When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, you’ll learn how to lead your organization through the difficult, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous process of adaptation. First, you’ll learn what adaptive leadership is and the kinds of challenges it can help address. Then, you’ll learn how to diagnose and treat challenges. Finally, you’ll learn how to build an adaptive company culture.
“Adaptive leadership” is marshaling people to tackle problems with unknown solutions and thrive while doing so.
These problems with unknown solutions are called “adaptive challenges.” The only way to solve them is for the people in organizations to learn and change. (Challenges with known solutions are called “technical problems” and can be solved using existing workflows and expertise.) Adaptive challenges have the following qualities:
Since adaptive problems don’t have known solutions, you won’t be able to fix them by following pre-existing directions and protocols. Therefore, adaptive leadership is dangerous—it involves challenging the expectations of the very people who gave you power.
For example, if a company hired you to run a department, they’ll want you to follow their directions and run the department in the way they expect. They’ll expect you to stay within your scope of authority and defer to them, even if this isn’t effective. Thus, changing your leadership style to face an adaptive challenge may upset your superiors.
Since adaptive leadership will make people resist you and potentially jeopardize your job, it’s only worth practicing when it will help you or your organization achieve a purpose—a cause that brings you or your organization meaning and that you value. To determine what your or your organization’s purpose is:
You can diagnose adaptive challenges within your organization by:
These assessments will help you understand the scope of the problem and the resources you have available (or can acquire) to address it.
There are five characteristics to consider when assessing an organization’s adaptive capacity:
Characteristic #1: Sector membership. Consider what sector (not-for-profit, private, public) your organization belongs to and how this affects its adaptability. For example, private sector organizations are usually driven by profit and competition, and like to stick with what worked in the past. Sticking to the past doesn’t help them adapt.
Characteristic #2: Formal structure. Consider how your organization’s formal structures, such as the organizational chart, encourage or discourage adaptability, both implicitly and explicitly.
Characteristic #3: Culture. Consider how myths, practices, norms, and conventions (especially in meetings) govern people’s behavior and encourage or discourage adaptability.
Characteristic #4: Habits. Consider the default perspectives and behaviors the people in your organization take and how these affect its ability to change.
Characteristic #5: Politics. Consider how everyone in your organization relates to each other, both formally and informally, and how this affects their openness to adaptive change. When faced with an adaptive challenge, what’s at stake for everyone, what’s their preferred outcome, what are they loyal to, what are their values, and how much power do they have? Do these factors help or hinder people’s adaptability?
There are four characteristics to consider when assessing your leadership abilities and capacity for adaptation:
Characteristic #1: Psychology. Consider your background, culture, experiences, loyalties, values, pet peeves, and triggers. Consider how these factors impact how adaptable you are.
Characteristic #2: Repertoire. Consider the strategies you use to effect change in yourself and others. The more varied your approaches, the better your chances of success because you can be effective in more contexts.
Characteristic #3: Roles. Consider your multiple selves and the roles you play, and how these help or hinder your ability to lead others or yourself through adaptation. (Shortform example: In some groups, you may represent level-headedness; in others, ambition.)
Characteristic #4: Authority. Consider who gives you both formal and informal authority, and what the boundaries of that authority are. How does the scope of your authority contribute to your leadership and adaptation abilities?
There’s a two-step process for assessing adaptive challenges:
The most common reason change initiatives fail is because they attempt to apply a technical solution to an adaptive problem. Therefore, the first step when approaching a problem is to determine if it’s technical or adaptive. If the problem falls into any of the following archetypes, it’s probably adaptive:
Once you’ve determined that you’re dealing with an adaptive challenge and not a technical problem, ask yourself the following questions to get a handle on the scope of the problem:
Here are some tips for launching initiatives to address diagnosed adaptive challenges:
Organizations, teams, and individuals often default to interpretations of problems that don’t require change or for them to take responsibility. Default interpretations aren’t always wrong, but they usually don’t capture the full picture. As an adaptive leader, part of your job is to shift people’s interpretations towards what’s most accurate, not what’s easiest to swallow. To push yourself and others to do this:
The more political power, particularly informal authority, you have, the less you’ll have to subvert expectations, and the safer your adaptive leadership journey will be. To increase your political clout:
Surfacing conflict is a way to reveal unarticulated and unacknowledged differences in values and points of view. It won’t be possible to solve an adaptive challenge until this information comes to light and people understand the challenge’s underlying issues. There’s an eight-step process to surfacing and getting through conflict:
1. Do your research on people involved in the conflict. Before bringing up the conflict, talk to all the parties involved, find out their political alignment, and develop informal authority with them using the techniques described above.
2. Set the scene. Create an agenda for the meeting in which you’ll announce the conflict and come up with rules that help people feel safe (for example, expectations of confidentiality).
3. In the meeting, invite people to state their perspectives. Ask everyone for their opinion on the adaptive challenge and to state their values.
4. State the conflict. Articulate the differences between the values everyone has just stated. This is when people will start to get uncomfortable because they realize conflict exists and someone will lose. If the participants try to avoid conflict, keep it at the forefront. Regularly remind people what you’re all trying to do by working through the conflict—make a necessary adaptive change for the better.
5. Encourage reflection on loss. Ask everyone to think about how the losses they and others might suffer will affect them and the people they represent. You can give them anywhere between hours and months to reflect on and come to terms with their losses.
6. Establish experiments. With the help of the group, come up with experiments for both managing the adaptive change and for handling casualties.
7. Set up peer consulting. Parties should share what they learn from experimenting so they can learn from each other’s difficulties. The goal is to get everyone working together, regardless of which side of the conflict they were originally on.
8. Don’t judge people for their reasons for ultimately agreeing to your initiative. Your goal is to make an adaptive change, not to make everyone pure of heart—it doesn’t matter if someone only supports your initiative for selfish reasons (Shortform example: The change harms an enemy).
For the best chances at success, interventions should be:
There’s a six-step launching process for interventions, and you can complete the steps individually or together in sequential order:
1. Always keep the big picture in mind. Even after you’ve started acting, maintain your diagnostic mindset so you can keep a clear head, continue to look at the situation objectively, and change course if necessary.
2. Assess how widespread the urgency to change is within the organization. If only one group is ready to deal with an adaptive challenge, your first step will be to make the issue urgent throughout the organization.
3. Decide how to frame and state your intervention. Clearly communicate the course of action and why it’s important. It must resonate with other people’s points of view, not yours, and inspire them. Use whatever mix of facts and emotions will connect to your group’s value. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. framed his dream of equality within the context of the American dream.
4. Relinquish control. Once you’ve set off an intervention, let other people discuss and change it. This creates space for other people to participate and become more invested in it.
5. Use the factions within your team as a proxy for organizational factions. As an intervention gains momentum, some people will engage with it and modify it, and others will resist it. Notice who in your team falls into each group and predict how this reflects the actions of the factions in the whole organization so you can start addressing potential resistance.
6. Keep people focused. Because adaptive work is uncomfortable, people will look for ways to avoid it at all stages of the process. Encourage them to stay on-task by (politely) calling them on work-avoidance measures like changing the subject or making a joke to defuse tension.
Since addressing adaptive challenges is a long, experimental process, at points, people (including you) might be tempted to give up. To maintain your momentum:
In the previous sections, you learned how to tackle specific adaptive challenges. Now, we’ll look at how to increase your organization’s general adaptive abilities by building an adaptable culture. Here are five qualities of an adaptive organization:
1. People acknowledge problems. Everyone is allowed and even encouraged to bring up problems and ask uncomfortable questions, even of senior leaders. As a result, these organizations catch problems early, before they spiral into disasters, and adapt to solve them.
To develop this quality at your organization:
2. People care about the whole organization. People still have job titles and reporting relationships, but they also feel responsible for the whole organization’s future, not just their own. This aids adaptability because adaptation requires working together across departmental lines.
3. People use their brains. People are open to changing their opinions if they get new information, and people at the lower levels of the organizational chart are encouraged to come up with ideas and make decisions. The more brain power an organization can harness, the higher its capacity for adaptation. To develop this quality at your organization:
4. People develop leaders. Hiring talented people and putting them in appropriate positions is one of the best ways to develop adaptability because a common growth limitation is the lack of good leaders. To develop leaders:
5. People are committed to learning. Everyone in the organization admits there are gaps in their knowledge and takes steps to close them. Openness to learning is an ingredient for adaptability. To encourage a commitment to learning:
When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, three leadership experts—Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky—explain how to lead your organization through the difficult, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous process of adaptation.
In Part 1 of this summary, you’ll learn what adaptive leadership is and the kinds of challenges it can help address. Next, in Part 2, you’ll assess your organization’s current capacity for adaptation and learn to diagnose challenges. Then, in Part 3, you’ll learn some tips and tricks for addressing these challenges. Finally, in Part 4, you’ll learn how to build an adaptive company culture.
(Shortform note: We’ve rearranged the book’s content for concision and clarity.)
“Adaptive leadership” is marshaling people to tackle problems with unknown solutions and thrive while doing so. (Both the people and the organization should thrive, and for an organization, thriving generally includes having good customer service, high morale, high profit, and satisfied stakeholders.)
These problems with unknown solutions are called “adaptive challenges.” The only way to solve them is for the people in organizations to learn and change. (Challenges with known solutions are called “technical problems” and can be solved using existing workflows and expertise.)
We’ll look at the following four facets of adaptive challenges in the rest of the chapter:
Adaptive challenges have the following qualities:
Quality #1: They include an element of loss. Like biological adaptation, some things have to be left behind for things to change, but much will still be retained.
Quality #2: They include a human element. Problems are created by people, so everyone involved with the challenge will need to change.
Quality #3: They generate resistance. Some people will resist any sort of change because they fear the loss that comes with it—even the most seemingly dysfunctional workplace is working for some of the people in it. Others will agree that change is necessary but won’t agree on the best way to tackle the challenge. Even formal authority may not be enough to overcome this resistance.
Quality #4: They require spending time in the “productive zone of disequilibrium”—a zone in which a problem puts enough stress on people to motivate them to act, but not so much stress that they’re overwhelmed and can’t do anything at all.
Quality #5: They take a long time to solve and require experimentation and iteration. Since there’s no known solution, you’re going to have to try different things, and inevitably, not everything you try will work.
There are three key activities to engage in to understand adaptive challenges: observing, interpreting, and intervening. You’ll need to do all of them multiple times—as you interpret your observations, you may make new observations, and after intervening, you’ll need to observe the results to decide on your next intervention.
Observation is assessing the circumstances surrounding the challenge, and the challenge itself, as objectively as possible. To do that:
1. Get as much information as you can from all available sources. Research, talk to people, and pay attention to your surroundings.
2. Get some distance from the challenge. When you’re deeply involved in a situation, it’s difficult to see things that aren’t right in front of you, so step away and try to see the whole picture.
We’ll look at observation in more detail in Part 2.
Interpretation is attaching meaning to what you’ve observed—describing events rather than simply reciting them.
Your brain will interpret things (such as adaptive problems) unconsciously, and often in a biased way. When you mentally write a story to explain what you’re seeing, you, like most people, will include details and facts that support your favorite interpretation, and leave out ones that don’t. Typically, your favorite interpretation will be one that shows you in a good light and justifies your behavior. As a result, you may misinterpret adaptive problems and your own role in them.
To regain some control of your brain and its interpreting tendencies and ensure that you interpret situations as objectively as possible:
1. Question the accuracy of your interpretation—acknowledge that interpretations are made up of assumptions. When you and others observe the same events, consider their versions of the story.
2. Come up with as many interpretations as possible. The more angles and perspectives you can see a situation from, the more complete your picture of it will be.
3. Try to hold more than one interpretation in your mind simultaneously. This will allow you to stay open to new information: You’ll be open to information about multiple interpretations, not just one.
We’ll look more at interpretation in Part 3.
Intervention is coming up with a plan of action to address your challenge, based on your interpretation of its causes and intricacies. We’ll look more at interventions (also called change initiatives) in Part 3.
Since adaptive problems don’t have known solutions, you won’t be able to fix them by following pre-existing directions of the people who give you authority. Therefore, adaptive leadership is dangerous—by nature, it involves challenging the expectations of the very people who gave you power.
Since adaptive leadership will make people resist you and potentially jeopardize your job, it’s only worth practicing when it will help you or your organization achieve a compelling purpose.
Purposes are the causes that bring value, happiness, or meaning to you or your organization. You and your organization probably have many purposes, all of which are important, but one of them is most important (called the “orienting purpose”). Once you know this purpose, you can use it to guide daily decisions, time and resource allocation, and risk assessment.
To determine what your or your organization’s orienting purpose is:
1. Assess actions rather than words. What you do is a better indication of what you most value than what you say. If your words and actions don’t match up, contemplate the dissonance.
2. Consider what you or your organization are willing to take risks to do.
3. Ask yourself or your organization what you’re ultimately trying to do. This will give you an abstract, high-level purpose that you work backward from to figure out your more concrete orienting purpose. Whenever you contemplate taking an action, ask yourself if it will further your high-level purpose, and if it does, it’s a clue to what your specific, orienting purpose might be.
Trying to hold multiple orienting purposes or compromise your purposes usually doesn’t work—if you try to achieve too many purposes, you’ll run thin and won’t achieve any of them.
Though you and your organization can’t hold multiple orienting purposes at once, your orienting purpose can change. You can also delegate purposes to others temporarily if needed.
Now that we've learned some background info about adaptive challenges and how to lead adaptively, we're almost ready to move on to discussing diagnosing and treating adaptive challenges. However, before we do, here are some tips to keep in mind throughout the process.
Tip #1: Get help from a partner or a team. This is for two reasons: It’s less lonely, and it’s easier for people to resist or stop a single person (you) than a group.
There are three reasons people try to lead alone even though it’s a bad idea:
Tip #2: Practice every time the opportunity arises. Anytime you get a chance to practice adaptive leadership, whether that’s in your personal or professional life, take it so that you’re regularly learning. Don’t let the opportunity pass because you’re “too busy,” or for any other excuse. Even if this only makes you spend 5% more time practicing, that’s enough to make a significant difference to your skill level.
Tip #3: Reflect before acting. It’s very common to want to take action to solve an adaptive challenge right away. Leaders are often under pressure and have been trained to address problems quickly, so they’re predisposed to cut diagnosis and observation short and move straight to intervention. However, this is a mistake: Adaptive challenges take time to even fully understand, never mind address effectively. Before acting, consider the risks, whether they’re worth it, and whether you’re the right person to lead.
If you hold a high position, you can hold back prematurely starting the intervention stage yourself. If you don’t hold a high position, you’ll have to use some of the following non-confrontational techniques (lest you be accused of negativity or blocking progress) to slow down the people above you:
Tip #4: Embrace adapting yourself. When you’re a leader, to get through a particular challenge, you’ll need to change yourself. This is difficult because, as noted, all changes involve loss, and, in a leader’s case, the loss can include abandoning deeply held values.
Throughout this summary, there are reflection questions and exercises that encourage you to think about how the material applies to your life and organization. Some of this work you can do alone, and some of it you’ll have to do with your team or other people.
Here are the exercises for this section:
In Part 1, we learned about adaptive leadership and adaptive challenges. There are two steps to solving such challenges, and in this chapter, we’ll look at the first step: diagnosis. Diagnosis involves:
These assessments will help you understand both the scope of the problem and the resources you have available (or can acquire) to address it when it’s time for treatment.
There are five characteristics to consider when it comes to assessing an organization’s adaptive capacity (how capable it currently is of addressing adaptive challenges):
Your organization’s adaptability is informed by the distinctive characteristics of the sector it belongs to. Be aware of the limitations that come with each sector, all of which can impact an organization’s ability to change:
Another characteristic that affects your organization’s adaptability is its formal structure—the rules and hierarchies that govern an organization such as organizational charts, employment contracts, compensation plans, and so on. These structures encourage certain activities and discourage others, both implicitly and explicitly.
If your organization’s structure encourages activities that support adaptive leadership, your organization likely has higher adaptive capabilities.
The third characteristic that informs adaptability is culture—the collection of stories, unwritten rules, and conventions that govern people’s behavior. Culture is made up of four elements and all of them affect an organization’s capacity to adapt:
Mythos is the collection of jokes and stories that reinforce an organization’s important ideas and help people understand their surroundings. Most companies’ mythos includes stories that cover:
Because mythos is so often repeated and focuses on important images and symbols, it contains valuable information about the company’s culture—including how flexible, and thus adaptable, the company is. However, it is also often incomplete because people aren’t always forthcoming when reciting folklore. For example, a myth might describe what’s allowed but skip what’s not allowed, or vice versa.
Reflection Questions and Exercises
Practices are repeatable rituals, such as holidays or retirement parties. It’s important to understand company practices because you can associate them with adaptive challenges, which encourages people to pursue these challenges.
Reflection Questions and Exercises
Norms are how people interact with each other within an organization. They often include:
To assess how norms contribute to your organization’s adaptability, consider if the norms maintain the status quo or allow for learning and adaptation.
Reflection Questions and Exercises
Meeting covenants are the guidelines around meetings—who decides the agenda, who is invited, and how often meetings are held. These covenants shed light on the distribution of power and of information, both of which influence adaptability.
To assess meeting covenants and what they say about adaptability, consider the following questions:
Reflection Questions and Exercises
The fourth characteristic to consider when assessing your organization’s adaptability is habits—the default perspectives or actions that people take because they’re comfortable to carry out and have been effective in the past. The more people repeat a habit, the more entrenched it gets.
Habits can be helpful when times aren’t changing—people can quickly apply known solutions to known problems.
However, habits can limit adaptability because:
For example, when there was a war between militant group Hezbollah and Israel, the U.S. Jewish community reacted out of habit—they raised money to help Israel recover. Had they instead considered other actions and adapted, they might have been able to do something even more helpful. For instance, one person suggested sending some of the funds to southern Lebanon, which had also suffered damage due to war and was receiving funding from Hezbollah. If Lebanon had found another source of funding, it may not have supported the militant group so much, which would have weakened it.
Reflection Questions and Exercises
The final characteristic to examine when considering your organization’s adaptive capacity is politics—how people relate to each other, both formally and informally, and who has power. To successfully lead adaptive change, you need to diagnose the political landscape of the organization to predict people’s responses to the change—who will help you and who will resist? Resisters may oppose you because they will personally suffer loss from changing, or because they represent others who will suffer.
The following all contribute to an individual’s political alignment and willingness to participate in adaptive change:
Contributing Factor #1: Ideal outcome. When it comes to addressing the adaptive challenge, what is the best resolution for her?
Contributing Factor #2: Investment. To what degree does she care about the adaptive challenge and the company?
Contributing Factor #3: Stakes. What does she stand to lose? Your proposed solution to the challenge and the changes that this will create might threaten her values or just her desire for predictability. If you can figure out exactly what she’s afraid of losing (fear of change is really fear of loss), you can mitigate her resistance by helping her keep what she needs. To determine people’s stakes:
Contributing Factor #4: Values. What is most important to the stakeholder? Often, opposing your change is a way of serving her values, but if you can understand her priorities, you can find ways to frame your proposed changes in a way that means accepting them will allow her to serve her values in another way.
Contributing Factor #5: Loyalties. What people or parties depend on the stakeholder?
Everyone is loyal to three groups of people:
Loyalties drive behavior (or inaction in the face of an adaptive challenge) because:
They often conflict. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, and fear of disappointing someone might make someone choose inaction.
It’s hard to acknowledge unflattering loyalties. Usually, the loyalties that are contributing to an adaptive problem are the ones people keep secret because they often stem from insecurity or the need for something they’re not proud of. People often don’t want to admit to these loyalties, and without acknowledging them, it’s difficult to address them.
Changing can result in ostracization. If a stakeholder changes too much, they might not be welcomed back to the group they’re loyal to.
(We’ll look more at your own loyalties in the next chapter.)
Contributing Factor #6: Allegiances. What does the stakeholder have in common with other stakeholders, especially informally? These commonalities might encourage stakeholders to band together, strengthening their position (support or resistance) on your adaptive leadership.
Contributing Factor #7: Power. Who does she influence and what resources does she allocate?
There are two ways to assess someone’s political alignment (and thus, their receptiveness to your proposed solution to an adaptive challenge):
1. Flat-out ask her. However, keep in mind that if you’re above a stakeholder in the organizational chart, she might not be honest or tell you everything. Try to read between the lines and hold conversations in safe environments, such as around the watercooler or at a teambuilding activity.
2. Talk to a third party. Speak with someone both you and the stakeholder know to get another opinion on their alignment. Keep in mind that third parties may not tell you everything either, and they have biases and filters too.
Additionally, when assessing alignment, see people as complex, three-dimensional beings, not flat characters who selfishly get in your way. The goal of this perspective isn’t to be nice, but to be tactical. The better you understand someone, the more easily you can frame your initiative in a way that will appeal to her. For example, you can explain how supporting your initiative does more to further her values than resistance will.
| Stakeholder | Investment in the problem | Ideal outcome | Most important values | Loyalties | Stakes |
In the last chapter, we assessed the adaptive capacity of your organization and the people within it. Now, it’s time to assess one particularly important person—you—and your adaptive capacity.
Before we get started, it’s important to note that you’re partly responsible for any adaptive problem you find yourself facing and, like everyone in your organization, you will need to change yourself to successfully solve it.
There are six characteristics to consider when it comes to assessing yourself and your adaptive leadership abilities:
You are a system of multiple selves, not just a single entity. In different roles and contexts, you’ll highlight different parts of your personality and skills. To effectively manage adaptive change, you need to acknowledge, accept, and be mindful of these multiple selves.
Acknowledging your multiple selves might feel awkward—having one self provides clarity to both you and the people you interact with. Additionally, some people feel slimy or manipulative about being different people to get things done (even though all your different selves are authentic, because they’re all still part of you). However, constraining yourself to one self erases your complexities, which has two negative consequences:
1. It’s harder to think beyond that single self. If you’re drawing only one self’s intuition and experience, you won’t be as open-minded.
2. You’re easier to predict, which can be used against you. (Shortform example: If, in every situation, you most value environmental protection, people can attack your change initiatives by bringing up the environmental consequences of them, knowing that this will make you doubt your initiative.)
Your psychology is the combination of factors, including your genetics, culture, and childhood experiences, that shape your identity and perspective.
You respond to your surroundings based on your psychology—you’re always influenced by your circumstances and past. However, once you accept that you’re subject to influence, that’s actually when your will is most free because you can see the forces acting on you and choose how to react, rather than have your instincts take over.
The most challenging kinds of influences are triggers—stimuli that provoke a disproportionately large reaction. There are two types of triggers to be especially mindful of:
1. Unfilled needs. Everyone needs three things: influence, affirmation, and love. A lack of any one can trigger you into a variety of unhelpful behavior.
2. Other people’s problems. If it’s in your nature to help people, whenever you see someone with a problem, you’ll be inclined to help them. Helping them is a noble goal, but if you take on too much, you’ll burn out—since the problems belong to others, not yourself, you don’t have much control over them.
When you’re triggered, you regress into defensive, reactive mode and lose your ability to step back and see the whole picture. Additionally, once you’ve become emotional due to a trigger, you can trigger other people, and the more authority you have, the more chaos you cause.
To notice when you’re being triggered (and use this awareness to maintain control of your emotions), watch for the following signs in yourself:
Loyalties are the people, groups, or ideas that you represent or are responsible for. In the previous chapter, you learned how to assess other people’s loyalties to colleagues, community, and ancestors as part of assessing their political alignment. Now, you’ll learn how to assess your own loyalties, which you’ll be able to study in more detail than other people’s, because you can get deeper into your own psyche than someone else’s. Assessing your own loyalties is important so you can see how they might be holding you back from making effective adaptive leadership decisions.
To assess your loyalties, ask yourself the following questions and subquestions:
What Are Your Important Loyalties?
It can be difficult to name the people who make up the ancestors group. Try talking to people who have the same ancestry as you, ideally your family members, but also members of identity groups you belong to, and ask them to describe how your heritage has influenced your values.
What Is the Relative Importance of Each Loyalty?
Assess how important each of your loyalties is to you by asking yourself the following questions:
For the next 14 days, write down how much time you devote to each of the loyalty groups. The group that you give the most attention and energy is the group that you prioritize (regardless of what you say). Is it the group you thought it was?
For the next 14 days, write down how much time you devote to each individual member of the coworkers group. What does the log tell you about your priorities?
Which Loyalties Conflict?
Loyalty and Adaptive Challenges Questionnaire
With the help of a few peers (not a boss or subordinates), go through the following exercise steps to assess how your loyalties will affect your ability to lead adaptive change. After each step, discuss your response.
1. Think of an adaptive challenge your organization is facing. List what you could do more or less of to help solve it.
2. For every list item in step #1, answer this question: “This item demonstrates loyalty to ___” (This list is the loyalties you publicly share.)
3. What loyalties from the previous question are most important? Make a list of what actions you’re engaging in that are deprioritizing these loyalties.
4. For every deprioritizing action you listed in step #3, answer this question: “This action shows I’m also loyal to _” (This is the list of loyalties you keep to yourself.)
5. Make a list of the negative consequences that would happen if you stopped doing the deprioritizing actions on the list in step #3. This will tell you what you’re protecting yourself from.
6. To resolve the conflicts you brought to light in this questionnaire, you’ll either have to abandon or shortchange the loyalties you listed in step #2, or risk the consequences you listed in step #5. Try conducting a small experiment to see if the consequences you fear really will happen.
Your repertoire is the collection of strategies you use to promote adaptive change in either your organization or yourself. The more strategies you have, the more effective an adaptive manager you can be, because you’ll be better equipped to handle a variety of situations. Once you’ve assessed your repertoire, you can shore up weak areas if you have any.
To assess—and, if necessary, develop—your repertoire:
1. Assess your current repertoire. Ask yourself what you’re skilled at, and what you still need to work on.
2. Assess your tolerance for discomfort. Ask yourself if you can act even when you’re unsure of what to do, and if you can spectate and get involved in other people’s fights without becoming uncomfortable. (As an adaptive leader, you’ll need a high tolerance for discomfort because adaptive leadership involves making choices that will make people angry or resistant to you.)
Specifically, ask yourself:
3. Increase your repertoire and tolerance using the following exercises:
Roles are parts you play to represent a value for people. (For example, someone who lobbies for equal pay for employees of all genders might represent the value of equity.)
Some of the roles you play will be assigned—to organize themselves, groups cast members into roles, often informally. (Shortform example: At your workplace, you might be the go-to person for fixing the printer.) More than one person in a group can represent the same value at the same time, and a collection of people that represent the same values is called a faction.
You have some say in how to approach the roles others try to cast you in. If you don’t like the role, you can try to get out of it, or you can take on additional roles you’re more interested in.
The more roles you can play, the more versatile and effective you can be because you can choose the most appropriate role for the situation. Additionally, you become more effective because you make connections with more people.
All of your roles are authentic, even if they’re different (or even in conflict) with each other. However, always remember that you are separate from your role. A role is a part, not a reflection of your innermost self. If something goes wrong, you’re not a failure—you just didn’t do a particular role justice. Don’t take things personally, because this will decrease your effectiveness as an adaptive leader—when you start focusing on your inner self instead of the adaptive change, the change is less likely to succeed.
If you can dissociate yourself from your role, you’ll be better able to:
The final characteristic to consider is your level and type of authority. There are two kinds of authority:
Type #1: Formal. This authority is explicit and well-defined. Authorizers lay out what you’re expected to do in a job description or some other explicit agreement, and you’re officially accountable to them.
Type #2. Informal. This type is implicit, unwritten, and constantly changing. Informal authorizers don’t have any hierarchical power to tell you what to do or how to do it, but they still expect you to be accountable to them.
Your informal and formal authority likely don’t match up perfectly and it can be difficult to assess the boundaries of each because:
To find the boundaries of your authority, assess how much resistance you generate. If you don’t create any, you’re probably within your scope, and if you generate a lot, you’re probably far outside it. Aim to generate a manageable amount of resistance. You can do this by challenging norms, raising tough questions, or going ahead with an experiment without authorization and then asking for forgiveness later.
| Authorizer | Formal expectations | Informal expectations | What do you want to do that’s beyond the authorizer’s expectations? | Instances where you’ve encountered resistance from the authorizer |
| Supervisor | ||||
| Peers | ||||
| Reports | ||||
| External people (for example, customers) | ||||
| Partner | ||||
| Friends | ||||
| Other |
Whenever your organization faces an adaptive challenge, you’re part of the problem.
Describe an adaptive challenge your organization is currently facing.
How are you exacerbating the problem? (For example, if the challenge is that your organization lacks transparency, you might be keeping things to yourself.)
How could you fix your part in exacerbating the challenge?
How could you demonstrate your fix and lead by example?
In the previous two chapters, we assessed the adaptive capability of your organization and the people who make it up, including you. This gave you a sense of your current capabilities and resources. In the last chapter of this part, we’ll learn to assess the adaptive challenge itself so that when you move into treatment in Part 3, you’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with.
There’s a three-step process for assessing adaptive challenges:
As we learned in Part 1, there are two types of problems: technical, which have known solutions, and adaptive, which don’t yet have solutions. The most common reason change initiatives fail is because they attempt to apply a technical solution to an adaptive problem.
There are two main reasons people misdiagnose adaptive challenges as technical problems:
Reason #1: Most problems have both technical and adaptive elements, and it’s not always to tell which are which.
Reason #2: Technical solutions are easier, are less disruptive, and involve less emotional strife than adaptive solutions, so people are predisposed to misdiagnoses.
There are two questions to ask yourself when determining whether you’re facing a technical problem or an adaptive challenge:
Check if the problem falls into any of the four common adaptive problem archetypes:
A contradiction between words and actions is a gap between what a person or organization claims to value and what she or it actually does.
This archetype is the presence of conflicting priorities—in other words, mutually exclusive commitments.
Filtering is when people keep their potentially inflammatory thoughts and impressions to themselves and only say safe things aloud, such as polite banter. For example, employees may only bring up ideas they know their boss will agree with, instead of ideas they think will be most helpful to the business. People keep quiet because bringing up problems can make them unpopular, create conflict, or even get them fired. They especially keep quiet in front of senior leaders.
Work avoidance is when people invent ways to avoid making uncomfortable changes. Sometimes, it’s easier to see work avoidance techniques than an adaptive problem, so if you notice them, you can work backward to figure out what the problem is.
There are two main work avoidance strategies:
1. Distraction. Distracting encompasses the following actions:
2. Abdicating responsibility. This involves:
There are several indicators that suggest a problem is adaptive:
Once you’ve determined that you’re dealing with an adaptive challenge and not a technical problem, ask yourself the following questions to get a handle on the scope of the problem:
1) What group is facing the challenge?
2) What is the mission of that group?
3) Is the challenge based on external changes (for example, changing market conditions) or internal changes (for example, changing company values)?
4) What do I think and assume about the challenge? Are my assumptions limiting me?
5) What is my role in the organization, how much authority do I have, and what resources are available to me?
6) What fixes have I tried, and how did they work? What fixes have I thought of that I haven’t tried, and why haven’t I tried them? What fixes am I avoiding even thinking about?
7) Who is affected by or invested in the challenge and what do they think about it?
8) Where are people running into conflict? Do they disagree about the mission or values of the group, or about the strategy and goals, or about tasks? To determine where the conflicts are, gather all the interested parties and start the discussion at the highest level of abstraction—mission and values. Probably, all of the parties agree with the mission. Then, ask what the parties would have to do to achieve the mission and values. If you don’t find a conflict here, keep asking what the parties would have to do to achieve the step you’ve just covered until you find a conflict.
In Part 2, you learned how to diagnose your organization and yourself, and how to identify an adaptive challenge. Now that you know what you’re dealing with, we’ll look at some tips for putting together change initiatives and interventions to tackle your challenge. Since people changing is a key ingredient of adaptive change, the treatment tips are all people-related.
First, in this chapter, we’ll look at how to manage others by shaping their interpretations of the adaptive challenge.
People (including you) have to change to carry out adaptive change. However, organizations, teams, and individuals often default to interpretations of problems that don’t require change or for them to take responsibility. Default interpretations aren’t always wrong, but they usually don’t capture the full picture—which is necessary for adaptive change.
These default interpretations might be related to a departmental perspective on the problem. For example, often, senior leaders cement default interpretations by gravitating towards them or minimizing other interpretations.
As an adaptive leader, part of your job is to shift people’s interpretations towards what’s most accurate, not what’s easiest to swallow. When you concretely describe a complicated problem, this helps people find their footing and focus. Even if they don’t agree with your interpretation, having something concrete to discuss will spark work towards solving the problem.
People’s interpretations usually need to shift in the following three directions:
Direction #1: Technical to adaptive. Teach everyone at your organization the difference between technical and adaptive challenges so that they realize the different types require different solutions. This will help them understand:
Direction #2: Benevolent to conflict-laden. Once people understand what adaptive challenges are, they’ll start to understand that they inherently involve loss and there’s no point in avoiding it—what they need to do is acknowledge conflicts, assess which losses are acceptable, and then move forward.
Direction #3: Personal to organizational. Problems are usually greater than one person is experiencing—there’s something about the system (that needs to be adapted) that allows them to persist. (For example, the fact that you have to deal with an underperforming employee might be because the organization’s culture protects underperforming employees.) Once people realize the problem exists outside themselves, they can start to assess how everyone in the organization is affected by it.
To get people to make these shifts, try the following five techniques:
The first technique rewires people’s defaults so that they think first about how the problem is organizational, rather than how it’s personal. (If it were only personal, not everyone would have to change.)
To do this:
1. Determine the default, personalized interpretation of the groups a person belongs to. To do this, watch how the group responds to problems and situations and try to identify a pattern.
2. State the default. There are two ways to do this:
The next technique is to ask people more questions. This pushes them further beyond their default interpretations and helps them open themselves to adaptive change.
Ask these questions:
The third technique is to keep pushing people to interpret. Even once people have moved beyond their default interpretation, they’ll probably still be inclined to assign only one interpretation to a given situation, which limits their ability to work towards adaptive change.
People usually stop at one interpretation because:
Acknowledging only one interpretation only gives you one angle from which to approach the adaptive problem. To generate more solutions, you need to generate more interpretations, the more diverse the better, because this allows for a complete and accurate view of the situation. This can be messy, create conflict, and take time, but in the long run, it’s more efficient and innovative.
There are two ways to encourage more interpretation:
1. Ask what-if questions about the existing interpretations.
2. Make a structural change that facilitates multiple perspectives.
Once you’ve generated more interpretations, your job is to encourage people to keep considering all of them. One way to do this is to share the responsibility for evaluating interpretations.
The fourth technique is to maintain the progress you’ve made in using the above techniques by calling out people who regress to their default interpretations. People regress for two reasons:
Here are some signs that people are regressing and how to respond:
The final technique is to zoom in on yourself—like everyone, you have defaults too. To avoid getting too attached to your defaults, which will limit your ability to change, think of presenting them like auditioning for a part in a play. During the audition, you’re playing a character who’s invested and passionate in the interpretation, but once the audition is over, let go of your investment.
Watch how others react (or don’t) to your interpretation and solicit feedback. Don’t defend your interpretation, because this will stifle discussion.
In the last chapter, we looked at how to get others to acknowledge the existence of adaptive problems. In this chapter, we’ll continue looking at how to manage the people who will be responsible for making adaptive change by studying techniques to improve political clout. The more political clout you have, the more power, support and influence you have, and the less people will resist you.
Here are six techniques to increase your political power:
The more informal authority you have, the less you have to break expectations when exerting authority, and the more likely you are to be part of many factions with overlapping interests. All of this will make adaptive leadership easier.
To increase your informal authority:
Before you announce your change initiative, whether that’s a formal announcement or just bringing up the idea in a meeting, you should recruit allies to support you. You especially need allies when you’re dealing with a group of more than 20 people because the political relationships will be complicated and you won’t be able to manage them by yourself.
Potential allies are:
Keep in mind that your allies are loyal to other people and perspectives too—your allies won’t necessarily prioritize your needs over their other allies’.
The third political-management technique is to manage senior leaders, who have the potential to greatly help or hinder the change initiative.
To best manage senior leaders:
1. Determine how they individually feel about the adaptive challenge. Because adaptive change involves a human element, feelings and emotions will come into play.
2. Warn them about the chaos you’re about to unleash. Once your change initiatives start creating discomfort, people are going to want to talk to senior leaders about you. People might complain to leaders, ask leaders to step in and stop the initiative, or even ask leaders to fire you. If you give the leaders advance warning that all this will happen, they’ll be prepared for sabotage attempts.
3. Use their knowledge and perspective as progress indicators. Senior leaders have a high-level view of both the external and internal overall environments you work in. They can take a step back for you and tell you how the initiative is affecting the organization and how much more chaos it can stand. If they’re not chatty, you can also get this information by observing how they talk about the initiative, how they talk to you, and how they wield their political power.
The fourth technique is to manage those who oppose your proposed solutions to the adaptive change. To do this, you need to be aware of what’s going on with them—get close to them, solicit feedback, tell them you value their input, and listen. Find out how much discomfort they’re experiencing and if they’re reaching a breaking point.
To manage your opponents:
Empathizing with the opposition comes with some potential pitfalls:
Even though empathizing comes with consequences, you should do it because:
For example, President Ford expected the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States to oppose his decision to grant limited amnesty to protestors of the Vietnam War. To head it off, he personally delivered the news to the group in advance of announcing it publicly.
The fifth technique is to accept that your change initiative is the reason people have experienced loss. Spend time with the people who suffer losses, empathize with them, and help them endure or recover from the loss.
This has three potential benefits:
In every organization, some people are perpetually contrarian—they’re negative, critical, or unrealistic, or steer the conversation in an entirely different direction than what everyone is agreeing on. The sixth technique is to listen to these people—they’re often irritating, but they’re also early-warning systems, and they’re not afraid to ask hard questions. Therefore, they provide potentially more complete and accurate information than others about the adaptive challenge.
Give troublemakers space to speak by:
Encouraging naysayers may encourage others to voice their dissenting opinions too. To encourage other minority voices:
The following five tables will help you get a handle on who plays which roles (ally, opponent, and so on) when it comes to adaptive challenges. Fill out each table and add as many rows as needed:
| Potential ally’s name | Why is she a potential ally? | What’s her priority? (Does she support the initiative, you personally, the company, and so on?) | How can she help you with your initiative? |
| Potential opponent’s name | Why is she a potential opponent? | What will she lose if your initiative goes through? | How can you stop her from opposing you or get her to support you? |
| Senior leader’s name | Why is she important to your initiative? | What does she tell you, or what signs does she give off, about the organization’s reaction to your initiative? | How can you get her support? |
| Name of the person who will experience loss | What will be lost? | What new skill could you help her develop to endure the change? | How could you help her get those skills? | Will she need to leave the company? | How could you set her up for success at a new company? |
| Troublemaker’s name | What useful ideas has she mentioned? | How can you get others to listen to these ideas? | How can you protect her voice? |