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Perils of Adaptive Change
By Sujit Mundul
Leadership would be a safe profession if organisations and communities only faced problems for which they already knew the solutions. Every day, people have problems for which they do, in fact, have the necessary know-how and procedures. We term them “technical problems”. But there is a whole host of problems that are not amenable to available expertise or standard operating procedures. Someone who provides answers from the top cannot solve them. These are called adaptive challenges because they require experiments, new discoveries, and adjustments from numerous places in the organisation or community. Without learning new ways— changing attitudes, values and behaviours—people cannot make the adaptive leap necessary to thrive in the new environment.
At the beginning of the adaptive process people cannot see that the new situation will be better than the current condition. What they do see clearly is the potential for loss. People frequently avoid painful adjustments in their lives if they can postpone them, place the burden on somebody else, or call someone to the rescue. When fears and passions run high, people can become desperate as they look to authorities for answers.
When people look to authorities for easy answers to adaptive challenges, they end up with dysfunction. They expect the person in charge to know what to do, and under the weight of that responsibility, those in authority frequently end up disappointing people, or they get thrown out of the system in co-relation to the belief that a new “leader” will solve the problem. In fact, there’s a risk in adaptive change: The deeper the change and the greater the amount of new learning required, the more resistance there will be and, thus, the greater the danger to those who lead. For this reason, people often try to avoid the dangers, either consciously or subconsciously, by treating an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical one.
Indeed, the single most common source of leadership failure we’ve been able to identify—in politics, community life, business, or the non-profit sector—is that people, especially those in positions of authority, treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.
In times of distress, when everyone looks upto leadership to provide direction, protection, and order, this is an easy diagnostic mistake to make. In the face of adaptive pressures, people don’t want question; they want answers. They really don’t want to hear that they will have to sustain losses; rather, they want to know how you’re going to protect them from the pains of change.
In mobilising adaptive work, one needs to engage people in adjusting their unrealistic expectations, rather than try to satisfy them as if the situation were amenable primarily to technical remedy. You have to manage their heightened dependency and promote their resourcefulness. But this requires time and artful communication.
When you are in a position of authority, there are also strong internal pressures to focus on the technical aspects of the problems. Most of us take pride in our ability to answer the tough questions that are thrown our way. We get rewarded for bearing people’s uncertainty and want to be seen in a competent, heroic light. We like the feeling of stepping up to the plate and having the crowds cheer us on. Yet raising questions that go to the core of people’s habits goes unrewarded, at least for a while. You get booed instead of cheered. Leadership takes the capacity to stomach hostility so that you can stay connected to people, lest you disengage from them and exacerbate the danger.
There is nothing trivial about solving technical problems. Medical personnel save lives every day in the emergency room through their authoritative expertise because they have the right procedures, the right norms and the right knowledge. Through our managerial know-how, we produce an economy full of products and services, many of them crucial to our daily lives. What makes a problem technical is not that it is trivial; but simply that its solution already lies within the organisation’s repertoire. In contrast, adaptive pressures force the organisation to change.
In the 21 st century, people and organisations encounter adaptive pressures every day, in their individual lives and at all levels of society; and each leadership opportunity to respond to these challenges also carries attendant risks with it. For example, when your car breaks down, you go to a mechanic. Most of the time, the mechanic can fix it. However, if the car breaks down because of the way the family members use it, the problem will probably happen again. The mechanic might be able to get the car on the road once more but it should not be treated as a purely technical problem. By doing so the family may end up avoiding the underlying issues demanding adaptive work, such as how to persuade the mother to stop drinking and driving, or the grandfather to give up his driver’s license, or the teenagers to be more cautious. No doubt, any family member would find it difficult and risky to step forward and lead the prickly conversations with the mother, grandfather, or even the teenage driver.
(Mundul is the CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Nepal Ltd.)
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