You’re leading, on the European side, a long-standing industrial partnership with a Chinese company. You learned it early, and experience seemed to confirm it: in China, relationship comes before business, time, meals, trust before the contract. You built your approach on that, with your longtime counterparts, over years. It paid off.
A new generation of engineers is now taking over on the Chinese side, trained in a hyper-competitive market. They get straight to the point, expect a fast decision, treat the exchange as a matter of efficiency. You keep applying the same lens. It no longer illuminates anything: it misleads you.
This isn’t disrespect. It’s a model that has stopped being a useful lens and become an obstacle. Yours descends from a century of thinking about how organizations and cultures are managed, from Taylor to Hofstede (1), each version correcting the one before it without ever questioning what they all assume: that the world they describe stays stable while we refine them.
Violette Bouveret and Jérémy Lamri (2) call this kind of period an “intercycle.” It’s the transition between a paradigm that’s running out and another that hasn’t yet taken shape. In their words, “nothing is settled in advance.”
In a stable cycle, adjusting an imperfect model is the more cost-effective choice. You correct it, wait for things to settle, and land back on your feet.
In an in-between period, that calculation no longer holds. There’s nothing stable to wait for. The ground keeps shifting while you correct. That difference is what makes adaptability necessary, not a nice-to-have: without it, you keep perfecting a tool for a world that isn’t coming back.
Two responses are possible here, and they are not equivalent.
The first is to keep refining the lens: shift entirely toward efficiency, at the pace of the new generation. That’s adaptation, in the strict sense — a correction to the model. It works, until the same stability it depends on runs out too.
The second, adaptability, is a different capacity. Walker, Holling and colleagues, in the literature on social-ecological systems, give the most rigorous definition (3): it’s the capacity of actors to influence a system’s trajectory under disturbance, to act without a validated model, to hold multiple readings of a situation at once, without forcing one to settle the others.
Watch out for stopping halfway. You notice there are now two ways of engaging, one relational, one efficient. You decide which to apply based on the other person’s generation. That’s still adaptation.
A finer one: a grid with two categories instead of one, just as doomed to go stale in an in-between period. Adaptability begins when you refuse to think in categories, “nationality” and “generation,” or any other, and instead build the relationship at every exchange, with your presence, and with the person actually in front of you, not their profile.
Two responses are possible here, and they are not equivalent.
The first is to keep refining the lens: shift entirely toward efficiency, at the pace of the new generation. That’s adaptation, in the strict sense — a correction to the model. It works, until the same stability it depends on runs out too.
The second, adaptability, is a different capacity. Walker, Holling and colleagues, in the literature on social-ecological systems, give the most rigorous definition (3): it’s the capacity of actors to influence a system’s trajectory under disturbance, to act without a validated model, to hold multiple readings of a situation at once, without forcing one to settle the others.
Build the relationship at every exchange with the person actually in front of you, not their profile.
None of this makes older models useless. They keep doing what they were built for, in situations where the world stays stable long enough to refine them. What changes is recognizing the limit of adaptation before you exhaust yourself on it, and knowing when to shift to the other capacity.
Refining a model and holding multiple readings at once are not two degrees of the same skill. They are two distinct capacities, and the second doesn’t replace the first: it takes over once the first has given all it can. This is the capacity to stay present and stay connected under uncertainty that I work on with my clients, under the name Compass: an instrument that doesn’t show you which way to go, but keeps your sense of direction when everything is moving.
Stay oriented. Wherever it moves. One conversation at a time.
Notes
Over the weekend, violence shook a city where two team members have family. On Monday, the meeting opens with the quarterly figures. The leader stays silent so as not to get political, but that silence does not land the same way for everyone.
Asking a team member to erase their difference can lead to a double loss. The team avoids examining its own way of deciding, and loses what that difference could have brought it, exactly when it needs it most.
AI can analyze conversations and reveal participation patterns. But leaders still need presence to interpret context, trust, power, and risk — and to turn shared contribution into better decisions.
