T2 – Adaptation

This is a draft of the manual for public review. If you have any comments, please email them to info@omimo.org. Please check back for the final version.

The core category of the Compass is solutions: the main reason we have leaders is to get expected results, and that’s done by designing and then implementing solutions. However, both our environment and our understanding of the environment change, which requires us to adapt to those changes by adjusting our solutions. That’s why we need to surround the solutions category with the adaptation category.

Sources of change

There are various sources of change that should be monitored. Those sources belong to two major categories:

• Changes in our understanding: It’s not possible to learn everything about the subject before designing a solution for it. There’s an optimal amount of information we need before deciding; more than this would be a waste of resources, and less than this might make the solution ineffective and adaptation too complicated. Therefore, our understanding of the subject is always partial, and as we learn more about it while implementing the solution, we may realize that the solution must change to adapt to our new, improved understanding.
• Changes in the environment: There may be various types of change in our environment, both internal and external to the organization, which can change the suitability of the solution or even change our goals and visions.

Feedback

User feedback is a common way of discovering how to adapt, but not the only way. Moreover, user feedback itself can be understood in two ways:

• What people tell you
• What you observe about people

The second source of feedback is more reliable because people usually mistake what they want with how they want to be judged based on their desires.

In a more general sense, you need to pay attention to two different things:

• What people need
• What people want

The first one helps your long-term success, whereas the second helps with your short-term success. Like most other things, you must balance the two.

Target audience

Remember that if you try to make everyone happy, you probably won’t make anyone happy. That’s key in adjusting solutions: Except for ethical aspects, which should not be compromised, we should be brave enough to draw the line somewhere and exclude some expectations so that we can adapt in order to satisfy a targeted subset of the potential audience.

Becoming reactive

There’s a common form of over-adaptation that gradually turns into reactive tweaking of the solution without paying attention to high-level goals and visions on the one hand and opportunity cost on the other. When leaders and people around them fall into this trap, their work no longer generates the expected results, while they might be praising themselves for how adaptive they are.

Behaviors

The following are the expected leader’s behaviors in the adaptation category:

1. You regularly evaluate visions and goals to ensure they remain desirable and achievable.
2. You regularly adjust in-progress solutions to ensure they remain justifiable.
3. You remain open to replacing your selected solution with another that’s justifiably better.
4. You ensure that proposed changes to solutions are justifiable based on all relevant factors before implementing them.
5. You ensure that competing factors that impact a solution (e.g., quality vs. cost) are continuously identified and balanced.
6. You ensure that work items are continuously reprioritized, allowing the critical ones to gain more attention.
7. You ensure that relevant expectations are continually evaluated and justifiably met via solutions.
8. You are always proactive and encourage others to be proactive as well.
9. You constantly review the past to identify how you can make better decisions in the future.