An interesting observation in organizations is the fact that we often struggle to pin down the root cause of a problem and then end up fixing things that don’t need fixing.
We call it “execution failure” and move on. Which is convenient, because “execution” is a label that can mean anything and therefore explains
There’s a particular kind of fatigue that shows up when people are doing everything “right.”
People are disciplined. They show up early. They answer fast. They keep lists. They close loops. They have the language of execution down to a fine art. And yet, after a few weeks or months, a strange pattern emerges: we keep doing the same things, with the same level of effort, and the outcomes keep drifting. Not collapsing… drifting. The numbers wobble. The team feels heavier. The work feels oddly less effective even though everyone is busy. That’s usually the moment someone says, with a straight face, that the solution is to execute harder.
It’s a comforting idea.
It also often fails. Because what changed wasn’t your effort but the conditions. And repeating the same moves while expecting a different outcome is not… well, let’s say the best tactic.
Let me give you an example from the sea: A crew can run a beautiful routine in stable weather. The boat is balanced, the sails are trimmed, the timing of maneuvers becomes elegant. You start believing you’ve “figured it out,” which is the most dangerous phrase on water. Then you get a different day: wind shifting every few minutes, chop building from the side, visibility slightly reduced, the kind of conditions that aren’t dramatic enough to feel like a storm but are unstable enough to make everything feel off by a few degrees. Nothing breaks. Nobody panics. It’s just… different.
And you and your crew respond exactly as most organizations do. You repeat the same sequence as the day before. Same commands. Same timing. Same division of roles. Same confidence that last yesterday’s routine should work again, because yesterday it worked and everyone remembers it working. You pull the same lines, in the same order, with the same force… and then you stand there, momentarily surprised that the sail doesn’t set cleanly, the boat doesn’t accelerate the way it “should,” the maneuver feels clumsy. You try again. Harder this time. Tighter. Faster. More determined.
That is the moment you can watch adaptability fail in real time: not through laziness or incompetence, but through loyalty to a past reality.
The sea doesn’t care that your process is excellent. The sea cares whether your calibration matches the wind you have, not the wind you remember.
That’s where adaptability comes into play: Most of us don’t lose capability when things change but we lose the fit between our capability and the requirements of the environment. And instead of updating the fit, we intensify the routine.
Adaptability is not a vibe of “being open to change” in the abstract sense. It’s much more practical and slightly less flattering than that. Adaptability is the speed and quality of your updates.
When execution becomes a form of avoidance
In leadership circles, “execution” is a popular word because it sounds serious and measurable while remaining conveniently vague. It can mean focus, discipline, accountability, grit, cadence, rigor, velocity… pick your favorite. The problem is that execution language often becomes a way to avoid admitting something else: that you might be in learning terrain, not performance terrain.
There are situations where the path is known. The system is stable enough. The inputs are familiar. In those contexts, performance goals are rational. You can set a target, align the team, and get better at hitting the mark through repetition and refinement.
But when conditions shift (be it the market, technology, customer behavior, internal constraints, etc.) continuing to treat the situation as pure execution is a risky call to make. You certainly can intensify the effort, tighten the metrics, and add meetings until your calendar looks like a crime scene. None of that guarantees adaptation, because the task isn’t “do the same thing better.” The task is “figure out what the thing is now.”
This is why so many competent teams look strangely incompetent during change. They aren’t incompetent. They’re over-committed to a routine that no longer maps to reality.
At sea, that shows up quickly because the feedback loop is immediate and physical: the boat feels wrong. The sails flap. The heel angle changes. The speed drops. You don’t get to debate it. You adjust or you drift…
In organizations, the feedback loop is slower and more forgiving. You can drift for months while explaining it as “market headwinds” or “execution gaps.” That’s why adaptability matters more on land: you can avoid it longer.
The loop most people never close
The mechanics of adaptability are simple to describe and surprisingly hard to live by.
- You sense that something is different.
- You anticipate something.
- You interpret what that difference might mean.
- You act.
- You reflect on what happened.
Then you update what you do next.
The last step separates adaptable people and organizations from everyone else. Many teams never truly update. They hold retrospectives, write notes, nod at insights, and then restore the old routine because it’s familiar and feels efficient. Reflection is happening, but recalibration is lacking. Talking about what has been learned doesn’t imply actually changing behavior.
If you want a clean diagnostic for adaptability, it’s this: after you learn something, how quickly do you change what you do? Not what you plan. What you do.
Intention as Calibration
The way we frame our intentions changes how we experience difficulty and novelty, which in turn changes how we learn.
This is a critical distinction to be made in goal research: when you orient towards mastery (learning, skill-building, improvement) you tend to engage with challenges differently than when you orient primarily toward performance (proving yourself, hitting a target, looking competent).
Mastery framing generally supports persistence and deeper learning, especially under novelty. Performance framing can narrow attention toward protecting image and avoiding failure.
And then there’s meaning. The very personal version where you can answer a simple question: why is this worth doing when it becomes frustrating? Motivation research (Self-Determination Theory is one of the central frameworks here) shows that when people experience learning as self-directed and connected to intrinsic value, the quality of their motivation improves (more sustained engagement, more curiosity, better persistence).
So yes: framing matters.
But to make this useful and not just polite advice, we need to connect framing to the actual moment adaptability fails: the moment you keep doing the same thing and blame the world for not behaving.
- When the environment is stable, a performance goal helps you execute.
- When the environment shifts, a learning intention helps you navigate.
The problem isn’t performance goals. The problem is applying them when the situation has become unfamiliar.
Calibration in Motion
There’s a small scene I replay often because it captures the whole issue. A skipper calls for a tack. Everyone knows their role. The crew moves with confidence… almost muscle memory. But the wind has backed slightly and the chop is now hitting the bow at an angle. The timing that worked last hour is now a fraction off. One person releases too early, another hesitates because something feels wrong, and the sail luffs in a way that looks, to an observer, like “messy execution.”
The instinctive response is to tighten discipline: be faster, be cleaner, follow the routine more strictly. Sometimes that works. Often, it makes it worse.
The missing ingredient is sensing. Not effort. The crew needs to pause for a beat, register what’s different, and adjust the sequence… maybe hold the sheet longer, maybe change the angle, maybe delay the turn a second. This is calibration.
In organizations, this is the weekly meeting where everyone pushes the same dashboard harder while the underlying conditions have changed. You can see it in the language:
- “We need to hit the number.”
- “Let’s double down on what worked.”
- “Execution is the problem.”
Sometimes those statements are true. Often they’re a way to avoid saying the actual truth: we are in new conditions, and we don’t yet know what works here.
That truth is harder to say because it feels like weakness. In reality it’s the start of adaptability.
The practice: a reframe that doesn’t insult your intelligence
If you’re leading in changing conditions, you don’t need a spiritual awakening. Before you intensify execution, force a mode check. And do this in two sentences that are annoyingly simple:
- What am I trying to learn right now?
- Why is it worth learning now?
If you can’t answer the first, you’re likely executing a routine out of habit. If you can’t answer the second, you’ll abandon the learning the moment it becomes inconvenient and revert to whatever looks efficient.
This is where meaning matters as it becomes the fuel for staying in the loop long enough to actually update something. One of the reasons adaptability gets romanticized too often is that people think it means constant reinvention. It doesn’t. Constant reinvention is just instability at scale (which even in changing environments should not be the default condition and most likely is caused by a bigger problem).
In practice, adaptability is a sequence of small calibration moves: controlled experiments that are close enough to reality to teach you something, but small enough to be survivable.
At sea, you don’t redesign the boat when the wind shifts. You change trim, angle, timing. You run a new sequence, observe, and adjust again.
In business, the equivalent is resisting the urge to “roll out a transformation” when what you actually need is a set of one-notch-harder tests: a pilot with constraints, a customer conversation that challenges the narrative, a different decision rule for a month, a new cadence that surfaces feedback faster.
Adaptability is not speed for its own sake. It’s the discipline of learning quickly without pretending you already know. Retrospectives that actually change something
Most teams are good at reflection. Many are good at insight. Few are good at updating.
So the final practice is blunt: after you learn something, change one behavior.
One.
Earned Outcomes
The world will keep handing you weather you haven’t met yet. It’s the permanent condition of the world we live in.
You can respond by gripping the routine tighter and calling it discipline. Or you can accept what good sailors learn early: the routine is not the point. The fit is the point.
The question is whether you’re updating fast enough to deserve the outcomes you want.
nothing.
Whenever I’m out sailing, I see similar things happen. On a calm day, a crew looks sharp: clean tacks, tidy lines, confident timing. Then the sea gets rougher. The same people suddenly “forget” what they did an hour ago. Someone pulls the wrong rope first. Someone hesitates mid-maneuver. Not because they became incompetent in the last ten minutes, but because competence was calibrated to familiar conditions. The context changed, and what looked like mastery turns out to be early-stage competence that doesn’t yet transfer under novelty.
And sometimes it’s not the crew at all. A worn block jams. A winch slips. The boat itself can’t safely take the load. You can coach the crew all day, but the environment will still cap performance.
And then there’s the third thing you only notice in heavier weather: people can know what to do, have a decent boat, and still not commit in the moment because the perceived cost of making the wrong move is too high. It’s a system of consequences shaping whether action initiates and sustains.
Performance depends on three gates: competence, environment, activation.
Miss one, performance drops.
Miss two, performance collapses.
Miss all three, well…
Why “execution failure” keeps producing wrong prescriptions
When something doesn’t work, organizations reach for the levers they like.
Training feels responsible. Process change feels decisive. “People don’t care” feels satisfying.
But if you pull the wrong lever, you create secondary damage: cynicism, fatigue, learned helplessness, and a workforce that stops believing you diagnose before you prescribe. The central issue is that leaders often choose the intervention before they understand the cause.
Gate 1: Competence
Competence is the reliable delivery of outcomes, including when the situation is unfamiliar.
This is why the oldest assessment distinction still matters: there’s a difference between knowing and doing. In medical education, George E. Miller made it famous with a simple progression (knows → knows how → shows how → does). The important point is the last step: real-world conditions change the game. If you only measure “knows how,” don’t act surprised when “does” fails.
And the “rough sea” moment has a name: transfer. Applying learning in a new context is not automatic. Research reviews on transfer (Barnett & Ceci are a good reference point) emphasize how dependent transfer is on similarity of context, cues, and practice. In organizations we routinely assume far transfer while funding only near-transfer training.
So the competence diagnostic is specific:
- Can you deliver in a clean setting?
- Can you deliver when the case is unfamiliar, inputs are imperfect, and timing matters?
- Can you explain why the steps change when conditions change?
If not: you don’t have an execution problem. You have a competence-development problem (often a transfer problem) and the fix is practice design, scaffolding, feedback, and progression.
Gate 2: Environment
Environment is everything that makes delivery possible or impossible: time, tooling, decision rights, data quality, coordination load, handoffs, incentive design, and the policies that govern what happens when things go wrong.
This is basic psychology and organizational science: outcomes emerge from interaction between person and environment. Kurt Lewin’s framing is the classic shorthand for that insight.
Modern research tightens the screw with the idea of “situational strength”: in high-constraint contexts, individual differences matter less because the situation dictates behavior. Translation: you can hire better people and still get the same output if the system is a straitjacket.
The environment diagnostic is equally concrete:
- Do you have authority aligned to accountability?
- Do you have access to the inputs required to deliver (data, tools, permissions)?
- Are handoffs designed for flow or designed for blame distribution?
- Do incentives reward outcomes or reward risk avoidance?
If the environment blocks delivery, developing competence becomes only one thing: costly. You don’t become a captain by asking your crew to row a leaking boat faster. You need to fix the boat.
The system can make competence irrelevant… fast.
Gate 3: Activation
Activation is not “being motivated.” It’s the real-time willingness and capacity to initiate and sustain action inside a specific set of consequences. Motivated or not
People activate when:
- the goal is clear enough to act,
- autonomy is exists (not performative),
- the cost of trying is tolerable,
- feedback loops make progress visible,
- leadership doesn’t punish initiative the moment uncertainty appears.
People don’t activate when the organization trains them to wait. Or when the downside of action is personal and the upside is collective. Or when organizational stress turns initiative into self-harm.
This is why changing activation conditions is often more effective than anything else.
But, activation is not “the missing third ingredient you now need and all problems vanish.” It’s just one of the gates that might be failing.
Sometimes activation is the main issue. Sometimes it’s a symptom: competent people in a hostile environment eventually stop initiating action because they learned it’s unsafe.
You need to diagnose the pattern… not the person
The root cause can be:
- Pure competence gap (they can’t yet deliver under novelty)
- Pure environment constraint (the system blocks delivery)
- Pure activation failure (consequences or stress inhibit initiation/sustainment)
- Any combination, including the common ones such as competence exists, environment kills it, activation fades or environment is fine, competence is partial, activation overcompensates until it burns out or competence is high, activation is high, environment is chaotic
“Execution failure” doesn’t tell you which pattern you’re in and that’s why you need to work on diagnostics.
A practical diagnostic
If performance drops, don’t start with a solution. Start with three questions:
- Can you deliver in a clean setting, and can you transfer under novelty? If not, design practice for the unfamiliar case. Don’t punish yourself and the people around you for being exactly as trained.
- If you put a genuinely competent person into this system, does the system still slow or block delivery? If yes, fix the operating system first. Training people to navigate broken handoffs is equal to outsourcing responsibility.
- What is the perceived cost of initiating and sustaining action here? If the cost is high, don’t demand courage. Change consequences, and feedback so action becomes rational.
Then (and only then) choose the lever to work with. Sometimes you’ll pull one. Sometimes two. Occasionally all three. The win is that you’ll know why.
Performance fails way too often because diagnosis is lazy. You need to treat performance like a system of gates (competence, environment, activation) and identify the failing gate(s) before you prescribe a fix. The wrong prescription can look productive for months, right up until the moment your best people stop trying.