🗒 Summary
Abbi joined us to reframe how People teams think about resilience and change. Your job isn't to make people endlessly resilient. It's to create the conditions where people can actually adapt well. She shared two practical frameworks - the Change Curve and the ADAPT model - to help People leaders and managers do exactly that.
📡 The Big Ideas
👉 Adaptability is an intelligence - not a personality trait AQ (Adaptability Quotient) sits alongside IQ and EQ as a measurable form of intelligence. And critically, it's not fixed. It's shaped by character, by learned ability, and by environment. People teams have the most leverage on the environment piece - and that's where the biggest opportunity sits.
👉 Not all stress is bad - but the line is finer than you think Healthy pressure creates focus and momentum. But when pressure becomes constant, unclear, or unsupported, it tips into harmful strain. The analogy: an athlete who never rests doesn't get stronger - they break down. The same is true for your team.
👉 The warning signs are behavioural, not just attitudinal People going quiet who usually speak up. Sick patterns increasing. Quality dipping. Snappiness between colleagues. Hours creeping up. Complaints rising. These aren't attitude problems - they're nervous system signals. Listen for the change in frequency.
👉 Leaders model more than they realise If you're telling your team to take breaks while you're working all hours, they will follow what you do, not what you say. This is especially true for high performers who set themselves very high standards. They need permission as much as anyone.
👉 Change leaders are often ahead of the curve - and forget that everyone else isn't If you've been living inside a change for six months, you've already gone through the change curve. Your team is only just starting. Under-communicating because it feels old to you is one of the most common and most damaging mistakes in change management.
⚡ The Two Frameworks
The Change Curve Adapted from Kubler-Ross's grief cycle. Not a linear process - people jump around - but a useful shape for understanding what's normal during change: shock, denial, frustration, depression, experimentation, integration. The job of a People leader isn't to rush people to the end. It's to create the space for people to move through it in their own time - and to allow themselves the same grace.
The ADAPT Model
- A - Look for Alternatives. Rigidity rarely survives contact with reality. Generating alternatives paradoxically makes it easier to stick to the original plan, because you've stress-tested it.
- D - Scan for Disruptors. Change makes organisations turn inward. Looking outward - at competitors, at other industries, at peers - provides perspective and breaks the tunnel vision.
- A - Challenge Assumptions. What do we believe to be true, and is it actually true? Or do we just want it to be?
- P - Make Flexible Plans. Plan for what you don't know yet. Build in flex. Think through what you'd do if something unexpected happens. Confidence in change comes from knowing you've thought it through.
- T - Make it Simpler and Faster. Uncertainty is what causes the performance dip. The faster you can get people to clarity about what's happening and what it means for them, the more time they have to actually adapt. Complexity is the enemy of adoption.
✅ What You Should Do: A Practical Step Plan
1. Stop treating adaptability as an individual problem If your approach to resilience is telling people to be more resilient, you're missing the point. Audit the environment first: do people have peer support, psychological safety, access to learning, and leaders who model the behaviour?
2. Name what people are experiencing - don't smooth it over Toxic positivity ("this is such an exciting change!") makes people feel like their discomfort is wrong. Name it instead. Acknowledge the difficulty. Give people permission to feel what they feel - it helps them move through it faster.
3. Map your team on the change curve - and map yourself too Before you lead anyone else through a change, situate yourself on the curve first. You can't authentically support people through a change you haven't processed yourself.
4. Watch for the quiet ones When pressure tips into harmful territory, one of the clearest signals is when people who usually speak up go silent. That's not disengagement - it's a warning sign. Make it safe to name it before it becomes withdrawal.
5. Communicate more than feels necessary - especially when there's nothing new to say Regular touchpoints matter more than complete information. "We don't know yet, but here's what we do know, and we'll tell you as soon as we know more" is a complete and valid communication. Silence gets filled with the worst thing people can imagine.
6. Use the ADAPT model as a team reflection tool, not just a leader tool Bring it into team sessions. Ask: what alternatives haven't we considered? What assumptions are we making? Where do we need to build in flex? Giving teams agency in the change conversation helps move them from frustration to experimentation faster.
7. Set guardrails for experimentation People get stuck in the experimentation phase when they don't know what they're allowed to try. A clear communication from leadership - here's what you can do, here's what you can't - creates the safety to actually experiment. Without it, people freeze.
8. Get managers through the change curve first Managers are your biggest lever. If they're still in frustration or depression, they can't lead anyone else through the change. Invest in getting them to experimentation before expecting them to role-model it for their teams.
💬 Q&A Highlights
How do you deal with communicating change when you don't have the full picture yet? Be honest about what you know and what you don't. Regularity matters more than completeness - telling people "we don't have the answer yet but we'll keep you updated" is far better than silence. People will fill a vacuum with the worst possible scenario.
How do you help someone move from depression to experimentation on the change curve? You can't force it - but you can create the conditions. Asking people what they think they might need, acknowledging that you're asking them to move faster than feels comfortable, and naming that honestly is often enough to unlock movement. For some people, it's time. For others, it's clarity on what they can control.
How do you mourn positive changes? All change carries some loss, even welcome change. The research on hedonic adaptation shows people return to baseline after both positive and negative change events. Giving people permission to grieve the old version of something - even if the new version is better - is genuinely useful.
How do you introduce a framework like ADAPT without it feeling remedial? Frame it as a planning and reflection tool, not a fix for struggling people. Embedding it in performance conversations, team check-ins, or planning sessions normalises it. The goal is to get people curious and forward-facing - not to signal that something is wrong.