The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Last year, I sent the email below to a group of friends and colleagues. I wanted to share what I was reading, and encourage them to focus on the learnable skill of adaptability over intelligence or good planning, like so many excellent business people do.
Looking back, I’m struck by how much the email foretold what would be required of us all in 2020 — and what we still need to learn as we face this next stage of the pandemic, along with the economic and social disruption it has precipitated, which is not being felt at the same level around the globe. We still need to build our adaptability muscles. We still need to act without certainty. And, perhaps hardest of all given the excruciating isolation of pandemic, we need to find ways to get out, to understand the experiences of others, and to understand how those experiences shape their actions and our own opportunities.
May we all rise to meet the challenges ahead.
February 9, 2020
A team of Buddhist monks arrives at a shuttered paper plant in rural Maine. Their sandals don’t hold much traction on the snow and their incense burns in cavernous rooms filled with obsolete and unmaintained equipment. Their arrival — along with a feng shui consultant from Hong Kong who will advise on how to prevent spirits from the adjacent cemetery from looking in on the factory — heralds a new chapter for this small town. Nine Dragons Paper, the Chinese manufacturer that seized upon converting waste paper from the United States into cardboard in mainland China, has pivoted with the uptick in recycling costs and purchased the defunct plant to access virgin pulp from Maine forests. They have committed to operate it for 100 years. If it works, it will completely reinvigorate the town.
This isn’t a scene in the Amazon alternate universe series The Man in the High Castle. It’s actually happening in Old Town, Maine, and it says a lot about the world to come: when geopolitics, technological shifts, unprecedented levels of connection and shifting market dynamics converge, exponential (and unexpected) change is not just possible; it’s probable.
I work on ExxonMobil’s internal Design Strategy team and for the past four years, we’ve helped business lines across the corporation deal with uncertainty and think differently. As I’ve been invited into challenges great and small, and spurred on by the delightful impossibility of doing new things in a company with a 135-year history, there’s a conversation I wish we had more, and it’s about adaptability. We get close to it when we talk about resilience in our core leadership behaviors. But resilience merely speaks to the ability to bend, not break, or to withstand hardship. In order to thrive, we need to be both resilient AND adaptable, as individuals and as a business. We need to withstand hardship and reframe the problem; to confront criticism on Wall Street and seek new opportunity. The good news is that adaptability — unlike intelligence — can be taught. Here are some ways we might encourage adaptability in our own teams.
Get out…and really look
I joined this company right out of graduate school, not intending to stay for long. But then a year passed and another. And over the course of time…which has gradually become the longest period of time I’ve spent anywhere…I didn’t realize how quickly the world “out there” had changed. Until I went back to Boston with my kids in August, 2019. The buses of students piling into Harvard Square were speaking Arabic and Mandarin. There was no plastic, anywhere. No straws! And everyone was glued to their phones in the Public Garden. It was unsettling, and it had all happened while I was working, ostensibly in roles intended to help the corporation stay in contact with the external world. At the end of the day, what’s going on “out there” matters. The people who purchase our end products, the stakeholders we negotiate with for acreage, the regulatory bodies that create and destroy trade agreements — they’re all “out there” and if we lose touch with them, we’ll be blindsided when their needs change beyond our ability to fulfill them. We need to get out to stay in tune with the broader world. Not just to see it, but to see it. Allow ourselves to observe trends and behavior in a new light and extrapolate how we need to shift to keep up. This involves not taking our reality for granted and allowing ourselves to be surprised by what’s really in someone else’s mind. Don’t settle for staying in your bubble— encourage your teams to bring something of the outside world into their work every day.
Spend less time finding certainty
No one could have predicted that a home run would be “caught” by a man holding a beer in each hand during the [2019] World Series. The probability is immeasurably small. But the probability of something happening was large enough to warrant staffing a team at Budweiser to watch the game and turn it into a commercial in the next night’s game. You may not sell advertising content (or beer) but we all live in a world of probability zero. Highly unlikely things happen every single day. We will never be able to capture or predict or de-risk everything. Instead, what we need to do is to recognize where we have information, make some good guesses and bets, and then set alerts or triggers to act when something about those guesses changes. Ford knows that human mobility will change over the next 30 years. They’ve made bets on e-scooters, autonomous vehicles and other mobility devices. They’re not meeting Wall Street expectations right now. I suspect their triggers are not stock price, but some other market data that will tell them when it is time to abandon one investment as an experiment with a null hypothesis, and when it’s time to go big on another. Separate what you know from what you hypothesize, and encourage your teams to move forward with well-designed experiments, rather than rock-solid plans. Reward the experiment and pass on the information we learn when something doesn’t happen the way we expected. This will increase the speed at which we adapt as people across the organization learn and spread information to their networks.
Coach adaptability
Doing things differently isn’t just difficult because it flies in the face of our organizational silos or known processes. It’s hard because it feels weird. We’re accustomed to being good at things. Really, really good. We don’t tolerate failure, and when something isn’t going well, we question ourselves and our direction. One habitual way of working in business structures — functioning in hierarchy, seeking approval, exceeding expectations set by others, acting with certainty — has been ingrained in most of us for decades. It takes, on average, 66 days to create a new habit. That’s only for habits done every day, like brushing your teeth. If you only send something up for review once a month, or evaluate performance once a year, it will take repetition after repetition to create a new habit. But the world we’re headed toward — one where Monsanto buys a weather data company to start selling crop yields based upon predictive analytics, and then gets bought by Bayer; one where a mail order DVD startup can disrupt cable providers and prompt Disney to rethink its content delivery strategy; one where a social media platform that didn’t even exist 15 years ago can become the primary policy tool of the President of the United States — this world requires us to perceive, interpret and act in a way that won’t let us take the time to learn and be perfect. Set adaptability as an expectation in your teams and watch how they rise to the occasion. If they know that reframing a problem and picking themselves back up again after learning something is an expectation, they’ll do it better the next time.
In a time of disruption, we know we all must be resilient and keep showing up. I hope we’ll also work to become adaptable. It won’t be easy. We have to be gentle with ourselves and each other as we learn, and at the same time push ourselves to reframe and rethink and not take the world as we know it for granted. The paper factory workers in Maine will tell you that it’s an unexpected future, and we need to keep up.
