John Bull on Adaptive Leadership

If the pace of change within an organisation is slower than the pace of change in its environment – it will become irrelevant. Reading this paper will help you build your capacity to thrive in disruptive times.

Adaptive Leadership Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment.

John Bull

Executive Summary - The Idea in Brief

“If the pace of change within an organisation is slower than the pace of change in its environment – it will become irrelevant.”

In any time of significant disruptive change, some organisations adapt, some die or fade, and some new organisations emerge with a DNA better adapted to thrive in the current environment. It is surprising, and should be a warning to all of us, how quickly a dominant position can fade when the world changes. We are obviously all facing multiple drivers of disruptive change. Geopolitical forces, trade tariffs, technological advances like AI, climate change, and a sluggish economy. Some of these changes, like AI, are emotive. Creating conflict and making it even harder to align on a solution people buy into. Leading adaptation is not easy. The skills required are very different to those that serve us well in more stable times, and there are several traps that can inhibit us. Fortunately, there are some standout organisations and leaders who can teach us a lot about how to not only survive but thrive in an environment of constant change.

We define adaptive leadership as the mindset, skills and practices that enable organisations to respond effectively to changes in their external environment.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

The below table summarizes the 4 core skills adaptive leaders excel at, along with the traps that can inhibit our response.

Skill

Trap

Spot the need for change

Operating from outdated assumptions

Master our response

Being hijacked by emotions

Empower to solve

Overly directive leadership

Mobilise co-ordinated action

Underinvestment in buy-in & alignment

Building their organisation’s ability to deal with disruptive change has become the number one challenge our clients are looking for help with. They see how rapidly the world is changing, and they’re worried their organisation will struggle to adapt fast enough. Our aim with this paper is to help you become a better adaptive leader and build this capacity in the leaders around you. By bringing these skills and traps to life, we will help you to assess your current effectiveness, identify the skills you need to work on, and equip you with some practical tips that will help you to become more effective right away.

Before we go further, we just wanted to mention that if you’d rather listen, watch, or talk about Adaptive Leadership, we have…

…other ways to engage

Podcasts : You can find a mini-series of interviews with John Bull about Adaptive Leadership on. the podcasts page of our website Videos : You can watch John being interviewed by Hugh Reynolds on our Youtube channel. Learning Events : Our series of online interactive workshops regularly cover themes in and around Adaptive Leadership.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Adaptive vs. Authoritative Leadership

To understand how adaptive leadership is different from authoritative leadership, let’s compare the approaches of two competing Arctic explorers. Amundsen and Scott. Scott was a bold, decisive leader who trusted his experience. He chose to use a combination of horses and motorised sleds in his trip to the pole but tested neither to see if they would work in the conditions they would face. As it turned out, the horses’ legs sank into the deep snow. The motorised sleds failed in the cold conditions within days. Amundsen recognised there was a lot he didn’t know about the environment and visited the Inuit people to study how they thrived in the arctic. He learned from them how well adapted dogs were to the environment. He also tested everything. How much energy did raw fish provide? How many calories would each of his team expend in a day given the temperature and workload? Whilst Scott cursed his bad luck, Amundsen planned for it. Taking 5 times the amount of food he had calculated they’d need, to allow for contingencies he couldn’t anticipate. Placing multiple markers either side of their food depots to make them easier to find. Harvard Professor Ron Heifetz used the phrase Adaptive Leadership in 2009 to describe the mindset and skills required to lead adaptation in a fast changing and uncertain environment.

At the time he was researching why some organisations did better than others in response to the financial crisis. When operating in a stable environment, as leaders we often assume the role of experts, and are focused on directing effective execution of a known strategy. This is what we mean by authoritative leadership. Responding to adaptive challenges requires a very different mindset and set of skills. Whilst exercising control can serve us in stable environments, it can seriously inhibit adaptation.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

“While Scott cursed his bad luck, Amundsen planned for it.”

Adaptive leadership requires us to take regular timeouts to analyse our environment and the effectiveness of our response to it. When we spot a need to change or a problem we don’t know how to solve, we need to be humble enough to recognise we don’t have the answers. Empowering others to help us solve it and encouraging a culture of experimentation to figure out what works. Once we do figure out what will work, we often face the challenge of getting people to let go of ways of working they are loyal to. What follows is a closer examination of each of core skillsets of adaptive leaderships, along with the traps we need to watch out for.

Picture Credit : The Public Domain Review, Amundsen’s South Pole Expedition

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 1: Spotting the need to change

But they were so focused on protecting their position in this market, they failed to spot how phones were becoming the next computer platform. They failed to update their assumptions about what a phone was and could become. This left a space in the market for Google to step in with their Android Operating Software for all phones except iPhones. We absolutely can update our assumptions by applying skilled analytical thinking. First surfacing the assumptions we are making and then evaluating if they are still useful. But doing so takes deliberate effort. In the rest of this section we will explain 3 tips to help improve your capacity to spot the need for change. “The issue is not that we make assumptions; we have to. The issue is we forget they are assumptions based on what is happening at a particular time.”

Trap: Operating from outdated assumptions

One of the marks of great sports people is their ability to ‘play what’s in front of them’. Staying present and situationally aware to make decisions based on what’s really happening, not what you hoped or expected would happen. When we’re open to what we don’t know, the human brain is very good at making sense of our environment. But once we’ve made sense of it, we tend to commit this mental ‘map of the world’ to autopilot as permanent facts. This ability to create mental maps of how our world works is incredibly useful in a stable environment, saving us a lot of energy by not having to reinvent our response each time we come across a similar situation. So the issue is not that we make assumptions, we have to. The issue is we forget they are assumptions based on what is happening at a particular time. Unfortunately, we are not nearly as good at revisiting these assumptions when circumstances change, meaning we are often slow to update our thinking. In the early 1970s, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, founders of Microsoft, spotted an opportunity to develop a universal operating software for all PCs. By the year 2000, they had 94% of the market.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

1. Schedule-in regular timeouts to ‘Stand on the Balcony’

Following on from the video, one of the traps that can prevent us spotting the need to adapt is tunnel vision. A state of mind where we become so narrowly focused on a single issue, detail, or outcome that we lose awareness of the bigger picture. Including alternative options, or important surrounding information. In the video above, about 50% of watchers are so focused on the task of counting passes between players, they miss the gorilla! To counter tunnel vision, Ron Heifetz recommends we take regular time outs to ‘Stand on the Balcony’. Zooming out to analyze our environment and the assumptions we are making about it. To bring his analogy to life, imagine hosting a party which you initially think is going brilliantly because you’re having a great time. Then you stand on the balcony and notice lots of people on the periphery who don’t know anyone. How often have you seen a sports team transform their approach after the opportunity of a ‘time out’ provided by the half time break? This enforced structure helps teams to take a

If you’ve not yet come across the test of our ability to keep track of passes of a basketball between the players in a complex environment, take 90 seconds to complete this famous science experiment by watching this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG 698U2Mvo

collective time on the balcony. Combining multiple different

perspectives. Similarly, this is one of the key habits that enables adaptive leaders and teams to continually update their thinking. Regularly pausing to seek out new data and critically evaluate their assumptions.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 1: Spotting the need to change

In contrast to Microsoft, Steve Jobs spent a lot of time scanning for new technologies that could disrupt their market. He spotted the potential for digital music early and asked Apple engineers to get ready to build a digital music player as soon as there was a chip powerful enough to carry a ‘1,000 songs in your pocket.’ The iPod was launched in 2001. In 2004 Sony launched a phone that could also play music, and Jobs immediately foresaw phones would replace the iPod. When Jony Ive showed him an early prototype of a touch screen tablet, he instructed his team to immediately pivot from the tablet project to working on shrinking it to produce a touch screen phone.

Adaptive leaders recognise it is easier to spot outdated assumptions in others than it is in ourselves. They encourage people to challenge themselves and their peers with data. The key skill here is open dialogue. Creating an environment where people share their thinking to surface the assumptions we are making and encouraging peers to challenge where appropriate. This is very different from typical team discussions, where we are trying to influence others to see things our way. Rather than being about who is right or wrong, the focus is on using the cognitive diversity of the team to develop a more accurate shared view of the environment. An example we often reference in MF is how Pixar have systemised the use of constructive dialogue through their ‘brains trust meetings’. Every 4-6 weeks that a team is working on a movie, they invite 15-20 peers not working on it into a room to critically assess what they’re doing.

2. Name elephants – encourage people to challenge the status quo

When organisations fail or stumble, there is usually an abundance of evidence in advance that they are in trouble. But hierarchy and a lack of psychological safety to challenge the status quo means the need for change often becomes a proverbial ‘elephant in the room’. An adaptive challenge which lots of people see, but don’t talk about. It’s hard to believe no Microsoft engineers foresaw the importance of phones as a computer platform. The question is what stopped them being listened to?

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

3. Recognize when ‘just work harder’ is not the answer

In all these 4 cases, the default response is often ‘we just need to work harder’ or ‘we need more commitment’. As we’ll explore in the next section, whilst hard work might be a necessary short-term solution to help us buy time for the deeper adaptive work, it is seldomly the right answer in the long-term.

Finally, in addition to taking regular time outs on the balcony and encouraging people to challenge the status quo, there are several indicators we can use to alert us to the likelihood that we’re facing an adaptive challenge. These include: 1. A persistent gap between desired and current level of performance, or repeated cycles of failure 2. A once trusted strategy no longer works, or we need to work progressively harder to achieve the same results. There is nothing more frustrating than watching your favourite sports team continue to persist with a tactic which is clearly not working!

3. Trusted authorities/experts are unable to solve the problem

4. A growing sense of frustration and negativity in the team.*

* It’s worth noting this final indicator is actually very useful, provided we recognize it for what it is: people are calling out for change .

‘Just work harder’ : is not the answer for this running rodent. (There’s an adaptive challenge presented by the AI generated wheel that cannot turn!)

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 2: Master our response

The special forces have a 3-step process for dealing with feelings of overwhelm: Breath. Observe. Make a call. Note the first step is to take a moment to compose yourself. Our emotional response as a leader sets the tone for the team. One way we can help others to respond effectively, is to be conscious of setting the ‘thermostat’ temperature to the right level of urgency to prompt productive action. Not too hot that people panic, but equally if people are complacent, we may need to up the heat.

Trap: Being hijacked by emotions

Develop double vision

As adaptive leaders we need to practice a kind of double vision. In addition to scanning our external environment, we need to develop our ability to monitor the effectiveness of our response to it. How are our preferences, values, assumptions, loyalties, strengths and comfort zones biasing our response? Similarly, how effective is our emotional response? We obviously want to avoid panic under pressure. But complacency about the need for change can also be very damaging.

Remain resourceful under pressure and setting the thermostat

Adaptive challenges come in two types. Emergency situations that require an immediate response, and situations where we have more time to adapt. Each of these has their own traps and requires a different approach. In crisis situations, our first priority as leaders is often to figure out how to buy time. When making decisions under time pressure we need to remain calm and

Picture Credit : NASA/Bill Ingalls, Portrait of Retired Flight Director and Manager Gene Kranz

In the film of the Apollo 13 rescue, we see Flight Director Gene Kranz constantly monitoring and changing the thermostat temperature in the team around him following the explosion on board the spacecraft. Initially raising it when the team think it must be an instrumentation issue.

resourceful. If we start to go into overwhelm or panic, our clarity of thought is affected.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Gene says: “They’re talking about spinning through debris, that doesn’t sound like instrumentation to me.” Then, when he notices people starting to panic:

They failed, and at the time he was angry, feeling the simulator team was making the scenarios unrealistically difficult. But during the real Apollo 11 descent, they experienced exactly that kind of momentary loss in comms, forcing Armstrong to take manual control. Because they had practiced the scenario, they remained calm. Kranz immediately thanked the Sim team. A useful variation on contingency planning is a technique called ‘pre- mortem’. You ask the team to ‘imagine we’ve failed and consider what the most likely cause is.’ This makes it safe for people to talk about niggling concerns they’ve not mentioned because they didn’t want to appear negative. Another is preparing for ‘Black Swan’ events. The definition of a black swan event is something that has a very low chance of happening but would be devastating if it did. While it’s not useful to prepare for every individual ‘Black Swan’ event, it is worth building in a buffer of resources in preparation for the likelihood that ‘something’ will go wrong. This is why Amundsen took 5 times the amount of food than the science suggested they would need. Preparing for ‘Black Swan’ events is why adaptive organisations tend to keep more cash reserves. Allowing them to navigate unanticipated issues with confidence.

“Settle down people. Wake up whoever you need and let’s work the problem.”

Be prepared: Contingency planning and ‘Black Swan’ events

One technique good adaptive organisations use to help people remain calm and respond effectively to sudden changes is contingency planning. Taking time in advance of a key performance opportunity to think of ‘what if’ scenarios, prioritising them by likelihood and impact, and figuring out an effective response in advance. In the lead up to the Apollo 11 launch, the flight control team ran many intense descent simulations, designed to throw all kinds of problems at the controllers. In his autobiography, flight controller Kranz describes one particular sim involving a communications blackout at a critical moment during descent.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 2: Master our response

Don’t be a boiled frog

You can’t ignore the need to add value for today, getting permission to be here tomorrow may well depend on it. But adaptive organisations do a better job of prioritising adding value for tomorrow.

When facing a crisis, once we’ve bought ourselves some time, it is critical we then follow up with a broader process of adaptation to prevent the crisis happening again. Failing to do so is comparable to a patient who fails to see that cardiac surgery is only a temporary solution if they don’t also make changes to their lifestyle. Constant firefighting is not a good indicator of an adaptive organization. It highlights that we’re not tackling the underlying issues. The metaphor of the boiled frog is based on the idea that whilst a frog will immediately jump out of hot water. If you first place it in cold water, and only gently heat it, it fails to notice the building heat and dies. Thankfully this is not true, which is good news for frogs, but the metaphor is still a useful one for us humans. With situations where we have more time to adapt, there is a very real danger that we squander the opportunity to do the adaptive work while we have the time to do so. It’s not that we haven’t spotted the need for change, it’s that we’re not treating it with sufficient urgency. We also avoid adaptive work because the return on investment feels less certain. Every leadership team we’ve worked with faces the challenge of balancing the need to add value today with adding value for tomorrow.

“…there is a danger that we squander the opportunity to do the adaptive work while we have the time to do so.”

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 3: Empower to solve

Initially only 15 cm in diameter, to enable faster progress whilst being wide enough to get comms, food, water and medical supplies to the miners if they reached them.

Trap: Overly directive leadership

The team he assembled included engineers from 5 countries, NASA

scientists, a 3D mapping software expert from Australia and a psychologist from his own company to help him create effective collaboration. Two of the most important contributors just walked up to the gate. The first was a Chilean Geologist who had been working on a gyroscope tool that could be attached to drills to improve directional accuracy. The team tested his equipment, and once Sougarret saw the improvement it made, he put him in charge of tracking accuracy on all drilling efforts. The second was a 24-year-old field engineer who recommend they try a cluster hammer his US employer had been developing to speed up the drilling. This innovation enabled them to cut 8 days off the time it took them to reach the miners. Assembling the best experts was only the first step. Sougarret continually told everyone ‘ no matter how expert you are, no one can solve this alone ’. He saw his primary role as creating a culture where everyone would engage in open discussion around ideas, rapidly test these ideas, share learning, and implement that learning.

Picture Credit : Hugo Infante/Government of Chile. The last of the trapped miners returns to the surface.

When André Sougarret was asked to lead the Chilean Mining Rescue in 2010, he immediately put word out for anyone with expertise that might be helpful to get in touch. Setting up a team to sort through and test these ideas. Despite his 22 years of experience, including previous mining rescues, he realised they were facing a challenge no- one had solved before. Not only did they have to drill through 700 metres of some of the hardest rock on the planet faster than had ever been done before. Because the maps of the mine were so inaccurate, they couldn’t be sure where the underground refuge was. To maximise their chance of locating the miners if they were still alive, they drilled 10 holes at once.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 3: Empower to solve

Adaptive leadership requires us to be learners, not just experts

It was well intentioned, but it led to further collapses in the mine. A risk which could have been avoided by inspecting the stability of the shafts. Before exploring options around what might work, we need to take a broader and deeper view of the cause-and-effect relationships at play. This is what is meant by systems thinking. A good example of this approach is how Toyota discovered that increasing inspections on the production line actually made quality worse, not better. This insight enabled them to revolutionize quality by removing inspectors and empowering any worker to stop the line by pulling a chord. Increasing individual ownership for quality. This system thinking approach also highlights the importance of getting people to work across relevant functions in seeking to understand and solve complex issues. Avoiding the trap of trying to solve the issue within a single silo. “When facing adaptive challenges, we need to be humble enough to recognize when we don’t know what will work.”

We’ve been conditioned to associate good leadership with expert insight into how to proceed. But when facing adaptive challenges we need to be humble enough to recognize when we don’t know what will work. Amy Edmunson uses the phrase ‘situational humility’ to describe this mindset. In our experience it is a key enabler of the effective exchange of ideas we see between scientists trying to solve tough challenges like cancer. Like Sougarret, our role as leaders in the face of an adaptive challenge is to quickly assemble the best experts we can. Give clarity on the goal and create an optimal

level of urgency. Then create an environment of open dialogue to facilitate shared learning.

Avoid acting before diagnosis

One trap to watch out for, particularly under time pressure, is acting without accurate assessment of what is really going on. The pressure to act quickly and decisively can be significant. As already discussed, we do sometimes need to take quick action to buy time. But it is vital to recognize that misplaced action can often make the situation worse. Before Sougarret was appointed to lead the rescue at San Jose mine, the original team on site tried to use an old ventilation shaft as a fast access route.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

which she defines as ‘experimental forays into unknown territory with the intent of learning.’ Whilst test & learn is standard practice in domains like science, technology and engineering, many organisations ignore it in their approach to strategy. Jumping straight from planning to implementation at scale. By the time they do review, they have already committed a lot of resource. Making it far less they will abandon an ineffective plan. People, and in particularly leaders, instinctively resist admitting when they don’t know what will work, and thus risk overcommitting resources into untested ideas. Instead, we need to see testing as a key part of the creative process in figuring out what works. Just as comedians try out new material in small clubs. Key features of an effective approach to testing include:

A clear learning outcome, which has potential to be important I.e. a specific hypothesis or assumption.

•

Fire bullets before cannonballs

In his book Great by Choice , Jim Collins uses the metaphor of ‘fire bullets before cannonballs’ to highlight the importance of running fast, low cost, low risk tests. In old Navy battles, Cannon Balls were expensive and scarce, and before committing to using them it was wise to first fire cheaper bullets (musket balls) to calibrate for distance and wind. This concept is similar to Amy Edmundson’s recent work on ‘intelligent failure’,

An effective way of measuring success.

•

Low cost – both in terms of money and time.

•

Low risk – consequences of failure are small, making it safe to push the boundaries.

•

The learning is captured

•

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 3: Empower to solve

A common trap is measuring activity rather than outcomes, before we have a proven cause and effect relationship to performance. E.g. tracking the percentage of managers who complete annual reviews, rather than measuring the impact of those reviews on performance. Or tracking how many people have completed DEI training, as opposed to assessing how inclusive the culture is. A culture of test & learn helps build confidence that your strategy is based on empirical evidence. One you have this evidence, measuring and holding people accountable for quality activity can be very useful. A powerful illustration of the test & learn mindset is the response within Google when one of their team discovered that changing the colour of the text on AdWords, increased click rates by 14%. Rather than implement the new colour immediately, it prompted them to then test the full spectrum of colours. It turned out there was a different shade of blue that increased clicks by 20%.

We’ve reached the final focus for Skill 3:

Debriefs – the core discipline of a learning organization

The core discipline which helps drive learning in a team is debriefing. Structured pauses to share reflections on what happened, why it happened and unpick the learning around what helps or hinders performance. If you only act on one discipline from this paper, we suggest it is debriefing. No other habit will have as much of an impact on organizational learning. When we don’t debrief, or debrief poorly, individual insights go uncaptured and we miss the opportunity to correct ineffective behaviours. “The only sustainable competitive advantage is an organization's ability to learn faster than the competition” Peter Senge

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Key features of an effective debrief include:

Feeling safe to talk openly about mistakes without fear of negative judgement or defensiveness.

Contributions from all; pooling people’s different observations is key.

Making time to unpick both what worked and what didn’t . Many organisations only debrief when something goes seriously wrong, but this misses the learning available in every team performance. Including learning from examples of when we’ve been at our best.

Looking deeper for the underlying causes of effective or ineffective behaviours.

For example, if we recognize teamwork was better, explore why it was better on this project?

“In addition to building a habit of debriefing, watch out for patterns in the team which undermine learning – such as defensiveness, and siloed working.”

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Skill 4: Mobilise coordinated action

Trap: Underinvestment in buy-in & alignment

Once we have empirical evidence for what works, we need to commit to ‘firing cannonballs’ without delay. Having the best strategy in the world is of little value if you’re unable to convince people to act on it. It was a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, who first developed digital photography technology in 1975. At the time senior executives dismissed the technology as “interesting but not practical.” Believing consumers would never adopt it and fearing that it would cannibalise their sales of film. Given the first commercial digital camera was not released until 6 years later in 1981 by Sony, Kodak turned down the opportunity to dominate the next big technology. The ability to get people, including those senior to us, to buy into and change their way of working in line with a new strategy is our final skill. What makes this particularly challenging with adaptive change is we’re often asking people to let go of ways of working which have served them very well and which they feel very loyal to. We offer four key tips for developing our capacity to mobile people at pace. We’ll explain each of them in the rest of this section.

Picture Credit : Morio, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, Sony Mavica (1981), a “still video camera”, being the first to record images digitally onto a removable disk.

1. Use examples and facts to make the case for change concrete

Highlight the cost of not changing, then excite people about the future we can create. Engineers at Intel convinced Co-founders Grove and Moore to pivot their focus from memory chips to the emerging market of microprocessors by showing a 5-year forecast of their market share collapsing in the face of competition who could offer higher quality and cheaper alternatives. At the time, Intel was investing more and more money into marketing to slow their rate of decline. Having grabbed attention, they then were able to excite them an alternative strategy. A strategy that would only be possible if Intel acted now while it still had a respected brand name for innovation.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

This is not about allowing endless debate to stop action. Instead, what we’re looking to build is a culture Intel call ‘disagree and commit.’ Allow open debate and ensure you enter it with an open mind to what we might be missing. But also set a time limit on the dialogue, and make it clear who will decide at the end of that discussion.

2. Link the change to a goal people care about

Reassure people by focusing on what is not changing, and by linking the change to a purpose they care about. E.g. ‘Our purpose has always been…, it still is. In order to keep succeeding we need to….” One of our longtime clients, Asthma and Lung UK, have repeatedly got their workforce to buy into significant changes by connecting it to the impact it is going to have on people they serve.

4. Capability Mapping

New strategies often require a significant shift in capabilities within the organization. Sometimes this can be addressed by supporting people to retrain. Amazon for instance have for some time now had a successful programme offering warehouse workers the opportunity to retrain as robotics engineers. At other times it will require a shift in the workforce. Either way, capability mapping is a very useful tool you can use as a senior team. Step one is to map out the skills which will be most important to delivering on your new strategy. Step two is to score your current capacity in each. Highlighting critical gaps you have, along with any skills which will be less relevant.

3. Encourage people to talk openly about their concerns

If we avoid talking openly about people’s concerns, it will only increase resistance. Begrudging compliance will not help us adapt at pace. We need people to be 100% committed. You can only get that level of commitment if you bring concerns into the open. Listening to people’s concerns cannot just be seen as a required step to gaining buy-in. We need to go into these conversations open to gaining important insights around how we can make our plan stronger.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

Conclusion: Be a disruptor or be disrupted. You choose.

A fascinating insight from simulations in the Intelligence Services, is how much easier it is to disrupt than it is to defend against disruption. At its best, adaptive leadership is about always looking to be on the front foot. We do this by building our organisations skills and processes to enable us to adapt early and often.

Raise awareness in your team about the importance of the skills of adaptive leadership, and the common traps. Exploring insights from when you have been at your best in adapting, and what traps you have fallen into.

If you’re keen to make this a core strength of your organization or team, here are some recommended next steps.

Identify & prioritize your most important adaptive challenges: Create space for the team to ‘stand on the balcony’, identify and prioritize current adaptive challenges you need to respond to.

Empower a small group of people to work on each challenge: Bring together a good mix of people to diagnose the issue and figure out what ideas to test.

Build your organisations skills in debriefing to support a culture of learning and continuous improvement at all levels.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

…other ways to engage

If you’d like to explore how we can help you with this, please feel free to reach out and we can set up a call to discuss.

info@managementfutures.co.uk

We typically recommend an initial 1- day session with your team. Raising awareness of the key skills and traps, and prioritizing the most important adaptive challenges you need to work on.

About the author

MF director John Bull heads-up High Performance Research . John has worked with a huge range of organisations, teams, and leaders over more than 25 years, in sport, technology, business and the social sector. He combines a sense of fun with a focused energy for helping people to make rapid breakthroughs. His deep expertise is offered with a lightness of touch and humility.

Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment

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