ADAPTABILITY

Unless we can create an “everyone culture” we face more disorder and pressure to innovate. For example, in a rainforest, every plant and animal makes a contribution towards keeping the ecosystem in balance and thriving. It’s mutual interest that drives order yet it’s competition drives adaptability. Both self-managed and self-organising teams are needed to produce a balance of social and economic change.

We need self-organised teams to generate new thinking and new ideas and self-managed teams to deliver solutions on a bigger scale.  Organisations need to employ a diverse range of people who are passionate about creating possibilities they can believe in and feel passionate about. Their passion and commitment to innovate around a shared vision will be more important than their specialist skills. This is because the future is generated in language, where innovation is a meaning-making process that looks for solutions that are unique and valued.

Adaptability displays some common principles like:

• Reciprocity: Designing processes where relational outputs influence inputs, fostering adaptation, and coevolution through dynamic mutual exchange and system renewal.

• Interdependence: Creating networks where every part enhances the whole (e.g., circular economies).

• Wholeness: Focusing on the health of the entire system, not just its individual parts.

• Developmental Processes: Designing systems that adapt to change and improve over time, ensuring systems evolve to meet changing needs and conditions.

Innovation or transformation is the art of creating fundamental change. Changing a person’s Way of Being is no easy task, even when they commit to it. This is because change involves a shift in the way we see ourselves and are seen by others. We cannot think and act in the same way and expect different results. To succeed at innovation we need to see it as a personal skill that requires practice in shifting our whole Way of Being. 

We have to be convinced that the “risks” of resisting change are worth the pain of accepting it. The impact on relationships cannot be underestimated. This makes change easier when we engage with others to share experiences and adopt new behaviours and attitudes. It is the process of adoption that makes innovation so difficult to embed in organisations and society.

This is where self-management and self-organisation become crucial in the conversational practices needed to achieve innovation and transformation. This is because having ideas and methods are not enough. A diverse range of ideas and perspective are need for our minds to make sense of the impact of change on behaviour. It takes time to create the diversity of ideas needed to find sustainable solutions. 

For human systems to adapt, different kinds of conversations and commitments are needed to generate new stories to drive new actions to cope in challenging environments. When self-organised group activity has produced adoption of the vision, self-managed behaviours get produced, ordered systems then drive the vision. Order emerges from self-organisation where there are no rules. Put simply, following the innovation of smartphone technology a wave of unpredictable innovations emerged to apply the technology. It is enhancing human communication and commitment as well as new Ways of Being in the world.