Adaptive Thinking

Adaptive thinking is imperative to survive and thrive in this amazing period of change. Being adaptive requires the ability to actively scan and identify changes (internal and external) based on both the intuitions and analytics, and effectively respond to such changes for continuous efficiency (operations and improvement) and innovation (growth and transformation). See figure 1 from Gill (2015) – Adaptive Cloud Enterprise Architecture Book.

Figure 1.  The Gill Framework® V3.0 – Adapting to change (from Gill 2015)

Adaptive thinking is a complex phenomenon and has several facets. This post discusses the following key elements of “adaptive thinking” (based on Gill 2013; Gill 2015; Gill et al. 2015).

  • Agility
  • Analytics
  • Service Science
  • Design Thinking
  • Resiliency
  • Systems Thinking

Agility is the ability of an adaptive entity that is responsive, flexible, fast (to accommodate expected or unexpected changes rapidly), lean (follows the shortest time span, uses economical, simple and quality instruments in a dynamic environment) and learning (applies updated prior knowledge and experience to learn from the internal and external environment).

Analytics is the ability of an adaptive entity to monitor, collect, analyse, and interpret data and information for actionable insights. Analytics could be descriptive, discovery, predictive and prescriptive in nature. 
    
Service science offers a service-centric view of an environment where services are fundamental unit of exchange and where value is not delivered rather co-created.  

Design thinking is a balanced interplay of intuition and analytical thinking for the continuous design or re-design of an entity for continuous efficiency and innovation.

Resiliency is the ability of an adaptive entity to operate well under stress and has the ability to adapt and recover from a disruption or disaster state.  It could include concepts of continuity, availability, recovery, security, and governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

Systems thinking refers to a holistic living system of systems (SoS) thinking where a system is not merely a sum of its parts. It is continually evolving and has many independent and dependent parts that strive to maintain and restore to steady or normal state from an expected or unexpected disruption.

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