What if we’ve become too good at adapting?

I was chatting with a family member recently. They are a vibrant, successful and capable professional.  Someone who has built a career they once loved and has done very well in it. But something had changed. “I just don’t want to do it anymore,” they said. “It’s not bringing me joy.”

They weren’t being dramatic. There was no great crisis, or spectacular falling out, and no obvious failure. In many ways, everything was still going well.

Then I had an almost identical conversation with a ex-colleague. Then a client. Then a friend. Different industries, different ages and stages, and different circumstances. But some version of the same feeling kept surfacing. People who had spent years building successful careers were contemplating walking away from them, at least for a while. They wanted space. Space to think, dream, and remember what they enjoyed before their days became an endless succession of meetings, decisions, deadlines and demands. Space to consider what might be possible for their lives if they weren’t constantly responding to what was immediately in front of them.

And I totally get it. Somehow, over the past few years, work has accelerated again. There seems to be much more ambiguity, volatility, information, technology, restructuring, and significantly more pressure to do more with less and faster. AI has arrived with great possibilities while simultaneously unsettling all our assumptions about work, expertise and even what it means to create something of value.

And we have become extraordinarily good at adapting. Perhaps too good. Because adaptation has a shadow side. If we can keep absorbing more, then we’ll keep getting given more to absorb. The meeting gets added. The restructure happens. The technology changes. Yet another role disappears. The targets increase again. We adjust, compensate, work around it and carry on.

Until one day something inside us says: ‘I just don’t want to do this anymore‘. I wonder whether that feeling is always a signal to leave. Perhaps sometimes it is a signal that we just need a circuit breaker.

The circuit breaker

An electrical circuit breaker exists for a reason. When the load becomes too great, it interrupts the current before the system is damaged. It doesn’t destroy the system, but protects it. Human beings need circuit breakers too. A holiday can be one, a sabbatical, walking the Camino. Painting or gardening. Travelling alone. Learning something we’re terrible at. Spending a month without trying to turn every thought bubble into a business opportunity.

Creativity can be a circuit breaker because it asks something completely different of us. It moves us from producing to exploring, from knowing to wondering, from efficiency to curiosity. And perhaps that is why I have found myself increasingly drawn towards creativity lately. Writing, painting, architecture, interior design, fashion, artists and makers. I am fascinated by people who begin with an empty space and ask, “What could exist here?”

That feels like a very different question from the one much of organisational life asks us: ‘How do we get more out of what we already have?’

But this isn’t only an individual question. Because organisations need circuit breakers too.

What happens when the organisation can’t stop?

Imagine a company under intense market pressure (which feels like most companies right now). Revenue is falling, costs are rising, and technology is disrupting the industry. Investors want answers and customers expect more. Competitors are moving quickly. What does the organisation instinctively do? It accelerates. More meetings, more reporting, and more scrutiny. More transformation programs, more dashboards. More cost reduction, more urgency.

All of it is understandable, and some of it may be necessary. But there is a paradox here. The moment an organisation most needs imagination may be the moment it feels it can least create the space for it.

When pressure rises, our field of vision tends to narrow. We instinctively reach for what we know. We may become more controlling or more cautious. We may become more focused on immediate threats.

Organisations do this too because, despite the language we use about systems and structures, organisations are just collections of human beings. And human beings carry themselves into work. We bring our histories, fears, ambitions, insecurities and old survival strategies through the office door with us.

Leaders do too. Under pressure, the executive who prides herself on being decisive may become controlling. The collaborative leader may avoid the difficult decision. The visionary may generate another strategy when what the organisation actually needs is focus. The high achiever may simply work harder and unconsciously expect everyone else to do the same.

We don’t leave our nervous systems at reception. Which raises a question I think deserves much more attention in leadership:

How do you circuit break an organisation?

What does the organisational equivalent of putting down the tools and going for a long walk look like?

Perhaps it is stopping a major initiative rather than starting another one. Or taking the executive team away from the boardroom without a 47-slide strategy deck and asking them what they are actually seeing and feeling. Perhaps it is deliberately creating white space in people’s calendars. Perhaps it is inviting artists, anthropologists, philosophers, customers, young people or people from completely different industries into conversations about the future. Perhaps it is asking a question that has nothing to do with this quarter’s numbers:

‘If we weren’t already doing it this way, would we invent it this way today?’

Or perhaps the circuit breaker is even simpler. Stop. Look. Listen. Notice what has become normal that shouldn’t be.

Leadership as interruption

We talk endlessly about the importance of leadership in uncertain times. Usually the conversation quickly turns to resilience, adaptability, agility and navigating change. All important. But I wonder if we have over-indexed on our capacity to endure.

There is another leadership capability that may matter just as much now: knowing when to interrupt the pattern. When everyone is accelerating, perhaps leadership is sometimes slowing the room down. When everyone is solving, perhaps leadership is asking a better question. When the organisation is clinging tightly to what it knows, perhaps leadership is creating enough safety to imagine something it doesn’t. And when people have been carrying too much for too long, perhaps leadership is recognising that recovery isn’t indulgence, but necessary to performance.

This is where creativity becomes much more than painting pictures or coming up with clever ideas. Creativity is our capacity to imagine what does not yet exist. And we cannot do much of that when every part of our attention is occupied with surviving what already does.

Maybe that is what I have been hearing in all these conversations lately. “I don’t want to do this anymore” may sometimes mean exactly that. But sometimes, I suspect, there is another sentence hiding underneath it.

I don’t want to keep living and working like this.

Those are two very different things. One asks us what we should leave. The other asks us what we might create. And perhaps before we blow up the career, restructure the company, launch another transformation program or decide the whole thing is broken, there is another possibility worth trying.

Trip the circuit. Create some space. And see what comes back online.