The Adaptability Blind Spot: When You're Executing an Obsolete Growth Strategy
In 2008, Blockbuster's CEO dismissed Netflix as "a very small niche business". By 2010, Blockbuster had filed for bankruptcy while Netflix was valued at $13 billion. The difference? Netflix continuously adapted its strategy - from DVD-by-mail to streaming to original content - while Blockbuster executed a rigid strategy built for a world that no longer existed.
This isn't just a cautionary tale from the past. In today's AI-accelerated world, a five-year plan can become obsolete within a few months. You can't achieve any growth ambition without disciplined execution of growth initiatives, but you can't be rigid about execution either and let it blind you to emerging reality.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore often-overlooked barriers to sustainable growth. Drawing from Vibrance's Growth Orienteering approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation's full potential.
In this instalment, we examine the Adaptability Blind Spot, a limitation to growth that arises when companies can't adapt their strategy over time and subsequently get stuck executing an obsolete growth strategy.
The Adaptability Blind Spot
One of the most persistent traps in strategy execution is mistaking rigidity for commitment. As Harvard's late Professor Clayton Christensen warned, "very often, when a company is trying to implement a deliberate strategy, they're so focused on their goal, they miss the emergent opportunities appearing on the right and on the left." These missed opportunities can lead to far better outcomes than the original plan ever could.
Too many organisations approach strategy execution in a way that is now dangerously out of sync with the pace of technological change. The Adaptability Blind Spot is widespread in today's business world and reveals itself through several warning signs:
Current resources are locked in, preventing flexibility and agility in pursuing growth.
Organisations are reluctant to divest underperforming assets and stop zombie projects.
Organisations are unable to seize emerging opportunities outside of “the plan”.
Ask yourself: When did we last fundamentally question our strategic assumptions? Are we measuring leading indicators of change or just lagging performance metrics? Do our teams feel empowered to raise concerns about strategic direction, or do they focus solely on execution?
If these questions make you uncomfortable, you may be experiencing the Adaptability Blind Spot.
Process: Emergent Strategy Through Growth Orienteering
In a complex and fast-changing world, strategy can no longer be a yearly event. Instead, it must become a living, breathing process, one that evolves in response to reality. That's the essence of Emergent Strategy: a continuous learning system that connects strategic thinking with real-world execution.
"If you're in a mode of emergent strategy, yes, you have to go after something in a deliberate way," Christensen explains. "But you have to plan on things to emerge on the right and on the left of that which you may never have thought about before."
This is where our Growth Orienteering approach becomes essential. Like orienteering in unfamiliar terrain, successful growth requires both a clear destination and the ability to navigate obstacles and opportunities as they appear. After the initial phase of alignment on Growth Ambition, our framework operates as a double-loop learning system where insights from Realisation continuously inform and refine Strategy Design, creating an adaptive cycle that keeps strategy alive and relevant.
Growth Orienteering process
Growth Ambition
Business Model Review
The journey begins by visualising how your organisation creates, delivers, and captures value today. We suggest use of the Business Model Canvas to establish a shared language and clarity about your starting point, a foundational strategy tool we introduced in our Strategy Blind Spot article.
Disruption Risk Assessment
You can then broaden the lens by using the environment scan techniques highlighted in our Trend-Spotting Blind Spot article to scan for disruption threats and emerging opportunities. This includes analysing shifts in technology adoption, evolving customer behaviours, competitive landscape changes, and regulatory developments. The goal is to ensure strategy design anticipates the most likely evolutions rather than operating on outdated assumptions.
Opportunity Mapping
With environmental insights in hand, you can then explore growth opportunities both within the core business and beyond. Using the Growth Map, leaders can identify underexplored or adjacent sources of growth that align with emerging market realities.
Strategy Design
Opportunity Prioritisation
This step allows convergence on strategic priorities that form a clear but flexible strategy foundation.
Operating Model Design
Critically, you should also design the operating model adjustments necessary for selected growth priorities to succeed, including governance structures that support rapid learning and adaptation.
Business Model Validation
Whether pursuing core business shifts, new offerings, strategic partnerships, or acquisitions, you can validate future business models by testing their most uncertain assumptions. This approach quickly de-risks larger investments while maintaining flexibility to pivot based on learnings.
Growth Realisation
Execution Planning
Rather than creating rigid blueprints, you should design focused, hypothesis-driven plans for each growth initiative. These plans identify the next most critical assumptions that must hold true for success and determine what we most urgently need to learn through Business Model Validation activities.
People Enablement
As we highlighted in our Employee Blind Spot article, building trust, and engagement among the workforce is a pre-requisite for growth. Teams can't deliver adaptive growth unless they're properly empowered. This means teams in charge of growth initiatives should have access to decision-makers, adequate resources, support to remove internal barriers, and most importantly, they should operate in a psychologically safe environment where they can report both successes and failures honestly.
Value Delivery
When growth initiatives move into full execution - building products, forming partnerships, making acquisitions - you will need maintain rigorous execution and tracking of outcomes, not just activities. Every initiative remains an option and based on real-world results, you may choose to persevere, pivot, or stop altogether.
The Governance Challenge
One common objection to emergent strategy is stakeholder management: "How do we maintain investor confidence if we're constantly changing direction?" The answer lies in transparent communication about learning milestones rather than rigid deliverables. Stakeholders gain confidence when they see systematic learning that reduces risk over time, even if the specific tactics evolve.
This is why we recommend quarterly strategy reviews focused on: What have we learned? What assumptions have been validated or invalidated? How should this inform our next moves? Transparent curiosity around your strategy creates predictable touchpoints while maintaining adaptive capability.
Case Study: Slack, from Failed Game to Growth Powerhouse
Slack's journey illustrates the power of disciplined adaptability. Originally, Tiny Speck set out to build an online multiplayer game called Glitch. Despite significant investment and a talented team, Glitch struggled in a competitive and fickle gaming market.
Learning
The key learning was the realisation that their internal collaboration tool - built to coordinate game development among distributed studios - was generating more excitement than the game they had worked on. Instead of clinging to their original $17 million investment in Glitch, they were open to experiment with a strategic pivot to focus on the collaboration tool.
Experimenting
They ran experiments to test desirability of their internal tool. They measured user engagement, conducted interviews with potential enterprise customers, and tested core assumptions about workplace collaboration needs. When the data consistently showed high market potential for the collaboration tool, they committed to the pivot.
Managing Stakeholders
The team transparently communicated their learning process to investors, showing how their game development journey had revealed a larger opportunity in workplace collaboration. They reframed their investment in Glitch not as a loss, but as expensive market research that uncovered a massive opportunity (Slack was eventually acquired by Salesforce for $27 billion).
Contrast The Alternative Path
Consider how differently this could have played out. Many companies in similar situations would have continued pouring resources into Glitch because "we've already invested so much" or dismissed the collaboration tool opportunity because "we're a gaming company." This rigid thinking has trapped countless organisations in obsolete strategies.
Growth Orienteering as an emergent strategy process
In our AI-accelerated world, the companies that thrive will be those that master the art of Growth Orienteering. This requires viewing strategy not as a fixed plan but as a living process that evolves through continuous learning and adaptation.
The most successful organisations of the next decade won't be those with the best initial strategies, they'll be those with the best learning and adaptation capabilities. They'll embrace continuous learning, encourage intelligent experimentation, align resources with emerging opportunities, and empower teams to navigate uncertainty effectively.
Ask yourself: What could you achieve if your strategy process enabled you to adapt to emerging opportunities and threats on a quarterly basis rather than every few years?
In a world where AI capabilities evolve at breathtaking speed, the answer might determine whether your organisation executes yesterday's strategy, or builds the adaptive capabilities that turn uncertainty into competitive advantage in tomorrow’s world.
Note: an earlier version of this post was originally published on the Vibrance blog
