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The Journal of Global Business Management Volume 15* Number 2 * October 2019 issue 15

Adaptive Leadership Diagnostics: A Conceptual Framework Drawing Upon Three Generations of Business Leaders

Andrew J. Czuchry, East Tennessee State University, USA

Andrew J Czuchry, Jr., Institute for Contemporary Leadership, USA

Andrew J Czuchry, III, Drew Czuchry Golf, LLC, USA

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to connect three generations of practical and effective business

leadership constructs, into a unified conceptual framework that effectively addresses the current state of

change dynamics in business and technology today. The connections across the three generations are

leveraged to synthesize and present a conceptual framework for Adaptive Leadership Diagnostics, based

upon the need to respond to change in new ways. This framework gains heightened importance in

addressing the growing need to effectively diagnose threats and capture opportunities before the

narrowing time window of opportunities closes on any one particular change. Each of the three

generations brings a timely element to the framework: 1. positional influence, 2. experiential influence,

and 3. data-in-context influence. The conceptual framework addresses a core dynamic that change has

inherently become fluid, and must be addressed from multiple perspectives to avoid change merely

becoming churn. The multiple perspectives are combined to enable a set of Adaptive Leadership

diagnostics for change dynamics: a. Opportunity change dynamics, b. Capability change dynamics, and c.

Data change dynamics. Interestingly, the three diagnostics may be viewed differently across the three

generations when considered independently, yet together they expose a conceptual framework that

enables each generation to contribute with greater impact across business organizations that use

technology.

INTRODUCTION

For many people, and their respective organizations, a new reality is emerging. There is an

accelerating pace of change, particularly in how the use of technology can benefit businesses in many

new and different ways. Given that accelerating pace, the very nature of change from a management and

diagnostic perspective has shifted. Rather than change simply being a transition process between one

static state to another static state, change itself has become fluid and dynamic. The resulting impact is that

each change invariably leads to another change; this perpetuates change as an enduring state, rather than a

state transition. In other words, a person or organization does not change to get somewhere and stay there;

change becomes part of a continuous adaptation process to capture the next set of emerging adjustments

for success. From a diagnostic and managerial perspective, this means that rather than attempting to

manage the change directly, which often leads to change becoming churn due to the elongated time to

completion, leaders need to adapt to change dynamically as an inherently fluid part of ongoing operations.

To that end, this paper presents three generations of current perspectives on how leaders can learn to

effectively adapt with change, rather than simply endure in change, so each leader can capitalize on the

value that change can bring for their organization.

The Journal of Global Business Management Volume 15* Number 2 * October 2019 issue16

In this paper, the authors present three current perspectives as a conceptual framework based upon

their personal and collective experiences: 1. adaptive leadership in software and hardware systems

production ecosystems, where the leader leverages positional influence, 2. adaptive leadership in

organizational transformation, where the leader leverages experiential influence in driving adoption of

new ways of working and new ways of interacting in software technology ecosystems, and 3. adaptive

leadership in professional sports, where the leader leverages the relevant data influence in the applicable

context. The benefit of the framework for leaders is that they can capitalize on the accelerating pace of

change, by applying the conceptual framework in this paper, to effectively exhibit adaptive leadership

and to accomplish their objectives more effectively and consistently.

BACKGROUND AND STUDY SETTING

Traditional enterprise operating change models are not capable of dealing with the emerging faster-

paced, turbulent reality as reported by Ewenste in et al. which indicate a 70 percent failure rate(2015).

Leaders often respond to changing market dynamics only to find that the market shifts again before their

initial response is fully realized. Thus, leaders formulate a new response and businesses are continually

disrupted by the next change and become exhausted by the prospect of having to respond yet again.

Ultimately, many enterprises do not survive in this uncertain and ever-changing environment. The good

news is that an alternative path does exist through adaptive leadership.

Three generations of authors have shared their progressive experiences as their careers developed

and matured in concert with each other. The emerging result is a synthesis across generations of learning

to leverage three types of leadership: 1. positional influence, 2. experiential influence, and3. data

influence in the applicable context. Based on the synthesis, a conceptual framework was proposed and

implicitly tested by each person in their own ecosystem. The conceptual framework may help positively

impact new and emerging leaders, particularly those leaders who realize businesses that leverage the use

of technology need to be able to adapt nimbly and responsively to threats and opportunities in the rapidly

changing market conditions of today and for the foreseeable future.

The context of this paper is also intended to help fill a gap in the current body of peer-reviewed

literature. Much of the relevant literature to date, beyond the application experiences depicted in this

paper, is published in business books; less is published in the academic and peer-reviewed literature. This

paper begins to expand the reach of the relevant literature into the space of academic and industry peer-

reviewed publications.

RELEVANT LITERATURE

The primary relevant literature comes from a seminal adult learning peer-reviewed publication

(Czuchry, 2019) and a collective synthesis of published literature on adaptive organizations in the context

of business agility transformations (Shalloway, 2019), along with achieving Lean Agility at Scale

(Czuchry and Czuchry, 2016).

Czuchry (2019) provides a conceptual framework based on the realization that adult learners can

have practical experience equivalent to experiential learning. The application of the conceptual

framework has proven to be effective for teaching innovative entrepreneurship to adult learners; it has

also been proven to have a mutually beneficial outcome for the community, the learner, and the broader

organization employing the learner.


The work of Shalloway (2019) shows how organizations produce business agility improvements

through the application of a new set of constructs synthesized from pre-existing partial solutions. Each of

these partial solutions provide contextually-relevant solution patterns for the broader organizational

transformation problem in today’s adaptive contexts: Lean (Ohno, 1988), Theory of Flow (Reinertsen,

2009), Theory of Constraints (Goldratt, 1984), Agile(Beck et al., 2001), Scrum (Takeuchi and Nonaka,

1986; Sutherland and Schwaber, 1995; Sutherland and Schwaber, 2017), Kanban (Anderson and Dragos,

2005; Anderson, 2010), and technical agility through eXtreme Programming (Beck, 1999).Related work

for achieving lean agility at scale (Czuchry and Czuchry, 2016), addresses how creating sustainability in

adaptive organizations can be viewed as a non-linear systems engineering challenge in today’s

competitive business arena.

The topic of Adaptive Leadership, as introduced by Harvard professors (Heifetz, Grashow, and

Linsky, 2009), provided a foundational observation that the “organizational adaptability required to meet

a relentless succession of challenges is beyond anyone’s current expertise”. Application of Adaptive

Leadership, through consulting practices such as Boston Consulting Group (2010), has identified one of

the key objectives for adaptive leaders: “create the conditions that enable dynamic networks of actors to

achieve common goals in an environment of uncertainty.” Ties to complexity science and chaos theory

have also be pursued (Obolensky, 2014). The current authors extend the prior body of knowledge into the

following areas: a. addressing constraints imposed on leaders in leveraging positional influence,

experiential influence, and data influence in the applicable context, and b. addressing the change

dynamics combined in the pursuit and application of Capabilities, Opportunities, and Data.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR IMPLEMENTATION

The conceptual framework presented in this paper helps leaders diagnose individual needs and

leverage the diagnoses to lead their organizations through business and technology change. The

framework is centered around an observation that the nature of change is fundamentally changing, and

therefore, a new operating framework is needed to help leaders and their organizations adapt at the speed

of change. The framework shows how the effective application of constraints, along with the adaptive

change dynamics encapsulated through the constraints, can bring forward the positive adaptive outcomes

sought by many organizations today.

The rate of change across an entire system, particularly business systems that are interconnected

globally, is impacted by the particular type of constraints applied to that system and the nature of where

those constraints are applied relative to the overall system; i.e., constraints applied at the boundaries of

the system, or applied internally to the system itself. In the constraint-based systems approach,

specifically addressing where the constraints are placed determines how adaptive the corresponding

business system becomes as execution occurs.

First, let’s consider two types of constraints. One type of constraint increases predictability and

reduces variability; these are called governing constraints. They are typically what people consider

when using the term “constraints” outside of a formal context; i.e., the constraints that impose limits and

boundaries on set of actions and outcomes. In contrast, there is another type of constraint; this type of

constraint increases flexibility and reduces direct control. These are called enabling constraints. They

are the constraints that enable coherent action to emerge based on combinations of multiple variables,

without having to pre-determine exactly what will come out as the result. Enabling constraints are the


type of constraints people are typically invoking when they discuss concepts such as self-organization and

emergence.

Each of these types of constraints has benefits and limitations. Governing constraints provide a

benefit of limiting the scope of options and therefore reduce variability to accelerate the pace in creating a

result; however, they have the limitation of being inherently rigid and lack adaptability in responding to

novel scenarios. Enabling constraints provide a benefit of opening a system up to produce novel

responses to novel scenarios; however, they have a limitation in operational effectiveness since they can

produce many novel responses that have no perceived valued relative to a result that is sought.

Enabling constraints can be combined with governing constraints to address the context for which

novel responses are matched to an applicable scenario for outcomes. An example of this is provided

through the implementation approach of the Conceptual Framework presented by Czuchry (2019);

strengths, in this context, are a form of enabling constraint. Czuchry uses the Gallop StrengthsFinder to

identify talents that individual returning veterans have (Rath, 2009), and uses those talents as the initial

enabling constraint set. Note that this is an important contrast to how some individuals interpret their

StrengthsFinder results, since some people treat their individual strengths as governing constraints to

bound capabilities rather than as enabling constraints to expedite their ability to adapt to new learning

opportunities. The contrast in strengths approaches becomes positively expanded as Czuchry maps a

learner’s real-world experience into a set of core competencies, through the learner’s strengths profile, to

create enabling constraints with a specific context for creating perceived value in new business

opportunities.

Within that conceptual framework (Czuchry, 2019), formal knowledge is combined with wisdom

gained from experience. A storytelling approach is suggested (see Czuchry, Czuchry and Williams, 2011)

to synthesize the formal knowledge with experience. Generally, the storytelling approach will draw out

relevant behavioral examples, as a starting point in a win-win perspective. By extending that approach

into a dynamic context, where adaptive responses by the learner are required, the corresponding

competencies map into the Change Dynamics – Capabilities circle in the Venn Diagram of Figure 1.

Beyond the Capabilities they represent, Strengths and the behavioral examples through storytelling,

also create a form of potential performance data. That data can be incorporated into the corresponding

context of the learning objectives, and the opportunity gap can be closed through the directed learnings.

In business organizations, the Strengths Finders tool can be used, in combination with storytelling, to

explicitly depict potential performance data. This is referred to as performance data-in-context. In golf, an

analogous tool for performance data-in-context is TrackMan. This observation, across both adult learning

and the sport of professional golf, shows how performance data-in-context is leveraged in the conceptual

framework for Adaptive Leadership, through the Change Dynamics – Data circle in the Venn Diagram of

Figure 1.

Leaders in golf, particularly as a player who is a leader-of-one, leverage technology for data and

feedback; this has become increasingly important for creating measurable performance differences and

improvements in the modern game of golf. As a specific example of applying data-in-context, the

TrackMan tool can accurately measure and display an entire suite of data individualized for each golfer.

Four exemplary data points appear in the context of the golf swing: attack angle, face angle, club path,

and exact yardages. Together, these data point numbers provide feedback, and as the data is stabilized

those numbers become valuable in another way; the data points become leading indicators for producing

predictable shot distances to match target yardages, and to predict the relative finish point of the golf ball

after a shot, as the golfer plots their strategy around the golf course. This example depicts how data-in-


context can enhance the connection between strategy and execution, because the data processing serves

not merely as an optimization of an isolated set of actions, such as the swing path or ball spin on their

own; the data process serves as an optimization of the executable strategy performed as a professional

golfer navigates their path for scoring on a particular golf course.

Figure 1: Adaptive Leadership addresses Change

Dynamics in Opportunities, Capabilities, and Data

Applying data-in-context to Adaptive Leadership (as per the Change Dynamics - Data circle in

Figure1), means a leader is attentive to measuring the right things not merely measuring just anything.

The Adaptive Leader leverages an appropriate level of patterns identified in the data, as refined through

prior experience, to avoid the curse of the micro-managers; getting too far into the details, and getting

bogged down in details rather than the outcomes, consumes managers with a micro-focus that limits

adaptive responsiveness. Adaptive Leaders shift their focus to center directly on the outcomes to be

attained, and learn to know which patterns of what details are important for navigating the dynamic

course to achieve those outcomes. Note that, as a corollary negative impact, micro-managers tend to be

drawn into optimizing the wrong things, particularly when they focus on the details of data. Harris and

Taylor (2019) state that metrics are not a strategy, “A company can easily lose sight of its strategy and

instead focus strictly on the metrics that are meant to represent it. ”Applying this to professional golf, this

means many professional golfers need to become an Adaptive Leader of one, not simply a manager of

one; however, it readily becomes apparent that many remain as managers who limit their own success,

even as they achieve intermittent wins and make professional progress through their careers.

Analogous data-centric results emerge in the agile movement that has gained significant traction in

technology-driven businesses (Beck et al., 2001; Kerievsky, 2016). Even given the modern successes of

agility practices in local contexts, the re-applied execution frameworks of agility at scale often become

trapped in management and micro-management on activities rather than outcomes (Shalloway, 2019).

Leaders need to know which details are important, rather than presuming that more details are somehow

better. The attention to appropriate details in context, highlights a distinction between leadership (which


addresses strategy, inspiration, outcomes), and management (which focusses on details, execution,

activities).

The importance of leadership, and focusing on outcomes, becomes amplified as the pace of change

accelerates because the connection between activities and outcomes gets disguised in complex adaptive

systems; today’s businesses have become hyper connected complex adaptive business systems, so this in

no longer simply a conceptual impact. This is where the Change Dynamics – Opportunities comes to the

forefront of Adaptive Leadership. The alignment captured in the Opportunity dynamics (see the

corresponding Opportunities circle in the Venn Diagram of Figure 1), is centered on outcomes and value,

rather than merely tasks and activities. This particular type of centering for alignment becomes important,

as the pace of change accelerates, because the activities that traditionally are the center of alignment may

need to change from the original forecast, as progress is made along the path and pace of pursuing an

outcome. In the dynamic context of today’s complex adaptive business systems, the traditional alignment

eventually creates conflict between the original activity commitments and identification of needed

adjustments to the path that emerge; Eric Ries (2011, 2017) refers to this as persevere or pivot dynamics.

Combining each of these sets of Change Dynamics, a bigger picture emerges. The bigger picture in

business today is business and technology together, not merely business and technology as separate

disciplines. Businesses today need to adapt to take advantage of technology. They also need to adapt

faster, in order to create better results and to capture business opportunities. They need to do all this in

order to effectively capture the value that matters, while it still matters. This bigger picture is tied

together through all three circles of the Adaptive Leadership conceptual framework (see Figure 1).

The bigger picture, including the adaptation dynamic toward a specific objective, is initially

captured in the Change Dynamics – Opportunities. Extending this into what needs to happen on the

ground in business operations, remember that knowing (cognitive potential) and doing (execution

fulfillment) are two different things. The knowing versus doing differentiation of the bigger picture also

connects to Change Dynamics – Data; the technology to capture data-in-context is leveraged both for

business execution as well as connection to the capabilities domain for determining the most productive

opportunities in capability development. This connects the data of execution knowledge, with the

capabilities domain of knowing and doing at a systems-level; i.e., the Change Dynamics – Capabilities

domain.

The combined bigger picture shows that leaders need to adapt to the pace of change in technology,

with a specific outcome context in mind; the outcome context serves as validation of how effective the

adaptation is for the business. It is timely to note that managers typically have a different perspective than

leaders. Leaders change themselves and the system to fulfill the objective; however, in the limit,

managers often change the objectives to make themselves look good in their current state. Since the

actual objective is to create effective results, and not merely to look good by doing independently of

outcome validation, Adaptive Leadership is needed for an organization to become an effectively adaptive

organization.

As an applied example of synthesizing the bigger picture and creating Adaptive Leadership, let’s

return to the sport of golf. For a professional golfer, the bigger picture extends beyond the club, ball, or

shoe technology, and it also extends beyond the data collected from a TrackMan or a Fitness tracker. The

bigger picture for the professional golfer is determining how to capture the opportunities created during

competition on the golf course. Interestingly, this ties into a golfer being an adaptive leader of one and

not simply a manager of one; leaders inspire someone to take extraordinary action to create extraordinary

results, and those results are measurable.


It is important to recognize that all three domains (Data, Opportunities, and Capabilities) are

required to provide the out comes in Adaptive Leadership; if only two domains are utilized, change

becomes churn and progress is ineffective. Data and Opportunities, without sufficient Capabilities, means

the results cannot be delivered quickly enough and the change just churns. Similarly, if Data and

Capabilities are addressed outside of actual Opportunities to frame the dynamics and responsiveness

required, churn results again. Pursuing Opportunities and Capabilities without Data, such as often occurs

if no validation steps are included in the process flow, can lead to a false assumption of success, or

potentially worse a lack of realization of effective progress that is being made (e.g., increased swing

speed consistency that produces increased predictably for golf shot distances); churn can result, yet again.

Taken together, the validation from Data, the Capabilities to execute, and the Opportunity to set the

context, the fluid dynamics for change in the context of specific objective outcomes is captured across the

framework for Adaptive Leadership.

APPLICATION EXAMPLES

Change Dynamics – Capabilities

Capturing Change Dynamics – Capabilities is based in aligning the ability to execute with the

particular outcome to be accomplished. This was exemplified in a hardware-software technology

initiative in a large global enterprise, as executed by the first generation of this paper’s authors; the

behaviors exhibited included leveraging positional influence.

One of our authors had the opportunity to leverage their positional influence when they were

challenged with a seemingly impossible engineering task. The task was to create an engineering solution

that could defend a missile defense system from attack by another missile; in other words, create an

ability to shoot an attacking missile with another missile as defense. One of the author’s colleagues, being

an avid marksman, said “Dr. Czuchry, that’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet”.

Dr. Czuchry thought about that frame of reference for a moment and prepared his response. He

placed his right hand on his hip, reaching for his imaginary pistol, and calmly said, “want to see the

fastest draw in East Tennessee?”, as he barely twitched his arm. After a short pause and no further

movement he asked, “want to see it again?” He then went on to explain that a marksman would not shoot

a bullet with a bullet in the same way as they would shoot a slow-moving clay target or a stationary range

target; instead, they’d line up to shoot the bullet directly, head-on, because otherwise they’re no way to

catch up to the first bullet from any angle, given how fast the first bullet would be moving.

After establishing this new frame of reference, Dr. Czuchry used his positional influence as the

leader of the laboratory to create the next result. He simply said, “OK now, I know each one of you

personally and professionally. Your team is a world-class group of engineer sand scientists. You know

what success looks like now, and you have the capability to achieve it. Go create a system that uses a

defensive missile to shoot an offensive missile, head-on.” History shows they were successful; millions

of lives were saved because of their success.

The coaching point from the authors, embedded in this example, is that even in team-centric

execution a captain must step in at times to enforce their positional influence; this is typically required to

drive effective convergence of execution. Otherwise, teams tend to drift off course over time. The guiding

expectation and intent of the captain is the feed-forward signal to focus the team’s Capabilities Change

Dynamics. Furthermore, in modern organizations it is important to note that positional influence may


come not only through the formal organizational position, e.g., from an HR perspective; positional

influence may also come through the network of relationships that the captain has established informally.

In the conceptual framework for Adaptive Leadership, the execution of positional influence is

applied via a systems-thinking approach to strengths, constraints, and adaptation (see Figure 2). This is

the manifestation of influence through a dynamic constraint-based system. Strengths-Based Capabilities

occur at the individual, team, team of teams, and system level. Strengths also can be creatively drawn

from areas beyond the current thinking limits, and applied in new ways, through a process called

exaptation (applying a function in a way it was not originally envisioned). System Limiting Constraints

appear as governing (limiting) constraints to serve two purposes: a. establishing system boundaries, and b.

establishing internal system limits. Constraints also appear as enabling (opening) constraints which

provide adaptive flexibility for potential unforeseen outcomes to emerge dynamically. The Synthesis &

Adaptation box, see Figure 2, is the active process of driving adaptive consistency or coherence across

both the Capabilities and the Constraints.

Change Dynamics – Opportunities Capturing Change Dynamics – Opportunities is based in creating alignment around explicit value

clarity. This was exemplified in a software technology initiative in a large global enterprise, as executed

by the second generation of this paper’s authors; the behaviors exhibited included leveraging experiential

influence. Explicit value clarity sets the stage for true alignment, in the pursuit of a business outcome. If

everyone on the team isn’t aligned behind clearly and explicitly defined value, they will often

unintentionally work at cross-purposes to each other, which eventually makes it impossible for them to

succeed.

Figure 2: Capabilities - Adaptive Synthesis of Relevant Capabilities

Experience shows us that business leaders talk a lot about the importance of getting employees

aligned behind the company vision and its strategic business goals. To do this, they may communicate the

goals to employees through corporate reports, company-wide emails, and town hall meetings, assuming

that’s enough to get everyone on board. However, somewhere along the way, the message inevitably gets

diluted, and as a result, the corresponding focus on the intended value of the outcomes, loses its clarity.

Some leaders equate pursuing Opportunities with defining and tracking Output, rather than explicitly

validating the pace and path of progress through incremental Outcomes; that’s an error.

One of our authors had the opportunity to leverage their experiential influence when they worked

with a healthcare analytics company that wanted to transform its auditing processes to generate more

value as part of a broader strategic effort to grow revenue. Prior to introducing the concept of alignment,

the auditors were tasked with “increasing leading indicators of revenue” as a way to generate more value


and growth. As auditors, their key leading indicator was identifying claims that were incorrectly

processed, because it translated into recoverable revenue, so that’s where they focused their efforts.

The problem was that it unintentionally biased them toward new clients. When new clients come in,

they bring three years of back data for auditors to review, which meant there was a lot of potential for

finding incorrectly processed claims; conversely, current clients only deliver a month of data, and over

time each client got better at correctly processing claims. This resulted in a measurement system that

rewarded auditors for focusing more time on new clients and lowered the perceived value of existing

clients, which was counterproductive to the goal of growing the business. It also caused the team to

repeatedly miss their business growth targets.

These kinds of misalignments happen when teams are left to translate strategic business goals

without clear guidelines or relevant measures to track progress. As part of an Adaptive Leadership

transformation, the author encouraged this company to implement progressive value measures by

extending objectives and key results (OKRs) as an operating model. The OKR operating model is well

aligned with an adaptive approach when leveraged as a structured process that leaders can use to set

measurable, outcomes-focused business goals, and actively monitor dynamic results across the

organization. The template for explicitly depicting the OKRs and the corresponding opportunity is

depicted in Figure 3.

The coaching points from the authors, for completing the template of Figure 3, are based in

observations that have consistently facilitated adoption of the dynamic operating model. Typically,

effective OKR creation and adoption involves two key adjustments in approach to traditional goal setting

and tracking: 1. proper differentiation between the Initiative name (what we’re working on) and the

benefit delivered through the Initiative (the impact stated as because we believe), and 2. Using Key

Results (as measured by) as incremental leading indicators of value, rather than simply binary tasks or

deliverables that are completed.

Once OKRs were adopted as an operating model for this organization, the teams were able to define

two separate outcomes-focused measures that would drive value for the auditing team. Within two

quarters the department was exceeding its growth targets and had more satisfied customers.

We're working on: [Initiative/Challenge/Opportunity]

Because we believe: [Objective (the impact)]

As measured by: [set of Key Results (the metrics)]

Figure 3: Opportunities - Adaptive Tracking of Opportunity Pursuit

Change Dynamics – Data Capturing Change Dynamics – Data is based in differentiating implicit patterns in data, along with

the applicable context where the patterns are relevant, in order to explicitly influence decision making and

decision executing. An important key point to realize is that it’s the patterns in the data, more than the

raw data itself, that are what create leverage. This becomes increasingly important given the proliferation

of data in so many areas; e.g., fitness trackers, smart watches, smart phones, smart homes, smart cars, and

the Internet of Things. The application of leveraging data patterns in professional sports is a timely area

for consideration, as exhibited by the third generation of this paper’s authors (see Figure 4).


Figure 4: Data - Adaptive Tracking of relevant Data-in-Context

One of our authors had the opportunity to leverage their data influence in the applicable context

when he adjusted his competitive strategy by identifying patterns in the data that revealed a risk to be

mitigated. It began by collecting data, including myriad parameters that could overwhelm even the most

accomplish golfer, and assembling the data into patterns that emerge through the relevant context. In this

case, it was the “wedge combines” feature of the TrackMan; a series of distance and accuracy challenges

with a specific set of clubs and specific target ranges as would appear during key scoring opportunities on

the golf course.

At first, the perception was no gaps existed in execution, and no particular yardage would be any

worse than any other. Utilizing TrackMan, the first sets of shots seemed to be consistent with that

perception; however, as the “combine” continued, a distinct pattern emerged. There was clearly a gap in

execution with the 100-yard shot; he would not have realized that gap existed without capturing the data

patterns, in the specific context of repeated execution with specific clubs and distances, as measured

through the “wedge combine” on TrackMan.

The immediate solution was a strategy adjustment; actively avoid 100-yard shots during

competition, to reduce the risk of lower performance with those specific shots. For the professional

golfer, this strategy adjustment is very doable because the 100-yard shot is typically some form of

“layup”; meaning a distance specifically selected, from a longer yardage starting point, as the weigh point

in a multi-shot approach to the green (e.g., on a par 5). A professional golfer could choose to layup at any

preferred distance (e.g., 80-90 yards or 110-120 yards), and avoid the risky 100-yard distance. The

immediate benefit of the competitive strategy adjustment was lower scores in competitive rounds.

The next phase was equally important along the path to becoming a championship performer; adjust

the practice regimen to improve the 100-yard shot, and once it had been sufficiently mastered over

time,re-introduce the shot into competition. The changes made during practice, in parallel with the

updated strategy during competition, enabled a new set of capabilities to emerge. As a result, not only did

the 100-yard shot become a favorite go-to distance, but also the data-in-context adjustments opened up

more shots and more competitive versatility and effectiveness across his entire wedge game. The story is

continuing, and the impacts are increasingly positive.

This dynamic strategy adjustment reflects the collection of data, identification of applicable data

patterns, making refinements and adaptations based on the use of the data-in-context, applying execution

in the competitive landscape, and leveraging the resulting outcomes to provide the validation feedback

loop. The adjustments also reflect a parallel path of practice to improve capabilities, leveraging data-in-

context from practice as well as competitive play, to improve the overall level of play over time.


SUMMARY AND MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS

Building your Adaptive Leadership capabilities and results for an organization ties into your HR

approach; i.e., with the people you hire and the behaviors you reward. Seek to attract, hire, develop,

reward, and retain talent that exhibits each of the three change dynamics of Adaptive Leadership: Change

Dynamics – Capabilities, Change Dynamics – Opportunities, and Change Dynamics – Data. While some

may view these characteristics as representative of specific generational profiles, the authors have

collaboratively depicted that the characteristics can be drawn into any generation, when therespective

value and impact of each characteristic is captured.

Capturing Change Dynamics – Capabilities is based in aligning the ability to execute with the

outcome to be accomplished. Creating the alignment enables extraordinary results to be accomplished by

effectively applying and adapting a foundation that already exists in the person or the system. Hitting a

missile with a missile on different trajectories is highly unlikely; hitting a missile with a missile when

they are racing directly toward each other head-on is much more likely to create a successful outcome.

Capturing Change Dynamics – Opportunities is based in creating alignment around explicit value

clarity. Be explicit in what you measure, and how you measure it. Establish outcome-based

measurements, and track progress to demonstrate and validate incremental improvements over time, or to

identify where objectives are misaligned. Once you have measures of success, communicate those results

across the company, and talk about how they connect to the value creation process, and prove that it is

working. These kinds of messages reinforce alignment behavior, and celebrate the people and the

objectives that are delivering the best results.

Capturing Change Dynamics – Data is based in providing feedback and applying data-in-context, to

enhance the connection between strategy and execution and results. Identify and leverage an appropriate

level of patterns in the data to avoid the curse of the micro-managers, who get too far into the details and

get bogged down in details rather than the outcomes. Adaptive Leaders focus on outcomes and learn to

know the patterns of what details are important. As corollary impacts by managers, they tend to be drawn

into optimizing the wrong things, particularly when they focus on the details of data; leaders focus on

addressing data patterns at an effective level of encapsulation. Often, the assistance of an experienced set

of additional eyes, such as provided by a professional coach who has already produced the desired results

in a similar context, helps accelerate the process of learning how to recognize and apply the relevant

patterns in the data.

Captured together, and synthesized cohesively, the three Change Dynamics (Capabilities,

Opportunities, and Data) create the conditions for Adaptive Leadership to emerge. Adaptive Leadership

allows a leader and their organization to sense opportunities and threats, and respond to them with

sufficient nimbleness, so that the corresponding perceived value can be captured. Adaptive Leadership

allows the leader of today, and the leader of the future, to capture the value that matters while it still

matters.

Path Forward Future research paths include investigating the combined impact of leveraging combinations of the

three behavioral elements simultaneously, within the Adaptive Leadership conceptual framework: 1.

positional influence, 2. experiential influence, and 3. data influence in the applicable context. Along

those lines, in some current and future contexts, positional influence may be primarily exhibited through a


network effect rather than a hierarchical effect, as modern organizations adjust their organizational

structures to meet the demands of change dynamics in business and technology.

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