Adaptability in companies: why it is not a permanent state
- Bernhard Nitz
- Jun 26
- 3 min read
Most management teams consider their company adaptable, and they have good reason to. They have been through a merger, handed over leadership to the next generation, or weathered the COVID pandemic. Whoever has gathered such experience trusts themselves with whatever comes next. Over time, a conviction grows from it: that adaptability is something you possess once you have proven it.
The Census data on AI adoption paint a different picture.
Why established companies often lose ground in change
Kristina McElheran and Erik Brynjolfsson examined for the US Census Bureau how the adoption of industrial AI affects American manufacturing, using plant-level data from 2017 and 2021. Who loses most is a surprise: not the young firms, but the old, established ones.
It is not the technology. It is what happens inside these plants under pressure. Experienced works that had tracked their key figures and kept their production targets in view for years stopped doing so when the newly introduced system challenged them. The routines that had held the place together fell away first. Nearly a third of the additional losses of these older plants can be traced to that alone.
The experience they relied on did not protect them. If anything, it made them careless.
Why past adaptability does not guarantee the future
A machine builder who relocated half of production to Eastern Europe twelve years ago knows how to carry out a site relocation. Whether he knows how to introduce an AI-supported planning system, or how to maintain and develop his machines with AI-supported analytics, is another matter. It is an entirely different task. It demands different things of the organisation, and the routines of back then help only so far.
That is exactly what the Census data show when you look at the winners. The best way out of the trough was found not by the firms with the longest history, but by those that were already digitally advanced before adoption. They brought with them what this particular change required. General experience of change helped little.
McElheran puts it plainly: AI cannot simply be plugged in and switched on. It demands a rebuild, and that rebuild costs established firms effort in particular.
Adaptability is situational, not permanent
With that, a widespread self-image loses its ground. "We are an adaptable house" describes no quality one has, but at most one shown the last time. The AI adoption poses different questions than the relocation before it: who carries the data upkeep, who checks the system's suggestions, whose judgement still counts. To these questions, experience with workshops and supply chains gives no answer.
Whoever accepts this asks a different question than before. No longer whether the company is adaptable, but whether it holds what bears the load for the change now at hand, and will keep it under pressure. What this can be read from beforehand, before the figures confirm it, is shown by the three early indicators.
Organisational resilience as an ongoing task
The notion of permanent adaptability is reassuring, because it spares an effort. One need not re-examine oneself before every major change if one believes one already possesses the quality. That spared effort is precisely the one that matters.
An adaptive organisation is recognised not by having the examining behind it. It is recognised by never holding it to be finished. Whoever wants to know how their own company stands before the next strain will find in the Pulse-Check the structured way in.
A personal note on this. Adaptability is not free; it costs efficiency. A company that has optimised away every reserve runs lean in normal operation and is, for that, more vulnerable in change. One that holds too much slack pays for it year after year, without it paying off. That makes adaptability not merely a matter of belief and attitude, but rather an economic trade-off. How much adaptability and which reserves should be built up depends on how the management assesses the future need for change.
Bernhard Nitz is the owner of transformind GmbH and a partner at Königswieser & Network. He supports leadership teams in corporations and SMEs across the DACH region when change threatens to founder on its own complexity.
