If you’re not Adaptive, then you’re competing against someone who is!
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45% of organisations have some level of Adaptive Culture – are you one of them?
An organisation has an ‘Adaptive Culture’ when at least half their employees report that their working environment is positive, proactive and future-focused.
A longitudinal study of over 3,000 of BPA’s organisational surveys (with some 810,000 respondents) shows that about 45% of organisations will meet this threshold as a minimum, but that the top 21% will exceed it by a lot.
It is often said that we can understand something by recognising its opposite. So, to help understand what makes an Adaptive Culture, we need to unpack its opposite. We call this a ‘Resistant Culture’.
An organisation has a Resistant Culture when over 60% of employees knock back the idea that their working environment is a positive, proactive and future-focused one.
About 29% of organisations are like this, and many of them are quite large.
There are varying levels of Resistant Cultures. Out of the 29% of organisations in this group:
17% are reactive (overwhelmed by problems and never really getting on top of things)
10% are blaming and accusatory; and
the remaining 2% have fallen into some form of despair about the future.
Work units’ sub-cultures can also be either Adaptive or Resistant. The middle ground for organisations (about 26% of them) have such a mixed bag of Adaptive and Resistant unit sub-cultures that they can’t really qualify as dominantly Adaptive or dominantly Resistant as an organisation. They are usually in some form of transition – some on the Up escalator and some on the Down escalator.
