While past work on adaptability and adaptive performance has developed and matured primarily over the last two decades, a number of gaps exist in the literature. Namely, existing work generally takes a static approach to examining adaptability and fails to consider potentially important cognitive and behavioral processes that can influence adaptation over time. Furthermore, this work pays little attention to the different ways in which a task can change, which may have implications for how and how well people are able to adapt. Finally, little work has focused on in situ self-regulatory processes that may influence how well people are able to adapt to various types of task change. To address these gaps, the current study introduces and builds from a process model of adaptation by which it is hypothesized that in order to exhibit high levels of adaptive performance effectiveness, people must detect changes in the task they are facing, diagnose the nature of those changes, and finally develop and enact appropriate task strategies. Furthermore, and based on Wood's (1986) taxonomy of task complexity types, this study suggests three different ways in which tasks can change and examines the processes by which people are able to adapt to each of them. In addition, a metacognitive intervention was designed that encouraged participants to devise plans, monitor their performance effectiveness, and evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies in order to investigate the impact of these in situ self-regulatory processes on adaptive performance. Finally, a number of hypotheses were investigated regarding the potential impact of individual differences factors related to cognitive ability, goal orientation, and personality on adaptive performance effectiveness in relation to the different types of task change. Using a laboratory-based radar simulation task, the findings provide support for the efficacy of thinking about adaptability as a process rather than simply as performance at a given point in time. Specifically, evidence suggests that change detection, relevant knowledge acquisition (e.g. diagnosis), and appropriate strategy change were related to higher levels of adaptive performance effectiveness, although these results were not entirely consistent across the three types of task change that were investigated.