The Impact of Politics of Change & The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

The Impact of The Politics of Change & The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

Key Concepts Learned

Adaptive leadership was a completely new and unique idea for me when we first

started the course a few months back. As the content kept unwinding I could make 

significant links with our lives both personal as well as professional. I have tried to

 gather some key concepts learned throughout the course and tried to summarize

 briefly how each concept has impacted our lives. These are picked from the book

 titled,”The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow 

and Martin Linsky. The book introduced us to a few key metaphors, the most common 
used was getting on the balcony and above the dance floor. 

Getting on the balcony provides you the space and opportunity to get a 
distanced perspective on what’s bothering or troubling you. It helps you 
understand what is happening around you, and why is happening around you,
 who are the various stakeholders involved. When you are in the middle of a situation , 
like on a dance floor you only see whats right in front of you and you get to see only
 one perspective but when you move back and forth between the balcony and the dance 
floor you get to see a different view and  gain a deeper insight of what’s happening around
 you empowering you to take corrective actions.

During our small group discussions as well as large group discussions

 we all used to take a balcony moment to reflect on what was happening around,

 group dynamics were discussed and we used the adaptive leadership cycle

 to review the cases under discussion as well. For example during one small group

 discussion I shared with the group that we all seemed to be thinking on different lines,

 and a group member agreed with me and each one of us then took a back 

seat and reflected on what was happening, how each member was responding or

 reacting, why did they feel different and so on.

Another important concept that I learned about was how to differentiate

between technical challenges and adaptable challenges that we face in both our

personal and professional lives and how best to handle them. Adaptive challenges

require hard work and effort, it requires tolerance, patience and wisdom

to move people and to believe in what your saying, it’s more to do with changing their
belief system, their habits and values and it sure does require a lot of effort. 

I still remember one of the movies that we watched as part of the course, 

this was the 12 Angry Men, lead by Henry Fonda. The 12 Jurors could not come 

to a common verdict amidst the existing repertoire of strategies and resources 

each one had. There seemed to be a difference between their espoused values 

and their belief about the judicial system.

 Except one member all the rest 11 members had assumed that the boy had committed 
a crime. They believed because he had belonged to a slum, went to an orphanage, 
was beaten everyday, therefore he must have committed the murder. 
The jurors did not want to investigate further , they were firm on their beliefs.
Only one juror challenged their beliefs by telling them what they needed to hear
 instead of what they wanted to hear. He had disturbed the equilibrium.
He mobilized them to do the work they were supposed to do. He took a herculean task 
to convince the group to talk about the case and managed to do well through logical  
reasoning, convincing the juror to look from different lenses, without bringing his personal

 bias in the case. He helped people navigate through the disequilibrium. The purpose
was not to disturb the jurors, but make progress collectively on the challenge
that the group was facing, which he was able to do successfully because of his 
adaptive leadership skills.

We often face similar situations in our lives. Often employees are asked to quit jobs or 
are removed because that is the easiest thing to do instead of taking a balcony moment 
to find out what was actually happening around that might have caused the employee to
react the way they did. Their voices are marginalized by a few members. As a result the
organizations end up losing their valuable resources. During the large case debrief sessions
many students shared incidents of failed leadership, where the leaders in the respective
organizations had applied technical fixes to solve the problem at hand.
The case presenters discussed in detail about their leadership failure. It was tough discussing
the inside - and outside - in cases. I had shared in our small group about my leadership
failure which was a technical fix. I did not consider it as an adaptive challenge for the organization.
Senior colleagues often have insecurities when they see their junior colleagues doing 
exceptionally well at the workplace, the fear that they might take their place, this forces
them to nudge them to the extent that they either quit themselves or are forced by the
administration to leave their jobs. The organizations fails to see it as an adaptive challenge, 
where the mindsets of the senior employees need to change, instead of narrowing
the space for creative people in organization, more space should have been created for 
more people to benefit from them.

Another important concept that we learned was the Adaptive leadership cycle which

 the course instructor keep referring to even during the case discussions in the large class

 debrief. The process consists of three steps, these are observe, interpret and intervene. 

The writer has linked observing to getting off the dance floor and moving to the 

balcony to get a different perspective. The process requires you to get to different site,

 distance yourself from what’s happening, try to find  patterns in what’s happening around you, 

which is obviously not possible when you are at the dance floor or the ground floor. 

Moving to the next step, intervening is more challenging than observing. 

 Another key metaphor used here was listening to the song beneath the words. 

The purpose to think of all the possible solutions, alternatives, to gather as 

much info as possible about what’s happening around you. We as humans have a 

natural tendency to run towards the right answer or jump towards the conclusions.

 Interpretation in other words is a guess and it only gets perfect with practice. 

The last step in this cycle is intervention. This could be an action, an experiment, 

a hypothesis in the service of a shared purpose (as in the jurors case shared above). 

What is important while designing an intervention is to have a skills and resources 

tool kit ready, which will allow you to launch several diversified interventions. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said and I quote here that, the test of a first rate

 intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same

 time and still retain the ability to function. That's exactly what adaptive leadership

 requires you to do, it gets you to believe in your intervention and that this was the

 right thing to do and at the same time keep you conscious and aware that you could

 be dead wrong about something.

Each one of the concepts shared above are valuable beyond measure and 

can be practiced in our daily lives resulting in more conscious decisions. It was an 

honor to be part of the course that ended equipping us all with so much valuable 

insight of not only ourselves but the people around us.

Regards and prayers

Sheeba Ajmal