The World Economic Forum (WEF) declared cognitive flexibility as one of the top skills needed to excel in a 2020 and beyond in the workplace.  Cognitive Flexibility is an indispensable skill needed to navigate two fundamental realities of the 21st century: change and complexity. 

Cognitive flexibility theory focuses on the nature of learning in complex and ill-structured domains. (Spiro, and Jehng, 1990): “By cognitive flexibility, we mean the ability to spontaneously restructure one’s knowledge, in many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands. This is a function of both the way knowledge is represented
(e.g. along multiple rather single conceptual dimensions) and the processes that operate on those mental representations (e.g. processes of schema assembly rather than intact schema retrieval).” 

(Innocent, 2021) says, “Cognitive flexibility refers to our ability to switch between different mental sets, tasks, or strategies. The easiest way to think of ‘cognitive flexibility’ is having good mental agility. It is not to be confused with ‘multi-tasking’ which is a myth; as the brain is not capable of carrying out multiple tasks simultaneously. It’s a crucial skill to develop as the changing world of work demands you carry out a broader set of tasks than your job description implies, therefore, placing importance on your ability to switch between activities.