The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Review the following list of potential losses to begin getting some ideas: • Identity • Competence • Comfort • Security • Reputation • Time • Money • Power • Control • Status • Resources • Independence • Righteousness •Job • Life

UNDERSTANDING THE POLITICAL relationships in your organization is key to seeing how your organization works as a system.

If people have arrived at only one interpretation of the situation, the options for action are often severely limited; any one interpretation will tend to drive toward a single solution or a small set of solutions. To expand the array of options, encourage people to come up with more than one possible interpretation.

An organization will be better equipped to identify and grapple with adaptive challenges if its people do not expect the CEO and other senior authorities to always have the answers.

Group norms govern how people relate to one another in an organization and can further illuminate the adaptability of an organization.

A conflict that requires immediate resolution suggests that you select fewer stakeholders, in the interest of timeliness. But the more the conflict at hand requires adaptive work to be resolved, the more expansive your definition of whom to include should be.

For people in authority roles, one of the most difficult aspects of orchestrating conflict is resisting the temptation to take the conflictual elements of the adaptive work off of other people’s shoulders and putting it on your own. The pressure to relieve them of that work comes from both them and from you. You have undoubtedly been rewarded for e

Reality testing, the effort to grasp the challenge fully, is often an early victim of the social and personal unrest associated with adaptation.

Leadership therefore requires the diagnostic ability to recognize those losses and the predictable defensive patterns of response that operate at the individual and systemic level.

Organizations fall back on defaults because they are familiar and they have proved useful for explaining reality and solving problems in the past.