McKinsey’s State of Organizations report just landed, and it names three forces reshaping every leadership team right now: AI, economic uncertainty, and geopolitical fragmentation. One thing stood out above the rest: the importance of organizational adaptability.
The headline isn’t the tech. It’s this: sustained performance and value creation are the priority now, ahead of short term gains. That’s a real shift. Leaders are being asked to build a flexible operating model and the adaptability to meet a future they can’t fully map yet. Read that sentence again and you’re basically reading Vision & Strategy, one of the six dimensions of EVOLVE.
Nine shifts, one thread
McKinsey names nine shifts reshaping organizations right now:
- AI-enabled organizations
- Humans and AI agents learning to work side by side
- AI powering end to end shared services
- New value models in a fractured geopolitical context
- Flow over rigid structure
- Economic disruption most of us are already living through
- Aiming higher with real BHAGs instead of safe, achievable targets
- A renewed DEI focus given the current climate
- Leadership that starts from the inside out
Pull the thread on all nine, and you land in the same place: organizational adaptability is the name of the game. Organizations that treat change as a project will keep losing to organizations that treat change as a capability.
The ROI question isn’t going away
Boards keep asking the same question: what’s the ROI? Fair question. I know of at least one organization that just cut off access to Fable over cost. I’d bet we see more of that, not less.
The numbers back up the concern. 88 percent of organizations are deploying AI in some form. Only 1 percent describe their rollout as mature. 86 percent of leaders say their organization isn’t prepared to adopt AI in day-to-day operations.
So the real question isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s what needs to be true inside an organization before adoption actually works. That’s exactly what the EVOLVE AI Readiness Assessment is built to answer.
The line that really excited me
Here’s the sentence I keep coming back to: for every $1 spent on technology, $5 should be spent on people. Capturing AI’s value depends as much on people as it does on the technology itself.
We love to see an aware leader.
But that raises a harder question underneath it: value according to whom? McKinsey references value the way most reports do, as a given. It doesn’t get into how an organization actually determines what value means for its own people, its own customers, its own context. That’s the gap EVOLVE sits in. Value definition workshops, value stream mapping, gemba walks, persona building and refinement. You can’t spend $5 on people wisely if you haven’t done the work to define what those people actually value in the first place.
Ethics as a practice, not a training
One thing the report gets right: organizations that are handling AI well treat ethical and responsible use as ongoing, not a training people click through once. Given how fast the technology is moving, a one-and-done approach is already out of date by the time it’s delivered. This has to be a living practice, revisited as the tools change, and organizations need to be ready to adapt quickly and routinely.
Breaking silos is the whole game
The report talks about using AI to break down functional silos. This is directly in line with a lot of the work I’ve done for years. Once you can see a system end to end and understand it as an ecosystem rather than a collection of departments, that interconnectedness becomes the thing you actually manage change around.
And here’s a prediction: brownfield implementations, where you’re rebuilding systems and processes while people are still standing on them, will feel impossible. They’ll take more time and need more care than anyone budgets for. I know I’m stretching “brownfield” outside its usual construction and IT meaning, but in the context of organizational change it fits. You’re not building on an empty lot. You’re renovating a building while people still live in it.
So how do you actually build adaptability?
If adaptability is the skill that matters most right now, the obvious question is: how are we building it?
I ran an informal poll on LinkedIn asking people that exact question. 47 percent said books and podcasts, 39 percent said trying new things, and 13 percent said investing in courses. Nobody picked “not here, comment below.” So the honest answer is: most of us are still leaning on consumption (reading, listening) over lived experience, even though trying new things came in a strong second.
Here’s my own answer, and it’s a little different. I used to take Krav Maga, partly for the workout and partly to scare myself on purpose. Picture a 5’0″ woman walking into a room full of men who expect her to hold pads while they hit them. I did it in three different cities: Atlanta, Detroit, and Miami. It rattled me every single time. Before my first class in a new Detroit studio, I called my husband just to get hyped up enough to walk through the door.
That’s what “get comfortable being uncomfortable” actually means. It doesn’t have to be work-related at all. Pushing yourself into unfamiliar discomfort is how you build the actual muscle for adaptability, not just the mindset for it.
I had a call with Faith Morris of Remote Operations Partner, and she put it better than I could: “if you’re not feeling like an imposter in at least some of the rooms you’re in, you’re too comfortable.”
One generational thread worth watching
The report also found a generational split. Gen X and baby boomers see AI’s productivity gains as the highlight. Millennials are less moved by that framing. It’ll be worth watching how that shifts as more millennials and Gen Z move into leadership roles and the generational ratios in leadership change.