Change becomes easier to work with when we train our ability to respond to it. The world keeps moving faster, businesses face unexpected shifts, and familiar ways of working lose their usefulness sooner than we expect. Alex T. Steffen sees adaptability as an ability we can develop deliberately. In our conversation, we explore what happens in the brain when circumstances change, how overwhelm affects our decisions, and how we can use the resources already available to us when the environment around us becomes uncertain.
Alex has worked across several worlds. He studied business, started his career inside a large corporation, moved into startups, built companies of his own, experienced failures and successes, wrote several books, and eventually began advising organizations on change and adaptability. His early corporate experience also taught him something about his own way of working. He questioned established practices frequently and discovered that his instinct to challenge familiar approaches fit better in entrepreneurial environments. Over time, that became part of his work with companies trying to combine the accumulated experience of established organizations with the flexibility of younger businesses.
One of the ideas we spend time on is what Alex calls adaptability intelligence, or AQ. We usually associate intelligence with IQ and with our ability to understand, analyze, and solve problems. Alex adds another dimension: what happens when the problem itself changes, when something arrives unexpectedly, or when the resources we thought we needed are unavailable?
“What what I’m saying is, in AQ. That’s the adaptability intelligence. If you add that to your IQ, you’re better equipped for the future. That’s essentially the message, and that’s essentially the beauty of being able to train what I call your change muscle, your response to a threat, and your ability to use your existing resources to tackle that threat and evolve and emerge more capable, more ready for the future.”
Alex T. Steffen
His image for adaptability is the flying fish. Faced with a predator, the fish uses its existing fins differently for a short period of time. The resources remain the same. Their function changes. Alex uses this example to describe resourcefulness in business and life: learning to rearrange what we already have when circumstances require a different response.
That ability becomes especially relevant when we feel overwhelmed. Alex describes the modern environment as increasingly complex and demanding. Messages arrive continuously, decisions accumulate, and our attention gets divided among competing demands. His response is to create what he calls “macros”: principles decided in advance that remove recurring decisions from everyday life.
“So what I’m saying is, instead of deciding over and over every day in micro decisions, try to come up with macros for your life. That make your life easier and that get you results automatically.”
Alex T. Steffen
One of his own macros is having no meetings before 10 a.m. Another idea he learned from a friend is “no decision before movement.” These rules reduce the amount of mental energy spent revisiting the same questions every day. The broader idea is useful for entrepreneurs as their companies grow. Adaptability becomes harder as organizations accumulate processes, layers of decision-making and established habits. Alex suggests building the capacity for change while a company is still young, then carrying it forward as the organization expands.
We also explore what happens before creative thinking becomes useful. Alex describes self-awareness, the ability to shift our emotional state, and ways of reducing overwhelm. From there, experimentation and lateral thinking become easier to use. Change starts with noticing our own resistance and learning how our reactions influence what happens next.
Later in the conversation, Alex connects these ideas with his ebook Six Ways to Thrive in a Changing World, a workbook built around exercises for developing skills suited to an unpredictable environment. He describes a shift away from relying mainly on accumulated resources and toward becoming more resourceful when circumstances move in directions we had never anticipated.
“So really, what we need to do and understand is that the 20th, 21st century is asking us to develop these 21st century skills, which revolve really around being able to respond effectively. With your given resources to situations that we didn’t expect, right? So to really surf that wave that you know a surfer never knows how the how the wave really what it turns into, but that’s kind of part of the excitement. You want to learn, you want to explore, and you want to be able to to master this unknown situation. So developing a little bit of a of a an interest in in building the skill will effectively make you better. At at responding when an unexpected situation happens, and business leaders know every business leader knows that that’s the nature of the economy, right?”
Alex T. Steffen
Our conversation with Alex is ultimately about developing a better relationship with change. Adaptability grows through repeated practice. We learn to notice our reactions earlier, protect our mental energy, simplify recurring decisions, experiment with what we already have, and become more comfortable working with situations whose outcome remains uncertain. In an environment that keeps changing, that capacity becomes part of how we continue learning, building and moving forward.
Main Ideas
- Adaptability is something you can train. Your ability to deal with change depends partly on how you respond when something unexpected happens. You can strengthen that response through repeated exposure to new situations and by learning to manage your first reaction. When uncertainty appears, the few moments between the event and your response can influence what happens next. A calmer state gives you more room to work with the situation and find a useful response.
- Resourcefulness matters more when circumstances change. Having more money, people or tools can help, yet change often arrives before additional resources become available. Your task is then to look differently at what you already have. Existing skills, relationships, knowledge and experience can serve another purpose when the context changes. Adaptability grows when you become better at rearranging available resources around the problem in front of you.
- Your emotional state shapes the quality of your decisions. Irritation, fear and overwhelm can narrow the range of responses you see. Learning to recognize these states early gives you a chance to change your state before making a decision. This is especially useful when an email, conversation or business problem creates pressure for an immediate answer. Creating a little space between stimulus and decision can improve how you respond.
- Create rules that eliminate recurring decisions. Repeated small decisions consume mental energy throughout the day. You can simplify your environment by creating personal principles for situations that appear frequently. A rule about meeting times, exercise before major decisions or protected family time removes the need to reconsider the same question every day. Look for recurring decisions that consume your attention and decide once how you want to handle them.
- Consistency helps you stay in the game long enough to adapt. Unexpected problems are part of entrepreneurship. Technology fails, plans change, opportunities disappear and previous approaches stop working. Your ability to continue gives you more opportunities to learn from these events. Consistency and adaptability reinforce each other: you keep moving long enough to learn, then use what you learn to adjust the way you work.
