Adaptive problems are tangled, complex, and involve multiple systems.

Developing adaptive leadership capacity

Niki VincentChief Executive OfficerLeaders Institute of SA

Leadership is an activity – the function of which is to mobilize people to address their adaptive challenges.

Heifetz and Linsky (2004)

Adaptive problems are tangled, complex, and involve multiple systems.

Solving them requires new learning, creativity, innovation and new patterns of behaviour – changes of hearts and

minds. Painful adjustments.

*http://www.integralhealthresources.com/integral-health-2/the-four-quadrants

Integral Quadrants

*http://www.integralhealthresources.com/integral-health-2/the-four-quadrants/

*Revista de la Construcción, Vol. 9 Nº 1 / agosto 2010 / páginas: 26 - 38

Integral Quadrants

We rarely want our leaders to confront us with difficult questions - to disturb our jobs or our lives. We want

them to fix the problems without causing us pain.

Heifetz and Linsky (2004)

Horizontal and vertical development

Horizontal development involves increasing knowledge, competence and skill by adding more information to what we already know and getting more skilled at

putting that to good use.

Vertical development involves transformations in the way we see the world and what we are actually able to be

aware of.

A person’s stage or level of development influences what they notice or are able to become aware of - and

therefore what they can describe, reflect on and change.

McCauley et al (2006)

People at different levels of development have different capacities to take the perspectives of others, to be self-directed, to generate and modify systems, to manage

conflicts, and to deal with paradox and ambiguity.

McCauley et al (2006)

How do we develop?

Development is essentially a matter of immature defences giving way to more mature ones in

response to persistent discrepancies between what is arising for us in our environment and our existing

ways of understanding the world.

How do we develop?

• Life experiences• Personality factors• Psychological factors• Timing

How do we develop?

Intervention programs that help shift consciousness need to:

• Be cognitively and emotionally engaging and challenging, • Involve interpersonal engagement and relationships• Personally salient for the participants• Have content that is structured at one to two stages higher

than the stage of participants to create dissonance

Developing Adaptive Capacity

This involves:

• Connecting to our purpose• Getting comfortable in the chaos• Living our lives as a leadership laboratory • Engaging above and below the neck – our hearts as well

as our minds• Resisting the leap to action – taking time to reflect

Developing Adaptive Capacity

• Discovering the joy of making hard choices• Surfacing the cultural norms and forces that limit us• Releasing dependence on authority• Staying connected to those who oppose us • Learning how to orchestrate conflict

Developing Adaptive Capacity

• Accepting and taking responsibility for casualties along the way

• Understanding ourselves as a system • Running experiments• Building the stomach for the journey • Inspiring people

This is not about leadership development in the traditional sense. Its about what makes us wiser, more adaptive

human beings

The adaptive problems we face in the world might represent powerful forces but this doesn’t let us off the hook. On the contrary, it makes it even more

pressing for us to be part of alternative forces that imagine a different future and take responsibility for

seeing it come to fruition.

Further reading

• ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’ by Ron Heifetz, Alex Grashow, & Marty Linsky (2009)

• ‘Seven Transformations of Leadership’ by David Rooke and Bill Torbert, Harvard Business Review (April 2005)

• ‘Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership’ by Bill Torbert and Associates (2004)

• ‘Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change’ by Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs (2009)

• ‘In Over Our Heads: The mental demands of modern life' By Robert Kegan (1994) 

• www.leadersinstitute.com.au

• Please see me for academic references