Question Change Before You Adapt: The Strategic Risk of Accepting Change Too Quickly
Adaptability is rightly valued in leadership. But organisations can become so focused on responding to change that they stop asking whether the assumptions behind it are true, inevitable, or open to influence. The strategic discipline is knowing when to adapt, when to investigate and when to reshape the conditions themselves.
Andy Demir | Qalbur Perspective | Strategy | 11–12 minute read
Executive Summary
Adaptability is essential, but it can become a liability when leaders classify environmental change as inevitable before examining its causes, assumptions and boundaries.
Deepak Malhotra’s I Moved Your Cheese offers a useful provocation: some constraints that appear fixed may survive because nobody has seriously tested them. Research on judgment and strategic decision-making adds an important qualification. Expertise matters, but experience can also lead people to impose familiar patterns too quickly on unfamiliar situations.
For senior leaders, the implication is demanding. Change should neither be resisted automatically nor accepted automatically. It should first be understood.
In This Article
This article examines why leaders should distinguish between genuine constraints, inherited assumptions and conditions they may still influence. It explores the limits of adaptability, the risks of premature acceptance and a practical way to test what an organisation should accept, question or attempt to reshape.
- Adaptability Became a Leadership Virtue for Good Reason
- A Maze Is Useful Until We Forget That Somebody Built It
- The Most Expensive Assumptions Rarely Appear on the Balance Sheet
- Experience Helps Us Read Reality — and Can Make Us Read It Too Quickly
- Premature Acceptance Has a Commercial Cost
- The Case Against Over-Questioning Change
- The Constraint–Assumption–Influence Test
- Change Leadership Should Begin Before the Change Programme
- Questions for the Boardroom
Adaptability Became a Leadership Virtue for Good Reason
Few executives need reminding that organisations must adapt.
Markets move. Technologies alter economics. Competitors change positions. Customer expectations evolve. Regulation changes what can be sold, produced, or financed. People reconsider where and how they want to work. A company that insists the environment should remain as it was eventually discovers that the environment has no obligation to cooperate.
The modern emphasis on agility, resilience and change readiness therefore has a sound foundation.
Yet useful ideas become dangerous when they mature into doctrine.
Once adaptability becomes an unquestioned virtue, leaders can begin to treat every external development as something the organisation must accommodate. The discussion moves rapidly from what is changing to how quickly we can respond.
That transition often feels like decisive leadership.
Sometimes it is.
But it can also close the most important strategic question too early: what, precisely, are we adapting to?
A market signal may be temporary rather than structural. A customer requirement may be negotiable. An industry convention may be habit rather than necessity. A cost structure may reflect historical choices rather than economic law. A competitor’s move may deserve observation rather than imitation.
When these distinctions disappear, an organisation can become exceptionally efficient at adapting to a reality it has insufficiently examined.
That is the strategic risk.
A Maze Is Useful Until We Forget That Somebody Built It
Deepak Malhotra’s I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze was first published by Berrett-Koehler in 2011. It was conceived partly as a challenge to the philosophy associated with Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese?, published in 1998. Johnson’s parable emphasised anticipating, acknowledging, and accepting change. Malhotra asks a different question: what if we should question the maze itself?
That distinction is more consequential than it initially appears.
The value of Malhotra’s argument for executives is not that leaders should rebel against every constraint. Organisations operate within genuine boundaries: law, physics, capital, contractual obligations, customer economics and time cannot simply be wished away.
The useful provocation is that perceived constraint and demonstrated constraint are different things.
Strategy often begins inside assumptions that arrived before the current leadership team did.
“This market requires that route to customer.”
“Our customers will never pay for that.”
“This capability has to remain internal.”
“That function cannot be decentralised.”
“This is simply how margins work in this industry.”
Perhaps each statement is correct.
The strategic failure occurs when its status changes silently from proposition to fact.
Once that happens, management no longer investigates the boundary. It optimises inside it.
This is how the maze enters the organisation.
The Most Expensive Assumptions Rarely Appear on the Balance Sheet
An untested assumption creates no immediate accounting entry.
There is no line for “strategic possibilities never considered”. No impairment charge appears because management accepted a market convention that could have been challenged. No auditor requires a note explaining that a business model was inherited rather than independently examined.
Yet assumptions eventually become economic.
They shape capital allocation, organisational design, pricing, channel strategy, hiring and partnerships. Once investment follows them, reversing the original assumption becomes progressively more expensive.
Consider what happens when management concludes that a particular technological change is inevitable.
Budgets move. Teams are built. External partners are selected. Existing capabilities are allowed to decline. Customer propositions are redesigned. Incentives are attached to the new direction. Careers become associated with its success.
At that point, questioning the original assumption is no longer an intellectual exercise. It threatens committed capital, organisational status and personal credibility.
The organisation has moved from believing something to having something at stake in continuing to believe it.
That transition deserves far more boardroom attention.
It also explains why challenging assumptions early is usually cheaper than challenging them after adaptation has begun.
Experience Helps Us Read Reality. It Can Also Make Us Read It Too Quickly.
Experienced executives cannot analyse every decision from first principles.
They rely on pattern recognition. Years spent observing customers, markets, organisations, and people create mental libraries. A familiar situation arises, and the experienced leader recognises something a less experienced manager might take weeks to discover.
This is one legitimate advantage of experience.
But it has conditions.
Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, approaching judgment from different intellectual traditions, found substantial common ground on when to trust intuitive expertise. Their analysis emphasised that skilled intuition is more reliable in environments with sufficiently regular patterns and opportunities to learn them through feedback. Novel or highly uncertain environments provide weaker foundations for confident intuition.
That distinction matters considerably for executives.
Many strategic decisions occur precisely where feedback is slow, causality is ambiguous, and historical comparison is imperfect. Acquisitions, market entries, organisational restructurings, technology bets and major capital decisions may take years before their quality becomes fully visible.
Experience remains useful. But the more genuinely novel the environment, the more carefully leaders should distinguish recognition from resemblance.
A new situation may look familiar because the executive has seen something like it before.
“Like” is doing considerable work in that sentence.
The danger is not executive experience itself. It is the speed with which experience can convert analogy into certainty.
Organisations Add Another Problem: Agreement Can Feel Like Evidence
Individual judgment does not occur in isolation.
Organisations create their own filters through hierarchy, incentives, professional identity, and information distribution.
Research on strategic decision-making has repeatedly examined how overconfidence, confirmation bias, anchoring, self-interest and group dynamics can distort consequential decisions. Lovallo and Sibony argued that improving strategic decisions requires changing the process around judgment, because simply knowing that biases exist does not reliably remove them.
This shifts the issue from personal self-awareness to organisational design.
A board cannot merely instruct executives to “challenge assumptions”. It must examine whether the decision-making process provides a challenge somewhere to go.
McKinsey’s survey work on strategic decisions found that executives reporting more satisfactory outcomes also rated practices such as seeking contrary evidence, giving dissenting voices room to speak, and thoroughly reviewing business cases more highly. That evidence should not be treated as proof of simple causation, but it does reinforce an important executive principle: the quality of debate matters.
Hierarchy complicates this further.
When senior leaders express a preference too early, people further down the organisation may reinterpret investigation as implementation. The question subtly changes from “Is this correct?” to “How do we make the leader’s view work?”
The organisation can still appear analytical. Presentations are prepared. Data is collected. Scenarios are discussed.
Yet the frame has already closed.
Information is being used to refine the answer rather than test the premise.
Premature Acceptance Has a Commercial Cost
The commercial consequence of this behaviour deserves more attention than the language of “resistance to change” normally allows.
Suppose an organisation interprets a new market development as permanent and moves early.
That may produce first-mover advantage. It may also commit capital before demand is sufficiently visible.
Suppose a company accepts that a new channel will dominate customer access.
Moving quickly may protect revenue. It may also transfer bargaining power to an intermediary that later becomes difficult to escape.
Suppose leadership concludes that an external capability is becoming commoditised and decides to outsource it.
The immediate economics may improve. Five years later, the organisation may discover that the apparently non-core capability contained knowledge necessary for differentiation.
These are not arguments for hesitation.
They are reminders that adaptation changes the organisation itself.
Every response to change reallocates something: capital, knowledge, authority, relationships, capability or risk. An adaptation decision therefore cannot be judged only by whether it fits the emerging environment. Senior leaders must also ask what strategic options disappear once the organisation makes that response.
This is where change leadership meets economics.
Flexibility has value precisely because the future is uncertain. A strategy that commits too early can destroy option value even when its underlying interpretation of the future ultimately proves correct.
Timing matters almost as much as direction.
There Is a Strong Case Against Over-Questioning Change
Malhotra’s provocation also has limits.
An executive culture that celebrates questioning can become intellectually impressive and commercially useless.
Some changes are genuinely outside management's control. Regulation can impose deadlines. Liquidity can disappear quickly. A technological substitution can move faster than an incumbent’s willingness to debate it. Customers can leave while leadership is still interrogating whether their preferences are permanent.
Organisations can also use “we need to understand this better” as sophisticated language for avoidance.
That danger should not be understated.
There are moments when adaptation speed matters more than conceptual elegance.
Research into organisational decision-making similarly warns against assuming that more information and more deliberation always produce better outcomes. The requirement is balance: some decisions benefit from extended debate; others need decisive action once the available evidence has reached a reasonable threshold.
The executive challenge therefore cannot be reduced to “question change”.
It is knowing when questioning still creates information and when it starts consuming time without materially improving the decision.
That is a much harder judgment.
And it exposes the genuine trade-off: adaptation protects the organisation from being left behind; interrogation protects it from moving confidently in the wrong direction.
Both capabilities matter.
The Strategic Discipline Is to Separate Three Kinds of Reality
A useful way to think about this problem is to separate the conditions facing an organisation into three categories.
The first is demonstrated constraint.
These are conditions supported strongly enough by evidence that strategy should respect them. They may include legal requirements, physical limits, contractual conditions, available capital, or customer decisions already visible in behaviour.
Debating them may be intellectually interesting but strategically wasteful.
The second is working assumptions.
These are propositions that may be reasonable but remain contingent: future customer behaviour, competitor responses, adoption rates, channel economics, talent preferences or technological trajectories.
They are necessary because strategy cannot wait for perfect information. But they should remain visibly labelled as assumptions.
The third is a shapable condition.
This is where Malhotra’s provocation becomes most valuable.
Some elements of the environment are neither fixed nor merely forecast. They can be influenced through negotiation, pricing, product design, coalition building, investment, regulation, partnerships, market education, or organisational capability.
Treating a shapable condition as an external fact creates unnecessary surrender.
Treating a demonstrated constraint as shapable creates waste.
Treating a working assumption as certainty creates fragility.
Executive judgment lies partly in knowing which kind of reality the organisation is facing.
I call this the Qalbur Constraint–Assumption–Influence Test.
Its purpose is not to produce another management framework for its own sake. It is to stop fundamentally different kinds of strategic conditions being discussed as though they were equivalent.
Change Leadership Should Begin Before the Change Programme
This distinction also changes how transformation should be governed.
Most change programmes begin after senior leadership has settled the underlying interpretation.
A new operating model has been chosen. A technology strategy has been approved. A restructuring has been announced. A market exit has been decided. The organisation is then mobilised around implementation.
By that stage, change management is largely downstream.
Communication, engagement, milestones, capability development and resistance management all matter, but they operate after the central assumptions have become strategic commitments.
For consequential decisions, leadership needs an earlier discipline.
Before asking how the organisation will adapt, the executive team should make visible what it currently regards as fact, what remains assumption, and what might still be influenced.
Then it should look deliberately for disconfirming evidence.
Gary Klein’s premortem technique offers one practical mechanism. By asking a team to imagine that a proposed course of action has failed and then explain why, leaders can create permission for reservations to surface before commitment makes dissent more difficult.
The objective is not permanent scepticism.
It is preserving intellectual mobility until enough evidence justifies organisational commitment.
What Senior Leaders Should Consider
The discipline starts with language.
When someone says, “the market is moving towards X”, ask what evidence distinguishes a structural shift from an emerging tendency.
When a proposal says, “customers require Y”, separate explicit customer behaviour from management interpretation.
When an industry convention is presented as unavoidable, ask what would happen if the organisation refused to follow it.
For major commitments, record the assumptions supporting the decision at the moment it is made. Include the evidence that would cause those assumptions to be reconsidered.
This matters because memory is adaptive. Once events unfold, organisations become surprisingly good at reconstructing why their original decision was reasonable.
Finally, examine incentives around dissent.
A leadership team cannot claim to value challenge if disagreeing with an accepted strategic premise damages the career of the person who raises it. Intellectual independence is partly a cultural value, but at the executive level it is also a governance issue.
Questions for the Boardroom
- What are we currently calling inevitable that is actually an assumption?
- Which of our strategic constraints have been tested recently rather than inherited?
- Where would our capital allocation change if one major assumption proved false?
- Which market conditions can we realistically influence rather than merely respond to?
- What evidence would cause us to reverse the position we currently hold most confidently?
What This Means for Leaders
The enduring value of Malhotra’s maze is not the suggestion that every wall can be removed.
Some walls are real.
Leadership maturity lies in discovering which ones are.
Adaptability remains essential because organisations do not control the world around them. But neither are they always passive occupants of somebody else’s environment. Companies negotiate, invent, invest, persuade, redesign, partner and sometimes change the economics of the markets in which they operate.
The danger appears at either extreme.
Refusing to adapt can turn conviction into denial.
Adapting without sufficient examination can turn responsiveness into surrender.
Senior leadership, therefore, requires something more than change readiness. It requires the judgment to decide when reality should be accepted, when it should be tested, and when the organisation still has agency to alter it.
The fastest organisation through the maze is not necessarily the one that has understood the maze best.
And before committing the organisation to running faster, a leader should know the difference.
References
- Johnson, S. (1998). Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
- Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755
- Kahneman, D., Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2011). Before you make that big decision. Harvard Business Review, 89(6).
- Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review, 85(9).
- Lovallo, D., & Sibony, O. (2010). The case for behavioural strategy. McKinsey Quarterly.
- Malhotra, D. (2011). I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. He writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business, and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets, and cultures.
