Is Your Culture Ready for the New Ab-Normal?
Posted Oct 18, 2026 by Rick
In recent speaking engagements, I've been welcoming audiences to what I call the "New Ab-Normal": a work and life environment defined by constant disruption, accelerating change, and unprecedented uncertainty. The question for leaders is no longer whether the next challenge is coming. The question is whether their culture is ready for it.
The reality is that we need to change the way we manage change.
Traditional, event-based change management approaches were designed for a world where disruptions were occasional. Today's environment is different. Organizations are navigating continuous change, and the cumulative impact is taking a toll on employees and leaders alike.
As Gallup's recent workplace research suggests, employee engagement continues to struggle, with many employees reporting disengagement at work and managers facing similar challenges. Success in the New Ab-Normal requires organizations to move beyond simply measuring engagement and begin actively building the cultural conditions that maximize it.
That's why we're developing the Agile Culture Scorecard™, a new assessment designed to help leaders understand and strengthen the leadership behaviors and cultural characteristics that drive engagement, adaptability, and organizational performance.
Moving Beyond Measuring Engagement
Employee engagement surveys are valuable, but they often answer only one question:
How are we doing?
What leaders really need to know is:
What should we change?
Measuring engagement tells us where we are. Measuring cultural agility helps us understand what to improve.
The Agile Culture Scorecard™is designed to uncover the leadership behaviors that shape workplace culture and influence how employees experience communication, trust, innovation, accountability, and change. By identifying strengths and gaps, organizations can focus leadership development, coaching, and training efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
What Are Leaders Hearing from Their Workforce?
During recent presentations and leadership discussions, we've gathered feedback that points to several recurring themes across organizations:
- Leadership's vision for the future often earns broad agreement, but relatively few employees express strong conviction.
- Communication clarity frequently emerges as a significant concern during periods of change.
- Psychological safety appears uneven, with many employees feeling supported while others remain hesitant to speak openly.
- Change communications often generate widely different experiences across organizational levels, suggesting inconsistencies in both clarity and execution.
These patterns highlight an important reality: leaders and employees frequently experience the same culture differently.
The challenge isn't simply understanding whether those gaps exist. It's identifying exactly where they exist and determining which leadership behaviors will have the greatest impact on closing them.
That's the purpose of the Agile Culture Scorecard™.
Introducing the Agile Culture Scorecard™
AHC’s Agile Culture Scorecard™ provides leaders with a practical framework for assessing organizational agility through the lens of AHC's Six Traits of Agile Organizations©.
The assessment is designed to provide:
- An overall measure of organizational cultural agility
- Insights into how leadership behaviors are experienced across the organization
- Comparative analysis between senior leaders, managers, and frontline employees
- Identification of cultural and leadership gaps that may be hindering engagement and adaptability
- Actionable recommendations to strengthen organizational agility and workforce engagement
Rather than focusing solely on engagement outcomes, the Scorecard helps leaders identify the cultural drivers behind those outcomes.
When leaders can see where perceptions differ between the boardroom and the front line, they gain a clearer picture of where change efforts should be focused. These insights can help organizations strengthen trust, improve communication, reinforce accountability, and create a culture better equipped to adapt and thrive.
This is the path from simply measuring engagement to truly maximizing it.
Building Cultures That Thrive Through Uncertainty
Organizations that succeed in the New Ab-Normal won't be the ones that react fastest to disruption. They'll be the ones that intentionally build cultures capable of adapting through disruption.
Healthy, agile cultures share several characteristics:
- Employees see themselves as stakeholders in a compelling future.
- Leaders are trusted to act in the best interests of the organization and its people.
- Innovation is encouraged and learning from failure is accepted.
- Change is embraced as an opportunity rather than resisted as a threat.
These are the cultures best positioned to thrive, regardless of what comes next.
At AHC, we're committed to helping leaders build those cultures intentionally and sustainably.
Join the Agile Culture Scorecard™ Beta Program
We're currently recruiting a limited number of organizations to participate in the Agile Culture Scorecard™ Beta Program, scheduled to begin in late November.
Beta participants will receive:
- Complimentary access to the Agile Culture Scorecard™
- Confidential assessment results
- Organizational gap analysis across leadership levels
- Strategic insights and recommendations
- An opportunity to help shape the final version of the product prior to its planned 2027 launch
Participation is limited to organizations ready to take a proactive approach to strengthening culture, engagement, and organizational agility. If that describes your organization, contact me directly at [email protected] to explore whether the Agile Culture Scorecard™ Beta Program is a fit.
You can also learn more about the Agile Culture Scorecard™ here: https://www.adaptivehumancapital.com/ahcs-agile-culture-scorecard-beta
AHC’s Agile Culture Scorecard™is designed to help leaders understand where they are today, where they need to improve, and how to build the agile culture required for tomorrow. The organizations that win in the New Ab-Normal will not simply manage change better. They'll build cultures designed to succeed because of change.
Let's make 2027 the year we move beyond measuring engagement and start building cultures that can truly thrive.