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Module 03Adaptive Leadership

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Module 03: Adaptive Leadership Presentation Script

Outline

We are now moving into a new section where you be learning about adaptive challenges. If

you had difficulty deciding what business structure might work for your business or where to

start with your revenue model and market segments, this module will give you some

practical tools and strategies for addressing these challenges creatively. Adaptive Leadership

is an essential skill in creating almost any kind of social change.

This module will discuss the importance of adaptive leadership for the success and

sustainability of a social enterprise. Adaptive leadership is a leadership strategy for

individuals and organizations to adapt to challenges that exist and to changing environments.

This critical skill will help to us identify adaptive and technical challenges as well as to

mobilize stakeholders to implement systematic and transformative changes when an

organization faces an adaptive challenge.

Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership framework that helps individuals and

organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments.

Topic 1: introduction

Adaptive leadership is all about change.

It’s about making progress in complex problems. Adaptive Leadership challenges us to

understand the current situation: why are things how they currently are? What are the

underlying causes that have given rise to prevailing mindsets, behaviors and

interrelationship between actors? Once we understand the interrelationships and values

that reinforce the current situation, we may want to explore how we can engage and

mobilize the different actors to review current paradigms in order to move forward to the

new or desired state.

So, in essence, adaptive leadership is about mobilizing stakeholders to do the necessary

work to experiment, learn, and modify behavior.

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An example: Astronomers

Adaptive Leadership is a relatively new concept and can be difficult to grasp. The following

example will help us to gain a deeper understand of exactly what it is:

Assume there were no astronomers among us and we all went out and saw the sky at night.

It is not a cloudy night and we are able to see the dark sky. What do we see? At best, stars,

the moon, and small lights moving around, which may be airplanes. Perhaps we may even

think we see some constellations and, depending on where we are standing, we might be

able to distinguish the North Star.

Now, imagine we repeat the exercise and we all went out to observe the sky at night again.

But, this time, we have an astronomer in the group. Once again, it’s not cloudy. It’s a

beautiful dark night. What would we see? Probably stars, the moon, and the same lights we

saw before. The astronomer is able to identify where planets are located. The astronomer

helps us identify constellations and tells us their names more about them. Suddenly, what

was just dark sky, stars and the moon, has some structure and coherence. We “see” a

different sky because the astronomer has the knowledge to enable us to “see” differently.

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Example: Proust’s powerful quote

This example has taught us the meaning of Proust’s powerful quote: that in having new eyes

we discover new territories. In our example, these new “eyes” is they way in which the

astronomer has helped us understand and respond to the night sky.

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Topic 2: Leadership and Authority

Adaptive Leadership provides key distinctions to the vast literature on leadership.

In the next slides we will introduce you to the concept of leadership as a dynamic concept,

as opposed to a position of power within an organization. The active nature of adaptive

leadership is critical to help us tailor solutions and actions to the different challenges

organizations might face.

The first distinction is that leadership is not the same as authority. Most leadership

approaches equate authority positions to leadership. Hence, we say “the leadership of the

company” or the “leader of the organization” when referring to the management or the

director of a company or organizational unit.

Leadership is not a position, but rather an activity. As such, it can be undertaken by

any member of your organization. We can all exercise leadership; regardless of where the

position we have in the organization.

Authority and Its Components

In “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership,” our suggested additional reading material, Heifetz

and Linsky explain that understanding authority is as important to exercising leadership as

understanding gravity is to designing airplanes.

Clearly, we could not design airplanes if we do not understand gravity. The same applies to

leadership: In order to exercise leadership, we need to know what authority is and what it

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entails. Let’s explore the three distinctions within authority: the social function of authority,

formal authority, and informal authority.

The social function of authority refers to what groups expect from authority figures. For

example, it is what we anticipate from the director of our organization: direction, protection,

norms.

Formal authority is the authority derived from the position we hold, from the chair we sit in.

If we hold the position of general manager, we are imbued with the authority associated to

that position, which is different; let’s say from the formal authority we’d have if we were to

sit in the chair of the director of public works or the chair of the chief of accounting.

To a large extent, formal authority derives from who we are in the organization, what role

we have in the organization’s hierarchy. Formal authority in our organization can be

exemplified by the authority the organization’s director has to make decisions on where to

implement projects.

Informal authority is granted to us by others, based on the perception they have of our

competence, legitimacy, and integrity. As such, informal authority is very context-specific

and dynamic. It varies over time, depending on what we do (and how people – stakeholders

perceive this authority) rather than on which particular chair we sit in. In other words, we

have to earn informal authority; it does not come with a particular position.

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Classifying problems

The second distinction adaptive leadership offers is a lens through which we can classify

problematic situations. In Adaptive Leadership, we have two main categories to help us

identify problems:

Technical problems are problems that can be well defined, there is experience on how to

solve them such as protocols, procedures and methods, and the group with the problem can

typically rely on an “authority figure” say, a technical expert, a manager, a mayor, etc., to

solve the problem using preexisting knowledge.

Adaptive challenges. These are complex problems, that in many cases cannot easily be

defined, and where the group facing the problem has no experience addressing the problem

and so must learn to do things differently. In situations where a group faces an adaptive

challenge, it’s the group with the problem that has to do the work to solve it. Generally,

adaptive challenges cannot be “solved” in the short run and so the objective is to constantly

be in “progress.”

Classifying problems

When facing times of uncertainty, organizations have to usually tackle a mixture of technical

problems and adaptive challenges. As we can see in the diagram, problems are not solely

technical or adaptive, but a combination of both. So the first challenge is to tease out the

technical components from the adaptive issues, and determine how to best address each

one.

We will come back to these concepts and analyze each of these distinctions at greater depth

in the coming slides.

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In Video Quiz 1: Leadership and Authority

Before moving into the next topic, let’s pause to check your understanding of the four key

terms we have discussed in Topic 2: formal authority, informal authority, adaptive

challenges, and technical problems.

Read the four concepts on the left and match each one of them with the definition on the

right that best describes them.

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Topic 3: Why focus on Adaptive Leadership?

Let’s turn now to see the importance of adaptive leadership. Why should you care about

adaptive leadership in your organizations?

Leadership is much demanded and we all have our own view of what it is and what it is not.

When discussing leadership, we all bring our own definitions of leadership to the table.

The literature on leadership is extensive. A simple search on Amazon.com, the largest

internet bookstore in the world, identifies over 113,000 results on the topic! Although it is

not easy to distill all this information in a one-week course, we will focus on a practical

framework that can enable action in your organization. Certainly, MacGregor Burns’

observation stated in this slide is as true today, as it was over three decades ago.

Adaptive Leadership in Your Organization

So, again why focus on adaptive leadership? And why is adaptive leadership important for

your organization?

First, because of the distinctions already highlighted. These distinctions make Adaptive

Leadership provide the “lens” to look at our reality differently in order to understand and

tackle existing and new issues differently.

Second, Adaptive Leadership is a product of teaching. The Adaptive Leadership framework is

a distillation from many years of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky teaching and learning from

hundreds of public servants and managers from all over the world at the Kennedy School of

Government at Harvard University. It is therefore practical and (unlike many other

approaches) it provides a strategy to exercise leadership.

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Finally, adaptive leadership is inclusive and helps us all realize our potential. Overall,

Adaptive Leadership help us understand why leadership is an activity, moving away from the

idea of “heroic leadership.” Heroic leadership emphasizes that only some people with

specific traits or characteristics can exercise leadership effectively and that the rest of us

were “born” to be followers. This is a very disempowering approach because it leaves

organizations and societies “waiting” for these individuals to show up and lead us to better

places. But what happens if these people don’t materialize, do we just wait for them to

appear? In the intricate world we live in today, to think that only certain individuals have

the answers and already know the way forward for complex systemic problems, is

somewhat preposterous.

Remember that

So, do remember that Authority and Leadership are not the same!

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Authority

Every organization faces two competing demands: it must execute its current activities and

adapt those same activities to face future opportunities and challenges. These two tasks of

managing for efficiency or effectiveness and leading the organization through change

correspond to the two functions of Authority and Leadership. By separating the functions of

leadership and authority, you can more easily build integrated competencies across an

organization, which is critical to create new and sustained value.

It is important to keep in mind that there is a big difference between an authority figure and

a leader. Many people in positions of authority don't exercise leadership. Many people

exercise leadership without much authority, sometimes without any formal authority. But if

you want to exercise leadership, having authority can be both a resource and a constraint.

Let’s explain this in detail.

In Adaptive Leadership, individuals that look for a service, grant authority to the service

provider. It can therefore be withdrawn if the service is not provided. Consider our case,

this eLearning course. How are you authorizing us? What enables us to interact with you?

It is through your attention that you are granting us the authority to provide information.

There is an expectation that we will provide a service (content, activities, teaching, etc.) to

you in exchange for that authority. The minute we lose your attention, you are un-

authorizing us to provide the service we agreed upon.

Social functions of authority

Societies require authority structures.

We would have not gotten where we have if we did not have authority structures that

enable groups to thrive by providing the social functions of authority. People with formal

authority are expected to provide groups the social function outlined.

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Namely, people expect their authority figures to provide direction and a sense of purpose;

protect them from external threats and establish order: who does what? how are conflicts

resolved in order to garner cohesion and what are the prevailing norms? Notice how all

these are key for groups to work effectively. Remember the Rudy Giuliani story in the Tedex

video.

Let’s think of how the “formal authority” figure (the head of household) embodies the social

functions of authority in you family. If you are the head of household, how well do you

perform these roles? Would I get the same appreciation you have if I asked your family

members, especially children or younger siblings?

Authority

The expectation that authority figures will provide the social function of authority derives

from their position.

It is what we expect from the people we report to and it’s what the people that report to us,

in turn, expect from us. If we do not perform the social function of authority, the group

seeks somebody else with in the group to do so, irrespective of their formal authority. It will

therefore be somebody with a lot of informal authority, somebody the group trusts and

somebody who they perceive as competent. Have you ever had this happen in a team or

unit you worked in?

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Formal Authority

Formal authority is time bound and finite, it is limited.

It lasts as long as you hold the position. It begins when you are appointed and sit in the

pertinent chair and it ends when you leave the position, either voluntarily or you are fired.

As formal authority resides in the “chair”, you are privy to it only when you sit in the chair.

Therefore, it comes with the powers of the office and there are explicit expectations from

formal authority figures.

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Informal Authority

Informal authority, on the other hand, is dynamic.

It is a function of how people perceive you along the vectors of competence, legitimacy and

integrity. So, it changes in time and is constantly being gauged by how people perceive the

interventions you are carrying out. You have to earn your informal authority. It’s in constant

flux and people can grant you informal authority as easily as they can take it away from you.

Clearly the more informal authority you have the more attention you will be able to

command and the easier it will be for you to mobilize the group.

Alternatively, if you have very little or no informal authority, it will be very difficult to get

people’s attention and also for them consider your interventions and be mobilized by them.

Informal authority comes with the power to influence attitude or behavior beyond

compliance. It seeks and rests on commitment.

In-Video Quiz 2: Informal Authority

Based on what we have learned on informal authority, choose from the list the terms that

best describe it. Let’s see if the concept of informal authority is more clear now.

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Technical Problems

Now, let’s get back to the technical problems.

Assume we were doing an exercise in a workshop and one of you fell and hurt an arm. The

participant who falls cannot move her arm and says it really hurts. It seems she broke her

arm. What would we do? (You are probably thinking: call your national emergency number

or take her to the emergency room.)

Why not take her to see the manager? After all, she’s the one in charge. Or to see one of you

(who is not a doctor or nurse) because you are so caring and kind? Or, why not to the

accounting department? They fix things there! For all their intentions and competencies, all

these people do not have the expertise to address this specific problem.

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Technical Problems

Okay, so we go to the emergency room, we wait, they check if she has insurance, and we

continue waiting. Finally, they confirm it’s a broken arm and recommend taking the

participant to what section of the hospital? Probably to orthopedics, right? Once the

patient reaches the orthopedics floor, what will happen? She will most likely get an x-ray,

the broken bone will be confirmed, and a cast put on her arm.

How many broken arms do you think the doctor has seen before? Couple of hundred? And

how many x-rays? And how many times has she/he put casts on people? Again, depending

on his or her experience, many, many times before.

The cast is placed and the patient is told not to get the cast wet, to take some Tylenol to

reduce the initial pain, and to come back in 45 days.

Who has done all the work? The doctor. The patient just took care of her arm and followed

the doctor’s instructions.

This is a technical problem.

Technical Problems

Let’s use the previous example to explain the characteristics of a technical problem. The

problem—the broken arm—can easily be identified, we know where and who to go to, and

the person who sees us has previous experience addressing this problem. There are well-

established medical protocols to deal with the problem.

The authority figure (in this case the doctor) has the solution and fixes the problem (with

some collaboration from the patient).

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Adaptive Challenges

Now, let us think of a different situation but this time at a barbeque.

This outdoor party takes place in a beautiful sunny day, where all the guests are enjoying

great food and having a great time.

You notice a man, a big hefty middle aged man of, let’s say, 300 pounds. The man is smoking

and drinking one can of beer after another. He does not stop eating and seems to be having

a great time. Suddenly, he turns red, huffs and puffs, and drops to the ground as he holds on

to this chest in pain. It seems he has fainted!

What would you do?

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Adaptive Challenges

You are probably thinking: see if there are any doctors at the barbecue, call the emergency

number, take him to the emergency room of a hospital.

Why not call the man in charge of the barbecue? He was such an expert at cooking meat.

Okay, why not ask help from the waiters distributing the drinks? They seem very helpful!

Again, despite their good intentions, they do not have the expertise.

Okay, so there is no doctor at the barbecue, you call the emergency number and an

ambulance is sent to take the man to the hospital emergency room. This time you don’t wait

as much and they send the patient to . . . orthopedics. Why not? That’s what they did last

time!

After insisting for a few minutes, he is taken to the cardiology section to undergo a surgery:

an open-heart surgery, very complex and long. Fortunately, there are no complications and

successfully comes out of the intensive care unit and is taken to a hospital room to recover

for a few days.

As soon as he is conscious, his family visits him. To the patient’s surprise, the doctor he has

been seen for many years also comes to visit.

Imagine the conversation doctor and patient have in the hospital’s room.

Adaptive Challenges

What do you think the doctor will tell the patient? Would “I told you so!” be helpful? He

might be thinking it, but saying it would most probably not be helpful. It may hurt the

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patient, put him on a defensive position and alienate him. How can de doctor get the

patients attention, create a holding environment and then mobilize the patient to act

differently?

What about: “You were very lucky this time. You were brought in just in time and were

operated on by an expert. You cannot imagine how worried your wife was and we had to

call your children from countries they live in and are flying here as we speak.”

How about that for getting the patient’s attention, showing empathy and to get him to take

action?

We know what he has to do: (1) Eat less, go on a diet; (2) stop smoking; (3) exercise; and (4)

stop or reduce his drinking. Anything else?

How easy is that? How many times have we been told some of the same things and have not

come through? How many times, for example, was “exercising more” your New Year’s

resolution, and come February without not having taken action?

Adaptive Challenges

The patient has to change his mindset, review his values and what is important for him,

modify his behavior, and learn how to live a more healthy life if he wants to live longer and

not have open heart surgery that will again cause distress to his loved ones. Here, he has to

view his problem as an adaptive challenge, one that needs to be tackle differently, to take

action.

A key aspect of an adaptive challenge is that the people with the problem have to do the

work to overcome the challenge. Authority figures (such as the doctor) can support, suggest

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and, perhaps guide, but the actual work has to be done by the people with the problem. So,

having the capacity to give the work back is key in adaptive situations.

Notice that this second story actually has a technical problem (the open heart surgery)

performed by a specialist (authority figure) who has performed many such operations

before and for the most part follows established protocols. That in no way diminishes the

complexity or difficulty of the operation, but the doctor solves the first part of the problem.

He does the work. Who has to do the work to solve the second part of the problem - The

adaptive challenge piece?

In-Video Quiz 3: Adaptive Leadership

Let’s see if you have a good grasp of what Adaptive Leadership is. Which of the following

statements does best with a formal authority figure?

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Technical versus Adaptive Challenges

In the Adaptive Leadership framework, the challenge for authority figures is to make

interventions to mobilize the group to assume the problem as theirs and make them part of

the solution. That is what exercising adaptive leadership is all about.

This chart distinguishes some key aspects between technical problems and adaptive

challenges.

Notice that technical problems can be solved quickly, even by edict. Adaptive challenges, on

the other hand, require experimentation and learning and so take longer.

Today’s technical problems may have been yesterday’s adaptive challenges.

Technical versus Adaptive Challenges

Let’s use the previous story about the man with a heart attack as an analogy of what our

organizations or societies face.

How many times do we face adaptive challenges and yet treat them as a technical problem?

Either we don’t want to do the work to overcome a challenge or we yearn for a formal

authority figure (a “leader”) to do the work for us. In other words, what we are trying to do

is apply technical solutions (casts) to heart attacks, and that makes no sense at all.

Adaptive challenges call for progress towards solving them, they are not about quick fixes.

Notice the implications. We would all like to have somebody else “fix it” for us—whatever

“it” is—and we look to authority figures to do this. So, what expectations must authority

figures meet? And how easy or difficult is it for them to be convinced that, yes, they can fix

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it and to attempt to (either in good or bad faith) satisfy the social system’s stress (at least for

the short run)?

As pointed out by Linsky in the Tedex video, for the most part, technical problems reside in

the head, while adaptive challenges reside in the gut. Also, confronting technical challenges

is also associated with loss; we have to let go of something as we learn new ways and

change.

Adaptive Leadership is about action

Adaptive leadership is the activity of mobilizing stakeholders to take action and implement

adaptive work to challenges in an organization.

What do we mean by mobilization? The capacity to organize, focus one’s attention,

motivate, and keep on task. As mentioned before, a prerequisite is to garner people’s

attention.

Mobilization of groups, organizations, society is done through action. This actions imply a

series of activities and mobilization efforts. In other words, Adaptive Leadership is not a one-

time phenomenon, but rather a series of interventions.

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Adaptive Leadership Framework

When our organization faces an adaptive challenge, formal authority is not enough to

address it. In order to mobilize people and get their commitment, not just their compliance,

we need to garner (or earn) sufficient informal authority. As authority figures have to “give

the work back” to the people with the problem.

Formal authority figures do not always exercise leadership; however, informal authority

needs to always be earned in order to challenge people to do the hard work to make

progress in adaptive challenges. to challenge people to do the necessary work to make

process in the face of adaptive challenges?

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Authority as a resource

Although adaptive leadership is crucial to tackle adaptive problems, formal authority should

not be discarded as unnecessary.

Formal authority provides many advantages to exercising leadership.

First, formal authority figures already have people’s attention. People look to them for

solutions.

Second, formal authority figures determine who sits on the table to address a particular

issue and can orchestrate the conflict necessary for the various groups or factions to put

forward their point of view.

Third, formal authority figures determine the agenda and the decision making process.

Final Reflections

The first challenge a person without formal authority has to mobilize the other groups is to

gain their attention. Why should they pay attention? Once she/he gets their attention, the

capacity to make interventions is more difficult because people without formal authority do

no control the interaction process or the decision making process.

Groups look toward authority figures in moments of crisis. And the expectation is that

authority figures will provide them with answers and “resolve” their problems. So, what

happens when the problem being faced by the group is an adaptive challenge? In this case,

there is no pre-defined solution and it’s the people with the problems that have to do the

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work. So, the challenge for the authority figure is to establish a relationship with the group

(container) in which she/he can “give the work back” so that the people with the problem do

the work. If we think of the example of the man who suffered the heart attack, the

authority figure (the doctor) at best can empathize and motivate the person who had the

heart attack to do the adaptive work to change his situation: that is eat less, exercise, stop

smoking and live a more balanced life.

And remember to ask the following key questions when you face a problem:

• Has the organization seen this before?

• Is there a procedure for how to solve this?

• Who has the power to make the changes or do the work needed?

The answers to these questions will help you apply Adaptive Leadership concepts when

thinking of the possible solutions to your organization’s problem.

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