(Part three in a series of four)

Growing up in Florida meant many long days at the beach. We’d spend the whole morning riding waves, playing ‘Marco Polo,’ and chasing down errant frisbees. Then, after a snack-gorging break, we’d shift to more sedate activities like collecting shells and, eventually, settling down to build sand castles. As we grew older, our castle construction methods graduated from standard bucket-and-shovel to more elaborate drip castles and sophisticated molding techniques. Once finished with our creations, we would pause to admire them from different angles, and then force our parents to do the same. We might add a few finishing touches or maybe a tunnel or two, based on ‘feedback.’

Eventually, our attention would stray and we’d stroll down to the pier, or wander off to watch people fish as the tide came in. Oh, wait! The tide’s coming in! A moment of panic would set in as we realized that we’d built our castles too close to the water’s edge (again). Filled with urgency, we raced back to check on our creations. The first order of business was to dig a moat as fast as possible to establish a barrier. Then we’d hastily construct a ‘wall’ to block the incoming force. It would work for a while, but the water would inevitably power through, slowing shifting from broad thin skims to more forceful foamy gushes. But this only boosted our valor. Sometimes ‘re-enforcements’ were called in. But we knew all along that the tide would win. In the final moments, we’d sit and watch each wave slowly take down our creation. We’d collapse, out of breath, and gaze at the destruction with a mix of loss, awe, and fascination as we surrendered our work to forces much larger than us.

Inherent Adaptation

There are many ways we embody and embrace adaptation as a species. In fact, we willfully and regularly construct contraptions far more substantial than sand castles with full knowledge that time will pass, paradigms will shift, and pillars will fall. Even when we don’t consciously do this, our enduring fascination with both historical shifts and science fiction are there to remind us that what may feel is permanent, is anything but.

In her recent article “Can Animals Tell Time?,” evolutionary biologist Heather Heying highlights this point in her consideration of the different ways humans have devised to measure time.

There are, we humans have proclaimed, 24 hours in a day. And an hour is now of fixed length, a length that is split into 60 minutes. But in the Middle Ages, this was not always the case. In some parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, it was asserted that those 24 hour were evenly split between day and night, no matter the season. Twelve hours of day. 12 hours of night, all year long. Thus, in the long sunlit days simmer in medieval Europe, the 12 hours of daylight were long hours, far longer than today's standard 60 minutes, and the brief nights had short hours, 12 short hours each of which was shorter than the modern hour.

“[Humans have] a tendency to create things, and then let them change.” – Heather Heying

In daily life, adaptation can surface as we watch the ‘anchors’ we collectively create shift from feeling like permanent structures to reminders that what’s around them has changed. Shifts in government, holidays, or commemorative objects — and the social functions they perform — are all prime examples.

At the genetic level, our bodies evolve through ongoing adaptations that take the form of mutations. There needs to be enough ‘error’ in the ‘printing’ of our DNA to allow our bodies to change in response to different environmental conditions. In that sense, adaptation is truly hard-wired into our physical form and how we exist in the world.

Unsurprisingly, adaptation is equally prevalent in the insights industry. The frameworks, strategies, and mappings we create may be perceived as fixed representations of a system; but, in the grander scheme of adaptive change, they function more as snapshots or perhaps catalysts within the flywheels of change. Essentially, they’re tools to drive more informed iteration (not solutions in and of themselves). Ultimately, the value of our work is in guiding iterations, and reminding our colleagues that the ‘right’ solution is rarely the first one, and likely won’t be the last either.

Leveraging Adaptation Models

So how do we leverage our species’ inherent forms adaptation? How do we facilitate them within cross-functional teams? To follow is an example from work I led that leveraged an adaptive process to inform product development.

As part of the central team within a product incubator for social apps, my role was to provide insight into human behavior and culture to help founders and their teams develop products that aligned with the communities they intended to serve. One of the biggest challenges most of the startup teams faced was how to connect people in meaningful ways while also providing ongoing value. Most of the founders tended to approach this challenge by focusing intently on tweaking different features and then testing them with a small group of beta users in tight feedback loops. While critical, what this approach often missed was a deep understanding of what consistently brings people together to form communities with lasting deep bonds. In short, they needed to zoom out, not in.

Borrowing from some previous work I led on collective achievement and the optimal ways it can be facilitated on digital platforms, I leveraged Van Gennep’s rite of passage as an inspirational model for how humans form lasting bonds. This was instrumental for the start-up teams within the incubator because it helped them understand the critical, and universal, stages of experience that drive people to form deep associations with a collective.

Depending on the team and where they were in their development process, I would start by sharing a mild adaptation of the model itself (below).

Then, I added a layer over the model that translated it into the needs of the teams. Part of this involved breaking the model down into three basic stages: trust, bonding, and new identity. I created a goal for each, and then broke the goal down into actions they could take to reach the goal. The actions were rooted in research that ran parallel to rites of passage, most of it focusing on community development practices.

These two frameworks were part of a workshop I hosted, which included a set of examples from start-ups and companies that excelled at building products that helped people form bonds. It also included exercises to help teams actualize the steps they would take to apply the principles.

While many factors contributed to the success and failure of each team, this application of one way in which humans adapt was instrumental for many of them to create more compelling and enduring experiences for their users. Many of them used the model to frame their product growth metrics across the stages of trust, bonding, and new identity, during their reviews.

AI Doesn’t Wander and it Isn’t Embodied

It’s worth noting that, even when mediated through an app or other digital experiences like gaming, people experience rites of passage in highly personalized, and often emotional and physical ways. They form trust with others through experiments with vulnerability and humility; they bond through shared struggles in which the give and take of collaboration and support are navigated through relationships within a cohort; and they take on new layers of identity that internalize their own unique mix of the personal, the cohort, and the cultural.

While AI models can help us identify patterns across adaptations, and even adapt themselves (listen to two AI agents ‘talk’ to one another here), their capabilities don’t include the forms of embodied experimentation essential to our adaptation. Nor do they involve the emotional connections between humans that might be considered the ‘lubrication’ for that embodied experimentation. In short, we humans see inherent value in the freedom to wander (even aimlessly) through new and different environments with each other; to form bonds through those experiences; and, eventually, reach new embodied understandings (even new physical manifestations) of ourselves.

The French situationiste’s understood this well. Wandering explorations of urban environments they called derivé demonstrated how our bodies serve as collective devices through shared experiences across changing conditions. This practice was designed to generate collective meaning-making through “aimless, random drifting through a place, guided by whim and an awareness of how different spaces draw you in or repel you” — to sense the ‘psycho-geographic’ conditions of a location. Applications from derives led to new approaches to architecture and urban planning that integrated what they called the “discovery of unities of ambiance…their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses.”

The ‘topoanalysis’ of phenomenologists like Gaston Bachelard, brought similar values to light. His examination of intimate spaces such as the house, cellar, attic, drawers, nests, shells, and corners, illustrates how these spaces evoke deep emotional human responses, and even reveries, within us. He argues that these spaces, and our relationship to them, serve as holding bodies for our memories and dreams; and that they play a crucial role in shaping our sense of self.

The forms of human adaptation explored in this post, their relationship to our physical environments, and our interactions embedded within them, are largely physical, sensorial, and emotional. They demonstrate how we’re propelled to adapt and interpret and bond, through forces that are uniquely human. Call it intuition, or maybe instinct blended with milieu; but whatever it is, human adaptation doesn’t follow set protocols or adhere wholly to patterns of predictive modeling.

As human insight practitioners, we’re in the unique position to leverage the human propensity to wander, to identify symbolic outliers, to sense layers of emotional meaning in our surroundings and interactions. And, we’re experts at sharing these realizations, struggling through interpreting them, bonding through their mutual resonance, and ushering in change (both emotional and physical).

I’d like to close with a few prompts:

• Are you limiting yourself to responding to questions from your team about behavior, or are you helping them see how behaviors sit within human adaptive responses?
• Are you caught up in solving for an endless string of particulars or are you zooming out to see how they’re connected, and under what paradigms?
• Are you checking boxes or interrogating the unexpected?
• Are you shifting focus between process and context?
• Are you showing up with answers or hosting new understandings?
• Are you focused on reactions or adaptations?