Insights From Patrick Hyland, Organizational Psychologist at Remesh
Adaptive cultures do not happen by accident. At the Employee Engagement Summit, the Organisational Culture stage session on “Using Rapid Research to Create Adaptive Learning Cultures” showed just how urgently leaders need to rethink the way they listen and learn. In a fast-moving, unpredictable world, the message was clear: annual surveys alone are not going to cut it anymore.
Why this session mattered
Patrick Hyland, Director of Research at Remesh, opened with a simple but revealing exercise from a recent study of 508 leaders in the US and UK: when asked to describe their culture in one word, the most common answers were “collaborative”, “supportive”, “friendly” – and “toxic”. What was missing were the words every organisation now claims to want: “adaptive”, “innovative”, “resilient”.
Patrick used this gap to pose a challenge to the room: if those adaptive qualities are not how people experience your culture today, what are you actually doing to build them? That question set up a powerful storyline that connected leadership, research, and real-time listening in a way that felt immediately actionable for engagement practitioners.
Technical vs adaptive challenges
Patrick then introduced the distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, inspired by Heifetz and Laurie’s work on adaptive leadership. A technical challenge is like fixing a broken machine: an expert can diagnose the issue and apply a known solution.
An adaptive challenge – like culture change, hybrid working norms, or evolving values – cannot be solved by a small group of experts, because it demands shifts in mindsets, behaviour, and shared assumptions across the system. Patrick argued that too many culture initiatives are treated as technical fixes, when what they really require is collective sense‑making and learning.
Why traditional listening is not enough
From there, Patrick turned to the tools most organisations still rely on: infrequent, largely closed-ended engagement and pulse surveys. These are good at tracking known constructs like engagement or satisfaction over time, but they are blunt instruments for exploring fast‑moving, ambiguous, “we’ve never seen this before” questions.
In a volatile environment, leaders need to ask new questions, surface unexpected insights, and iterate quickly – which is difficult when feedback loops are measured in quarters, not days. Patrick’s provocation landed strongly in a room full of engagement professionals who know the pain of waiting months for data that already feels out-of-date.
Enter rapid research
Patrick described rapid research as a pragmatic, discovery‑driven approach that grew out of public health and design practice, particularly during the COVID‑19 pandemic when leaders needed insight in days rather than months. Instead of long, static studies, rapid research uses short cycles, mixed open and closed questions, and real‑time analysis to keep pace with changing conditions.
The Remesh platform underpins this by enabling live, conversational studies with employees in multiple languages, where participants respond to questions and endorse others’ contributions that resonate with them. This creates a live signal of what matters most and reveals not only what people think, but why they think it, with AI tools turning large volumes of qualitative data into themes within minutes.
The “speed gap” case study
One of the most compelling moments came when Patrick shared a case study run in a single day with the same 508 managers. On the surface, most leaders felt they had enough data to make decisions, with around seven in ten confident in the volume of information available to them.
Yet when asked whether their organisations were actually making sense of ongoing change, that confidence collapsed to roughly four in ten, revealing a striking “speed gap” between data availability and decision‑readiness. Over 80% of respondents said their organisation needed to prioritise more agile, real‑time listening, focusing especially on three things: how employees are feeling, what customers want, and how external market forces are shifting.
From static metrics to learning cultures
Crucially, Patrick stressed that rapid research is not about throwing out your annual survey or abandoning longitudinal metrics. Instead, it is about filling the gaps between those big measurement moments, giving leaders a flexible feedback infrastructure they can turn on quickly in periods of disruption, transition, or experimentation.
For engagement leaders, the shift is from treating listening as an annual compliance exercise to using it as an engine for adaptive learning: running short, focused studies; surfacing emerging issues early; co‑creating responses; and then going back to test what is working. It is a mindset that reframes listening as continuous discovery rather than periodic diagnosis.
Why you should listen to the full session
If you care about building cultures that can genuinely keep up with – and even get ahead of – change, this is a conversation worth making time for. Patrick blends data, behavioural science, and practical examples in a way that will challenge how you think about surveys, dashboards, and “employee voice”, and leave you with concrete ideas to try in your own organisation.
Tune in to this podcast episode to hear Patrick dive deeper into question design, facilitation tips, and how AI can power truly adaptive listening in your organisation – then share it with your HRBPs and EX teams to spark the next culture conversation.
To register your interest for the 2026 Engage Employee Summit click here: