The stillness paradox

The capacity to move quickly rests on having settled, in advance, what will not move at all. Change readiness is sold as adaptability, agility and comfort with ambiguity, none of which says anything about direction.

Why flexibility is not the capability#

An organisation that can change anything will change whatever is cheapest to change, which is rarely the thing that needed changing. A person who adapts to everything has no way to tell adaptation from capitulation, and neither does anybody watching.

This is the difference between adapting and being moved, the distinction the whole drift versus design argument turns on. Drift is not incompetence. Every individual step is reasonable, and only the accumulation is not.

What has to be still#

Not the strategy, the structure or the tooling, all of which should change when conditions do. What has to be settled is the answer to one question: what would we not change under pressure? Most teams have never been asked it in a calm moment, which is the only moment the answer can be given honestly.

The written form of that answer is the anchor principle: a short sentence, chosen in advance by the people who will have to hold it, repeated when nothing is happening so that it is available when something is. It is the thing an adaptation is measured against, and without it the measurement does not exist.

The Kailahun case, which is the whole argument#

The book's central illustration of adaptation comes from burial practice in Sierra Leone during Ebola, where women facing a ritual that had become lethal changed the method entirely and protected the meaning. Gloves replaced hands, plastic replaced water, prayer stayed. What was subtracted was what had become dangerous and what was held was what the ritual was for.

That is stillness at the centre with everything else moving, the inverse of the usual organisational failure, which preserves the form and quietly loses the point. Form is what gets audited, so form survives.

Why this matters more now#

Tools change every few months, which makes adaptation continuous rather than occasional. A professional who adapts continuously with nothing fixed is not demonstrating readiness; they are being moved at the pace of somebody else's release schedule.

The practical version is the same discipline as custody and rules before tools. Write what does not move before the next tool arrives, because afterwards the answer bends towards whatever the tool makes easy. The four stages of the adaptation itself are at the adaptability cycle.

The cost, and who carries it#

Stillness is expensive at the moment it is exercised, and it looks like obstruction from outside. The organisational question is whether the cost falls on the individual who held the line or on the organisation that benefited, and where it falls on the individual the behaviour disappears within a year. That is what a cost ledger is for.

What this does not establish#

The paradox is an argument from practice rather than a measured finding. Nothing here shows that teams with an explicit anchor adapt better, and the Kailahun case is an illustration of the mechanism rather than evidence about rates. The claim that continuous adaptation without a fixed centre produces drift is a description of a pattern, not a measurement of one.

Source#

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

Related SuperSkills research#

• Change Readiness
• The anchor principle
• The adaptability cycle
• Drift versus design