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Introduction 1-3
p.2-3 What is needed from a leadership perspective are new forms of improvisational expertise, a kind of process expertise that knows prudently how to experiment with never-been-tried-before relationships, means of communication, and ways of interacting that will help people develop solutions that build upon and surpass the wisdom of today's experts.
p.3 Adaptive leadership is an approach to making progress on the most important challenges you face in your piece and part of the world... Our concepts, tools, and tactics aim to help you mobilize people toward some collective purpose, a purpose that exists beyond your own individual ambition... Our goal is to provide practical steps you can take to act further on behalf of your deepest values, to maximize the chances of success and minimize the chances of your being taken out of action.
Part One: Introduction: Purpose and Possibility
1. How to Use this Book 5-11
p.5 The practice of Adaptive Leadership is a field book for two reasons: first, we have written it from the field, drawing on our experiences... Second, we have designed it for the field, to be of day-to-day utility in your own leadership efforts.
p.6-7 The practice of leadership... involves two core processes: diagnosis first and then action... you diagnose what is happening... and take action to address the problems you have identified... The process of diagnosis and action begins with data collection and problem identification (the what), moves through an interpretive stage (the why) and on to potential approaches to action as a series of interventions into the organization, community, or society (the what next). Typically, the problem-solving process is iterative, moving back and forth among data collection, interpretation, and action.
p.7 in most organizations, people feel pressure to solve problems quickly, to move to action. So they minimize the time spent in diagnosis, collecting data, exploring multiple possible interpretations of the situation and alternative potential interventions. To counteract this drive toward a quick-fix response based on a too swift assessment of the situation, we spend a lot of time in this book on diagnosis... The single most important skill and most undervalued capacity for exercising adaptive leadership is diagnosis.
p.7 when you are caught up in the action, it is hard to do the diagnostic work of seeing the larger patterns... To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events.
p.8 When you move back and forth between balcony and dance floor, you can continually assess what is happening in your organization and take corrective midcourse action.
p.8 The conflict is structural, not personal, even if it's taken on a personal tone... start with diagnosing and acting on the system... adaptive leadership is an iterative activity... you have to start somewhere... you can do it at any point in the process: diagnosis of the system... or action on the system
p.10 so much of adaptive leadership work is iterative: you try something, see how it goes, learn form what happened, and then try something else. You tailor your interventions... to the unique (and shifting) characteristics of the situation facing you.
p.10 In our work, people often come to us for assistance with a specific adaptive challenge.
2. The Theory Behind the Practice 13-40
p.14 Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive.
p.15 Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it.
p.15 Organizational adaptation occurs through experimentation... Those seeking to lead adaptive change need an experimental mind-set. They must learn to improvise as they go, buying time and resources along the way for the next set of experiments.
p.15-16 Adaptation relies on diversity... The secret of evolution is variation
p.16-17 Adaptation takes time... Progress is radical over time yet incremental in time... Significant change is the product of incremental experiments that build up over time.
p.17 [Jeff Lawrence] "There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets." No one who tries to name or address the dysfunction in an organization will be popular.
p.19 The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems... 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.
p.26 The word leader comes form the Indo-European root word leit, the name for the person who carried the flag in front of an army going into battle and usually died in the first enemy attack.
p.31 Unlike with a technical problem, there is no clear, linear path to the resolution of an adaptive challenge. You need a plan, but you also need freedom to deviate from the plan as new discoveries emerge, as conditions change, and as new forms of resistance arise. Once you help unleash the energy to deal with an adaptive issue, you cannot control the outcome. That is why there are several possible outcomes at the end of the adaptive challenge line.
p.32 Adaptive leadership is an iterative process involving three key activities: (1) observing events and patterns around you; (2) interpreting what you are observing (developing multiple hypotheses about what is really going on); and (3) designing interventions based on the observations and interpretations to address the adaptive challenge you have identified. [JLJ - echoes of Eoyang's What? So what? Now what? and Archer's discernment, deliberation, dedication]
p.32 Observations... in exercising adaptive leadership, the goal is to make observing as objective as possible.
p.33 What are the patterns of behavior relevant to the problem that are not visible unless you're looking for them?
p.33-34 Interpretations... The idea is to make your interpretations as accurate as possible by considering the widest possible array of sensory information.
p.35 Interventions Once you have made an interpretation of the problem-solving dynamics you have observed, what are you going to do about it? ...Your next move, your intervention, should reflect your hypothesis about the problem, be considered an experiment... Good interventions also take into account the resources available in your organization.
p.36 When you are dealing with adaptive challenges, there is no obvious answer to the question "What is going on here?" ...Managing this ambiguity requires... an experimental mind-set: you try things out, see what happens, and make changes accordingly.
When you adopt an experimental mind-set, you actively commit to an intervention you have designed while also not letting yourself become wedded to it... This mind-set also opens you to other, unanticipated possibilities.
p.37 Thinking experimentally... opens you to learning... you make an intervention based on your interpretation of the situation, and you see what happens. You use the results of your experiment to take the next step or to make a midcourse correction.
p.38 Leadership is necessary when logic is not the answer.
3. Before You Begin 41-48
p.43 The purpose of this book is to help you see and take advantage of adaptive leadership opportunities more often than you have before, and on behalf of what you care most deeply about... you have to be willing and able to see opportunities where you might have missed them before. Start by recognizing that those opportunities are present everywhere and every day in your life... leadership is an experimental art.
p.44 Sorting through an adaptive challenge takes time and reflection.
Part Two: Diagnose the System
4. Diagnose the System 49-68
p.49 The first step in tackling any adaptive challenge is to get on the balcony so you can see how your organizational system is responding to it. Informed by this perspective... You will grasp the nature of the adaptive challenges at hand.
p.51 Many organizations get trapped by their current ways of doing things, simply because these ways worked in the past.
p.52 Adaptive challenges have unique characteristics... Input and output are not linear. Your strategy produces unintended consequences.
5. Diagnose the Adaptive Challenge 69-88
p.70 Leadership begins, then, with the diagnostic work of separating a problem's technical elements from its adaptive elements.
p.71 The most common leadership failure stems from trying to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges. Authorities make this mistake because they misinterpret or simplify the problem, fail to see how the organizational landscape has changed, or prefer a "solution" that will avoid disruption or distress in the organization.
6. Diagnose the Political Landscape 89-100
p.96 one element of thinking politically involves ferreting out the losses you are asking people to take.
7. Qualities of an Adaptive Organization 101-112
p.102 In a highly adaptive organization, no issue is too sensitive to be raised at the official meeting, and no questions are off-limits. Someone who senses early changes in the external environment that would disturb current operations if those changes were taken seriously has the freedom to say so... Crises are identified early on, long before they reach unmanageable proportions... Andy Grove attributed Intel's agility, in part, to an attitude of almost paranoid vigilance scanning for emerging threats and opportunities externally and internally
p.105 in organizations with significant adaptive capacity, there is an openness and commitment to learning.
p.107 People view the latest strategic plan as today's best guess rather than a sacred text. And they expect to constantly refine it as new information comes in.
p.110-111 The first step toward effective action is nonaction: the ability to avoid the all-too-common impulse to leap into action when an adaptive challenge rears its head... You need some nonconfrontational ways to slow down your organization's momentum.
Part Three: Mobilize the System
8. Make Interpretations 113-124
p.113 Effective visions have accuracy and not just imagination and appeal.
p.115 If you can make interpretations that surface the conflictual aspects of the problem, you can... begin identifying which losses are negotiable and which are not, engage in the courageous conversations needed to work through those conflicts, and create an environment in which the conflicts can be surfaced and managed so that new adaptations emerge.
p.119 Default interpretations work much of the time because they do capture elements of reality, at least superficially.
p.120 Once your people have generated several interpretations of their collective challenge, your goal is to help them keep those interpretations alive instead of gravitating prematurely toward one of them.
p.121-122 Once multiple options are on the table, ask people, "How would we know whether one of these interpretations is more accurate than the others?" Produce some low-risk experiments that might test the interpretations that seem to generate more energy, maybe even more negative energy. Think of the process as iterative and improvisational. You will probably find that some interpretations have more juice, more reaction, and more staying power in the conversation than others.
p.123 Creativity is less efficient... But when you are dealing with an adaptive challenge that requires creativity, you have to tolerate the pains of processes that increase the odds that new ideas will lead to new adaptive capacity.
9. Design Effective Interventions 125-132
p.125 Effective interventions mobilize people to tackle an adaptive challenge... Assume the need for a midcourse correction in whatever you do. Each intervention generates information and responses that may then require corrective action. Maintain the flexibility to move, reflect, and move again. [JLJ - perhaps in general it is resources that are mobilized to produce an effect. For example, when playing a strategic game or programming a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), it is the game pieces and logic elements, respectively, that are mobilized to create desired effects. There is always already a potential existing in these resources (or so says Francois Jullien), and a current configuration that already has an existing effect. With our interventions, we simply find ways to produce effects that (in the first case) cause future positions of the pieces to thrive in the game world, and in the second, a layout or logic design that operates with perhaps a faster fmax.]
p.126-130 Step 1: Get on the Balcony... Stay diagnostic even as you take action... Watch for patterns. Reality test your interpretation when it is... close to your default... Step 2: Determine the Ripeness of the Issue in the System... Step 3: Ask, Who Am I in This Picture? ...suppose you are the one who always presents ideas... group members may respond with silence... Wait for someone else to come forward to contribute opinions or to offer additional ideas... Step 4: Think Hard About Your Framing... Step 5: Hold Steady... The idea will make its way through the system, and people will need time to digest it... Once you have made an intervention, your idea is theirs... Let people in the system work with your idea without your getting attached to it... Step 6: Analyze the Factions That Begin to Emerge... Step 7: Keep the Work at the Center of People's Attention
10. Act Politically 133-148
p.141 Resisters to your initiatives are people who feel most threatened by it.
11.Orchestrate Conflict 149-164
p.149 Orchestrating conflict is a discipline. It requires seeing the process as a necessary step in the journey toward a better future
p.151 If you want to generate progress on adaptive issues, you have to seek out, surface, nurture, and then carefully manage the conflict toward resolution, rather than see it as something to be eliminated or neutralized... Conflict is an essential resource in getting to the real, as opposed to superficial, harmony.
p.152-153 Seven Steps to Orchestrating Conflict
1. Prepare... 2. Establish ground rules... 3. Get each view on the table... 4. Orchestrate the conflict. Starkly but evenhandedly, articulate the competing claims and positions you are hearing... 5. Encourage accepting and managing losses... 6. Generate and commit to experiments... 7. Institute peer leadership consulting
12. Build an Adaptive Culture 165-180
p.165 Although building adaptive capacity is a medium- and long-term goal, it can only happen by moving on it today and the next.
p.171 To build more adaptive culture, you might regularly explore questions such as these:
- How is our external environment (including... competitors' actions...) changing?
- What internal challenges are mirroring those external changes?
- What are the gaps between where we are... and where we want to be?
- How will we know that we are successful?
- What challenge might be just beyond the horizon?
Part Four: See Yourself as a System
13. See Yourself as a System 181-186
p.181 You are a system as complex as the one you are trying to move forward.
p.183 Accepting that you are actually multiple "yous," that you have more than one self within you, is critical to exercising adaptive leadership [JLJ - some of the "yous" (that make up me) agree and some of us disagree with this concept. Some of us think that there are not multiple "yous", that there is only one you in me. But others (of the "yous" in me, that is) agree that there are many of us. Most of "us yous" think that any "you" in us, that thinks it is the only "you" (in me, that is), is in fact fooling itself (yourself?).]
p.184 People who lead adaptive change most successfully have a diagnostic mind-set about themselves as well as about the situation. That is, they are continually striving to understand what is going on inside, how they are changing over time, and how they as a system interact with their organization as a system.
14. Identify Your Loyalties 187-194
p.193 What things, if they happened more frequently, or less frequently, would help make progress on the adaptive challenge I am working on?
15. Know Your Tuning 195-204
p.195-197 if you can get on the balcony and observe the forces acting on you... You will have acknowledged the reality that you are embedded in a web of relationships and are influenced by those relationships, so you create more freedom for yourself to act with understanding of those influences rather than merely to react unthinkingly to them.
p.198 When you are finely tuned to something that is happening, you see it coming before anyone else does. While others may be naive to it, not understand it, or try to ignore it, you will be sensitive to it and move to respond.
p.199 the more finely tuned your strings become over time, the more you are at risk of seeing things happening in the environment you are sensitive to, even when they are not there... when others know how you are tuned, they have more power to entice you... You become seducible.
p.199 The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.
16.Broaden Your Bandwidth 205-108
p.206 Will you be able to say to yourself, "I don't know whether this is the right way to proceed, but I know we have to try something, and anyway, whatever we do should be treated as an experiment"?
17. Understand Your Roles 209-220
p.212 Whatever role you are playing at any one time, that role does not represent all of who you are, even if it feels that way.
18. Articulate Your Purposes 221-232
p.221 Taking on adaptive challenges is difficult and dangerous work.
p.228 Stories are the explanations you tell yourself and often to others to show why things happen the way they do and to convey their meaning... The stories people create help them whittle down and make meaning out of the bewildering array of information coming at them all the time. We find it useful to take the perspective that people don't live in reality - we live in the story we tell ourselves about reality.
Part Five: Deploy Yourself
19. Stay Connected to Your Purposes 233-246
p.234 First, calculate your intervention's potential damage to others... Just how much damage are you willing to inflict?
p.241 Important purposes take time. You are not abandoning your purposes when you take an angled step toward them rather than move along a straight line.
p.245 If you are loudly and relentlessly certain you are on the right path, you may come across as self-righteous. And that can trigger resistance in others.
20. Engage Courageously 247-262
p.252 if you do not feel that you are operating at the very edge of your talents or even just beyond that edge, then you are probably not attacking an adaptive challenge.
p.253 Every day you make sense out of reality by connecting facts together and interpreting those facts to create stories... To create a story about your morning, you choose some facts and leave out others (depending on what strikes you as relevant at the time) and provide some interpretation of the facts you have chosen. The result is an account that has meaning.
p.254 practice viewing your stories about reality as just that, stories, and treating them as assumptions, not truths. Then test those assumptions, and revise them if your findings suggest that they are not quite on target.
p.257 Rework your decision... most decisions are iterative: you make a move, take the risk. If things seem to be going well, you continue. If not, you take corrective action.
p.257 Rarely are the stakes as high as people imaging them to be... In his wonderful book of essays Rules for Aging, Roger Rosenblatt begins with this advice: "Whatever you think matters - doesn't. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life." Try thinking of yourself as just making the next move on the the dance floor, and you may actually lighten the weight of the decision and even make better choices.
p.259 Conducting relatively low-cost experiments (such as pilot projects) can help you test your idea, fail, and not be destroyed (or destroy your organization) in the process.
p.260 Adaptive work generates what can feel like maddening digressions, detours, and pettiness.
p.261 Leading adaptive change will almost certainly test the limits of your patience.
21. Inspire People 263-276
p.272 when you are not in a position of authority, you may worry that no one is listening to you. [JLJ - I am not worried that no one is listening to me - I know that no one is listening to me.]
22. Run Experiments 277-288
p.277 Leadership is an improvisational art... Everything you do in leading adaptive change is an experiment... Framing everything as an experiment offers you more running room to try new strategies, to ask questions, to discover what's essential, what's expendable, and what innovation can work... When you view leadership as an experiment, you free yourself to see any change initiative as an educated guess, something that you have decided to try but that does not require you to put an immovable stake in the ground.
p.277 Experiments involve testing hypotheses, looking for contrary data, and making midcourse corrections as you generate new knowledge.
p.278 Try to understand why your idea went nowhere... And remind yourself that it is not you out there being affirmed or discarded; it is an idea that you put out there for testing.
p.284 Tomorrow, in the office, look for signs of resistance to ideas - whatever form it takes and to whomever it is directed. Try to pursue a new idea of course of action until you get pushback.
23. Thrive 289-298
p.291 Leading an adaptive change effort will take everything you are willing to give it, all your time, energy, attention, and care.
p.295 We want you to thrive. Thriving is much more than survival; thriving means growing and prospering in new and challenging environments.
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