially important soft skill as people learn more about the organization. Emphasizing the transitions under way in society can help convince people that adaptability will affect not only their company’s performance but their individual performance. “That’s the motivational component, which is difficult.”
He also observed that exercises in training and leadership development are greatly appreciated. “It turns out that fairly straightforward, simple, hands-on team work activities…have a very positive impact on the macro level to explain the urgency and universality of the changes.”
Wilson identified several questions and areas that have been overlooked in research on adaptability. For example, “How do we integrate the development of the soft skills over a career, not just for executives but for…all employees at all levels, and then how do we integrate those soft skills with the hard skills that have traditionally been the domain of engineering professionals?” An area that warrants research attention is the need to anticipate changes rather than reacting to them, and another is the need for adaptability to be driven by an individual’s desire and intention to improve performance, rather than by the boss saying, “Here are the four things you must do to adapt or you’re fired.” Finally,
research has often not differentiated between adaptations that require significant changes in behaviors, cognitive skills, and attitudes and those that require minor adjustments.
TEAM ADAPTABILITY
Individuals are embedded in social organizations’ hierarchical structure, said Steve Kozlowski, professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University, and that top-down context influences and constrains behavior at lower levels of the system, which can facilitate or inhibit adaptation. In this way, team adaptability both shapes and reflects adaptability at other levels, from the individual to the organizational.
At the same time, team processes produce bottom-up phenomena shaped by the attributes of individuals and how they interact collectively. As teams go thought the process of being formed and emerging, they are malleable. If one understands the mechanisms underlying this process of emergence, the formation of teams can be shaped and influenced, said Kozlowski.
He illustrated with three hypothetical individuals—Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie—who interact over time and with increasing levels of interaction in a particular context to create an organizational configuration (figure 4-1). Understanding the process mechanisms that underlie those interactions, including the mental models that people share, makes it possible to influence outcomes, he explained. The outcome may be a convergence where everyone comes to the same view, or it may be divergent and more distributed, where different experts have different knowledge sets and interact as a network. “If you want to shape those, you want to come in during the process,” Kozlowski said. “Once [an outcome] emerges, it has persistence and will tend to influence subsequent interactions.”
As the other speakers in the session noted, adaptability encompasses a number of concepts. It’s been defined as “performance capabilities [where] changing external contingencies require rapid shifts in role requirements across team members” (Kozlowski et al. 1999, pp. 241–242). Burke et al. (2006, p. 1192) defined it as “an emergent phenomenon that compiles over time from the unfolding of a recursive cycle whereby one or more team members use their resources to functionally change current cognitive or behavioral goal-directed action or structures to meet expected or unexpected demands.” Baard et al. (2014, p. 50) defined it as “cognitive, affective, motivational, and behavioral modifica-
tions made in response to the demands of a new or changing environment, or situational demands.”
Adaptability can be incremental, continuous, and forecastable, or it can be unpredictable and disruptive. Modifications may be cognitive, affective, motivational, or behavioral. If role requirements change, the performance capabilities of the people on a team need to be flexibly redeployed, Kozlowski said, and this process can involve many forms of adaptation.
The research literature tends to divide such adaptations into two categories (Baard et al. 2014) (figure 4-2). One, which Kozlowski labeled “domain general,” considers the broad characteristics of individuals and teams that are predictive of adaptation. This approach looks at desirable performance capabilities such as dealing with emergencies, handling stress, managing uncertainty, learning, and being culturally, interpersonally, and physically adaptive. It then examines the kinds of general cognitive, ability, and personality characteristics that are broadly predictive of those kinds of capabilities.
The other, labeled “domain specific,” is more about particular kinds of expertise in a particular context. It focuses on how individuals and teams operate in a particular situation requiring response to a change. It requires a diagnosis of the situation and development of potential solutions.
The domain-general approach is more selection oriented, whereas domain specific is more process oriented. Domain general is a more distant kind of predictor, and domain specific is more proximal. Domain general is about human capital—hiring people with certain capabilities; domain specific is about training—developing certain skill sets.
From a training and development viewpoint, it is important to remember that team adaptability is emergent and evolves over time. This allows for teams to think about and prepare a repertoire of possible responses for future events before a course is locked in, including developing a depth of expertise and a repertoire of skills for specific situations.
This team dynamic is influenced by the complexity of the task facing the team. Tasks vary in how much load they put on individuals or teams and on the nature of the adaptive process required. When a task imposes a low load, people can develop strategies, set goals, go through
a developmental process, and be monitored around the skills needed for the task. When the task load is high, intervention may be necessary to coordinate a team, adjust strategies, and update situations. “You can think about ways that you need to intervene to assist them, and then when it’s over you can help lead a team or individuals through a reflection process” to help the team continue to adapt.
Creating “desirable difficulties” for the learner can be a useful approach to training. Education and training are often “proceduralized” so that people learn rules designed to achieve particular goals. People who know proceduralized rules and how to apply them often look as if they are performing at a higher level than people who are exploring and making mistakes. But when things start to change, the people with proceduralized skills know only what they were trained to know and as a result have more difficulty grappling with change, whereas those who are guided to explore adapt more effectively. Individual differences can also be important, whether in terms of goal orientation versus performance orientation or avoidance of mistakes and difficult tasks.
Teamwork typically requires members to regulate attention and effort around multiple goals—individual and team—and to shift the focus of regulation as the situation dictates. This dynamic self-regulation accounts for both individual and team learning and performance (DeShon et al. 2004). Such processes can be modeled computationally, and Kozlowski and his colleagues (2016) are developing such models to look at different configurations of team characteristics and leadership structures and explore what kinds of structures are more robust and resilient and help promote adaptation.
Kozlowski concluded with three takeaway points:
- Individual and team adaptive capabilities are emergent and can be nurtured and shaped.
- Interventions can be effective if underlying mechanisms of team formation and emergence and contextual factors are known.
- Clearly specifying the types of adaptation, the levels of system adaptation involved, and relevant psychosocial mechanisms can generate knowledge that will help inform interventions.
ORGANIZATIONAL ADAPTABILITY
All of the previous levels of adaptation come together at the organizational level. Like individuals and teams, organizations can learn,
observed Linda Argote, David M. and Barbara A. Kirr Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge. She cited a study of advanced jet manufacturing in which it was shown that the total number of labor hours required to produce each aircraft drops with the cumulative number of aircraft produced, with improvements decreasing over time. This kind of learning curve has been observed in both the manufacturing and service sectors, with performance improvements evidenced by reduced costs, better quality, and enhanced service timeliness (Argote 2013).
Organizations show considerable variation in their rate of learning. Some exhibit dramatic improvement, while others show little or no learning. Even different parts of the same organization that have the same structure and make the same product may learn at different rates and approach different asymptotes (Argote and Epple 1990).
Argote cited four factors that contribute to the different rates at which organizations learn:
- training
- developing transactive memory
- using technology effectively
- transferring knowledge.
The first factor, individual training, improves organizational learning in ways described by previous speakers in the session. It affects individuals in different ways, but organizations can shape training so that it has an optimal effect on organizational learning.
The second factor that contributes to organizational learning is transactive memory, or knowledge of who knows what. The term was coined by a psychologist to describe the specialization in roles and responsibilities that married couples tend to develop (Wegner 1987). Argote explained that, in the workplace, transactive memory allows members of a team to specialize and share capability. “This cognitive specialization makes it easier to coordinate, because you know who is going to do which task, thus saving time and improving performance.” In fact, research has demonstrated that providing access to more information than one individual possesses can improve performance (Ren and Argote 2011), and team training that involves observation by the group enables the acquisition of tacit or hard-to-articulate knowledge.
Studies of such varied organizations as software design teams and surgical teams have demonstrated that team members who work together longer perform better and work faster than those with less experience working together. Strong teams match the most qualified members to the tasks they can do best, which promotes problem solving “because you know whom to consult if something unexpected comes up.” These sorts of memory systems are especially valuable in dynamic environments, where team members need to consult with and rely on others for advice. Argote mentioned the possibility of groups becoming ossified if they are kept together for a long time, but in most cases enough people move into and out of groups to keep that from happening.
The third factor that can improve organizational learning is the effective use of technology. The introduction of technology can speed progression along the learning curve, through either a sudden improvement (that is, a shift in the intercept of the curve) or a more extended improvement in the rate of learning. Adoption of a new technology is facilitated by strong teams with transactive memory. In addition, individuals and teams can embed expertise in a technology system, which then can spread the knowledge to other parts of an organization (Hwang et al. 2015).
The fourth factor, knowledge transfer, is the process through which one unit of a firm benefits from experience acquired in another (Argote and Ingram 2000). For example, a new procedure developed at one plant can be transferred to another to improve the overall performance of a firm. Argote and her colleagues have seen examples of this knowledge transfer process working across shifts in a manufacturing plant (Epple et al. 1996), products in a manufacturing facility (Egelman et al. 2017), geographically distributed establishments of a financial services firm, and even across units of pizza franchises. Figure 4-3 shows how quickly a second shift can learn from a first shift as both move along a learning curve. Furthermore, understanding how this knowledge transfer works allows learning to be incorporated in the training process.
CHANGING THE SYSTEM
During the question-and-answer session the four panelists considered whether adaptability can be taught directly or whether training needs to put people in situations where they are forced to be adaptable in order to learn to be adaptable.
In response to that question, Kozlowski elaborated on the difference between domain-general and domain-specific skills. Domain-general skills, such as being open rather than closed to new experiences, can be helpful. But in specific settings, domain-specific knowledge, often gained in the context of teams, can be irreplaceable, although keeping teams together can be expensive and difficult. Education can give people not only the skills specific to particular domains or tasks but also experiences that enable them to be more flexible within a domain, which may be more effective than broader training for adaptability. As he explained, “in a particular setting or environment [that requires] an airline pilot to be able to recover from an emergency, this is about skills flying an airplane, and not just handling emergencies.”
No magic bullet can address adaptability, said Wilson; it is one of a set of soft skills that need greater emphasis at all levels of education. The National Academy of Engineering has moved in this direction through such initiatives as the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and the
report The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century (NAE 2004). “Educational institutions need to be more intellectually and professionally aggressive to say that adaptability and other kinds of soft skills are a matter of national performance. It’s a big deal. It’s not just something that we can tack onto existing things.”
Schunn called attention to the risk of “unlearning.” If people learn soft skills but then spend 10 years in an environment where they do not use them, they will unlearn many of them. The skills will come back faster if they are needed again, but “you’re now going to need some retraining to shake the rust off all those long-forgotten” skills. The better option is to put people in situations where they can use and keep them.
Argote emphasized the importance of learning by doing. “Whether it’s projects in school or projects at work, people learn more from [those] and are more likely to be able to adapt their knowledge than from didactic lectures.”
Another prominent topic in the discussion session was the continued need for hands-on work as the workplace becomes more automated. Argote maintained that there would still be room for hands-on work, though perhaps not for as many people who worked in those areas as did previously. Schunn agreed, noting that the largest gap in the STEM workforce is not at the bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD levels but at the technical associate’s degree level.
Kozlowski pointed out that automation will have different effects depending on occupations. “A lot of people are going to be displaced by various technological changes.” However, many of these people have not been warned that their jobs are at risk and that they will need to adapt. Part of the challenge is educational; part has to do with parenting. “But there are no support systems to try to change those minds.”
