Adaptability and Customer Honesty in a Team Company

Gary Hamel argues that what matters most for organisations now is whether they can adapt faster than the world changes around them. Rob Fitzpatrick argues that most teams fail not because they can’t adapt, but because they never honestly find out what their customers actually need. Both writers are circling the same problem from opposite ends. 

This essay sits at the intersection of those two arguments. It uses Hamel’s What Matters Now (2012) and Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test (2013) to read a recent project in Pro D, the team company we belong to at TAMK Proakatemia. Wellness Appro, developed during Sprint 4 across two sub-teams, Know-latch and Mira, gives the essay its evidence. 

The argument that follows is straightforward. Adaptability without honest customer learning is just an irrelevant reinvention. The Mom Test’s discipline of listening before pitching is what turns Hamel’s abstract case for adaptability into something a small team can actually do. The essay closes by connecting both ideas to the EntreComp competences of Learning through experience and Mobilising others, and by asking when adapting stops being wise. (Bacigalupo et al., 2016) 

Adaptability as Organisational Imperative: Hamel’s Framework 

Hamel argues that the way big organizations are too rigid. Their models and methods don’t coincide with the rapidly changing world. The rapid changes around us need reinvention. Hence, the ability to be flexible. The world we see now isn’t the same as it was yesterday. Constant change in technological, economic, social, and global trends requires the organizations to be adaptive. (Hamel, 2012) 

What is adaptability for organizations? It’s the ability to reinvent and adapt for improvement rather than adapting because of external factors. (Hamel, 2012) 

The organizations that are unyielding often fail to keep up with megatrends. They also face delays in decision-making because of how hierarchical the organization.  

The adaptiveness doesn’t need to be only around megatrends; what else matters is the socio-economy, values, ideation as well as creativity (as Hamel argues). It’s evident that now the businesses that are perceived to be most innovative. The adaptability must be in the design, not something appended because if it isn’t, the system stays in the same mentality of controlling. (Hamel, 2012) 

In today’s world, companies need to have foresight about the anticipated global trends, changes. They must allow room for experimentation of new ideologies and creative ideas to help build the systems that allow growth.  

Hamel’s adaptability isn’t about reacting fast to the external changes but weaving in the ideation, distributed authority, and learnings. (Hamel, 2012). So how do organizations would learn to achieve this? There’s a philosophical framework; 

The framework is: 

Although this framework isn’t practical.  

Honest Customer Learning: The Principles of The Mom Test 

According to Fitzpatrick’s diagnosis, most customer conversations end up being unsuccessful in terms of acquiring the needed information, and this comes down to a few key reasons. The first and most essential one is the lack of clarity about what core information the interviewer or researcher is indeed trying to obtain. Based on past experiences working on different projects at Proakatemia throughout the first year, this has proven to be an obstacle that is genuinely hard to overcome – the barrier of personal assumptions and preferences is difficult to push into the background when you are invested in the idea you are researching. Moreover, questions that focus on the imaginative future are a trap that has often caused customer conversations to produce irrelevant results, since people tend to answer based on what they think they would do, rather than what they have in reality done. Fitzpatrick addresses these pitfalls through three core rules that reframe how customer conversations should be approached. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

The Mom test establishes three foundational rules to counter these failures. First, the book suggests that conversations should be centred around the customer’s life and current behaviours, keeping the discussion away from the product idea itself. As a result, the problem which the service or product aims to solve can be validated – identifying whether it responds to a real-world need rather than the assumptions and opinions of the producer. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

Furthermore, of equal importance to achieving that problem validation are questions that target specific past events, as opposed to generalised opinions about the future, since retrospective accounts provide more reliable insight into real behaviour. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

Alongside the above, Fitzpatrick emphasises the interviewer’s own approach and behavior during the conversation, stressing the importance of listening over speaking and allowing the customer to lead rather than being guided toward a predetermined conclusion.  

The sharpest distinction Fitzpatrick makes in his book is between compliments and commitments – an aspect which is inevitably easy to misinterpret and be misled by, especially in the early stages of developing a project, and something which has been overlooked many times during these first four sprints at Proakatemia. A customer saying ”I love this idea, I would definitely buy it” costs them nothing – it is a polite, natural human response that reveals very little about whether they would actually pay for the product. A commitment, on the other hand, is something that costs the customer something real: a signed order, money upfront, an introduction to a decision-maker, or even just a booked follow-up meeting. This was precisely the pattern recognised during our time at Proakatemia – positive reactions in early conversations often felt like validation, when in reality they were simply politeness. Fitzpatrick argues that learning to tell these two things apart is one of the most important skills in customer discovery, because chasing compliments leads to building things people praise but never actually use or buy. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

Therefore, taken together, these principles position The Mom Test not just as a practical interview guide, but as the foundational mechanism which Hamel’s concept of adaptability requires in reality. Hamel argues that organisations must build continuous learning into the way they operate on a daily basis, nevertheless he shares relatively little about what that learning looks like. (Hamel, 2012). Here Fitzpatrick fills that gap. If Hamel provides the architecture – the case for why adaptability must be applied, then Fitzpatrick provides the brickwork: the specific habits and disciplines that make honest learning possible at the most basic level of human interaction. For a small team company like those at Proakatemia, where resources are limited and every customer conversation counts, this connection between the two frameworks becomes especially relevant. 

Theory in Action:

Wellness Appro is the joint project that gave this essay its evidence. The work was split across two teams inside Pro D: Know-latch, which owned the B2B side and the relationship with venue partners, and Mira, which owned the B2C side and the design of the student experience. Neither team had set out to build a shared project. The two concepts came together when each team realised, through its own customer-facing work, that it was solving only one half of a problem. A wellness appro without a credible B2B model would not survive contact with venues. A strong B2B model without a designed participant experience would not fill the event. The decision to pool intellectual property and co-develop a single concept did not come from a coach or a structural directive. It emerged from what the work itself was telling both teams. 

That moment is worth holding on to, because it is where Hamel’s argument about distributed authority becomes something other than abstract. The teams reorganised around what the work needed rather than around their original boundaries. No central authority forced the merger and no formal process required it. The freedom to do this is something the Proakatemia model makes structurally possible, and it is the kind of move Hamel describes when he writes about adaptive organisations as ones where decisions happen close to the work. (Hamel, 2012 (Hamel’s ”distributed authority” point in chapter 3.) 

The architecture allowed it. What is harder to see, and what this essay is trying to take seriously, is that the architecture did not produce it. The teams produced it by listening to what they were hearing from customers and partners and being willing to act on it. 

The reflective work for both teams was, in different ways, about learning to trust customer-facing evidence more than internal conviction. Mira’s earliest framing of the concept was closer to wellness in the literal sense, designed around what the team itself found compelling. Research insisted on a different reading. What students described, when asked carefully, was not wellness in the spa-and-recovery sense but social connection without alcohol at the centre of it. The shift from designing for function to designing for feeling is small to describe and significant in practice, because it required the team to set aside its own preferred version of the project. Fitzpatrick’s framing fits closely here. When a team treats customer interviews as opportunities to confirm its existing direction, it tends to find confirmation. When it treats them as opportunities to be surprised, the direction itself becomes negotiable. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

The Know-latch experience taught a sharper version of the same lesson. The first venue pitch was built around the concept of Wellness Appro, treating the event itself as the offer. Venues were polite. They did not commit. The instinct, in that situation, is to assume the pitch needs to be more persuasive; the concept more clearly explained, the materials more polished. The honest reading was different. Venues were not unconvinced by the event. They were being asked the wrong question. They did not need to know what Wellness Appro was. They needed to know what it would do for their slow Thursdays. The rewrite that followed is the cleanest moment of Mom Test discipline in either project, because it required the team to stop selling its idea and start describing the partner’s life back to them. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) 

What both teams were learning, beneath the specifics of either project, is a version of Fitzpatrick’s most uncomfortable claim. Most attempts to learn from customers fail not because the questions are wrong but because the questioner is already invested in a particular answer. The discipline is not in the interview script. It is in the willingness to come back from a conversation with a worse picture of your idea than the one you went in with, and to update accordingly. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) Hamel argues for adaptable organisations. Fitzpatrick describes what adaptability looks like at the smallest unit of organisational behaviour, which is a single conversation between someone selling and someone deciding whether to buy. The two arguments need each other. Hamel without Fitzpatrick gives a team the structural freedom to adapt without the daily practice that makes adaptation real. Fitzpatrick without Hamel gives a team the practice without the structural permission to act on what it learns. 

The EntreComp framework provides a useful vocabulary for naming what was happening inside both teams during this period. Learning through experience, in the Into Action cluster, is the competence the project most directly cultivated. (Bacigalupo et al., 2016) 

The point of that competence, in EntreComp’s framing, is not the accumulation of experience itself but the deliberate use of experience as a learning input. Both teams treated their customer and partner conversations as something to be learned from rather than something to be performed. The shifts in the project – in concept, in pitch, in business model – were the visible traces of that learning. The competence is not in having had the conversations. It is in having allowed them to change the work. 

The harder companion competence, drawn from the Resources cluster, is Mobilising others. Adaptability at the level of two people in a partner meeting is one thing. Translating that into a structural change the wider team accepts and acts on is another, and it is the place where many adaptable-on-paper teams stall. The Wellness Appro project worked because both teams were willing to trust each other’s customer insight enough to redesign their own work in response. This required something closer to organisational generosity than to individual skill. (Edmondson, 1999) (This is the key place where the Edmondson citation does real work. Psychological safety is what allows that ”organisational generosity” to happen.) The team merger, the pitch rewrite, the customer journey rebuild – none of these happened because one person convinced the others. They happened because the teams were operating on a shared assumption that the evidence from customers and partners outranked the team’s prior preferences. (Bacigalupo et al., 2016) 

This is also where the limits of Hamel’s argument come into view, and where the essay’s discussion section will pick up. Hamel writes about adaptability at the level of organisational architecture. The Proakatemia model offers a small-scale version of that architecture, and the Sprint 4 work confirms that it functions as Hamel suggests it should. What the work also suggests, and what Hamel says relatively little about, is that the architecture is necessary but not sufficient. Structural freedom does not produce adaptation on its own. What produces it is the daily-level discipline of asking better questions and trusting what the answers say, even when they push against the team’s preferred direction. That is the discipline Fitzpatrick describes, and it is the part Know-latch and Mira had to learn for themselves.  

The Limits of Adaptability: When Listening and Committing Collide 

Hamel’s case for adaptability is easy to agree with. The pace of change is faster than most organizations can match. Standing still is expensive. The harder question, the one Hamel sets aside, is what adaptability costs the people doing it. (Hamel, 2012) 

A team that is always adapting is a team that never finishes anything. Each new direction means letting go of the previous one, often before there has been time to learn whether it was working. After enough shifts, there is no stable comparison point left. The team can’t tell whether the latest change is an improvement or just the next round of restlessness. The change becomes the work. 

This hits harder in a team company than in a large organisation, because the people doing the adapting are the same people whose sense of progress is at stake. Constant reinvention is tiring. It produces a team that rarely gets to feel that anything has been completed. Hamel names passion as one of the things that matters now, and passion is sustained partly by the felt sense that the work is going somewhere. When the destination keeps moving, the engagement that drives adaptation in the first place starts to thin. (Hamel, 2012) 

Fitzpatrick carries the same risk in a different form. Customer-honesty discipline, taken too far, becomes its own problem. A team that revises after every interview ends up with a concept that is the average of its most recent conversations rather than something coherent. The Mom Test works best as a check on assumption, not as a substitute for commitment. (Fitzpatrick, 2013) Eventually the team has to decide it has learned enough to act, and then act long enough to generate the kind of evidence that only comes from running the actual thing. 

So when is it wise to stop? Adaptation has a time horizon, and that horizon should be set by what the team needs to find out, not by pressure to keep moving. There is a phase for listening and a phase for committing. Treating only the first as adaptive, and the second as stagnant, is the mistake. Holding a direction steady long enough to read its real results is itself a form of maturity, and constant adaptation can quietly erode it. 

None of this contradicts Hamel. It asks him to be read more carefully than the phrase ”what matters now” sometimes invites. Adaptability matters. So does the willingness to stop and let the current version of the work breathe. 

Conclusion  

Hamel and Fitzpatrick work at different altitudes. With one describing the kind of organisation that can survive a moving world, while the other one covers the kind of conversation that lets a team find out what the world is actually asking for. However, neither argument is complete without the other. 

A hightlights from Sprint 4 is that beneath the specifics of either side of the business, is that adaptability is a daily-level discipline before it is an organisational one. The freedom to reorganise around what the work needs is something the Proakatemia model already provides.  

The work for the team is to find the balance between adapting and committing: enough customer understanding to keep the work honest, enough consistency to let it become something.