Improving Adaptability is the difference between staying alive, and feeling alive

To help the human body keep up with its mind-boggling to-do list of high-speed chemical reactions, it relies on a band of superheroes called enzymes. With names so long they sound like Welsh mining towns, they lower the energy required to make things happen, increase the rate of change, and have the resilience of a Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstopper.

To recruit people who possess such attributes, you might think you’d have to head-hunt all-action stars like Bear Grylls, pay them like Roger Federer, and treat them like Beyoncé. The good news is that you may not have to do any of that, because these people could already exist in your organisation. The bad news is that rather than being the proactive pillars on which your organisation is founded, today they choose to be the passive padding that fills it out. Gallup reckons that disengaged staff outnumber engaged by 2:1. Yikes.

Motivating people on logic alone – like KPIs for example – won’t generate enough of a buzz to stop it being drowned out by a Mexican wave of yawns around the organisation. Any change initiative also needs to be framed in terms of its opportunity for individuals to contribute in ways the status quo can only dream of; the way it brings people together in the face of a shared challenge; and how it mandates the freedom to think and act differently. These are what will keep people fired up long after any stretch objective has been achieved.

Without enzymes, the body doesn’t have the energy to keep up with itself, and its internal environment quickly becomes lethally toxic. Without motivated people, organisations suffer the same fate – and change is the best antidote there is.

Let your people grow the organisation through change, and it will change how they grow as people.