In this solo episode of the Key Customer Growth Podcast, host Jermaine Edwards introduces the concept of hyperadaptation—a business capability that combines rapid, easy change with the creation of a superior, lasting competitive advantage. He begins by framing adaptation through evolutionary ideas, then categorizes business adaptations into structural (business model changes), physiological (new skill acquisition), and behavioral (new thinking and systems). Edwards argues that today’s challenge is not merely the speed of change but the speed of adaptation that yields advantage. He presents an equation: speed of adaptation × superior advantage = sustained competitive uniqueness, emphasizing that not all adaptation leads to advantage. He illustrates hyperadaptation with several recent examples: a European financial‑services firm’s risk‑detection software for remote work, a U.S. manufacturer’s germ‑resistant silicone bag, a UK consulting firm’s real‑time customer‑collaboration platform, and Pernod Ricard’s rapid pivot to hand sanitizer during the COVID‑19 crisis. From these cases he extracts principles about understanding root causes quickly and creating advantages that make competition irrelevant. Edwards then outlines a practical framework—the Hyper Adaptation System (HAS) – consisting of three steps: Harmonize (clarify problem, goal, and desired advantage), Analyze (identify assets, capabilities, and untapped resources), and Systematize (embed the process into repeatable business systems). He acknowledges execution challenges but cites Apple and the Pernod Ricard example as proof of feasibility. The episode concludes with a call to listeners to assess their own organizations’ hyperadaptation mindset and to consult the show notes for deeper detail.
It's Jermaine Edwards.
Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I've become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an irreplaceable advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide, your Journey starts all about—
it's about not necessarily the problem, but how we think about the problem. It's not necessarily our product, but how we think about our products. It's not necessarily about, you know, how we generate new opportunities. It's about how we think about the opportunities themselves. And so I'd like to first just set the scene here of what I mean by adaptation. And I guess when you think about the word adaptation, there are a few people that come to mind immediately, and immediately Darwin is one of those individuals. Now, whatever you think about the kind of theories of evolution or not, what I want to focus on is the idea of change and this particular quote around the strongest species that survive are not the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change. And so regardless of where we might be, in our own businesses, we can't ignore change. We experience that on an ongoing basis, particularly as business owners or people who work closely with anybody or any human being. You know that change makes a big difference, positively and negatively, in so many different ways. And so when we think about adaptation, or adaptation as a theory, there are a number of different adaptations that we can consider. Now, in the anthropological kind of world, and what you think about how we view the world both as animals, as plants, whatever that might be, we have different kinds of adaptations: structural adaptation, physiological adaptation, behavioral adaptation. So I want to translate this into a business context for those who are scientists in the background who may have that kind of leaning. You may want to look up the root of these particular areas afterwards. But structural adaptation refers in the business context to the change in business model. That we may have. The physiological adaptation is new skill acquisition. And the behavioral adaptation is our new thinking and systems. So all of these are different kinds of adaptations that every person in the organization at different points in time will be addressing through some kind of hardship, through some kind of crisis, if we want to call it that, through some kind of challenge that they're trying to overcome. And there are literally hundreds of examples In fact, business schools are designed and built to showcase these examples of how organisations change, how they adapt, how they create something new from something that seems quite disparate and disconnected or almost impossible to view as getting out of. And we saw this in 2008 with the financial collapse or 2011 after the World Trade Center incidents and so many different areas like that. But the world we're in today is no longer about whether you can change or how fast the change is happening. I want to be really clear here. It's not about whether you can change or how fast the change is happening. It's about how quickly or easily you can change. It is this kind of change that creates advantages, and I call these hyperadaptations. And so I want to break this down a little bit more because I first came across hyperadaptation as a term at a technology conference, and it was initially used as a reference to think about the way in which consumers take on new technology and assimilate those things into their world. You know, examples like voice, podcasts, and so forth, and the way we use products like Alexa and so forth, cryptocurrency, um, AI and the integration it's had now into almost every facet of our technology and IoT and Internet of Things. And in a literal sense, that is part of hyperadaptation, is these changes taking place, but it's also changing us, and we're adapting to that quickly, almost instantly, as soon as we're exposed to it. So there are a few different parts here I want to explore. So high adaptation here is really broken into two different kinds of things. So it's, first of all, a personal organization's ability to adapt rapidly while creating new superior advantage for long-term success. So there are these two terms: adapting rapidly and superior advantage. So adapting rapidly is really to make thoughtful changes quickly without impeding or restricting your current operations, the way in which we might serve our customers, the way in which you might run our companies. Things like that. And then superior advantage is a way, it's a way in which we can create or optimize or readapt a current set of known or unknown assets to solve an existing problem and bring some kind of long-term advantage in a critical area for you or your business. So some really, really, what I can call rich stuff that we can take from these areas. And so I really like equations. I think it's my economics background pouring in here, but it may look like this. If you think about this on a board, a chalkboard in a mathematical, medical room, maths class, you'd have speed of adaptation times superior advantage equals sustained competitive uniqueness or superiority. So that's speed of adaptation, how fast or easily you can change, times superior advantage, what we can create, equals sustained competitive uniqueness or superiority. And this is really important. That could also probably be described as you're creating superior advantage through new adaptation. That's one way to look at it. But the challenge here is not all adaptation brings superior advantage, which is why you want superior advantage in the equation. And let's say an example of this, let's take an example because There are many out there, and one of the biggest ones, particularly in 2020, has been organizations' need at all levels in industries and markets to digitize and virtualize their businesses. And so almost every B2B company business— that's where my specialty is— has brought on some sort of virtual enhancement or virtual delivery. And essentially, for many companies, that's a brand new adaptation. And they gained a small advantage in doing that. However, it won't remain a competitive advantage. Why? Because everybody is having to adapt to the same thing. Now, not everybody else will be able to do it well or will be able to do it at all, but yet you will get a significant number who either a little bit ahead of you or in the same place and doing the same thing. So eventually, 6 months, 3 months, maybe you have longer than that, it will no longer be something you can call an advantage. Just because you can deliver something online in the virtualized or digitized way does not mean that will be something that is a sustained advantage for you. So we have to think differently about adaptation. And how we adapt, which is why these two things are so important. So how do we take advantage of this? How do we think about this advantage of hyperadaptation in this new normal for our economy? Well, there are some things that we can think about here, and let me give you some examples of some things that we've seen in my own companies and customers, of things that have been created literally within weeks of using this particular kind of thinking and applying it to their business. So one particular financial services company in Europe has developed a new risk detection software for remote working, and they've offered that directly to their customers. There's a manufacturing company in the US that sold over a million units on release of a new silicone bag, this product that is germ-resistant, meaning you can actually cover things with it allows you to walk out safely in an environment where becoming sick can be very, very easily contracted. Also, a consulting company in the UK developed new customer collaboration software that tells you the customer story in real time, and I can actually speak more to that because it's something I've been involved in developing. But these are just a few new advantages created within literally 6 weeks. And the interesting thing is that these had never before been considered until the crisis hit. So of course there are always going to be exceptions to the rule, and sometimes you're going to need other people to adapt with, or other people to adapt to you, in order to make any kind of change permanently profitable to you. But here are some principles here. So first, we need to think speed, like I said, how quickly we can adapt, how easily, and we need to think advantage. So there are a few questions that we can ask. So speed is about not necessarily actions that we take, but it's speed to root cause, it's speed to understanding the problem best so we know what implications there are to the change, so we know how easily we could possibly change and how quickly we can do that. We have to, you know, we can't fully change until we fully understood. So we cannot fully change what we haven't fully understood. And we also need to think about advantages, which is making your business and your customers better through that advantage while making the competition irrelevant. And that's a really important distinction when you think about what you're trying to create. It's what makes you and your customers better while making the competition irrelevant. What would be difficult for them to catch up with should you create this thing over time? So remember, speed of change isn't the problem. Speed of adaptation and advantage thinking is. And there are so many ways you can think about this, but I will give you a model to decide on how you might do this within your business. I call it the Hyper Adaptation System, HAS. The HAS system. And so the first is to harmonize, to harmonize, and this is all about getting clear on the problem, the goal you want to achieve, and advantage you want to create from it. That's what the first thing you want to do. They want to analyze. You must then get clear on identifying your capabilities, assets, resources, exploring all known and undiscovered areas that could aid optimizing what you're doing and realizing advantages you want. Then we want to systematize. You need to design a way to access and evaluate on the ideas— execute on the ideas, I should say— those resources and assets. You'll then be able to apply this to anywhere in your business. So really clear: harmonize, get clear on a problem, analyze, identify those assets, systematize, get it into your system in your business into a way that you can execute easily across any area in your business. Now, that sounds easy in practice, but actually it can be quite challenging to execute when you haven't had somebody who's done it before doing that with you. But it can be done. We've seen companies like Apple demonstrate this, and recently, actually, an organization called Pernod Ricard. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, so if they're listening, please forgive me. But in the recent pandemic, March 2020, 2020, it was interesting to see that an alcoholic drinks company— now they were a big company, 34 billion French drinks company— were at the forefront of leading change in how hand sanitizers were being developed. Now you might say, what's a French drinks company got to do with hand sanitizer? Well, what they saw their business was they had to change, and people were naturally buying less, they weren't out into the stores and places where they would purchase this kind of drink. They wanted a different way to reach their customer base, so they saw an opportunity in their supply chain and the chemicals they work with to produce something else. And what they found was all they needed to do was to source two specific ingredients to make what they had already in their industrial plants able to make hand gel, hand sanitizer. And literally within 24 hours, this company, who had, you know, some very prominent brands in the marketplace, received government approval, and by the end of the week had its first batch of hand sanitizers rolled out to its customers. Now, this is phenomenal. Just think of the speed in which this is happening. When we have chemicals companies literally take months, and I'm not kidding, months to bring out a single product, they did this within a week because of what they saw as the opportunity. And this is just one example of many that you can take. So for you, what advantage are you currently creating for your company and your customers? How are you thinking about your departments? How do you adapt to change? How do your departments adapt to change? What is that process? Do you have a system for doing that? What does that look like? Do you have a hyperadaptation mentality of looking for advantage in the systems that you have? And hyperadaptation is part of the Growth Systems Framework, part of the whole blueprint to how we bring sustainability in growth with our most important customers? And as we grow as a company, how do we do that in a way that brings us advantage? This is a powerful, powerful way to think. And what I encourage my customers and partners and people who I kind of wish well in the world to consider. So I hope this has been of value to you. And again, notes will be inside the description. There's a blog with a little more detail on it that you can access, and I'll see you in the next episode.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you liked or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.
