The adaptive era: Making long-term moves in short-term cycles

Every era brings its challenges. The conditions may vary, but the underlying questions stay the same: How do we grow and optimize? And then what do we do with those gains?

Today, AI acceleration, compressed business cycles, and erratic market signals are creating new pressures on planning not just for what’s next but for what might change tomorrow.

Of the executives we polled across our recent Exec Connects, 85% said they’re actively shaping cultures that treat change as a constant and/or planning for multiple scenarios—not just one forecast—while 82% are prioritizing investments in platforms and/or resource models that flex and scale across different futures.

This mindset shift is also reshaping how we define competitive advantage itself. Where agility and vision used to be key differentiators, adaptability has become the only enduring edge. Indeed, 95% of leaders told us they’re designing operations that can pivot quickly and/or developing talent that learns and adapts faster. In other words, the advantage isn’t what you build, it’s how quickly you can evolve what you build next.

Today’s leaders are designing their organizations for movement, not certainty. Across our quarterly executive forums and conversations with Slalom’s own strategy and technology leaders, we identified four key themes shaping the executive playbook of tomorrow.

Today’s executives are designing for movement, not certainty.

85%

Executives are actively shaping cultures that treat change as a constant.

82%

Executives are prioritizing investments in platforms that flex and scale.

95%

Leaders are designing operations that can pivot.

1. From fast to focused: Speed still matters, just differently.

Speed arguably matters more than ever. But today’s top-performing organizations aren’t just faster, they’re more selective. As market signals get harder to read and the pace of disruption accelerates, long-term plans are becoming outdated before they’re even in motion.

In response, many leaders are shifting to shorter, three- to six-month planning cycles, placing smaller bets more often to improve the odds.

One operations executive described how her team shifted from multiyear projects to rapid, “no excuses” initiatives: short cycles tied to clear, non-optional priorities. “It’s not a nice-to-have. You can’t not do it,” she explained.

These rapid loops are valuable for their pace but also for how they help organizations learn faster, align quicker, and build toward future advantage. The key is reinvesting those gains into reskilling talent, redesigning how work gets done, and evolving operating models that scale more intelligently across functions.

But agility comes with a trade-off: what you build today might be obsolete tomorrow. As Amalia Goodwin, Slalom managing director and global outcome lead of adaptive organizations, put it: “We often talk about continuous reinvention as a positive. But the other side of that coin is planned obsolescence.”

Leaders must increasingly embrace the idea that some investments may be intentionally short-term: designed to solve a problem quickly, deliver value now, and then be retired or replaced. For example, a team might implement an AI coding assistant to speed development in the near term, knowing it may be overtaken by better capabilities next quarter.

Speed follows clarity. High-performing teams are using short-cycle planning, OKRs, and heatmaps to zero in on what really matters. It’s a different kind of discipline: one that treats speed not as the goal but as a mechanism for momentum and strategic reset.

Key insight from Coos, CPOs, and Strategy executives

Speed is a mechanism, not a goal.

Prioritize: Short, focused cycles tied to nonnegotiable outcomes.
Act: Build fast feedback loops and empower teams to pivot without penalty. Audit to see if your annual and multiyear plans are helping your organization or hindering it to make the changes needed in this era.
Watch for: Cultural inertia. Retire what no longer serves and reinvest momentum.

2. Siloed innovation doesn’t scale.

Speed is only as powerful as your ability to synchronize people, priorities, and processes. Today’s most resilient organizations are redesigning around full value chains, not just individual channels or functions. From customer experience to service to talent, integration across systems is what enables adaptability, not just alignment.

In one of our recent conversations with 250+ executives, a VP of business transformation shared how her team moved from siloed KPIs to shared enterprise metrics anchored in customer and operational value. They achieved this by reorganizing from project-based delivery to product-centric squads, each led by a product owner embedded in the business. These product owners joined staff meetings, engaged regularly with business leads, and owned a shared backlog tied to enterprise value, not just departmental output.

THE NEW METRICS OF VALUE

Function

From: Traditional, siloed KPIs

To: Shared enterprise metrics

Function

Technology & Data

From: Traditional, siloed KPIs

System uptime
IT ticket resolution
On-time, on-budget delivery

To: Shared enterprise metrics

Time-to-value for new capabilities
Faster business decisions and throughput
Downtime impact (CX disruption, revenue loss)

Function

Product & Experience

From: Traditional, siloed KPIs

Features released
Agile velocity
Roadmap milestones met

To: Shared enterprise metrics

Customer adoption
Feature adoption & value realized
Impact per release (NPS change, behavior shift)

Function

Operations

From: Traditional, siloed KPIs

Unit cost reduction
Operational efficiency (claims/hour)
SLA adherence

To: Shared enterprise metrics

End-to-end flow (order-to-cash, quote-to-close)
Experience quality (internal + customer feedback)
Speed of delivery on priorities

Innovation that scales is rarely owned—it’s orchestrated. For leaders aiming to move beyond pilot purgatory and isolated improvements into sustained enterprise value, the next step is operational coherence: adopting integrated intake models, aligning KPIs to shared outcomes across functions, and building the systems and processes to move seamlessly from data to insight to action. Organizations that succeed are rethinking how they prioritize work, not by department, but by the impact they want to create.

The result is a different kind of scale—less about size, more about cohesion. These organizations aren’t reacting to change on a case-by-case basis. They’re building the capacity to evolve continuously because their systems are designed to work as one.

3. Decision intelligence is the new competitive edge.

With new systems in place, many leaders are discovering a more fundamental constraint: You can’t scale what you can’t support. And in AI, that starts with data.

As Mark Waks, Slalom senior managing director of customer experience, observed, “The current moment isn’t about chasing what’s new. It’s about doing the less glamorous, foundational work of rethinking data strategy, building a more durable architecture, and mapping the end-to-end experience in order to enable the highest value AI investments.”

Key insight from CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and innovation & sustainability leaders

Focus on engineering decision readiness.

Prioritize: Clean data, aligned architecture, and end-to-end visibility.
Act: Pilot real workflows with cross-functional teams and shared outcomes in mind.
Watch for: Siloed data or disconnected systems. When information doesn’t flow, decision quality suffers.

That big-picture work isn’t a return to long, linear planning. Instead, leaders must design for movement, not permanence. A strong data foundation—structured to guide, adapt, and improve decisions in real time—is the prerequisite for intelligent decision-making. Without it, even the best tools will underdeliver.

But your data foundation is just that—a foundation. True decision intelligence comes from how leaders leverage that foundation to reason through uncertainty.

In today’s data-rich world, instinct isn’t enough. As Matt Kiesling, Slalom managing director of sales, service, and loyalty solutions, put it: “The executives who rise to the top will be the ones who can predict what’s going to happen next—and show how they got there.”

The advantage now comes not from being right every time but from making reasoned bets, adapting quickly, and aligning teams around a shared decision-making model.

4. AI runs on data. Progress runs on leadership.

If data is the foundation, leadership is the engine.

While the predictive edge is increasingly enabled by AI, this era demands more from leaders—not less. The companies moving the needle aren’t delegating AI to the innovation lab. They’re led by executives who get directly involved: piloting new workflows, pressure-testing use cases, and working across silos to move from exploration to enterprise value. As Gilbert Wong, Slalom general manager of strategy, noted, “Executives can’t sit above the change.“

Increasingly, leaders are orchestrating a “tribrid” workforce: humans, digital assistants and autonomous agents, and, increasingly, AI-enabled robotics all working in sync. As intelligent systems take on more decisions, leadership isn’t about calling every shot; it’s about designing systems and cultures that support faster, smarter execution, knowing when to trust the system, when to intervene, and how to keep optionality open until the last responsible moment.

If you’re not sure where to begin, ask: Is your data trustworthy? Accessible? Are your teams using it to make smarter—not just faster—decisions?

In this new environment, reliability isn’t about being right every time. It’s about creating the conditions for better decisions—continuously, and at scale.

Key insight from CHROs, CMOs, CXOs, and transformation leaders

Invest in continuous, contextual learning.

Prioritize: Role-level augmentation and adaptive capability building.
Act: Create peer networks and safe environments for experimentation.
Watch for: Skill lag. Design for learning in motion, not static training plans.

Flexibility is now foundational.

If the questions are: How do we grow and optimize? And then what?—the answers today lie in how you reinvest gains, reset priorities, and reorient teams toward adaptability over certainty. Long-term competitiveness is now the result of systems designed to evolve, not static plans or fixed roles.

To lead in this era, executives must:

Run in shorter, more focused cycles. Treat speed as a tool for learning, not just delivery.

Invest in integrated systems and cross-functional goals that scale beyond individual wins.

Elevate data as infrastructure—clean, connected, and ready to support intelligent action.

Lead from within, not above—testing, engaging, and modeling curiosity at every level.

As Ali Minnick, Slalom general manager of global outcomes and innovation, put it: “The miles you want to take your company forward will only be possible by the minutes you’re actually in these new technologies.”

In a world that doesn’t pause, resilience is the new efficiency. Focus is the new speed. And adaptability is the edge that endures.

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