Adaptability: The strategic capability we can't ignore

Adaptability is fast becoming a core capability for public sector success. This article explores how individuals, leaders, and organisations can build capacity to navigate complexity and change. From learning adaptability to leading adaptability, the series offers practical insights for a future-ready APS.

In today's public sector landscape, adaptability is no longer a desirable trait, it's a strategic capability we can't ignore. We are navigating one of the most volatile and fast-moving periods in history and disruption is now the new baseline as we see rapid technological advancement, institutional reform, policy complexity and shifting citizen expectations. The challenge isn't how to avoid it, but how we can build adaptability into our workforce.

For public sector leaders, the implications are significant. The capacity of the APS to meet its reform ambitions rests not only on structures and strategies, but on its people's ability to evolve with purpose. To do this, adaptability should be an embedded capability that strengthens organisations and is part of its continuous growth.

At this point it's important to distinguish between the skill of being adaptable, and the concept of adaptive leadership, or adaptive organisations. Building adaptability refers to the capacity for individuals to develop the skills and mindset needed to navigate uncertainty, shift perspectives, and adjust approaches as circumstances change. Adaptive leadership or adaptive organisations, on the other hand, focuses on embedding systems to mobilise people to confront complex, novel challenges where solutions are not immediately clear. While related, one is ultimately about personal capability, while the other is about leading others through collective adaptation. Both are essential, but they require different forms of development and support within the APS.

Disruption is here-adaptability must follow

The pressures facing the APS today aren't new, but their convergence is unprecedented. AI and automation are fundamentally reshaping the way we work. Policy design is increasingly contested by digital tools and community co-creation. Governance models are being tested by crises that don't fit neatly within departmental boundaries. Yet, across all of this, agencies often struggle to maintain a responsive posture. This is not a failure of effort. It's a failure of capability development.

We continue to treat adaptability as an assumed attribute - something leaders should model, and high performers should naturally possess. But adaptability is not innate. It is a learnable skillset, and one that we must deliberately develop if we are to remain responsive, trusted, and effective.

Adaptability is frequently described as:

1. Openness to Experience: the willingness to try new things and embrace novel experiences that encourages flexible thinking and reduces fear of change.
2. Emotional Intelligence: the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of others that enables people to stay calm under pressure, empathise, and navigate social changes more smoothly.
3. Resilience: the capacity to recover from setbacks, stress, or adversity that allows individuals to "bounce back" from failures and continue adapting instead of giving up.
4. Growth Mindset: the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and learning which encourages people to see challenges as opportunities rather than threats.
5. Cognitive Flexibility: the ability to switch between thinking about different concepts or perspectives, that supports problem-solving in unfamiliar situations and adapting strategies on the fly.
6. Self-Efficacy: the confidence in your ability to influence events and outcomes.
7. Curiosity: the desire to learn, explore, and understand, and seek out new experiences and learn from them.
8. Tolerance for Ambiguity: a comfort with uncertainty and unclear outcomes that reduces anxiety during transitions or in novel situations, making adjustment easier.

When adaptability isn't treated as a learnable capability, we miss key opportunities to strengthen performance and responsiveness. Learning to be adaptable involves acquiring the mindsets and behaviours required to operate effectively in dynamic environments. This includes learning how to navigate ambiguity, respond to shifting expectations, make decisions with incomplete information, and recover constructively from setbacks. These skills do not emerge automatically. They are the result of practice, often in high-pressure or unfamiliar contexts, and combined with opportunities to reflect, recalibrate, and try again.

What building adaptability looks like in practice

Evidence from complex operational environments such as crisis management, humanitarian coordination, and defence logistics reinforces that adaptability can be developed with targeted support. In these settings, people learn adaptability not by passively enduring disruption, but through structured exposure to real-world complexity: simulations, scenario planning, cross-functional deployments, and rapid cycles of action and review. The key is repetition and reflection; learning through doing, and then learning from what was done.

In more traditional organisational settings, the same principles apply. Adaptability improves when people are stretched just beyond their comfort zone, when experimentation is encouraged, and when learning is embedded into everyday routines. But unlike technical skills, adaptability is not transferred through instruction alone. It must be learned experientially—through challenges that mimic real complexity and through systems that support iterative learning.

Strengthening adaptability across the APS requires action at multiple levels—individual, managerial, and organisational. It involves creating learning conditions that stretch capability, develop confidence with ambiguity, and prepare the system to operate effectively in a rapidly changing environment.

Some practical approaches include:

• Rotational assignments and secondments that expose staff to different contexts, helping them learn to reframe problems, navigate different perspectives, and adjust to new operating conditions.
• Structured scenario planning where teams explore plausible future states and rehearse strategic responses, building familiarity with uncertainty and improving decision-making.
• Simulation-based learning, such as crisis response exercises, which replicate the complexity, ambiguity and urgency of real-world challenges—enhancing team cohesion and adaptive reflexes.
• Embedded reflective practice in leadership meetings and program governance, encouraging teams to interrogate assumptions, review outcomes, and identify how they will adjust going forward.
• Communities of practice that facilitate cross-team learning and knowledge exchange, enabling adaptive insights to be captured and applied beyond individual business areas.
• Stretch assignments and adaptive challenges that require individuals and teams to self-organise, experiment, and collaborate in unfamiliar conditions.

To remain effective, these approaches need to evolve alongside the workforce itself. Building adaptability now also means:

• Preparing the workforce for AI-enhanced work by supporting employees to adapt to changing roles, tools, and expectations. As AI functionality expands, the nature of work will shift, requiring staff to develop confidence navigating both human and machine-driven systems.
• Equipping managers to lead more complex teams, where human judgment and AI-generated insights must be integrated into effective decision-making and service delivery. This calls for adaptive leadership, but also practical systems that support new ways of working.
• Designing workforce structures that access and value different types of knowledge across the employee lifecycle - curiosity and learning from early-career staff, applied expertise from experienced professionals, integrative thinking from senior executives, and reflective insights from older employees. Adaptable organisations build in ways to draw on all of these assets, not just those aligned to traditional career stages.
• Embedding adaptability into capability strategies, ensuring that as AI augments technical capability, the system also evolves to integrate it meaningfully. This includes reshaping job roles, capability frameworks, and performance systems to reflect how human and digital strengths interact.

Looking forward

Building adaptability is not the work for one team, one function, or one reform cycle, it will require leaders to play a critical role in modelling the behaviours that make learning safe and expected. Importantly, it requires a shift from telling people to be agile, to deliberately shaping the conditions in which adaptability can be developed. That calls for recalibration of what we design for.

Building adaptability is a strategic imperative—because in an environment defined by disruption, our greatest risk is not that we change too fast—but that we learn too slowly.