Adaptability Requires Something Stable

Without an anchor, you're just reacting

There’s a failure mode that doesn’t get discussed much: the organization that adapts too often.

Not the rigid ones. Those get all the case studies. The ones that refused to change until the market left them behind. We know that story.

But I’ve watched teams drown in the opposite problem. Constant pivots. New direction every quarter. Strategy shifts so frequent that no one can settle into anything long enough to build momentum.

It looks like agility from the outside. Responsive. Dynamic. Always adjusting to new information.

From the inside, it feels like chaos.

People stop investing in initiatives because they’ve learned the initiative will change before it delivers. Institutional knowledge disappears because no approach lasts long enough to become expertise. The best performers leave because they can’t point to anything they actually built.

Flexibility becomes the identity. And when flexibility is the identity, nothing holds.

The paradox is real: adaptability requires something stable to adapt around. A fixed point. A mission that doesn’t move even when methods do. Without that anchor, you’re not adapting. You’re just reacting. And reaction, sustained long enough, becomes its own kind of paralysis.

The question isn’t just “Are we willing to change?” It’s also “Are we willing to stay the course long enough for change to matter?”

Both failures look different. Both end the same way.