The adaptability cycle

Spot the signal before it becomes a crisis. Sense what it actually means. Shift before certainty arrives. Shape what worked into the system. Four stages, each demanding a different strength, and missing any one of them leaves you stuck in a way that can be named.

Spot#

Perception. Noticing what most people have stopped seeing: a change in tone at a meeting, a local custom that does not fit the model, a silence where enthusiasm used to be. The enemy is comfort, which produces blindness rather than complacency. Most systems fail from inattention rather than ignorance, and the signal was usually available to several people who had stopped registering it.

Sense#

Interpretation, and the hardest of the four, because it requires admitting that your assumptions may no longer be true. The discipline is not rushing to confirm what you already believe: testing beliefs against reality, talking to people who see differently, asking what the data cannot report, inviting contradiction before it arrives as revolt.

This is the stage AI has made easier to skip. A system will supply an interpretation immediately, fluently, and without the discomfort that sensing is supposed to involve. Accepting it is not sensing; it is the substitution described at cognitive offloading.

Shift#

Movement. It may be a single sentence changed in a briefing, a process rewritten, or a habit dropped that once defined your status. It is uncomfortable because it requires acting without full certainty, learning by doing while others wait for proof. The delay between realising and moving is where most adaptability dies, and the delay is usually spent gathering evidence that will not change the decision.

Shape#

Consolidation, and the stage that gets skipped in good times. Take what worked under pressure and make it the baseline. Without shaping, every improvement decays into a one-off and what was insight reverts to accident.

The organisational symptom is distinctive: a company that keeps rediscovering the same improvement every few years, each time as a novelty, because nobody made it part of the system the first three times.

Keeping the meaning when the form collapses#

The cycle's point is not speed. It is protecting the purpose while the method changes completely. The book's central case is a burial practice in Sierra Leone during Ebola, where the women involved subtracted what had become lethal and protected what remained sacred: gloves replaced hands, plastic replaced water, prayer stayed. The method changed and the meaning endured.

Adaptation that keeps the form and loses the point is the failure the cycle is built against, and the more common one in organisations, because form is what gets audited.

What this has not been shown to do#

The cycle has not been tested. Four-stage sense-making rhythms of this general shape appear in several literatures, and no first use is claimed for the idea that perception precedes interpretation precedes action. What is claimed is this formulation, its four names, and the diagnosis that each stage fails in a characteristic way. Nothing here measures how often organisations fail at each stage, and the failure points are argued from practice rather than counted.

Source#

Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter five.

Related SuperSkills research#

• Global Adaptability
• Getting global: three drills
• Change Readiness