Sublime

Within any profession or sector, one of the primary characteristics of the artistry of leadership is the willingness to work on an edge—the edge between the familiar and the emergent.

In the midst of action, you have to be able to reflect on your own attitudes and behavior to better calibrate your interventions into the complex dynamics of organizations and communities. You need perspective on yourself as well as on the systemic context in which you operate.

Obviously, a company that cannot self-correct cannot thrive.

Adaptive executives and operations folks understand that their most vital responsibility is getting the right people in the right roles doing the right jobs.

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.

Leadership is a difficult practice personally because it almost always requires you to make a challenging adaptation yourself. What makes adaptation complicated is that it involves deciding what is so essential that it must be preserved going forward and what of all that you value can be left behind.

What makes some organizations more adaptive than others? We’ve identified five key characteristics: 1. Elephants in the room are named. 2. Responsibility for the organization’s future is shared. 3. Independent judgment is expected. 4. Leadership capacity is developed. 5. Reflection and continuous learning are institutionalized.

Although we suggest you bring an experimental mind-set to work, we are not saying you must always tell everyone that you are running an experiment.

Can we become better than our competition at accumulating, disseminating, and building on our firmwide expertise and experience, so that each professional becomes more valuable in the marketplace by being empowered with a greater breadth and depth of experience?