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Part A:Recognizing Adaptive challenges in the workplace. Adaptive challenges require some change to structures, attitudes, and relationships. These situations cannot be solved by applying standard procedures; they require collective genius and innovation, including distributed/shared and collective leadership. In your initial post, please create a keyword/phrase list from the readings and from Kuenkel’s video (Links to an external site.). Identify the key terms that capture what we are learning this week about defragmenting our thinking and action. HINT: Go to the Kuenkel YouTube video and click on the “….” button to view a transcript of the video (located next to the Save button). Provide the key word list (~20), introduce and explore an adaptive challenge within your organization. Explain how the situation requires collective talents of the organization to get at the adaptive challenge. NOTE: this is not a technical fix. Present what is currently being done about the challenge and consider why you believe efforts are falling short. When exploring how your organization might address the adaptive challenge. It is very important to integrate the keywords taken from the Kuenkel video into your post. NOTE: We will continue to explore this adaptive challenge in Next Week, So the more specifics you can offer here, the better off you will be for your work next week. 2 Pages response excluding cover and reference pages. Part B:Leadership within Turbulence As a leader who cultivates an attitude that recognizes turbulence as normal and how it destabilizes and promotes self-organization in human systems, position yourself as a fractal, an attractor that influences what happens by what you embody, say, and do. Explore how this mode of thinking affects your attitude toward the adaptive challenge you identified this week in your discussion post (recognize bias and projections). How would you begin planning and mapping as presented in Kuenkel’s video (Links to an external site.)(MUST WATCH) and models your organization’s exploration of the adaptive challenge? 3 Pages response excluding cover and reference pages.
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Week 5: Exploring the Way
As we explored last week,
leadership does not stay isolated
within positions or upper rungs of
bureaucracies. In fact, good
leaders’ model and foster
emerging leadership within their
organizations. If people within the
organization observe purposeful
and intentional leadership from
their leaders, they themselves
assume these behaviors and
characteristics. This week we will
explore why leaders today–in our
current turbulent times, need to host the emergence of other leaders. To tackle
today’s adaptive challenges, organizations need to call upon the collective genius
of their members. Leaders in formal positions of authority must acknowledge and
call forth this genius. They are no longer the heroes of their organizations; they
are the hosts of a multitude of leaders–emerging from their organizations.
These leaders then recognize how they are energized from collaboration and put
their skills and thinking together for innovation and collaboration. As we will hear
this week from our materials, “They defragment their thinking and they
defragment their acting…. build upon their human competence…. draw upon
their collective leadership…. –through invigorating fractal influence over patterns
within the organization.” Collective leadership allows us to foster collaborative
eco-systems within organizations to address adaptive challenges. This language
may sound foreign as you read it now. But by the end of the week, let’s acquire a
confidence regarding our understanding of collective action and leading
innovation and addressing adaptive challenges.
Please keep in mind our learning objectives as we move forward this week.
So first, let’s consider what is the difference between technical fixes and adaptive
challenges. Click on the following link and read how the two are
described: Technical Fixes vs. Adaptive Challenges
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When you reflect upon the many actions of administrators and management, do
you find them devoting time to troubleshoot the result of a problem? Do you find
them searching for solutions? Do they function primarily as the cybernetic
leaders we read about earlier this semester? Are they seeking to secure
stability? Many scholars, Harvard professor, Ron Heifetz specifically, argue that
figures of authority are encouraged to find easy fixes to these technical problems.
We like to find answers to routine problems. It feeds our authority. Adaptive
challenges encourage us to find resolutions for problems we’ve never
entertained–bigger problems. To use talents and skills not currently used in the
organization. For example, we can fix a man’s congested heart, but how do we
get the man to choose a healthier life afterward–to change his trajectory?
Authority structure can do its part. Adaptive challenges require people to become
a part of the problem and the solution. They must become responsible for the
problem so they can become a part of the solution. Consider how many times we
try to address adaptive challenges without sharing authority and responsibility.
This is a large social example. Place then within a smaller context. How might
this look in an organization? Do we isolate responsibility and authority? Do we
suggest that certain people are accountable where others are not? Is this
problematic thinking? Reflect on how people become passionate and committed.
People shirk responsibility to those in authority. Those in authority insulate their
responsibility. It’s a win-win, right? Think again. Our success is dependent upon
calling forward collective intelligence and collective leadership. So, what does the
question become then? What questions should leaders be entertaining?
Watch the Kuenkel video. Read the Scott chapter from Pearson’s text.
Create the assigned keyword list and begin your weekly discussion.
We hear from Petra Kuenkel that the complex problems that we are actually
dealing with are hidden by our fragmentation from one another and from these
root problems. We have worked toward compartmentalized and shrink complex
problems. Hence, they continue to fester, and leaders continue putting band-aids
on deep wounds or poor lifestyles. Again, we hear about eco-structures and
networks as being an effective, necessary call for getting at this complexity. Hard
problems though can be quite scary. So, in some cases, people figure out that
we must collaborate. So, she asks us, “Do we collaborate effectively?” Do we
collaborate as a “need to build upon human competences–on what we can do”?
Do we call upon inclusive, multi-sectoral work? She argues this generates an
energizing climate, a way of regulating diversity to get where we need to go. This
is a collective leadership, right? Next, she asks us to see the fractal leadership
within our organizations. Do you see smaller, separate collaborations focusing on
a similar problem? If you were able to get a 10,000-foot view of an issue, you
might see that it has many factors–each addressed by a separate unit, let’s say.
Each unit is focused on addressing their “problem”. The problem, however, is
again a technical fix to a bigger issue. Let’ s return to Heifetz’s example. We can
see cardiac disease as a major issue faced by leaders. Yet, how often do we see
this issue as being only a health-related issue? So… we address the issue by
clinical care. Yet, your city has no safe public space for walking or exercise. Your
city sits in the south and fried food is embedded within the culture. Churches, the
hub of social events, offer Sunday lunches of fried chicken and mashed
potatoes. Are you beginning to see how well-intentioned leaders can address
the problem from within their unit? Kuenkel poses this is a fractal system, many
good collaborations spending attention on their part of the issue but not getting at
the complex challenge. This fragmentation from the complexity of problems
creates turbulence and perpetuates turbulence. Can you see how isolated
fractals can still be unsuccessful in achieving real change? So, who brings them
together?
Collective leadership brings those fractals–complete independent efforts,
together so they can be energized by others’ diverse knowledge, talents, and
skills. Collective leaders must “scale up” and attend to the six dimensions of
collective leadership: future possibilities (with aspects of future orientation,
empowerment, and decisiveness), engagement (with aspects of process quality,
connectivity, collective action–small successes of working together) , innovation
(with aspects of creativity, excellence–mastery and including others who may
have the talent I don’t; agility–risk and learning from crisis), humanity (with
aspects of must be in the center and the basis: mindfulness; empathy; and
balance–task, content with process and relationships), and collective intelligence
(iterative learning, diversity, dialogic quality), and wholeness (with aspects of
contextuality, mutual support, and contribution). These dimensions with their
three aspects inform leaders why collective is important and how to
operationalize it. Consider Kuenkel’s collective leadership compass as a model
for addressing adaptive challenges:
Readings & Resources
1.
Kuenkel, P. (2015). The collective leadership as a fractal of large systems
change in collaboration.
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2.
Video source (Links to an external site.) –
Must watch.
Scott, K. T. (2012). The new basics: Inner work for adaptive challenges. In
C. S. Pearson’s (Ed.) The transforming leader: New approaches to
leadership for the twenty-first century. (pp. 93-101 hardcopy, pp. 82-87
ebook). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
From Scott, we hear that tapping into our inner selves connects us with our
energy and intelligence. This mindfulness and presence give way to recognizing
and managing our emotions. Today’s turbulence cannot be addressed if leaders
lack the capacity to stay calm. What does “conscious, self-differentiated
leadership” look like for you?
Both sources this week tell us that this collective leadership relies upon a distinct
balanced and conscious approach from the individual and the collective
leadership. Did you hear how individuals’ leaders must be responsible, mindful,
regulated, and inclusive? Are you considering the leader you are and want to
become? Are you hearing how we must move beyond our individual–“island unto
ourselves” and chart a path for engaging other selves–other “islands”? Are you
gaining confidence in the importance of collective leadership and your ability to
orchestrate it?
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS VS.
ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES
The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.
TECHNICAL PROBLEMS
ADAPTIVE CHALLENGES
1. Easy to identify
1. Difficult to identify (easy to deny)
2. Often lend themselves to quick and
easy (cut-and-dried) solutions
2. Require changes in values, beliefs,
roles, relationships, & approaches to
work
3. Often can be solved by an authority
or expert
3. People with the problem do the
work of solving it
4. Require change in just one or a few
places; often contained within
organizational boundaries
4. Require change in numerous places;
usually cross organizational
boundaries
5. People are generally receptive to
technical solutions
5. People often resist even
acknowledging adaptive challenges.
6. Solutions can often be implemented
quickly—even by edict
6. “Solutions” require experiments and
new discoveries; they can take a
long time to implement and cannot
be implemented by edict
EXAMPLES
Take medication to lower blood
pressure
Change lifestyle to eat healthy, get
more exercise and lower stress
Implement electronic ordering and
dispensing of medications in
hospitals to reduce errors and drug
interactions
Encourage nurses and pharmacists
to question and even challenge
illegible or dangerous prescriptions
by physicians
Increase penalty for drunk driving
Raise public awareness of the
dangers and effects of drunk driving,
targeting teenagers in particular
Adapted from Ronald A. Heifetz & Donald L. Laurie,
“The Work of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review,
January-February 1997; and Ronald A. Heifetz & Marty Linsky,
Leadership on the Line, Harvard Business School Press, 2002
GROUPSMITH
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