Rakesh Wadhwa:

What are the ways in which leaders can build adaptive intelligence?

 

Keith Coats:

So I would look no further than those four areas. We call that the DNA or the adaptive intelligence because DNA has four elements and why I like those four elements is because it comes out of the research. Adaptability comes from biological framing, the originality of being adaptive is something that is applied to evolutionary biology systems. So if you go to really try and dig and find out what it means for us as a business to be adaptive, you probably in your research will end up going into the areas of, biological adaptive processes. It was looking at evolutionary biology. Okay. So it's not just some consultants' opinions because it's a nice literation. So it's based on research number one. And if you did dig into each one, those four areas, they offer very practical lessons. So I didn't even talk about the ability to live with change and uncertainty. Now, if you're an accountant, What makes you a good accountant is that you probably have a brain that sees in terms of black and white. It's very difficult for you to see grey. It's very difficult for you to be comfortable with ambiguity the way your brain works as an accountant is that you like to default to black and white. So when you start talking about living with change and uncertainty, it starts at a very personal level. Some people are more adaptive at doing it than others. So it becomes a personal agenda. What does that translate into your organization? At an organizational level, I think, we can throw away most of the tools that we have currently used up to this point in time and in shaping strategic plans. The tools that we have used for strategic planning and our reliance on strategic planning makes no sense in a world that is uncertain.