Areté is a continual striving to be better, always moving toward excellence. Flourishing in business goes beyond personal expertise or enterprise growth. Our professional life offers a unique arena to expand and develop aspects of our character and consciousness.

Business excellence in the twenty-first century will be attained by those who can embrace their capacity for adaptability. Today, excellence in the business world is moving beyond the expertise model demanded in the last century and is attained by individuals who can embrace indeterminacy and contextualism.

The adaptations required to flourish in business are transformative. True adaptation is a change process that goes beyond technical advancement or adjustments to changing circumstances. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan has shown how developmental psychology can enhance business leadership development. Kegan’s model of human cognitive development stresses the role of increasing differentiation between subject and object. At each stage of cognitive development, we gain the capacity to see how a perspective that we have endorsed as objective is actually subjective. This is analogous to the capacity for adaptation required for business excellence, being able to see the circumstances that defined a prior business context is perspectival and not fundamentally objective, universal business reality.

According to Kegan without understanding the assumptions that hold our behavior in place, we may be immune to any efforts to change that behavior. Rather than fighting with ourselves to change the behavior, Kegan has developed a programmatic exploration that focuses us in on the beliefs that hold us in place, limiting our growth and change.

Social-construction theory also reveals the power with which our view of reality defines reality. Our views construct our world to a degree that far exceeds perspective. Perspective and cultural differences are not merely variations of knowledge or experience, but in fact reflect how we are each embedded in a reality-defining worldview. Contextual intelligence is the cognitive ability to grasp competing views of reality and is essential for viable business leadership adaptation.

Contextual intelligence includes the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and opening up a very wide event horizon for possible outcomes. Contextual intelligence requires being able to change our way of thinking and that a persistent mindset or relying on simple explanations for complex phenomenon will limit our contextual intelligence. Some of these limits to contextual intelligence are explored in research conducted by Daniel Kahneman.

Tarun Khanna applies contextual intelligence to business adaptation. He developed his understanding of contextual intelligence by exploring how a successful business migrates into different environments. He stresses how technology is not independent from or immune to people’s beliefs, religion, and cultural institutions. According to Khanna,

“Understanding the limits of our knowledge, which is at the heart of contextual intelligence, is a very basic component of human comprehension.”

The September 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review focused on business adaptation to globally diverse markets. Throughout this issue, various articles emphasized that successful management and leadership required flexibility and openness to learning, which are both key manifestations of contextual intelligence. For example:

“I’ve learned that the biggest predictor of success is a person’s attitude toward learning: Is he or she willing to listen and understand rather than imposing personal views.” Eduardo Caride, a global director at Telefonica; “it isn’t the fittest that survive; it’s the most flexible.” David Cote, CEO of Honeywell, quoted by Shane Tedjarati, global high growth CEO at Honeywell

Research in the field of positive psychology indicates that the qualities needed to flourish in business are also essential elements of wisdom. In addition to adaptability and contextual intelligence, other qualities needed to flourish include curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, in his article 21st Century Talent Spotting, in the June 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review, identifies five key attributes that exist in people with high potential:

“Motivation: a fierce commitment to excel in the pursuit of unselfish goals. High potentials have great ambition and want to leave their mark, but they also aspire to big, collective goals, show deep personal humility, and invest in getting better at everything they do.
Curiosity: a penchant for seeking out new experiences, knowledge, and candid feedback and openness to learning and change
Insight: the ability to gather and make sense of information that suggests new possibilities
Engagement: a knack for using emotion and logic to communicate a persuasive vision and connect with people
Determination: the wherewithal to fight for difficult goals despite challenges and to bounce back from adversity”