The Adaptation Advantage

11Capability Is King: Looking Beyond the Resume to Design Your Adaptive Team

Key Ideas

1. To build an adaptive team, leaders must break the narrow definitions of jobs and organizational structure.
2. Adaptive teams start in the hiring process, one that de-emphasizes past skills, credentials, and experience, and instead seeks values alignment and both inquiry-based problem finding and framing coupled with fluid problem solving capabilities.
3. Culture fit doesn't mean homogeny, in fact quite the opposite; the best teams bring diverse life experiences, world views, and skill sets, especially cognitive diversity in an environment of psychological safety.

No More Little Boxes

Imagine: it's Christmas Eve and you still have presents to wrap. A small piece of jewelry. A child's bicycle. A sweater. A drum set. Theater tickets. Some power tools. You want to surprise your family with these gifts in the morning and all you have is a roll of wrapping paper, some tape, and a pile of 8 × 10 boxes. How are you going to wrap these different-sized gifts with these uniform supplies?

Every day across the globe, business leaders attempt this same packaging trick when they look at their workers as boxes on an organizational chart wrapped neatly in a job description.

This inside-the-box thinking worked well enough when processes and responsibilities were constant, skills and credentials were fixed, and boundaries between roles were well defined. Executives could manage people in roles, conducting ...