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About

Why?

The world is transitioning in many respects, not least socioeconomically and geopolitically. Our mission is to help smooth this transition by ensuring organisations, both public and private, adapt accordingly.

Background

The Adaptive Edge Initiative started out as the The Intelligent Leadership Hub (ILH). It was created by Ade McCormack, a former technologist and Financial Times columnist. Ade is focused on helping organisations transition from an industrial era approach to one better suited to an increasingly disruptive world.

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Over the last decade or so, Ade noticed that both business and society were struggling to cope with the increasingly disruptive macroenvironmental forces bearing down on them. To understand what was happening and to provide a way forward, Ade developed a thesis, underpinned by anthropological principles, that he wove into his advisory, speaking and writing work.
 
This struck a chord with clients and the market in general. Latterly the emerging thesis / framework has embraced concepts from neuroscience, technology, evolutionary biology, natural systems, genetics as well as human performance management. 
 
In late 2021, Ade decided that the best way to make an impact was to support those with the greatest influence, ie leaders. However more recently, he realised that in many respects leadership (rather than ‘heroic’ individuals) was part of the organisational design and thus a focus on the organisation would be more effective than focusing on the behaviours of a few, albeit influential, individuals.

 

So today our focus is on influencing organisational design and development primarily through the lens of living systems. Living systems have the advantage of billions of years of testing in the harshest of conditions. In our view, the key determinant of evolutionary success is intelligence.

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Our offerings

We are evolving solutions to support organisations based on their maturity in respect of disruption readiness.

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Keynoting – Where there is a broad need to alert the organisation in respect of what lies ahead.

Workshops – Where the organisational implications of what lies ahead are considered and a response is drafted.

 

Advisory – We believe that organisations have the capacity to adapt, they just need the governance / nervous system to orchestrate it. We can help you overlay this onto your current setup in a manner that is welcomed by all stakeholders.  

 

Resources – To evolve our thinking and our helpfulness, we produce reports and other content. This is a free service. Though we would not rule out a sponsorship model with organisations who are in a position to advance our mission.
 

Our values and approach

We are in favour of developing organisations that take a long-term view and consider the needs of all stakeholders including staff, citizens and the planet. So wellbeing, fairness and sustainability are important to us. 

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More fundamentally, we focus on:

 

  • The operating environment - markets, society, ecosystems.

  • Leadership – Distributed leadership.

  • Organisational design – guided by living systems.

  • Risk management – Resilience and survivability.

  • Innovation – Fuelled by the integration of natural and artificial cognition.

  • Asset management – Creating stakeholder value by looking beyond profit.

 

We have developed a simple framework to enable organisations move from a process oriented ‘organisation to something more akin to a living adaptive organism.
 

The team

This initiative is currently led by the AEI founder, Ade McCormack.


Over the last few years we have built a network of specialists across a diverse array of disciplines.

Next step

Keep up with Adaptive Edge Initiative developments:

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