Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage
Adaptation requires two basic things. Fist, in order to be adaptive individual and collective learning is required. People learn best from their mistakes. Therefore, a culture that allows making mistakes is a mandatory precondition for adaptation. Second, adaptation requires some kind of variation. In order to create variation, people need the chance to undertake experiments what is contradictory to the very popular super efficiency paradigm.
The two biggest enemies to adaptability in today's organizations are “a culture intolerant to making mistakes” and “no slack policies” preventing experiments!
Stefan,
Think these are both critical elements that can foster or erradicate adaptability - thanks for homing in on them.
To my mind, the first of these underpins adaptability because if nothing else, it breeds resilience - nothing creates grit better than failing a few times and discovering that far from being the end of the universe as we know it (and I admit I tended to assume that it would be, when I was first getting started!) - it was 1. survivable and 2. often useful.
In order to be survivable however, we have to be able to fail at the 'right things' and to the 'right extent' which links implicitly to your second point... taken to extremes, super efficiency requires one to be right, first time, all the time. Which not only means that there's no room to experiment, it also means that if your big efficiency idea is wrong, you'll probably find out only after you've spent a huge amount of money trying to implement it.
In other words, IF you fail, the scale you fail on is too large - hence not survivable. Yes I owe my best thinking on this topic to Tim Harford...
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