When electric vehicle startup Fisker filed for bankruptcy in 2024, it wasn’t because the company failed to see the future; it was because it prepared for only one version of it.
Like others, Fisker assumed EV adoption would continue accelerating, capital would remain abundant and consumers would eagerly embrace new entrants. Instead, higher interest rates, slowing demand, intensifying competition and tighter funding created a very different reality.
The lesson extends far beyond the auto industry. In an era defined by uncertainty, the organizations that thrive aren’t those that accurately predict the future. They’re the ones that build the capacity to adapt, regardless of which future arrives.
See also: The 3 A’s of organizational agility
Today, AI is compressing timelines between opportunity and execution. But it’s not all AI-related. Geopolitical clashes, regulatory shifts, fragile supply chains and even talent constraints are adding to this uncertainty. As the Fisker example shows, yesterday’s advantage can quickly become today’s burden.
Andrew Grove, the former president and CEO of Intel, famously observed that “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.”
High-performance organizations understand this instinctively. They challenge assumptions, pressure-test their business models and deliberately design their workforces for multiple possible scenarios.
In short, they prepare for the future by planning for it and creating a workforce that embraces agility, which is a core, cultural trait far too few companies have today in our AI-disrupted world.
A disruption-ready organization isn’t one that predicts the future correctly. It’s one that can anticipate change, adapt strategy quickly and act before competitors do—a three-factor formula for agility which many high-performance organizations embrace:
- Anticipate: The ability to sense and forecast change by scanning for signals, using scenario planning, or making workforce and business data visible to leaders. As a result, the workforce comes to view change as not only expected and manageable, but as a chance to disrupt both within the organization as well as the industry.
- Adapt: The proficiency to rapidly reset enterprise strategy, reallocate resources, update priorities and ensure enterprise alignment. Often, this means that the organization works hard to break down rigid silos and hierarchies to enable rapid knowledge sharing, continuous learning and teamwork, while purposefully instilling an inclusive, collaborative spirit in the workforce.
- Act: The competence to implement and sustain new ways of working by continually building capabilities, reinforcing desired behaviors and scaling effective practices. This may necessitate restructuring to minimize hierarchy and bureaucracy, as well as to empower individuals and diverse, self-directed teams—no matter their proximity—to make rapid decisions and execute quickly.
Our research shows that the most agile organizations report significantly higher productivity (3-6X more than the least agile organizations). They also report higher engagement and the lowest level of change fatigue (12%). Additionally, they often maximize technology more than others, operationalizing AI at a rate 2-5X of other companies we studied.
The Three As of Agility are a simple yet effective framework for organizations to increase agility and prepare for the future. However, to be truly effective, they rely on the consistent execution of practices which, when done on a regular basis, create a system capable of sensing change, adjusting strategy and implementing actions that result in performance advantages.
From hiring and onboarding to performance management, rewards and leadership development, HR has incredible influence when it comes to helping create an agile workforce and workflows, and—most importantly—a culture that embraces change.
The benefits of this are long-lasting. A change-ready culture not only absorbs disruption seamlessly but also exploits opportunities that change presents without turning every shift into internal chaos or workforce exhaustion. To build this culture, focus on three components:
- Strengthen adaptability by rewarding learning and knowledge sharing and making skill growth and new-technology adoption part of how work is done.
- Build cohesion through operational transparency, cross-functional collaboration and trust-building behaviors.
- Create agency by giving employees real decision rights, frequent check-ins and a clear line of sight between goals, strategy and accountability.
The Fisker story is a reminder that, more than anything, disruption exposes organizations that were built for constancy, rather than adaptability.
The companies best positioned for the AI era won’t necessarily be those with the best forecasts or the largest technology investments; they’ll be the ones that have built cultures capable of anticipating change, adapting quickly and acting decisively.
The question isn’t whether disruption is coming. It’s whether your organization is designed for it.
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