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Adaptive Capacity
The half-life of an organisational belief
Every organisation runs on beliefs it no longer tests. We looked at how long those beliefs survive contact with a changing environment.
YOULAB · Feb 10, 2025 · 12 min read
Beliefs inside organisations behave less like decisions and more like sediment. They form quickly during a period of success, then harden long after the conditions that produced them have gone.
Across the engagements we studied, the pattern was consistent: the belief outlived its usefulness by roughly two strategic cycles. Teams kept optimising for a world that had already moved.
The practical work is not persuasion. It is creating enough safety for people to say out loud what they have already noticed privately.
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