Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in your Organization

Featured in the Fall 2025 Newsletter

Every boundary can be a doorway, every difference an opportunity, and every ending a new beginning. We may be challenged by uncertainty, but we can find a way to move forward. (p. 218)

In their book, Adaptive Action: Leveraging Uncertainty in your Organization, authors Glenda Eoyang and Royce Holladay present a way of thinking about the complex and seemingly ever-changing world in which we find ourselves. They posit that organizations and society are best defined as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that self-organize around similarities for coherence, differences for innovation, and connections for relationships. CAS simultaneously track the influence that the parts, such as individuals or teams, have on the whole, which is the organization or community. They also look at the “container,” or culture, that the whole uses to influence the parts. 

If this seems overwhelming, the authors acknowledge that it is. The many factors and forces of the modern world create a future that is unknowable and can feel paralyzing. In the face of such complexity, they present a simple, iterative process to confront uncertainty. This process is summarized as 

1. What?
2. So What?
3. Now What?

In the first step, “What?”, one brings their curiosity to the situation and asks what is happening currently to find patterns in the chaos. The authors provide short lists of questions that help to decipher the current state from multiple perspectives and levels of focus. The second step, “So What?”, focuses on differences, exceptions, or surprises that may herald coming disruptive change. They say this helps to separate the “signal” from the “noise.” One generates options during this stage. The third step, “Now What?”, is action. In this final step, one creates or amplifies factors that are likely to provide resiliency and modifies or discards factors that interfere with sustainability. Because CAS are complex and interdependent, small changes can be as influential as drastic ones. The key is then to start the process over again: examining what new patterns emerged from the action, deciding which factors are important, and acting once more.

In addition to tools and models for each step, Eoyang and Holladay provide nine case studies that demonstrate how adaptive action can be implemented within an organization, as a leader, and on a personal level. In each example, people observe, analyze, and act in continuing cycles to respond to new challenges and uncertain futures.