Leaders Need to Adapt At The Speed Of AI (And Where To Start)

From VUCA to VUCA++

The last few days have delivered a sharp reminder of the world we are leading in. It's VUCA! Most leaders are familiar with VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

But that framing no longer goes far enough. As I say in my leadership keynotes, today’s environment is not just VUCA. It is VUCA++:

• Cascading volatility, not isolated shocks: Change is continuous and compounding, not something leaders can “wait out” or deal with once every 5-10 years.

• Exponential acceleration driven by AI and digital technologies: Change (and the opportunities and threats it brings) now moves faster than conventional leadership sensemaking, organizational learning cycles, and traditional planning approaches.

• Radical uncertainty that resists prediction: Cause and effect are no longer reliably knowable, making traditional forecasting less useful than sensing, experimenting, and adapting.

• Systemic hyper-connectivity: Economic, technological, social, ecological, and political systems are tightly coupled, so changes in one (e.g., Venezuela) create second- and third-order effects across sectors that used to function more independently.

• Heightened ambiguity of meaning, not just data: More information does not necessarily create more clarity; it often increases confusion about what matters, what is true, and what to do next.

• Emotional contagion and peak nervous-system load: Fear, anxiety, identity threat, and burnout are systemic features of the environment, not individual weaknesses.

• Identity disruption at every level: Roles, professions, business models, leadership authority, and human value itself are all in flux simultaneously.

In a VUCA++ world, predictions fail faster. Linear plans decay sooner. Assumptions mother****ups quicker. Overcontrol backfires more emphatically.

VUCA++ describes a world where the rate, depth, and human impact of change exceed the capacity of legacy leadership models, making adaptability and inner capacity as critical as strategy or intelligence.

Adaptability vs. Agility (and Why the Distinction Matters)

Agility is often mistaken for adaptability.

Agility is about speed. Adaptability is about capability.

Agility asks: How fast can we move?

Adaptability asks: How successfully can we change what we are doing to stay fitted with a VUCA++ reality?

True adaptability includes the ability to:

• Sense weak signals of the future earlier than competitors

• Experiment before consultancies write reports

• Update assumptions without defensiveness

• Learn under pressure

• Regulate fear while remaining curious

• Evolve identity, not just behavior

This is why so many technically “agile” organizations still struggle in VUCA++. They move fast, but they do not change deeply enough. This brings us to the crux of the leadership challenge:

How do humans and organizations ADAPT at the speed of aI while Maintaining coherence & stability?

What Evolutionary Science Teaches Leaders

Evolution does not reward the strongest. It does not reward the smartest. It rewards the most adaptable.

Across biological systems, survival depends on one core principle: variety.

Which brings us to one of the most important ideas for leaders navigating 2026: The Law of Requisite Variety.

In my new book, Speak Electric | Lead Magnetic, I explore a principle drawn from cybernetics and systems science: Any organism/organization can remain viable only if it has at least as much internal variety as its environment.

Put simply: If the world becomes more complex, leaders and organizations must become more complex internally to respond, not react, and adapt, not ignore. Not just complicated and clever, but richer in perspective, response, and intelligence.

When leaders lack sufficient internal variety, they default to:

• Rigid control

• Simplistic narratives

• False certainty

• Defensive decision-making

When leaders build adaptive capacity, they can:

• Hold paradox without freezing

• Respond without panic

• Integrate new information rapidly

• Lead humans through change without burning them out

Why Digital Transformation and The AI Transition Demand Adaptability Above All Else

Adaptability is crucial for digital transformation and the AI transition. You never get transformation right the first time, particularly if it was designed at the top and cascaded down, often months or years after the plans were drawn up at HQ, with consultants who have already moved on.

AI initiatives surface blind spots, break assumptions, and expose outdated operating models faster than almost any previous technology wave. And crucially, digital transformation is not just about bolting new tools onto old ways of working. It is about fundamentally shifting how decisions are made, how value is created, how humans collaborate with machines, and how organizations learn in real time.

That kind of change cannot be fully pre-designed. It requires leaders and teams that can experiment, course-correct, and evolve in real-time, together. Adaptability is not a “nice to have” during AI transformation. It is the operating system that makes any form of business transformation and innovation possible in the first place.

Why Adaptability Is Harder Than It Sounds (and Why That’s the Point)

Adaptability is often spoken about as if it were a mindset shift or a leadership attitude. In practice, it is far more demanding.

First, adaptability requires real effort and energy. Novelty is metabolically expensive. Experimenting with new tools, testing unfamiliar processes, prototyping new products and operating models, and learning from failure all consume cognitive, emotional, and organizational bandwidth.

This is why many change initiatives stall—not because they are poorly designed, but because people are already stretched, overloaded, and operating close to capacity.

Second, and often far harder, adaptability requires relinquishing the old. Letting go of familiar habits, trusted processes, and deeply held beliefs about markets, customers, employees, or even one’s own role is profoundly uncomfortable.

These patterns once delivered success. They formed identity at the individual, leader, team, and organizational levels. Releasing them takes courage, humility, and sustained commitment, especially when the new way is not yet proven or stable.

All Leaders & Teams Can Unlock Adaptability

Even though it is challenging to the modern mind and the linear organizational hierarchy, adaptability is not an exotic or elite capability. It is a core human skill.

It is the same capacity that has allowed biological life to survive, evolve, and regenerate across radically changing environments for millions of years.

Every living system relies on adaptability to remain viable. Which means this capacity can be activated, strengthened, and trained in anyone, provided the conditions are right.

The work of leadership in a VUCA++ world is not to demand adaptability from people. It is to create the conditions in which adaptability can reliably emerge.

Adaptability is not a slogan. It is not a competency you “add on.”It is a leadership practice.

It requires:

• Inner development, not just outer tools

• Emotional range, not just cognitive speed

• Courage to let go, not just push harder

  
  

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence To Adapt At The Speed Of AI

Crucially, AI itself can become one of the most potent enablers of human adaptability if it is used wisely. When deployed intentionally, AI frees up time, cognitive space, and emotional energy by taking on large volumes of analytical, synthesis, and pattern-spotting work that would otherwise exhaust human attention.

Used with nuance—and in combination rather than isolation—multiple AI systems can help offset each other’s blind spots, biases, and hallucinations, creating a more robust sensemaking field than any single model can provide.

Most importantly, AI allows leaders and teams to experiment at machine speed: prototyping ideas, stress-testing assumptions, and running destruction tests on strategies and ideas long before those ideas meet reality.

You can read more about leading with AI here.

Unlocking Adaptation To Stay Match Fit

The future of leadership is no longer about predicting what AI, markets, or geopolitics will do next. It is about who we become as we adapt to them and use them.

AI does not replace human adaptability; it can amplify it, enabling people and organizations to evolve at a pace closer to the pace of VUCA++ change itself.

If you are a CEO, board, or leadership team preparing for 2026 and beyond, the most valuable investment you can make is not another forecast.

It is building leaders with the adaptive capacity to meet whatever comes next. That is the work. That is the challenge. And that is where sustained competitive advantage now lies.

If you want to explore booking me to talk about adaptive leadership or organizational adaptation at the speed of AI, contact my team.

If you want to see how our adaptive leadership programs can unlock adaptability in your leaders and culture, find out more here.

Why is adaptability more important than agility in leadership today?

Agility focuses on speed, while adaptability focuses on capacity—the ability to sense, learn, let go, and evolve identity and behavior as conditions change. In a VUCA++ world, adaptability determines long-term viability.

What is VUCA++?

VUCA++ describes today’s environment of persistent volatility, radical uncertainty, deep systemic complexity, emotional strain, and AI-driven acceleration that overwhelms traditional leadership models.

How does AI help leaders adapt faster?

 AI can free up human time and energy, enhance pattern recognition, enable rapid experimentation, and stress-test ideas before they meet reality—amplifying, not replacing, human adaptability.