To Adapt or Not to Adapt : An Unconventional Insight

The Choluteca Bridge has an interesting story to tell. Originally constructed in 1930 over the Choluteca river in Honduras, it was re-built in 1996. Conscious of the extreme weather conditions in the region, the Honduras government had commissioned some of the best architectural minds in the world to build a bridge that could withstand the strong winds and violent hurricanes that frequented the area regularly. The much-needed bridge was a state-of-the-art engineering marvel, capable of holding out against the ruthless ferocity of nature, so characteristic of the Caribbean.

But just two years later, in 1998 something unexpected happened. Honduras was devastated by Hurricane Mitch, a category 5 typhoon that had ravaged the entire Caribbean with disastrous impact. Buildings collapsed, roads were wiped out, bridges were destroyed…there was devastation all around.

However, true to expectations, even in the face of this calamity, the Choluteca bridge continued to stand tall in near-perfect condition. But there was a small problem; the Choluteca river that was earlier flowing underneath the bridge had changed its course; now it was flowing beside the bridge, making the bridge completely useless and redundant. It became a bridge from nowhere to nowhere!

 Adapt to Change or Else…

For quite some time now, management gurus have been using the Choluteca bridge as a metaphor for what modern-day disruptions could do to us – threaten our jobs, careers and professions and make our skills & expertise absolutely redundant. They tell us to evaluate our current profession or specialization before we invest in it further and advise us to anticipate the change and ride on to the new bandwagon well in time. In essence, they seem to say: Adapt to Change or Else…  

 Does it Make Sense?

Is it worth leaving the area of your core competence and ride on to something which is the emerging trend? Leave humanities and start studying engineering because the latter offers better job prospects? Quit your career in marketing and join data analytics because it is the in thing? Move from being what you are to becoming what your organization wants you to become?  Become more competitive than missionary? Being more aggressive than being laid back? More optimistic than pessimistic?

 What does Neuroscience Tell Us?

Development in neuroscience today helps us think beyond conventional wisdom. It now confirms that our intrinsic personality is formed well during our pre-teens. By the time a child is three years old, their brain forms around 15,000 synaptic connections for each of its 100 billion neurons. In the next ten years, under the complex influence of one’s genes, experience and environment, these synaptic connections get more and more refined: some become stronger and wider, forming four-lane mental highways; others degenerate into narrow by-lanes with encroachments and speed-breakers, falling into disuse and disrepair.

These four-lane highways determine your basic talent. It is these mental highways that determine your personality – your likes & dislikes, choices & preferences, skills & abilities. They determine whether you like front-line sales or back-end operations, arithmetic or philosophy, whether you are competitive or missionary, optimistic or pessimistic…. Even if it is sales, whether you are a daily achiever like an insurance agent or like a pharma sales guy, your primary focus is on relationship-building that could drive sales over a long period of time.

 Your success and excellence in life or in your job largely depends on your core competence, which is determined by your intrinsic talent, skill and knowledge. The reality is, you can always learn a new skill and add to your knowledge, but it is nearly impossible to transform your intrinsic talent. Have you seen a super salesman becoming sales manager and failing miserably? Or an excellent manager stepping into a leadership position and looking clueless about his new role? All this, because they have gone out of their inherent talent-zone under the erroneous notion that with hard work and practice, we can adapt ourselves to any new discipline.

 However, nothing can be farther from truth. By shifting to a new talent-zone, you can expect to survive, but you’ll for sure, never thrive. For the simple reason that you can attempt to repair and broaden your mental by-lanes by trying to clear the encroachments and speed-breakers, but they’ll never become your four-lane highways. Also, the time and energy spent on broadening the narrow by-lanes, if invested in the already existing four-lane highways, could convert them into super expressways, leading to personal happiness, professional excellence and leadership in your domain.

 The Microsoft Journey

Take an example from the corporate world. Microsoft took the world by storm by the way it revolutionized home computing and office computing. Twenty-five years back, it built a formidable bridge (Windows) in the tech domain over the fastest flowing river (the PC market). Almost all the tributaries (brands) to the river kept flowing under its bridge simply because it was manufacturer-agnostic and it embedded its software in their machines. But then came the disruption caused by the internet wave with cloud-based services. Many competing platforms emerged and these streams started flowing away from MS Windows bridge. However, MS fortified its bridge with its internet-based applications, like Office 365 and augmented the flow under its bridge.

The tech-world was hit by yet another storm - the mobile-wave. As you can see now, Microsoft has been struggling to catch up with the new trends in tabs and touch-screens and the flow under its bridge is getting diverted. It is not that the people at MS have become dumb, or they are not able to see the threat. They are simply struggling to get into an area which is not their intrinsic strength, their core-competence.   

 How to Respond to the Choluteca Bridge Challenge

How do you respond to the Choluteca bridge challenge in your life and in your profession? Obviously, you can’t build a bridge that keeps shifting its location according to the flow of the river beneath. Nor can you keep building new bridges after every storm. But what you can very well do is that you can re-strengthen the bridge after every storm and re-divert the course of the river so that it starts flowing down your bridge once again.

What does it mean for you in your real life? Your talent is your asset, your Choluteca bridge. Just as you can’t shift the bridge after every storm, you should not move out of your talent-zone with every disruption. What you must do is to keep fortifying your bridge, that is, updating your skills and knowledge and keep investing in your talent to achieve excellence. Soon you’d find many Choluteca rivers competing with one another to flow under your bridge.