The Theory Behind the Practice

1 The Theory Behind the PracticeA Brief Introduction to the Adaptive leadership FrameworkExcerpted fromThe Practice of Adaptive leadership : Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the WorldByRonald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty LinskyBuy the book:AmazonBarnes & Business PressBoston, MassachusettsISBN-13: 978-1-4221-3240-13241 BCCopyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing CorporationAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of AmericaThis chapter was originally published as chapter 2 of The Practice of Adaptive leadership : Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World,copyright 2009 Cambridge leadership part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to or mailed to Permissions,Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts can purchase Harvard Business Press books at booksellers worldwide.

2 You can order HarvardBusiness Press books and book chapters online at ,or by calling 888-500-1016 or, outside the and Canada, 617-783-7410. |CHAPTER 2|The Theory Behindthe PracticeSINCE 1994, ADAPTIVE leadership has been advanced andexplored in a series of other books in addition to leadership With-out Easy Answersand leadership on the burgeoning litera-ture in this emerging field includes the work of our colleagues SharonDaloz Parks, in LeadershipCanBe Taught, and Dean Williams, in books have applied the adaptive leadership frame-work to the challenges in specific professional contexts. These includeRichard Foster and Sarah Kaplan s Creative Destructionand Donald s The Real Work of Leaderson applications to big businesses;Gary De Carolis s A View from the Balconyon systems of care; StacieGoffin and Valora Washington s Ready or Noton early childhood edu-cation; Shifra Bronznick, Didi Goldenhar, and Marty Linsky s Levelingthe Playing Fieldon women in Jewish organizational life.

3 And KevinFord s Transforming Church: Bringing Out the Good to Get to Greatonthe challenges facing American work grows from efforts to understand in practical ways therelationship among leadership , adaptation, systems, and change, butalso has deep roots in scientific efforts to explain the evolution ofhuman life, and before us, the evolution of all life going back to thebeginning of the nearly 4 million years, our early ancestors lived in small bandsthat foraged for food. They developed ever-increasing sophisticationin the design of tools and strategies for hunting and movement; andtheir physical capacity grew as they developed ways, through evolu-tionary change, to increase their range. Drawing on what anthropolo-gists and psychologists have identified as our capacity to internalizethe wisdom of elders, the first humans went on to form cultures withself-sustaining norms that required minimal reinforcement by authori-ties.

4 Cultural norms gave human beings remarkable adaptability andscalability when, quite recently, about twelve thousand years ago,people learned to domesticate plants and animals, and their new abilityto store food allowed and required sustained settlements. Large num-bers of people living together brought new needs for governing largeorganizations and early ancestors process of adaptation to new possibilities andchallenges has continued over the course of written history with thegrowth and variation in scope, structure, governance, strategy, and coor-dination of political and commercial enterprise. So has the evolution inunderstanding the Practice of managing those processes, including inour lifetimes what we call adaptive leadership is the Practice of mobilizing people to tackle toughchallenges and concept of thrivingis drawn from evolution-ary biology, in which a successful adaptation has three characteristics:(1) it preserves the DNA essential for the species continued survival;(2) it discards (reregulates or rearranges) the DNA that no longerserves the species current needs; and (3) it creates DNA arrangementsthat give the species the ability to flourish in new ways and in morechallenging environments.

5 Successful adaptations enable a living sys-tem to take the best from its history into the does this suggest as an analogy for adaptive leadership ? Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables thecapacity to environments and new dreams demandnew strategies and abilities, as well as the leadership to mobilizethem. As in evolution, these new combinations and variationshelp organizations thrive under challenging circumstancesrather than perish, regress, or contract. leadership , then, mustwrestle with normative questions of value, purpose, and does thrivingmean for organizations operating in anyparticular context?2 Introduction: Purpose and PossibilityThe Theory Behind the Practice3In biology, thriving means propagating. But in business, forexample, signs of thriving include increases in short- and long-term shareholder value, exceptional customer service, highworkforce morale, and positive social and environmental adaptive success in an organizational sense requires leader-ship that can orchestrate multiple stakeholder priorities to definethriving and then realize it.

6 Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than biological adaptations, though DNA changes may radicallyexpand the species capacity to thrive, the actual amountof DNAthat changes is minuscule. More than 98 percent of our currentDNA is the same as that of a chimpanzee: it took less than a 2 per-cent change of our evolutionary predecessors genetic blueprintto give humans extraordinary range and ability. A challenge foradaptive leadership , then, is to engage people in distinguishingwhat is essential to preserve from their organization s heritagefrom what is expendable. Successful adaptations are thus bothconservative andprogressive. They make the best possible use ofprevious wisdom and know-how. The most effective leadershipanchors change in the values, competencies, and strategic orien-tations that should endure in the organization. Organizational adaptation occurs through , sexual reproduction is an experiment: it rapidly producesvariations along with high failure rates.

7 As many as one-third ofall pregnancies spontaneously miscarry, usually within the firstweeks of conception, because the embryo s genetic variation istoo radical to support life. In organizations, the process appearssimilar. Global pharmaceutical giants must be willing to losemoney in failures to find the next profitable medicine. Thoseseeking to lead adaptive change need an experimental must learn to improvise as they go, buying time andresources along the way for the next set of experiments. Adaptation relies on evolutionary biology, natureacts as a fund manager, diversifying risk. Each conception isa variant, a new experiment, producing an organism withcapacities somewhat different from the rest of the diversifying the gene pool, nature markedly increases the oddsthat somemembers of the species will have the ability to survivein a changing ecosystem. In contrast, cloning, the original modeof reproduction, is extraordinarily efficient in generating highrates of propagation, but the degrees of variation are far less thanfor those in sexual reproduction.

8 Cloning, therefore, is far lesslikely to generate innovations for finding and thriving in newenvironments. The secret of evolution is variation, which in orga-nizational terms could be called distributed or collective intelli-gence. Likewise, adaptive leadership on economic policy wouldwant to diversify an economy so that people are less dependenton one company or industry for sustenance. For an organization,adaptive leadership would build a culture that values diverseviews and relies less on central planning and the genius of thefew at the top, where the odds of adaptive success go down. Thisis especially true for global businesses operating in many localmicroenvironments. New adaptations significantly displace, reregulate, and rearrangesome old analogy, leadership on adaptive challengesgenerates loss. Learning is often painful. One person s innovationcan cause another person to feel incompetent, betrayed, or irrele-vant. Not many people like to be rearranged.

9 leadership there-fore requires the diagnostic ability to recognize those losses andthe predictable defensive patterns of response that operate at theindividual and systemic level. It also requires knowing how tocounteract these patterns. Adaptation takes biological adaptations that greatlyenhance a species capacity to thrive unfold over thousands, evenmillions, of years. Progress is radical over time yet incremental intime. It seems to work this way: a variant in the current popula-tion has the adaptive capacity in its time to venture a bit beyondthe normal ecological niche for its kind, stressing itself near themargins of the range that it and its offspring can tolerate. Forexample, an unusual human being moves to colder or higher ter-rain and finds it can live there. By doing so, it invites the envi-ronment to place selective pressure over the next generations,favoring variants among its offspring that are stronger in that4 Introduction: Purpose and PossibilityThe Theory Behind the Practice5new environment.

10 In that way, over time, new adaptive capacityconsolidates; the progeny are no longer operating at the marginsof their capacity, but in the midrange. Among their adaptations,the distribution of insulating fat and warming capillaries haschanged. The process of evolution continues as some of their off-spring venture forth. Although organizational and political adap-tations seem lightning fast by comparison, they also take time toconsolidate into new sets of norms and processes. Adaptive lead-ership thus requires persistence. Significant change is the prod-uct of incremental experiments that build up over time. Andcultures change slowly. Those who Practice this form of leader-ship need to stay in the game, even while taking the heat alongthe people to meet their immediate adaptive challenges liesat the heart of leadership in the short term. Over time, these and otherculture-shaping efforts build an organization s adaptive capacity, fos-tering processes that will generate new norms that enable the organi-zation to meet the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges posed by aworld ever ready to offer new realities, opportunities, and Illusion of the Broken SystemThere is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: thatthe organization needs to change because it is broken.