Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky in their book, Leadership On The Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) write that the “single most common source of leadership failure --- treat adaptive challenges like technical challenges.” I think this is the result of default thinking and problem solving.
As Margaret Wheatley wrote years ago, “When confronted with the unknown, we default to the known.” And the default is to define all problems as technical problems. In part, I think this happens, because we are in a comfort zone when we do it. However, over time and when dealing with complex and adaptive situations, this is not always the best choice or the right choice. It merely is a default choice.
Still, recognizing that the role of leadership is to challenge status quo, and, at times, to change it rather than just to maintain it, we need to to help ourselves and the organization move through the uncomfortable, but normal process of adaptive problem solving. We also have to work on the organization instead of defaulting to only working within it, i.e. solving technical problems.
One outcome of working on the organization is that we also have to work on ourself and our choices as a leader. And therefore when we choose to do this level of work, we have to ask two uncomfortable questions. First, can I do this? Second, do I have the capacity and support to meet this challenge?
We need to ask these questions and we need enter into the world of the personal, because we routinely default to the professional or business mindset. We get so busy some days that we forget that leading other people is personal, not just professional. As leaders, we want people to like us and to agree with us. And, though we rarely admit it, we often feel vulnerable at the personal, not just the professional levels when it comes to dealing with complexity and adaptability issues.
After many decades of coaching people, I regularly have to point out to people in leadership positions that resistance to change is normal, and a form of feedback. It may feel personal and uncomfortable. But given our role and our job within the organizational chart, we must deal with these challenges and problems. While it is hard to separate role form self, it is important to do it.
Still, we have to learn how to be present with the uncomfortable work of dealing with complexity on the professional and personal levels. “When we attempt to eliminate the personal,” writes John Paul Lederach in his book, the Moral Imagination: The Art And Soul Of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), “we lose sight of ourselves, our deeper intuition, and the source of our understandings - who we are and how we are in the world. In so doing we arrive at a paradoxical destination: We believe in the knowledge we generate but not in the inherently messy and personal process by which we acquired it.” As he continues, “We must envision our work as a creative act, more akin to the artistic endeavor than the technical process…. the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist.”
In the end, the two questions, namely “Can I do this?”, and “Do I have the capacity and support to meet this challenge?”, need to be confronted and addressed. Inner clarity and confidence is the first step to dealing with complex adaptive systems, complex market conditions, and ultimately leading through complexity. While we may not have all the answers, we can call on our inner strength, clarity, and capacity to ask the right questions, engage in thoughtful dialogue, and discover realistic solutions to the adaptive and dynamic problems before us.
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