Resilience Won't Save Your Organization. Adaptability Will

Ross & Schneider — Resilience Won’t Save Your Organization. Adaptability Will

TL;DR

HBR.org Partner Content (sponsored / advertorial) from Egon Zehnder, the global leadership-advisory and executive-search firm. Authors: Mike James Ross (Egon Zehnder Canada HR / Leadership Advisory lead; former CHRO of La Maison Simons) and Greig Schneider (Boston partner; former leader of Egon Zehnder’s Global Leadership Advisory Practice).

The piece argues that the decade-long leadership focus on resilience (“the ability to bounce back”) has been rendered obsolete by the AI-driven pace of change — because there is no longer a “return to before”. Resilience, transformation, and change management all presuppose a fixed destination once the wave has passed; in a continuous-change environment the destination keeps moving. The proposed replacement: adaptability — informed by underlying agility, curiosity, and creativity — operationalised across three layers (how leaders lead, how they hire, how they build their own muscle).

Headline empirical anchor: an Egon Zehnder survey of 1,200+ global CEOs, of whom 92% agreed that “As CEO, leading through unpredictable times, I need to cultivate a level of adaptability in myself and my teams that goes beyond anything I’ve previously imagined.”

This is the wiki’s first HBR Partner Content source. The format matters for confidence calibration (see §Source-quality flag).

What was actually ingested

Full ~6-page advertorial as published on HBR.org. No appendices, no methodology disclosure for the cited CEO survey (n=1,200+ is the only sample statistic given; the survey instrument, fielding window, sampling frame, and weighting are not described).

Key claims

Resilience is the wrong frame for continuous change

• The traditional leadership emphasis on resilience presupposes that disruption is transient: the wave hits, you stay standing, the water recedes.
• Under AI-driven continuous change, “the pressure does not ease, goals are constantly shifting” — the to in the classic from-to transformation exercise is now in constant motion.
• Transformation and change management are framed as suffering the same flaw: they assume a fixed destination, which the AI era has erased.
• The article concedes that contemporary definitions of resilience already include both bouncing back (returning to baseline) and bouncing forward (adapting and learning) — quoting Dr. Etienne van der Walt (neurologist; CEO/founder of Neurozone): resilience is “the ability to cope effectively with stress, challenges, and setbacks.” The authors’ move is to argue that even bouncing forward is insufficient because it still implies the challenge will pass.
• Image: “there is not just one wave, but a never-ending succession, and resisting all of them is impossible. What’s needed is to reframe the problem from overcoming these waves to learning how to surf them.”

How to become a more adaptable leader (four practices)

Drawing on the work of Linda Hill (Harvard Business School professor; author of Collective Genius and the HBR article “What Makes a Great Leader?”; forthcoming Genius at Scale):

1. Continuously structure (and restructure) agile teams. Break silos; cross-functional teams reconfigurable as priorities shift.
2. Harness the power of diverse perspectives. Multi-functional groups spark more creative solutions to complex challenges.
3. Nurture productive conflict. Hill’s “creative abrasion” — make space for constructive challenge and divergent thinking; “not about finding a single right answer but fostering an ongoing creative journey.”
4. Bring the outside in. Per Genius at Scale, reach beyond organisational boundaries — partnerships and ecosystems for continual growth.

How to hire for adaptability

• Reframe job descriptions from day-to-day tasks to the challenges the role will tackle. Adaptable candidates (the article’s coinage: “Swiss Army knives”) get excited by flexibility and opportunity, not by task-lists.
• Look for those who have adapted before but have been overlooked: unconventional educational/professional histories; frequent role changes (driven by boredom or status-quo challenge); “their ‘issues’ may now be assets.”
• Be cautious of long tenure in one role. “The adaptability muscle can atrophy over time.”
• Interview for learning, not experience. Less “experiences in similar roles”; more “what new skills have you learned” and “on what subjects have you recently shifted your perspective.” Adaptable people are constant learners who change their minds.

How to build adaptability (personal practices)

Three practices framed as muscle-training:

1. Seek (minor) discomfort. Take a different route to work; brush your teeth with the opposite hand; move where/when/how your teams meet. “Teaching yourself and your teams that change is not to be feared, and that newness is good.”
2. Reframe situations. When bumps appear, ask “What is this teaching me, and how can I benefit from it?” The CEO survey’s headline prescription for mastering today’s complexity: “Cultivating a culture of curiosity and open-mindedness.”
3. Practice adapting. Plan to do new things — wander a new part of your hometown without a plan; give teams shorter time-frame challenges and force more dynamic next-step pivots.

Notable quotes

“As CEO, leading through unpredictable times, I need to cultivate a level of adaptability in myself and my teams that goes beyond anything I’ve previously imagined.” — Egon Zehnder CEO survey statement, 92% agreement (n=1,200+).

“Imagine change as a wave crashing on the shore: If you are strong enough, as these ideas imply, you will be able to take the hit and keep standing after the wave has passed. The challenge is that now there is not just one wave, but a never-ending succession … What’s needed is to reframe the problem from overcoming these waves to learning how to surf them.”

“Adaptability is the new resilience.”

“As expertise alone becomes less powerful — AI can outpace any human in information and problem-solving — leaders must focus on what machines cannot replicate: the ability to connect ideas and people, challenge assumptions, and drive creative breakthroughs.”

“The adaptability muscle can atrophy over time: If someone shows limited change on their CV, it’s important to understand why.”

Cross-source positioning (descriptive only)

The article touches a topic cluster the wiki already covers from several other vantages. The connections below name shared topics rather than drawing equivalence — Ross-Schneider is a vendor-framed practitioner essay, and the adjacent sources operate at different rigor and decision layers (see §Source-quality flag).

• Organizational-design parallel — Werner & Le-Brun’s Octopus Organization makes a structurally similar argument at the org-design layer: the world is complex not complicated; static designs fail. Ross-Schneider operates one layer up (the leader’s individual disposition and hiring criteria) rather than at org-structure. The vendor lens is also parallel: Werner-Le-Brun are AWS Executives-in-Residence; Ross-Schneider are Egon Zehnder partners. Both are practitioners writing through the lens of what their firm sells.
• Change-resistance complement — Carucci’s resistance-as-data supplies the human-reaction layer (how to read what people do when the change lands). Ross-Schneider operates on the leader-disposition layer (what the leader must become). Different layers of the same change-leadership stack.
• Durable-skills overlap — durable-skills already lists adaptability as one of the canonical durable skills alongside collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Ross-Schneider is the first wiki source to make adaptability the centerpiece rather than one item in a longer list — but does so via vendor narrative, not measurement. The Globerson et al. Vantage paper operationalises three durable skills psychometrically; adaptability is not yet one of those three.
• Hiring-criteria overlap — Sternfels at McKinsey reports the firm’s 20-year internal analytics surfacing three under-weighted partner-track predictors: resilience-after-setback, team-sport / retail-job experience, aptitude-to-learn-novel-stuff. The third overlaps directly with Ross-Schneider’s “interview for what new skills they have learned.” Two consulting-firm self-narratives (McKinsey via IdeaCast, Egon Zehnder via Partner Content) name overlapping hiring criteria from different vantages and on the same calendar date (9 Feb 2026).
• Dynamic-capabilities parallel — Teece’s dynamic-capabilities (sensing / seizing / transforming) and Warner-Wäger’s nine digital microfoundations cover the firm-level capability for continuous renewal. Ross-Schneider’s “adaptability” is the individual-level counterpart in informal vocabulary. No mention of Teece or the academic literature in the article.
• Strategic-foresight tangent — strategic-foresight / Webb’s 10-step FTSG methodology includes a “Bridge to Strategy” step that explicitly tests adaptability. Ross-Schneider sits adjacent but does not engage the foresight literature.
• Linda Hill — body mention only. Hill is cited substantively (Collective Genius, “What Makes a Great Leader?”, forthcoming Genius at Scale, “creative abrasion”) but she is not an author of this source. Per the author-entity promotion rule she is not promoted here — flagged for promotion if a second source cites her.

Source-quality flag

This is HBR.org Partner Content — branded-content / advertorial sponsored by Egon Zehnder. Format implications:

• Editorial standards differ from HBR editorial articles: no peer review, no HBR editor-of-record byline, no Idea-in-Brief panel, no reprint code, no journal volume. The format is intended to give a paying brand a venue for thought-leadership at HBR distribution scale.
• Vendor-sponsored per the Lifecycle rules: confidence boosts from this source to any concept page are capped at +0.05 with the cap 0.75 for concepts where this is the sole supporting source. For concepts already at higher confidence with multiple independent sources, this source serves as a descriptive cross-link rather than a confidence multiplier.
• The 1,200-CEO survey is the only quantitative anchor and it is not described in methodological terms — no sample frame, no field window, no instrument disclosed. Egon Zehnder publishes such surveys regularly as part of its brand strategy; treat the 92% figure as a vendor claim until a second source cites or replicates the survey.
• The article’s framing strategy is to set up a strawman version of resilience (returning to baseline) and then declare the strawman insufficient. The article itself notes that contemporary clinical definitions of resilience (van der Walt / Neurozone) already include bouncing forward (adaptation and learning). The “adaptability vs resilience” framing is therefore best read as a rhetorical reframing of an existing construct for the practitioner audience, not as a substantive theoretical departure. The wiki should not treat it as evidence that resilience has been intellectually retired.
• No new concept page created. Adaptability is already part of durable-skills and adjacent to dynamic-capabilities. Promotion to its own concept page is deferred until a non-vendor source centers adaptability with operational definition or measurement.

Linked entities and concepts

Entities (this wiki): Harvard Business Review (publisher; bumps source_count by 1; this is the first HBR Partner Content piece in the wiki — new sub-table on the HBR entity page).

Dangling (single-source mention, deferred per the author-entity promotion rule): Mike James Ross, Greig Schneider (Egon Zehnder partners; this article authors), Etienne van der Walt (neurologist; CEO/founder of Neurozone; cited definition of resilience), Linda Hill (HBS professor; cited via Collective Genius / Genius at Scale / “creative abrasion”; not an author here but substantively cited — promote on second source), Egon Zehnder (sponsoring firm; the authors’ employer — analogous to how AWS sits behind Werner-Le-Brun), Neurozone (van der Walt’s firm), La Maison Simons (Ross’s former employer, mentioned in bio).

Concepts: durable-skills (adds a vendor cross-source bullet to the cross-source-positioning section; centers adaptability among the listed durable skills; no confidence change — vendor source). Adjacent (existing, light cross-link only): dynamic-capabilities, ai-employment-effects, enterprise-ai-adoption, strategic-foresight.

Threads/syntheses: Not added to the organizational-frameworks-for-ai-adoption synthesis — the synthesis is built on 12 mostly-rigorous sources, and adding an advertorial would dilute that cluster. The connection is captured here in cross-source positioning and on the relevant adjacent source pages.

Source

• Raw PDF (~6 pages): article file
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review (HBR.org Partner Content)
• Sponsor: Egon Zehnder
• Date: February 9, 2026
• Authors: Mike James Ross (Egon Zehnder Canada, HR / Leadership Advisory) and Greig Schneider (Boston, former leader of Egon Zehnder’s Global Leadership Advisory Practice)
• URL: not captured at ingest (HBR Partner Content lives on hbr.org under a sponsored content path; not guessed here)