Sublime

Leadership is necessary when logic is not the answer. Leading adaptive change is not about making a better argument or about loading people up with more facts.

Mental Models.

Until you recognize the gap, and identify the goal or constraint which drives it, you won’t understand the behavior of the balancing loop.

The Learning Loop is an approach to learning while you perform your daily work: you try out a new approach in a small way (e.g., how you ask a question in a meeting), then measure the outcome, then get quick feedback, then tweak your approach based on that feedback (e.g., ask the question differently).

Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it.

“a key question in the practice of leadership becomes: How can one counteract the expected work avoidances and help people learn despite resistance?” He observes that although adaptive work is typically avoided, it is usually not avoided deliberately. It is often unconscious. So, again, adaptive leadership requires learning to look beneath the surf

The second book he bought was Drift into Failure by Sidney Dekker, which he passed out to all his IT infrastructure and operations people. Dekker’s book forces organizational managers to rethink blame and accountability in complex processes. When something goes wrong, it asks, “Should you blame the person? Or is it the system?”2*

If you are not training, then you are basically neglecting half the job.

People who rarely experience failure, however, end up not knowing how to deal with it effectively. And this serves to reinforce the normal human tendency to reason defensively. In