The Theory Behind the Practice: A Brief Introduction to the Adaptive Leadership Framework

This summary of The Theory Behind the Practice: A Brief Introduction to the Adaptive Leadership Framework was prepared in support of Grantmakers in the Arts’ and Hillombo’s Pro-BIPOC Arts Funding Community of Practice Workshop.

Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges & thrive

• Adaptive leadership is about change that enables the capacity to thrive
  • What does thriving mean in your particular context?
  • Leadership must wrestle with normative questions of value, purpose & process
  • Leadership must orchestrate multiple stakeholder priorities to define thriving and then realize it
• Successful adaptive changes build on the past
  • Successful adaptations are both conservative & progressive
  • Engage people in distinguishing what is essential to preserve from their organization/agency’s heritage from what is expendable
  • Anchor change in the values, competencies and strategic orientations that should endure in the organization/agency
• Organizational/agency adaptation occurs through experimentation
  • Utilize an experimental mind-set
  • Learn to improvise as you go
  • Buy time & resources along the way for the next set of experiments
• Adaptation relies on diversity
  • Build a culture that values diverse views & relies less on central planning & top-down management
• New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate & rearrange some old DNA
  • This is felt by some or even by many as loss
  • Learning is often painful, causing some to feel incompetent, betrayed or irrelevant
  • Leadership requires the diagnostic ability to recognize those losses and the predictable defensive patterns of response
  • Leadership requires knowing how to counteract these patterns of loss & defensiveness
• Adaptation takes time
  • Significant change is the produce of incremental experiments that build up over time
  • Culture changes slowly
  • Progress is radical over time yet incremental in time, taking time to consolidate into new sets of norms & processes
  • Adaptive leadership requires persistence; Stay in the game, even while taking heat along the way

The Illusion of the Broken System

• Any social system is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those with the most leverage) want it that way
• Every organization/agency is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets
• No one who tries to name or address the dysfunction in an organization/agency will be popular
• Closing the gap between the espoused value and the current reality, the value-in-practice, would be more painful to the dominant coalition than living with it
• The importance of this idea lies in the impact it has on the techniques for trying to address the problem
  • When you realize that what you see as a dysfunction in the system works for others in the system, you stop focusing on trying to convince them of the rightness of your cause
  • You instead begin focusing on how to mobilize and sustain people through the period of risk that often comes with adaptive change

Distinguishing Technical Problems from Adaptive Challenges

• Technical problems have known solutions that include the application of authoritative expertise through the organization’s current processes
• Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties
  • Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating the new capacity to thrive anew
• Many situations are a mix of technical problem & adaptive challenge & you must learn to differentiate between the elements
• The role of LOSS in adaptive challenges
  • The adaptive part can be found in the LOSS this change would represent for a stakeholder or group of stakeholders
  • The common factor in generative adaptive failure is resistance to loss
  • A key to leadership is the diagnostic capacity to found out the kinds of losses at stake in a changing situation
    • Jobs, wealth, status, relevance, community, identity, competence, others
  • Adaptive leadership puts you in the business of assessing, managing, distributing and providing context for losses
    • This context must move people through those losses to a new place
  • Balance loss with conservation of the best of what the organization/agency is
    • Answering questions about adaptive change and the losses involved is difficult because the answers require tough choices, trade-offs & the uncertainty of ongoing, experimental trial & error
      • It challenges individuals’ & organizations’/agencies’ investments in relationships, competence & identity
      • It requires a modification of the stories they have been telling themselves & the rest of the world about what they believe in, stand for & represent

Distinguishing Leadership from Authority

• Authority is power entrusted for services valued by the authorizer(s)
• Leaders challenge expectations & find ways to disappoint people without pushing them over the edge
• Managing the resistance you will inevitably trigger

Living in the Disequilibrium

• Honoring the reality that adaptive processes will be accompanied by distress means having compassion for the pain that comes with deep change
  • Disturbing people is not the point or the purpose, but a consequence
• Keep the temperature in the Productive Zone of Disequilibrium
  • Enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement & forward motion
  • But NOT so much that the organization/agency or your part in it explodes

Observe, Interpret, Intervene

Each of the processes below are highly iterative: You repeatedly refine your observations, interpretations & interventions

1. Observe events & patterns around you
   • This is a highly subjective activity that you will try to make objective:
     • Get off the dance floor & onto the balcony to gain some distance to watch yourself as well as others interact
     • Ask others to do likewise
2. Interpret what you are observing (developing multiple hypotheses about what is really going on)
   • Think through your interpretation of what you have observed before you act
   • Ask, “Is my explanation for what is happening correct? What are some alternative hypotheses?”
   • With time and increasing skill at adaptive leadership, you may find yourself actively holding more than one interpretation about a particular observation at any moment
     • This may include your holding mutually exclusive interpretations at the same time
   • While you will improve with time, your interpretation remains a guess
   • Interpreting is more challenging than observing
     • Making your interpretation public is itself an intervention & often a provocative one
     • You raise the risk of angering people who have formed different interpretations
3. Design interventions based on the observation & interpretations to address the adaptive challenge you have identified

Interventions as Experiments

• Your intervention should:
  • Reflect your hypothesis about the problem
  • Be considered an experiment (by yourself and perhaps by others)
  • Be in the service of a shared purpose
• Your intervention should:
  • Provide context: Connect your interpretation of the problem to the task at hand so that people can see that your perspective is relevant to their collective efforts
  • Take into account the resources available to your organization or agency
  • Consider your positional power in relation to others & calibrate your effort accordingly
  • Consider the skills and resources in your own toolkit
  • Be sufficiently outside your comfort zone so that you don’t continue to apply your standard interventions to every situation
    • Going outside your comfort zone also mitigates opponents’ strategies to deflect your efforts

Experiment and Take Risks Smartly

• Actively commit to the intervention you’ve designed but don’t let yourself become wedded to it
  • This allows you to consider and integrate unanticipated possibilities
  • This facilitates the iterative nature of the adaptive leadership process

Engage Above and Below the Neck

• Use your multiple intelligences (intellectual, emotional, spiritual & physical) & your multiple physical centers (mind, body, heart)
  • Connect with the values, beliefs and anxieties of the people you are trying to move
  • Arguments and facts don’t matter when your colleagues are stuck in their hearts and their stomachs – you must meet them there

Connect to Purpose

• What purpose is worth the risk?
• If you try to achieve this purpose, will you produce results valued in your organization?
• Defining a shared purpose is often challenging & painful; Some narrower interests will need to be sacrificed in the interests of the whole
• When you face a tough decision or when prospects for success look bleak, reminding one another what you are trying to do provides guidance, sustenance & inspiration