Remember when Apple's stock traded at $7 a share? I do, because that's when I sold my shares. Tech experts' sage predictions had convinced me that the Mac would never make a dent in the PC market. As it turned out, the Mac didn't need to make a dent, because Apple mutated its cute computer DNA into cute music players and phones that fit massive unfilled niches. Yet even the genius architect of this turnaround made faulty predictions sometimes. Remember the invention Steve Jobs said was going to be "bigger than the PC"? You may have seen a mall cop riding one recently.
Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. That's too bad, because our world is full of risk that we'd love to avoid and opportunity that we'd love to seize.
Fortunately, there's a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 billion years. It's called biology.
All of Earth's successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven't held "planning exercises" or created "predictive frameworks." Instead, they've adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising or inconvenient it may be.
While there's much chatter in the management world about the need to be adaptable, only a few creative companies and innovative managers have probed the natural world for its adaptability secrets. But when they have, they've been remarkably successful. A study of nature offers straightforward guidance through four key practices of adaptable systems.
Read more at The Harvard Business Review.
