Adaptability

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

A Time of Disruption Imagine your church somehow existed back in the 16 th century, at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. You would be surrounded by major changes in society, in religious...

At their core, transitions are the internal adjustments by which we reorient ourselves to new environments, new experiences, and new seasons of life.

[I] try to get into their world a little bit [by listening to hip-hop], because if they’re only adapting to you and you’re not adapting to them in some way, I don’t think you’ve developed a relationsh...

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

The great San Francisco 49ers football coach Bill Walsh, when asked about legendary wide receiver Jerry Rice said, “Rice was considered too slow for NFL greatness.” But, when you studied the film fr...

There is a profound difference between adaptability and conformity. The “greats” seem to instinctively understand this difference, and while they disdain conformity, they cherish the courageous abilit...

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming sp...

All great jazz musicians have at least three things in common: (1) they have gone into the practice room and learned and internalized all the scales, which are simply organized sequences of notes, unt...

In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe adaptive challenges as the work confronting a leader when there is no known fix to a problem. It’s when “best practices” ...

A couple years ago I got to take a tour of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The name is a bit misleading because what they are most known for are there amazing gardens. And so we were o...

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Humans run to a much slower evolutionary clock than our inventions. To use an engineering term, we are the “gating factor” that keeps a process from running faster. It...

In this short excerpt, professor and pastor Tod Bolsinger describes how the changing world of ministry (in the West) has led some pastors to simply give up trying: About twelve years ago, I heard a ...

[Jonathan] Sacks comments on this passage, tying it back to his study of adaptive leadership concepts. In the first occasion, Moses was faced with a technical challenge: the people needed food. On the...

In order to exercise leadership on that challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar terr...

HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.

Change is the only constant in life.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

There is nothing permanent except change.

One of [Lamin] Sanneh's key arguments is that while the spread of Islam has drawn ever-increasing numbers to the globalizing influence of Arabic, the spread of Christianity binds ever-increasing n...

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect te...

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transiti...