Adaptivity Under Acceleration
The practice of Minimum Effective Interventions.
Control Theater vs. adaptive practice
Most leaders are using tools built for a world that no longer exists.
The operating environment isn’t just changing, it’s undergoing a phase shift—like water becoming vapor. And even a well-built boat is useless in a cloud. That’s what it can feel like to lead now.
The game has changed fundamentally. Stability is now a risk and control is mostly an illusion. What wins is adaptivity: clear sight, clean decisions, and constant adjustment.
For CEOs navigating existential threats and accelerating uncertainty, adaptivity is the imperative to safeguard the organization’s long-term viability and strategic agility.
For decades, organizational optimization has usually meant adding structure, enforcing alignment, and increasing control. Consultants and leaders tried to engineer certainty through reorgs, and installing new operating models, tools, and processes.
We call this Control Theater, and it’s become increasingly costly, demoralizing, and unsustainable. The effects ripple through an organization’s culture as well its bottom line, eroding engagement and burning people out under growing bureaucracy and stalled decisions.
The teams that navigate vapor-like conditions best, aren’t the ones with the boldest vision or slickest roadmap. They’re the ones that see clearly, decide cleanly, and adjust with precision.
Adaptivity isn’t a state you reach. It’s a disciplined practice—a way of staying coherent and human as the world refuses to hold still.
And in unstable conditions, effort and outcome don’t correlate linearly. Big pushes often bounce. Small, well-placed moves can transform the system.
Disciplined adaptivity is about leveraging nonlinearity—changing just enough, exactly where it counts.
How small moves changed a system
Case in point: A newly appointed CEO at a national education company needed her senior team to gel fast through post-acquisition upheaval and pandemic disruption. We interviewed every leader, sat in key meetings, and mapped the pinch points. Then we made a few specific moves:
Re-designed the exec meeting so every voice was heard and every decision had a clear owner.
Coached individual leaders helping them show up more collaboratively and united.
Installed a cleaner governance model for decisions.
Before: Decisions dragged, trust wavered, and hard conversations were avoided.
After: Within a quarter:
High-quality decisions came 1.5× faster
Launch cycles accelerated by ~50%
Meetings produced results—and strengthened relationships
Small moves. Systemic gains. (Today we routinely add lightweight AI to these practices.)
Why Splendid Torch exists
At Splendid Torch, we believe organizations don’t need more control—they need more coherence.
Adaptivity isn’t built with frameworks or heroics, but through small, humane, well-placed adjustments.
We work at the intersection of leadership, operations, and AI, helping teams stay clear-eyed and connected as the world accelerates around them.
Where small fixes unlock big gains
A Minimum Effective Intervention (MEI) is the smallest, most targeted move that creates meaningful, systemic relief. It’s not a fix-all. It’s a strategically placed change with the potential to reorder your system.
Most organizational pain is cultural and operational (relational and structural). Leverage points tend to appear where these dimensions intersect, where a small nudge can change the pattern.
Knots might show up as a bad meeting, slow workflow, or stalled leadership habit. Consistently, we see three high-leverage domains where small changes have the biggest impact:
1. Structure
How teams are organized and how people move (hiring, onboarding, development).
Possible MEIs:
Clarify decision rights for one critical team
Rewire onboarding for a single high-leverage role
Install owner/advisor patterns for complex initiatives
2. Meetings
If culture lives anywhere, it’s here. Meetings can compound trust — or erode it.
Possible MEIs:
Retire one ritual status meeting
Replace it with an async brief + a 20-minute decision huddle
Stand up a weekly Decision Forum with inputs, owners, and a visible log
3. Operations & Intelligence
Work should flow; tools should support; AI should reduce load not headcount.
Possible MEIs:
Instrument one priority workflow end-to-end
Automate two high-volume knowledge flows
Create one source of truth for a cluttered process
Changes are small, but their effects compound. Benefits of Minimum Effective Interventions include:
Quick wins unlock systemic improvements and build momentum
Focus on high-leverage points maximizes the ROI of effort and attention
Changes that don’t work can be corrected quickly
Over time: greater coherence and adaptability as these habits set in
The Adaptivity Stack (your first 90 days)
Good doctors take their time. They diagnose, prescribe a minimum effective dose, track impact, and adjust. They don’t ask a few questions and then recommend surgery—but that’s exactly what happens in Control Theater.
Leaders, sometimes encouraged by consultants and TED Talks, launch sweeping reorgs to “get agile” or “go lean.” And everyone wonders why those initiatives fail.
At Splendid Torch, we work more like good doctors: assess → intervene → adjust. Always starting with the Minimum Effective Intervention.
While the type of intervention may vary—structure, meetings, operations etc.—the implementation path is consistent:
Mindset
Shared mental models about how value is created, where risk lives, what guardrails are needed and what AI is actually good for. These guardrails explicitly include ethical AI integration and responsible governance to ensure that AI amplifies human judgment without compromising trust or accountability.
When leaders see the same picture, debates decrease, decisions accelerate, and coherent narratives for the board and team emerge.
Cadence
Rhythms, owners, and forums that create shorter feedback loops, cleaner handoffs, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Intelligence
Human-centered processes, tools, and AI-supported workflows that improve synthesis, collaboration, and alignment — with clear review loops, security, and ROI tracking.
What changes in 30–90 days
Faster decisions and commitments
Fewer escalations and meetings
Smaller and more purposeful meetings
Cleaner handoffs in one or two priority flows
Early AI wins (briefs, policy drafts, knowledge capture)
Teams that feel calmer—and more hopeful
Call us when…
Great people are leaving—and you don’t know why
You bought AI tools… and the ROI is unclear or nonexistent
Decisions that used to take hours now take weeks (or don’t get made at all)
Hours in meetings keep increasing, but clarity doesn’t
People Ops is stuck in fire drills and fog
If that’s you, it’s not a crisis of leadership. It’s a signal to intervene.
The real costs of inaction compound fast. Slow decisions erode trust. Missed opportunities multiply risks that can become existential. Small shifts now prevent crises down the line.
Start here
Our Leadership Briefing is (usually) a half-day working session with an organization’s leadership team (2-25 people) that creates:
a shared model of your system under load,
2-5 specific interventions with guardrails and success metrics, and
a 90-day operating plan to make them real.
We bring our full team together—Mayo Clinic style—when the case warrants it; otherwise we stay light, focused, and quietly effective.
Splendid Torch is a collective of senior operators, org designers and technologists. We help principled leaders build more adaptive organizations without the collateral damage of large transformations.