Of all the business skills that you hear about being crucial, adaptability can often sound like one of the more nebulous. Being prepared to deal with any situation that might arise is understandably important, but that in itself doesn’t prepare you for those situations.
The shifting circumstances around your own business are entirely out of your control. As good as a place as your business might be in at any given time, that’s always subject to change. Therefore, your ability to navigate those choppy waters and land yourself in a spot that’s just as good or even better than you were in before is crucial.
A Confident Direction
When circumstances change for the worse, it’s natural for everyone at your business to feel some degree of anxiety. Your team will look to you in these times for some sort of support or direction, and you need to be able to provide them with exactly that.
This doesn’t mean that you should be blind to problems, you need to identify issues and how you can resolve them. It does mean that developing a more positive and constructive attitude about what you can do to improve your circumstances might be essential. After all, if you’re looking to get to a better place, you need to identify practical, achievable goals that can help you to get there.
Changing Times
As the relevant technologies around your business also change, you’ll be faced with the issue of if and how you decide to integrate them. This won’t always be relevant to your brand, and letting an opportunity slide past you can sometimes be the right call – allowing you to bolster the aspects of your brand that are already bringing you success.
When it comes to more universal tools that are making sweeping changes to almost every industry – like AI – you might want to be selective about how you include them in order to prevent a situation where you’re throwing out everything that works. Even if you decide to only use it for something like security, you might want to consult services like <a href="https://konghq.com/blog/engineering/owasp-top-10-ai-and-llm-guide">OWASP AI</a> that can help you to understand how to implement it in a way that makes the most of what it’s capable of offering.
Silver Linings and Complacency
Your circumstances won’t always change for the worse, but when they change for the better, you must understand how that might affect how you adapt.
When you’re in a negative situation, you’re naturally going to look for ways to improve and that can help you to adopt a problem-solving perspective. When things are good, though, you might not see any need for change, and then complacency can start to set in. This isn’t to say that you should needlessly change things, but it’s important to still ask questions. What’s going well? Why are they going well? Are these factors likely to change soon? This can help you stay on target without taking your hands off the wheel entirely.