While an organization may be aware that its current challenges are both “adaptive” and “technical” in nature, the real need may be to make headway on the adaptive or cultural aspects of its challenges. Technical challenges take resources, time, and effort to address, but they expand rather than change the accepted ways of doing business, whereas adaptive challenges involve a fundamental change in the organization’s culture and way of doing business.
Technical problems can be solved by an expert and fully implemented by clear direction using a “top-down” approach, because the solutions to the problem already exist. For example, we know how to build and run prisons, so it would be relatively easy (once the money is appropriated) to build a new prison and appoint a leader to direct the process. An expert, however, cannot solve an adaptive challenge because its solution, by definition, does not already exist. A solution cannot be thought into existence using current thought patterns because those existing thought patterns are part of the problem. Adaptive challenges can only be identified and solved by new ways of thinking and perceiving throughout the organization as a whole. Adaptive challenges disturb the existing set of values, roles, responsibilities, and collaborative networks across and beyond an organization’s boundaries. As a result, the task of finding and implementing solutions to adaptive challenges must be met at every level of the organizational structure in a “top-supported, bottom-up” fashion.
Leaders cannot approach adaptive change issues in the same way as technical challenges, because adaptive change is, “distressing for the people going through it. They need to take on new roles, new relationships, new values, new behaviors, and new approaches to work. Many employees are ambivalent about the efforts and sacrifices required of them. They often look to the senior executive to take problems off their shoulders. But those expectations have to be unlearned. Rather than fulfilling the expectation that they will provide answers, leaders have to ask tough questions. Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt. Instead of orienting people to their current roles, leaders must disorient them so that new relationships can develop. Instead of quelling conflict, leaders have to draw the issues out. Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge “the way we do business” and help others distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go.” [1]
Team discussions are helpful for solving technical challenges. The root of the word discussion comes from the same root for the words concussion and percussion, and it means to break things apart; it emphasizes the idea of using analysis to do so. Because there are right and wrong ways to solve the problem, teams need to argue back and forth among the various options to discard the poor ones and select the good ones. This is why meetings aimed at solving technical problems should be relatively quick; you do not need a lot of time to sift through the known solutions. However, discussion is useless when approaching adaptive challenges, because it assumes someone in a position of authority or expertise has the answer. Adaptive challenges call for dialogue, a much harder, longer, and subtler practice for teams to master. The root of the word dialogue comes from two Greek words dia, which means “through”, and logos which means “word” or the “meaning of the word”.
“The object of a dialogue is not to analyze things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions, and to look at the opinions – to listen to everybody’s opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means. If we can see what all of our opinions mean, then we are sharing a common content, even if we don’t agree entirely. It may turn out that the opinions are not really very important – they are all assumptions. And if we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in different direction. We can just simply share the appreciation of the meanings: and out of this whole thing, truth emerges unannounced – not that we have chosen it.” [2]
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[1] Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The Work of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), p. 124.
[2] Bohm, D. (2012) On Dialogue, Routledge, New York, p 30.