Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky: "The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and The World"

The Theory Behind the Production: Purpose and Possibility

The first humans went on to form cultures with self-sustaining norms that required minimal reinforcement by authorities. Cultural norms gave human beings remarkable adaptability and scalability. Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to take tough challenges and thrive. The concept of thriving is drawn from evolutionary biology, in which a succesful adaptation has three characteristics:

- it preserve the DNA essential for the species' continued survival

- it discards the DNA that no longer serve the species' current needs

- it creates DNA arrangements taht give the species' the ability to flourish in new ways and in more challenging environments.

Successful adaptations enable a living system to take the best from its history into the future.

What does this suggest as an analogyfor adaptive leadership?

- Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive

- Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it

- Organizational adaptation accurs through experimentation

- Adaptation relies on diversity

- New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate, and rearrange some old DNA

- Adaptation takes time

Mobilizing people to meet their immediate adaptive challenges lies at the heart of leadership in the short term. Over time, these and other culture-shaping efforts build an organization's adaptive capacity, fostering processes that will generate new norms that enable the organization to meet the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges posed by a world ever ready to offer new realities, opportunities, and pressures.

The Illusion of the Broken System

There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization need to change because it is broken. the reality is that any social system is the way it is because the people in that system want it that way. In that sense, on the whole, on balance, the system is working fine, even though it may appear to be 'dysfunctional' in some respoect to some members and outside observers. Jeff Lawrence says, "There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets".

CHAPTER 3

Before You Begin

Practicing adaptive leadership is difficult on the one hand and profoundly meaningful on the other; it is not something you should enter into casually.

Four tips before you step out:

- Don't do it alone

- Live life as a leadership laboratory

- Resist the leap to action

- Discover the joy of making hard choices