The Science of Adaptability: Inside the Adaptive Capacity Diagnostic™

In today’s environment, disruption is constant. Organizations aren’t falling behind because people aren’t smart or not working hard enough. They’re falling behind because they don’t have enough capacity to adapt.

Research backs this up. Harvard Business Review calls adaptability one of the foundational skills with the greatest impact on performance in rapidly shifting environments. And LinkedIn shows it’s one of the top skills U.S. professionals are trying to build right now.

Where Our Curiosity Led Us

This question became our obsession: how do you actually measure adaptability?

We sat through plenty of engagement surveys and culture assessments, and while they give useful snapshots, they don’t explain why organizations get stuck in the same loops. They don’t tell you why the same challenges keep resurfacing, no matter how many “fixes” you try.

As adaptive leadership strategists and cognitive coaches, we couldn’t let that go. Curiosity pushed us to dig deeper. We wanted to get underneath the surface — to measure the human behaviors and cultural dynamics that really determine whether an organization can grow, change, and adapt.

So, we built something that could.

What We Built

The Adaptive Capacity Diagnostic™ uncovers the dynamics that matter most: how people learn, experiment, trust, and reflect.

It’s rooted in adaptive leadership, systems thinking, and adult development; research we’ve studied and practiced alongside leading thought leaders in these fields.

This diagnostic is designed to give something practical: a clear picture of how adaptable an organization really is.

This isn’t about another scorecard to file away. It’s about creating the conditions where change becomes possible.

The Four Core Capacities

The Diagnostic measures adaptability across four essential capacities:

Learning Capacity

The ability to absorb lessons from successes and failures and turn them into sustainable improvement. Organizations with strong learning capacity don’t repeat mistakes; they evolve through them.

Experimental Courage

The willingness to take smart risks, test ideas, and adapt quickly. Instead of waiting for certainty, adaptive organizations learn by doing, piloting, and iterating.

Collaborative Trust

The culture of confidence and safety that allows people to share openly, challenge assumptions, and rely on each other to follow through. Trust makes real collaboration possible.

Reflective Practice

The discipline of stepping back to recognize patterns and make sense of complexity. Reflection turns experience into insight and ensures that every outcome, success or failure, becomes a source of learning.

Together, these capacities form the backbone of an adaptive organization.

The Environmental Factors

Of course, no organization operates in a vacuum. That’s why the Diagnostic also tracks environmental factors that are always in motion. These include factors such as:

• Psychological Safety — Do people feel safe to speak up and take risks?

  
  

• Leadership Support — Are leaders modeling and enabling adaptive behaviors?

  
  

• Time Pressure — Do people have the bandwidth to reflect and adapt, or are they stuck in survival mode?

  
  

We think of these as levers. Unlike the four core capacities, which take time to develop, environmental factors can shift quickly, which leads to changes in the capacities over time.

By tracking both the long-term capacities and short-term environmental factors, the Diagnostic provides a whole-system view; not just where you are, but what forces are shaping your path forward.

Why It Matters

For us, this started with curiosity. We wanted to understand why some organizations seem to bend without breaking, while others crack under the same pressure.

The answer isn’t more effort. It’s adaptability.

The Adaptive Capacity Diagnostic™ shines a light on how much you have and how much is holding you back. And that kind of clarity is the first step toward building a stronger, more resilient organization.