What strikes me most about this moment is something several thinkers circled from different directions …Harari, on collective fiction…Arendt -on the conditions for action…McLuhan on how media rewires the mind before we notice. Each, in their own way, was pointing at the same load-bearing structure: that human coordination has always depended less on facts than on shared stories about what we are and what we are doing together.
When those stories fragment, agency does not vanish. It diffuses. It becomes harder to locate, harder to aim at anything collectively. That may be the more precise diagnosis of what many people are experiencing right now — not powerlessness exactly, but a loss of traction.
If the first cognitive revolution gave us the capacity to imagine and coordinate through shared fiction, this moment seems to demand something different in return. Not just new stories. Amore deliberate relationship with the act of storytelling itself. The ability to watch how we think, not only what we think. To notice when a narrative is doing our reasoning for us.
That is harder than it sounds, because it requires holding two things at once: enough flexibility to revise the story when the evidence demands it, and enough groundedness to know which parts of it you will not hand over to an algorithm…to ambient consensus…to the pull of whatever frame is loudest.
Adaptability, in that light, is not a soft skill or a temperament. It is a discipline. One that might need to be taught far earlier and far more explicitly as a basic orientation toward a world that will keep moving regardless. Proactively, rather than reactively…
Your point about the erosion of agency resonated. One thing I’ve been thinking about from a different angle is how this plays out in environments where institutional stability was never strong to begin with like where I come from.
In many emerging systems, people grow up navigating uncertainty as a baseline condition. Adaptability isn’t a response to disruption, it’s the operating system from the start.
I wonder whether those environments might offer clues for the kind of adaptive thinking you’re describing.
That’s a really important point — and I think you’re spot on.
In environments where stability was never the default, adaptability isn’t something you switch on during disruption — it’s the operating system from day one. People develop this embodied, real-time intuition that’s incredibly powerful.
The distinction I’ve been exploring (and what the book lays out as the Adaptability Quotient) isn’t that one is “better” — it’s that they operate at different layers:
What you’re describing is instinctive and hyper-local — forged in uncertainty, optimized for immediate navigation. It builds extraordinary resilience.
AQ tries to add a deliberate layer on top:
• interrogating the kind of uncertainty you’re actually in (metacognition)
• simulating alternative paths through incomplete information
• running experiments that maximize learning while protecting downside
That’s exactly why those environments offer such rich clues — they’ve been stress-testing the instinctive side for generations. The opportunity ahead, especially as AI scales complexity everywhere, is the synthesis: that hard-won embodied adaptability + explicit, model-based tools.
That combination is what turns adaptability from a survival reflex into portable agency we can carry into any context. (It’s the whole reason the newsletter is called Early Adapters.)
I’d love your take — what are some of the specific practices or cultural norms from where you grew up that felt like they were doing versions of this modeling/simulation/experimentation loop, even if they weren’t named that way?
This really resonated with me, especially from the context I grew up in.
In Nigeria, adaptability doesn’t feel like something you switch on in moments of disruption, it’s the baseline. I’ve experienced periods where there was no electricity for months. You don’t pause your life waiting for systems to work, you find ways around it. The same with infrastructure, roads in terrible condition but people still move, still build, still show up. Even structurally, I did a four-year course that stretched to almost eight years because of repeated academic strikes. At some point, you stop expecting stability and start planning around instability.
So a lot of what you describe as simulation or experimentation is already happening, just without being named that way. You’re constantly adjusting, holding multiple possible outcomes, making decisions with incomplete information, and recalibrating in real time.
But I think there’s a tension within that which might be important for your framework.
Because over time, that level of adaptation doesn’t just stay practical, it becomes psychological. People begin to normalize what should be temporary failures. Entire ways of living are built around inconsistency, to the point where the focus shifts from expecting systems to function to simply finding ways to work around them.
So the adaptability being developed is very real and very strong, but it’s often optimized for navigating within broken systems rather than reshaping them.
That’s a big part of why I’m interested in furthering my studies with a master’s in Global Prosperity. I’m trying to understand not just how people survive and adapt within these environments, but how systems can be designed or restructured so that resilience doesn’t come at the cost of lowered expectations or delayed life trajectories.
Your point about adding a more deliberate, model-based layer to adaptability is really interesting in that context. It makes me think the opportunity might be in bridging the two, taking this embodied, lived adaptability and making it more explicit and transferable, without losing what makes it effective.
I’d be curious how you think about that boundary, between adaptation that preserves agency and adaptation that slowly conditions people to accept constraints that should actually be challenged.
Thank you! — this is one of the most clarifying notes I’ve received. You just surfaced something my first essay didn’t make explicit enough.
What you’re describing is a society overloaded with individual AQ — that raw, lived adaptability you grew up with — yet starved of institutional AQ. People aren’t short on ingenuity; they’re exhausted by it. The missing variable is conversion: can private workarounds become public voice, shared standards, and actual redesign, or do they quietly subsidize the very failures they’re working around?
This is why Hirschman’s "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" feels eerily perfect here (it literally grew out of his observations of Nigerian railways). When “exit” via hacks is always available, voice often gets crowded out. Without action, over time the psychological cost compounds — horizons shrink so the pain feels manageable.
But your point also gives me the precise boundary I needed. The danger isn’t low adaptability. It’s adaptability so effective that it removes pressure for the system to learn. I’m now calling this the AQ trap: high individual AQ subsidizes low institutional AQ. The deepest risk is not that people fail to adapt. It is that they adapt so well to broken systems that their adaptability becomes a subsidy to the very failures that should have been repaired.
Loyalty delays mass exit and gives voice time to work and cultivate attachment so people stay engaged long enough to push for improvement instead of just routing around problems. In places like Nigeria — where civic space is pressured but not closed — the practical way out of the trap starts small and local. Hirschman pointed toward grassroots cooperatives and community groups as the bridge; Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric self-governance shows how those groups can build durable shared rules and experiments that scale without needing a strong central state. Individuals come together in low-risk meso spaces (collectives, parent networks, professional circles, faith groups) to practice articulation — naming failure as failure and quietly rebuilding shared “cold stabilizers.” Those small experiments turn private hacks into coordinated voice and real prototypes, slowly building bottom-up pressure on institutions.
Your Global Prosperity studies are perfectly positioned to supply the deliberate, model-based layer that makes this conversion stick.
I’d love to hear: have you seen any pockets in Nigeria where private ingenuity started turning into shared voice or redesign? Those meso-level sparks are exactly where societal AQ begins.
This conversation is already shaping the whole series. Thank you!!
This framing of the AQ trap really clicked for me, especially the idea that people are not lacking adaptability, they are exhausted by constantly having to use it. That is exactly what it feels like in practice.
Growing up, adaptability does not feel impressive, it feels necessary. You solve for things privately because you cannot afford not to. But over time, you realise those private workarounds can quietly reduce the pressure on systems to improve, because life continues regardless. I mean, during the academic strikes I learnt a bunch of skills and I’m so grateful for that opportunity, I mean…it would have been nice to have graduated sooner, but I can do so much now, and I feel really cool about that.
On your question about whether private ingenuity turns into shared voice or redesign, I think there are pockets of that, but they tend to happen in smaller, trust-based groups rather than at a broad institutional level.
You see it in professional and creative communities where people share opportunities, resources, and set informal standards that did not exist before. You see it in faith-based groups that go beyond spiritual support to organize welfare, education, and structure where systems fall short. You also see it in peer networks where people guide each other through broken systems, turning individual knowledge into something collective.
In those spaces, people are not just adapting individually anymore, they are coordinating. They are naming problems, sharing information, and in small ways creating alternative structures that actually work.
The gap is in scaling that into something that feeds back into institutional change. A lot of it remains local and contained.
That is part of why I want to study more, see things from a global perspective. I want to understand how these small, collective forms of coordination can evolve into systems that reduce the need for constant individual resilience.
Your point about converting private adaptation into shared voice and redesign feels like the crux of it.
I reached out to Alec on LinkedIn but I didn’t get a response. It would mean a lot to hear from him.
What strikes me most about this moment is something several thinkers circled from different directions …Harari, on collective fiction…Arendt -on the conditions for action…McLuhan on how media rewires the mind before we notice. Each, in their own way, was pointing at the same load-bearing structure: that human coordination has always depended less on facts than on shared stories about what we are and what we are doing together.
When those stories fragment, agency does not vanish. It diffuses. It becomes harder to locate, harder to aim at anything collectively. That may be the more precise diagnosis of what many people are experiencing right now — not powerlessness exactly, but a loss of traction.
If the first cognitive revolution gave us the capacity to imagine and coordinate through shared fiction, this moment seems to demand something different in return. Not just new stories. Amore deliberate relationship with the act of storytelling itself. The ability to watch how we think, not only what we think. To notice when a narrative is doing our reasoning for us.
That is harder than it sounds, because it requires holding two things at once: enough flexibility to revise the story when the evidence demands it, and enough groundedness to know which parts of it you will not hand over to an algorithm…to ambient consensus…to the pull of whatever frame is loudest.
Adaptability, in that light, is not a soft skill or a temperament. It is a discipline. One that might need to be taught far earlier and far more explicitly as a basic orientation toward a world that will keep moving regardless. Proactively, rather than reactively…
Your point about the erosion of agency resonated. One thing I’ve been thinking about from a different angle is how this plays out in environments where institutional stability was never strong to begin with like where I come from.
In many emerging systems, people grow up navigating uncertainty as a baseline condition. Adaptability isn’t a response to disruption, it’s the operating system from the start.
I wonder whether those environments might offer clues for the kind of adaptive thinking you’re describing.
That’s a really important point — and I think you’re spot on.
In environments where stability was never the default, adaptability isn’t something you switch on during disruption — it’s the operating system from day one. People develop this embodied, real-time intuition that’s incredibly powerful.
The distinction I’ve been exploring (and what the book lays out as the Adaptability Quotient) isn’t that one is “better” — it’s that they operate at different layers:
What you’re describing is instinctive and hyper-local — forged in uncertainty, optimized for immediate navigation. It builds extraordinary resilience.
AQ tries to add a deliberate layer on top:
• interrogating the kind of uncertainty you’re actually in (metacognition)
• simulating alternative paths through incomplete information
• running experiments that maximize learning while protecting downside
That’s exactly why those environments offer such rich clues — they’ve been stress-testing the instinctive side for generations. The opportunity ahead, especially as AI scales complexity everywhere, is the synthesis: that hard-won embodied adaptability + explicit, model-based tools.
That combination is what turns adaptability from a survival reflex into portable agency we can carry into any context. (It’s the whole reason the newsletter is called Early Adapters.)
I’d love your take — what are some of the specific practices or cultural norms from where you grew up that felt like they were doing versions of this modeling/simulation/experimentation loop, even if they weren’t named that way?
This really resonated with me, especially from the context I grew up in.
In Nigeria, adaptability doesn’t feel like something you switch on in moments of disruption, it’s the baseline. I’ve experienced periods where there was no electricity for months. You don’t pause your life waiting for systems to work, you find ways around it. The same with infrastructure, roads in terrible condition but people still move, still build, still show up. Even structurally, I did a four-year course that stretched to almost eight years because of repeated academic strikes. At some point, you stop expecting stability and start planning around instability.
So a lot of what you describe as simulation or experimentation is already happening, just without being named that way. You’re constantly adjusting, holding multiple possible outcomes, making decisions with incomplete information, and recalibrating in real time.
But I think there’s a tension within that which might be important for your framework.
Because over time, that level of adaptation doesn’t just stay practical, it becomes psychological. People begin to normalize what should be temporary failures. Entire ways of living are built around inconsistency, to the point where the focus shifts from expecting systems to function to simply finding ways to work around them.
So the adaptability being developed is very real and very strong, but it’s often optimized for navigating within broken systems rather than reshaping them.
That’s a big part of why I’m interested in furthering my studies with a master’s in Global Prosperity. I’m trying to understand not just how people survive and adapt within these environments, but how systems can be designed or restructured so that resilience doesn’t come at the cost of lowered expectations or delayed life trajectories.
Your point about adding a more deliberate, model-based layer to adaptability is really interesting in that context. It makes me think the opportunity might be in bridging the two, taking this embodied, lived adaptability and making it more explicit and transferable, without losing what makes it effective.
I’d be curious how you think about that boundary, between adaptation that preserves agency and adaptation that slowly conditions people to accept constraints that should actually be challenged.
Thank you! — this is one of the most clarifying notes I’ve received. You just surfaced something my first essay didn’t make explicit enough.
What you’re describing is a society overloaded with individual AQ — that raw, lived adaptability you grew up with — yet starved of institutional AQ. People aren’t short on ingenuity; they’re exhausted by it. The missing variable is conversion: can private workarounds become public voice, shared standards, and actual redesign, or do they quietly subsidize the very failures they’re working around?
This is why Hirschman’s "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" feels eerily perfect here (it literally grew out of his observations of Nigerian railways). When “exit” via hacks is always available, voice often gets crowded out. Without action, over time the psychological cost compounds — horizons shrink so the pain feels manageable.
But your point also gives me the precise boundary I needed. The danger isn’t low adaptability. It’s adaptability so effective that it removes pressure for the system to learn. I’m now calling this the AQ trap: high individual AQ subsidizes low institutional AQ. The deepest risk is not that people fail to adapt. It is that they adapt so well to broken systems that their adaptability becomes a subsidy to the very failures that should have been repaired.
Loyalty delays mass exit and gives voice time to work and cultivate attachment so people stay engaged long enough to push for improvement instead of just routing around problems. In places like Nigeria — where civic space is pressured but not closed — the practical way out of the trap starts small and local. Hirschman pointed toward grassroots cooperatives and community groups as the bridge; Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric self-governance shows how those groups can build durable shared rules and experiments that scale without needing a strong central state. Individuals come together in low-risk meso spaces (collectives, parent networks, professional circles, faith groups) to practice articulation — naming failure as failure and quietly rebuilding shared “cold stabilizers.” Those small experiments turn private hacks into coordinated voice and real prototypes, slowly building bottom-up pressure on institutions.
Your Global Prosperity studies are perfectly positioned to supply the deliberate, model-based layer that makes this conversion stick.
I’d love to hear: have you seen any pockets in Nigeria where private ingenuity started turning into shared voice or redesign? Those meso-level sparks are exactly where societal AQ begins.
This conversation is already shaping the whole series. Thank you!!
This framing of the AQ trap really clicked for me, especially the idea that people are not lacking adaptability, they are exhausted by constantly having to use it. That is exactly what it feels like in practice.
Growing up, adaptability does not feel impressive, it feels necessary. You solve for things privately because you cannot afford not to. But over time, you realise those private workarounds can quietly reduce the pressure on systems to improve, because life continues regardless. I mean, during the academic strikes I learnt a bunch of skills and I’m so grateful for that opportunity, I mean…it would have been nice to have graduated sooner, but I can do so much now, and I feel really cool about that.
On your question about whether private ingenuity turns into shared voice or redesign, I think there are pockets of that, but they tend to happen in smaller, trust-based groups rather than at a broad institutional level.
You see it in professional and creative communities where people share opportunities, resources, and set informal standards that did not exist before. You see it in faith-based groups that go beyond spiritual support to organize welfare, education, and structure where systems fall short. You also see it in peer networks where people guide each other through broken systems, turning individual knowledge into something collective.
In those spaces, people are not just adapting individually anymore, they are coordinating. They are naming problems, sharing information, and in small ways creating alternative structures that actually work.
The gap is in scaling that into something that feeds back into institutional change. A lot of it remains local and contained.
That is part of why I want to study more, see things from a global perspective. I want to understand how these small, collective forms of coordination can evolve into systems that reduce the need for constant individual resilience.
Your point about converting private adaptation into shared voice and redesign feels like the crux of it.
I reached out to Alec on LinkedIn but I didn’t get a response. It would mean a lot to hear from him.