Sublime

How do you know whether you and your team are confronting an adaptive challenge? Look for two characteristic signals: a cycle of failure and a persistent dependence on authority.

adaptive challenges require new learning, innovation, and new patterns of behavior. In this view, leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive challenges—those challenges that cannot be resolved by expert knowledge and routine management alone.

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.

The most common cause of failure in leadership is produced by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.

You can learn a lot about your organization’s adaptability by looking at its meeting protocols. Protocols include what kinds of meetings are held regularly, who gets invited to them, and how the agenda is established. They speak to how power is distributed in the organization and what information is exchanged.

• Address interests unconnected to the adaptive challenge.

In any organization or community for which you are trying to exercise adaptive leadership, you own a piece of the problem at hand. If you are part of the organizational system, you must be part of the problem. This does not mean that you are responsible for the whole mess. Nor does it imply that you are not doing a lot of good in trying to address

in complex systems, it is rarely appropriate to go it alone. Forming partnerships within the faction one is working in, creating allies across the boundaries between factions, and finding confidants who are outside the field of action altogether is critical to the art of adaptive leadership.

Your job in exercising adaptive leadership is first to wean people away from interpretations on the left-hand side of the chart (where people define problems as technical, benign, and individually caused). Then you need to nudge them toward interpretations on the right-hand side (where they define problems as adaptive, conflictual, and systemic).