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Legislative Leadership

Minnesota 2013

Ronald HeifetzHarvard Kennedy School

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Distinguish

Technical and Adaptive Work

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Persistent conflicts are symptomatic of a bundled set of issues that are in part technical problems and in part adaptive challenges.

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The Classic Error

Diagnosing and treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems

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Essential Questions of Adaptive Work

1. What cultural DNA do we keep?

2. What cultural DNA do we discard?

3. What innovative DNA will enable us to thrive in the new and challenging environment?

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Properties of Adaptive Work

1. Adaptive work demands responses outside the current repertoire.

2. To thrive in changing conditions, adaptive organizations must be responsive to the environment.

3. Successful adaptations are conservative as well as progressive.

4. The people with the problem are the problem, and they are the solution. Solutions often lie within the society.

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Properties of Adaptive Work

5. Success requires local adaptations to local environments

6. Solutions involve direct and indirect loss as people re-fashion loyalties and develop new competencies

7. Adaptive work takes more time than technical work

8. Innovation toward adaptive change is experimental

9. Adaptive work generates disequilibrium and avoidance

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Social and Political Tension

Social and political tension and disequilibrium are part of social learning and adaptive change

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PRODUCTIVE RANGE OF DISTRESS

DIS

EQ

UIL

IBR

IUM

TIME

LIMIT OF TOLERANCE

THRESHOLD OF LEARNING

ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE

WORK AVOIDANCE

TECHNICAL PROBLEM

Technical and Adaptive Work

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Avoiding Adaptive Work

Societies and Organizations Tend to Avoid Adaptive Work

Why?

• To restore equilibrium and avoid losses

How?

• By diverting responsibility or attention

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Displacing Responsibility

1. Externalize the enemy2. Attack authority3. Divide the top team4. Kill the messenger5. Scapegoat

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Diverting Attention

1. Fake Remediesa. Define the problem to fit your competence

b. Misuse structural adjustments

c. Misuse consultants, committees, task forces

2. Denial

3. Unproductive Conflict

a. Gladiator fights with spectators

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Discussion Question

How can you reduce rather than amplify the constituency pressures that will constrain your ability to collaborate?

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The Politics of Leadership

ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE

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Discussion Question

In meeting adaptive challenges, social contracts of trust between authorities and citizens need to be “renegotiated.”

How can you help each other challenge and disappoint your constituencies at a rate they can tolerate?

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Properties of Authority

• A service contract • Formal or informal• Power entrusted for service

• Key components of the contract• Power• Trust• Service

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Services of Authority

• Direction

• Protection

• Order• Orientation to roles• Control of conflict• Norm Maintenance

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Trust

• Predictability

• Values

• Competence

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The Paradox of Trust

People will trust you when you fulfill their expectations for service

So what happens when you:

• Deliver information that conflicts with those expectations?

• Tell people what they may need to hear, but not what they want and expect to hear?

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A Strategy of Leadership:Mobilizing Adaptive Work

1. Get on the Balcony

2. Think Politically

3. Regulate Disequilibrium

4. Distribute Leadership and Responsibility

5. Infuse the Work with Meaning

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Get on the Balcony

• Unbundle Technical from Adaptive challenges

• Distinguish ripe from unripe issues

• Frame the key challenges

• Keep the key issues at the center of attention

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Think Politically

• Find allies

• Keep the opposition close

• Own your piece of the problem

• Acknowledge losses

• Model the changed behavior

• Accept casualties

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Regulate Disequilibrium

• Strengthen the holding environment for cross-boundary work

• Depersonalize the conflicts: distinguish role from self

• Maintain a productive level of disequilibrium

• Pace the work

• Take the heat and hold steady

• Maintain a collective sense of purpose

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Distribute Leadership and Responsibility

• Place the adaptive work where it must be done

• Encourage widespread social and policy experimentation• Refashion loyalties to move from dependency to distributed

initiative and responsibility

• Cascade leadership responsibility to local levels

• Protect unauthorized voices of leadership

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Infuse the Work with Meaning

Develop a narrative that:• Manages expectations

• Helps people comprehend the developments in their lives

• Builds from and conserves the past

• Names the losses and sustains people through transitional pain

• Engages people in their adaptive work

• Calls forth people’s resourcefulness