Understanding adaptability: What's resilience got to do with it?
Understanding adaptability: What's resilience got to do with it?
By SMU City Perspectives team
Published 16 June, 2023
While principles and good intentions are important, they require adaptability as the foundation for achieving success and avoiding failure.
David Chan
Lee Kong Chian Professor of Psychology, Singapore Management University
In brief
- The importance of adaptability becomes clear when individuals and organisations are faced with ill-defined problems amid uncertainty and rapid changes, rendering the responses that they are used to no longer effective.
- Principled adaptive leadership is critical for success. While principles and good intentions are important, they require adaptability as the foundation for achieving success and avoiding failure.
- While it is true that individuals do differ in many ways in terms of adaptability, it is still possible to train a person to be more adaptable.
This article is being featured in Special Feature: From Living to Thriving
Last Updated: 19 June, 2023
Adaptability is the ability to adjust to change and uncertainty. It allows individuals and organisations to navigate their way through shifting circumstances, unforeseen challenges, and ever-changing environments.
David Chan, Lee Kong Chian Professor of Psychology and Director of the Behavioural Sciences Initiative at the Singapore Management University talks about challenges to adapting and being resilient in an uncertain world. The willingness to adapt, not just the ability to adapt, counts too. In his advisory role to organisations and governments around the world, he often talks about the importance of principled adaptive leadership. One must be adaptive and principled, otherwise being just flexible can lead to a perception that the leadership is hypocritical.
Prof Chan highlights several key advances and applications at the individual, organisational and societal levels and identifies emerging issues in research, policy and practice contexts.