The skills that keep us going: grit, adaptability, resilience and growth mindset.
Because no business continuity plan covers everything. No strategic roadmap anticipated a global pandemic, the acceleration of generative AI, escalating geopolitical tensions and a deepening climate emergency – all arriving at once, and all demanding a response simultaneously.
The organisations that are navigating this most effectively share something in common. It is not the sophistication of their technology stack or the rigour of their processes. It is the quality of the people within them – and specifically, their capacity to keep going, to adapt, to recover and to keep learning.
In Part 3 of our four-part series on vital skills for the future of work, we explore four capabilities that sit at the heart of that capacity: grit, adaptability, resilience and growth mindset. These are the skills that sustain individuals and organisations through uncertainty – and that make continuous learning not just possible, but habitual.
9. Grit (or perseverance)
University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth has spent her career researching what she calls grit: the combination of passion and perseverance directed towards long-term goals. Her research identifies four psychological assets at its core: interest, practice, purpose and hope.
Grit is not stubbornness or blind persistence. It is the ability to maintain focus and forward momentum in the face of setbacks, distractions and the inevitable moments of self-doubt that come with any ambitious undertaking. It is what distinguishes those who see a difficult project through from those who quietly abandon it when the going gets hard.
In an age defined by information overload, fragmented attention and the constant pull of competing demands, grit is increasingly rare – and therefore increasingly valuable.
Why it matters for the future of work
The challenges organisations face today are not short-term problems with clear solutions. Climate adaptation, AI integration, shifting workforce expectations, geopolitical disruption – these are long-game challenges that require sustained effort, consistent investment and the willingness to stay the course even when progress is slow or invisible.
Teams with grit do not abandon difficult priorities when more urgent things arrive. They create the conditions for long-term business continuity by protecting time and attention for what matters most. Relationships, trust and a compelling shared vision are the soil in which grit grows. Leaders who cultivate all three will find their teams capable of far more than those driven purely by short-term targets.
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10. Adaptability
Most organisational change programmes fail. This is not a controversial claim – it is a well-documented pattern. And the reason is almost always the same: too much focus on process and commercial outcomes, and too little attention to the psychological and emotional realities of the people being asked to change.
In their book Helping People Change, Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith and Ellen van Oosten make a compelling case for a different approach. Lasting personal change, they argue, happens when it is connected to an individual's own long-term positive vision of themselves – not when it is imposed as an external requirement. When people can see a genuine connection between the change being asked of them and who they want to become, adaptability follows naturally.
This reframes adaptability not as a compliance exercise but as a deeply personal one. It requires leaders to be genuinely curious about the hopes and aspirations of the people around them – and to create conditions in which those aspirations and the organisation's direction of travel can align.
Why it matters for the future of work
People are working for longer and, increasingly, across multiple careers. Roles that exist today may not exist in ten years. Roles that will be central in ten years do not yet have names. In this context, the ability to adapt is not a one-off requirement – it is a permanent feature of professional life.
Organisations that understand this invest in their people's long-term growth, not just their immediate skill sets. They build cultures in which change is normalised, curiosity is rewarded and the emotional dimensions of transition are taken seriously. The result is a workforce that is genuinely adaptive rather than merely compliant.
11. Resilience
Strengths researcher Marcus Buckingham defines resilience as the capacity to withstand, bounce back from and work through challenging circumstances or events. It is, in essence, the ability to be tested and to emerge still functional – ideally, still growing.
Resilience is not about being unaffected by difficulty. It is about developing the inner resources to meet difficulty without being derailed by it. And crucially, it is built through experience. Each time we navigate a genuinely hard situation and come through the other side, we accumulate evidence that we can do so again. Fear of the unknown diminishes. Confidence in our own capacity grows:
“Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is not a mindset hack. It is a practice – one that builds slowly, through repeated encounters with challenge and the gradual expansion of what we believe ourselves capable of.”
Why it matters for the future of work
The business systems, tools and frameworks that served organisations well in more stable times were not designed for the level of complexity and volatility that now characterises most operating environments. Leaders and their teams are being asked to make consequential decisions with incomplete information, under time pressure, in conditions that keep changing.
Resilience is what makes it possible to do this without burning out or shutting down. It enables people to hold uncertainty without being paralysed by it, to try things that might not work and to recover well when they do not. Paired with adaptability, it is one of the most dependable foundations for sustained organisational performance.
12. Growth mindset
Dr Carol Dweck's decades of research on mindset have produced one of the most practically useful insights in modern psychology. Her studies showed that children and young people who believed their abilities could be developed through effort and learning consistently outperformed those who believed their intelligence was fixed – regardless of their starting ability.
The implications extend well beyond education. A growth mindset in a professional context means approaching challenges as opportunities to learn rather than tests of fixed capability. It means valuing effort and process alongside outcomes. It means being genuinely open to feedback, willing to experiment and comfortable with the fact that mastery is a journey rather than a destination.
Crucially, growth mindset is not a personality trait you either have or do not have. It is a set of attitudes and habits that can be cultivated – and that, once cultivated, tend to be self-reinforcing.
Why it matters for the future of work
The World Economic Forum's annual Global Risks Reports paint a consistent picture: the operating environment for businesses is becoming more volatile, more complex and harder to predict. The specific technical skills that are in demand today will shift, sometimes rapidly. Hard skills have a shorter shelf life than ever.
What endures is the disposition to keep learning. Growth mindset is the engine of learning agility – the capacity to acquire, apply and, where necessary, let go of skills and knowledge as circumstances require. Individuals and organisations that embody it are not just better at adapting to change. They are better at anticipating it, shaping it and using it as a source of competitive advantage.
Conclusion
Grit, adaptability, resilience and growth mindset are distinct qualities, but they reinforce each other in practice. Grit sustains the effort that growth mindset demands. Resilience makes adaptability possible when change is unwelcome. Growth mindset reframes the setbacks that test resilience as information rather than failure.
Together, they form what might be called a learning orientation: a fundamental stance towards the world that treats challenge as generative rather than threatening. In a period of such profound and sustained disruption, that orientation is not a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite for relevance.
In the final part of this series, we turn to the four vital skills that underpin our capacity to think, imagine and create: critical thinking, imagination, curiosity and creativity.
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Business transformation isn’t the latest software or project tool. Lasting organisational change happens conversation by conversation...
So, if you’d like to explore anything we've touched on in this blog or discuss any other aspects of the future of work, please do get in touch.
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