Building an Adaptive Culture in the Age of AI

In an era where AI is rapidly reshaping the way work gets done, it’s never been more critical to actively cultivate an adaptive culture. While this doesn’t happen overnight, there are several key steps organizations can take to instill adaptability. 

First things first: what exactly do we mean by “adaptability” in the context of this new AI-enabled era? It is the ability to take what you know, apply it in a new context, recognize when your assumptions no longer hold, and rebuild quickly.  

Adaptability means experimenting with AI – and also challenging its outputs and refining the results. And this approach should be expected from every person, at every level, regardless of function. 

It starts at the top 

Leaders set the standard for this adaptive culture through their own behavior, not their communications. When senior leaders publicly experiment, share what did not work, and visibly evolve their own approaches, they create permission for the organization to do the same.  

Within my own PeopleOps team, we make a point of having regular sessions where we talk about what we’re doing with AI – but we don’t just talk about the successes. We talk about mistakes we made and what we learned from those mistakes.  

The fact is, not every AI use case is going to work. Some use cases will be dead ends; others might be valuable but require a bit of fine-tuning. For complex workflows – especially those involving agentic elements – there aren’t many existing playbooks to turn to. You’ll have to experiment and sometimes fail – and that failure is part of the learning. 

The organization needs to celebrate that experimentation. Until the organization is perceived as a safe environment to try something with AI, they will have trouble building a truly adaptive culture. 

At the same time, leaders need to remind people of the value that they, as individuals, bring to the equation. If we revisit our definition of adaptability from earlier, a key element was “take what you know and apply it in a new context”. 

That “take what you know” part is key: people need to recognize that they already have the cognitive foundation to question AI outputs, apply real-world judgment, and course-correct as needed. Frankly, there will be situations where professionals should question AI results rather than taking them at face value and passing them along to someone else in the organization without a second thought. 

Helping people evolve and adapt 

It’s important to note here that adaptability isn’t just about learning new skills and habits. It’s also about unlearning some of our old skills and habits. Attributes that made us really successful for years are not necessarily the same attributes that will make us successful in the future.  

This process of learning and unlearning takes a lot of agility and resilience. Calling out these skills, building them into organizational values, and giving employees the tools and space to apply new ways of working will be essential to making adaptability real. 

Keep in mind, though: employees who have worked a certain way for years may have an emotional response to being told they must fundamentally change how they operate.  

When emotions are involved, actions carry far more weight than words: helping to create the right cultural conditions where people feel safe to be uncertain about how this transformation will affect them, supported enough to learn new skills and unlearn old ones, and trust that they are in an environment where failure is productive if it leads to learning.  

The good news is that adaptability isn’t a fixed personality trait – it’s a cognitive and behavioral skill that can be strengthened over time. That means every employee, regardless of role or tenure, has the capacity to build it. 

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Amy Nordness is Chief People Officer at iManage.