What is adaptive thinking?

Example: A senior engineer spent two years championing a microservices migration. Midway through, latency data showed the architecture was creating more problems than it solved. Instead of adjusting course, she doubled down — reinterpreting latency spikes as "growing pains" and dismissing team concerns as resistance to change. A junior engineer on the same team reviewed the same data, proposed a hybrid approach, and presented the revision not as a failure of the original plan but as an evidence-driven iteration. The senior engineer saw updating as retreat. The junior engineer saw it as navigation. The project eventually adopted the hybrid approach — six months later than it should have, at twice the cost.

This concept is part of Schema Evolution in the How to Think curriculum.