Three things that show you adaptability before it pays off

Most leadership teams recognise adaptability only in hindsight. A project goes well, a rollout succeeds, a crisis is weathered, and looking back the verdict is: we were adaptable. That is comfortable and useless. Because anyone who measures adaptability only by the outcome cannot steer it beforehand. They can only hope.

There is a firmer basis. A 2025 Census study by the research group around Kristina McElheran and Erik Brynjolfsson showed causally, for US manufacturing, that introducing AI costs productivity first and yields gains only over the medium term. A J-curve. What matters is what the study says about the losers: older, established firms suffer more, and a substantial part of their losses traces back to abandoning proven management practices under the pressure of the rollout. Adaptability here was not a matter of sentiment. It was readable in concrete behaviour, before the outcome was in.

From this, three indicators can be derived that are observable without waiting for the result.

Indicator 1: How quickly resources change their place

Adaptable organisations show a pattern that becomes visible in their budgets and staffing decisions long before it reaches the balance sheet. They move funds, people and attention between initiatives more often, and they do so on the basis of new information rather than the annual calendar.

It becomes concretely observable through one question: when did you last wind down a running, non-failed initiative because a better use of the resource became visible? Organisations that never do this are not stable. They are frozen. The resources stay where the last planning cycle assigned them, regardless of what has emerged since.

This indicator is transformind's diagnostic logic, not a study finding. It follows from advisory practice and from the older ambidexterity research, which shows that organisations must balance resources between the established and the new. Anyone who takes it seriously looks at how often a reallocation against plan happened over the past year, and how long the decision to make it took.

Indicator 2: What is preserved under pressure

Here the Census study delivers its hardest finding. When the manufacturing firms introduced AI, it was precisely the established ones that ran into trouble, because they let go of structured management practices that had worked before. The rollout created pressure, and under pressure the proven was sacrificed. A third of the losses among older firms traces back to this, according to the study's results.

This inverts the usual intuition. Adaptability does not show itself when an organisation throws everything overboard under pressure and starts again. It shows itself when an organisation holds its load-bearing practices under pressure while integrating the new. Anyone who suspends goal clarity, decision discipline or quality control at the first headwind is not agile. They are merely under stress.

It becomes observable through the question of what fell away first in your last major change. Was it the regular reviews, the clean prioritisation, the clear decision paths? Then you did not introduce the new; you damaged the proven.

Indicator 3: Whether everything around the technology grows with it

The J-curve has a simple cause. A new technology alone moves nothing. Only the complementary investments in processes, skills and structure lift the return. The studies on AI productivity are clear on this: where firms forgo the complementary investment, they stay stuck in the trough. Where they invest in change capacity as aggressively as in the technology itself, they reach the rising side of the curve.

It is observable in the ratio. For every franc that flows into a new tool, how much flows into enabling the people meant to use it, and into adapting the workflows it is embedded in? Organisations that put almost everything into the licence and almost nothing into the embedding buy themselves the trough, not the ascent.

What these three indicators have in common

They all measure behaviour, not outcome. Reallocation, practice preservation and complementary intensity are observable while the transformation is under way, not only once it is complete. That is precisely what dissolves the underlying problem this text opens with: adaptability becomes steerable the moment you stop pinning it to the result.

Anyone wanting to test these three things in their own organisation needs no large survey.

Three questions are enough to start:

1. Reallocation: When did you last stop a running, healthy initiative because a better use of the resources became visible, and how long did the decision take?

2. Practice preservation: What fell away first in your last major change, and was it something that had carried weight before?

3. Complementarity: For every franc in new technology, how much do you invest in the people and workflows meant to carry it?

If you hesitate on any of these questions, that is where the starting point lies. The Pulse-Check turns these three indicators into a structured picture of your organisation, before the next major rollout forces the trough.

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Bernhard Nitz is the owner of transformind GmbH and a partner at Königswieser & Network. He works with leadership teams in corporations and SMEs across the DACH region when change threatens to founder on its own complexity.