What will the age of AI look like once it fully dawns on us? Self-driven cars everywhere? Will we have robots book our holidays for us? Will schools cease to exist? What kind of jobs will be in demand?
Nobody really knows, and that’s the truth.
Here’s what we do know though: two things are unfolding around us at the same time.
1. Work is changing: As AI takes over more routine cognitive work, the human parts of a job are shifting. We are likely moving to a future where AI does the work and our role becomes to judge/critique it.
2. Tools keep changing: The AI tools your teen uses today will not be the ones they use in 5 years. Whatever they learn now, they will have to update or change.
This is a strange place to be at as a parent. How can you prepare your child for a world that is still taking shape? You can’t.
But there’s one thing that you can do: raise children that can adapt easily to whatever kind of future awaits us.
This may not be the first time that you are hearing this. “Your child will need to be adaptable.”
Adaptability, we are told, is a non-negotiable for the future we are moving towards. But here’s the question that rarely gets asked: how exactly do you raise a teenager to become adaptable?
As soon as you ask this, you will receive a series of vague responses.
“Be open-minded.”
“Embrace change!”
“Have a growth mindset.”
But this is what an adaptable person looks like once they have already become adaptable. What we need to learn is how to make somebody, specifically teenagers, adaptable.
This post will have 2 sections. First, we’ll look at an insight, one that helps us understand the core of adaptability. After that, we’ll look at how to build adaptability in teenagers using that insight. It’s going to be fun, so stay with me.
I.THE INSIGHT: Adaptability is an execution problem
Adaptability is what you gain when you try to learn something new, stick with it even as it gets uncomfortable, and keep adjusting until you succeed. That is an execution skill. What this means is that focus is extremely important for adaptability. When you learn to focus, you learn to be adaptable. Both skills are part of the same system.
Contrast this with the popular definitions we hear about adaptability. “Some kids are flexible, others aren’t”. We treat adaptability like a fixed personality trait. But adaptability is not something you necessarily have or don’t. It is a skill. And skills can be built.
Neuroscience backs this. One of the three core executive functions we possess is Cognitive Flexibility which in simple words is the brain’s ability to change how you think when something isn’t working. The other two are self-control and working memory (Diamond, 2013). The three work together as a system, and they are still developing through puberty. Which is what makes teenage a great age to build adaptability.
Now, armed with this insight (that adaptability gets built through execution), you are ready to move to the next section.
II. How adaptability gets built
Through focused and consistent execution!
Think of it as a chain with 3 links:
Consistency → Feedback → Adjustment
1.Consistency: Your teen keeps showing up to their goal, day after day.
2.Feedback: Showing up to something daily produces information. What worked, what didn’t, which part was too hard.
3.Adjustment: The information that keeps coming in is used to improve goal success. Which time of the day works best, which method is most effective, “How much more can I push myself?”.
Repeat this 3-step loop enough times and you get an adaptable person.
The third step, adjustment, is where adaptability lives. Because consistency on its own is not the goal here. A teen who does exactly the same thing every day, whether or not it works, is sure, consistent. But that does not automatically make them adaptable. The point of being consistent is to get feedback about what to change to get better. And then after that, to actually get better.
What happens to teens who are not able to get into this 3-step routine? A teen who quits their goal after the first week never becomes consistent or get the feedback they need to adapt. They don’t learn to adjust, because they never stayed long enough to find out what needed adjusting.
But if your child stays with a goal that they picked, just the act of trying to stick it out will make them adaptable. This does NOT mean that everyday will be 100% successful. That’s not expected or predicted. But missing a daily goal by a few minutes, or getting through four days of a five-day plan, gets treated less as failure and more as information. It tells your teen exactly where and how the plan needs to change. Sticking with a goal you had set is the single-minded, continuous pursuit of the question, “What do I need to change to get better at this?”. And that ends at the mastery of a skill that we call adaptability.
III. How we build adaptability at Kazivu
At Kazivu, we use our own structured method for helping teens work consistently on the goals they set. Every goal that a teen sets sits just beyond what a teen can currently do. Hard enough to stretch them, not so hard that they break.
Progress is tracked daily. So there is always real information to learn from. Goals are adjusted every week based on what actually happened. Over the months, teens get faster and better at spotting what is getting in their way and changing course on their own. And that is how we build adaptability- one week at a time.
