Adaptive Leadership Risky? Yes. Imperative? Yes!!
Dallas DeFee, PhD
The question for leaders is not, "Will we recover from the recession?" The question is, "Will recession recovery under my leadership create a stronger, better performing organization?" These extraordinary times require workers and leaders alike to challenge long-held beliefs about how things should be done. Habits and practices that have built success and economic dominance are being turned on their heads, threatening the incomes and security of us all. And leaders take the brunt of the common fear response these disruptions evoke. Adaptive Leadership, like Adaptive Planning, is defined by the idea that the same old business approaches and the existing toolkit are insufficient to solve the complex problems of today's economic environment. Adaptive Leaders understand the basic relationships between risk and adaptive change: the more radical the change, the more new learning is demanded and the more many people resist the change. As a result, there is an increased danger to the leaders themselves. Yet all leaders must become Adaptive Leaders. It’s not easy, but here are some action steps: •
understanding that the leader's job is not problem-solving, but problem-defining, and by extension, being a developer of problem solvers,
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merging the organizational silos of financial planning and operations management,
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increasing the organization’s capacity and skill for collaborative work, and
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leveraging today’s information technology (which is, paradoxically, both powerful and cheap).
Consider decisions made by three great leaders in history:
(1) John Kennedy’s national commitment to going to the moon “before the end of the decade.” (2) Norman Schwarzkopf’s decision to do an “end-run” around the Iraqi defenses in Kuwait during operation Desert Storm. (3) Bill Gate’s decision to “bet the company” by abandoning DOS in favor of Windows. None of these historic events was a solution to a problem. Just the opposite. Each decision created literally hundreds of new and immensely challenging problems. Problems that, in turn, inspired and created other leaders who in their turn added to a cascade of solutions that won a cold war, created a
one-sided victory in a dangerous hot war, and made a company the winner in an technology war. (http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html , www.emergingleader.com/schwarzkopf.shtml ,
blog.tomevslin.com/2006/05/when_and_when_n.html )