Adaptive Leadership in the Digital Age in Search of Emergence

“The secret to success is not to foresee the future, but to create an organization that thrives in a future that cannot be foreseen.” Michael Hammer

It is clear that something is happening. The global financial crisis is calling into question some of the principles on which our development model is based. And the impact of the changes is not being limited to the strict field of economics and production. It is also generating important consequences in the social and cultural sphere.

It would be deeply reassuring to see the current economic crisis as “a bad time we have to go through”. But if there is one thing that seems more evident every day, it is that we are not facing a simple stock market shock caused by an indigestion of toxic financial products and unethical bankers. The crisis has shown that the growth models of the past no longer serve us. They have allowed us to reach the current level of economic, social and technological development, which is not negligible. But the model is exhausted. The organizations and institutions we have created no longer work. They are rigid, opaque, slow, clumsy and bureaucratic. They are incapable of adapting to the challenges of the future. And what is worse: they are deadly boring. They are not designed for people, and they are capable of ending the passion of the best of our collaborators.

Today we know that the crisis will be deep and long-lasting. And the task of leading during a sustained crisis is arduous and complicated. In the first phase, the important thing is to survive in the new environment. As leaders, our task is to address the most urgent issues, adjust the operational structure to the new market circumstances, stabilize the situation and gain time. The management techniques necessary to deal with this first phase are usually known to the organization. They are, for the most part, technical solutions that we have learned from previous crises. It is about solving problems in the short term, with greater control of expenses and restructuring plans that allow the organization to “weather the storm”.

But surviving the crisis is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Because, in a second phase, we must necessarily address the underlying causes of the crisis, and we must develop the capacity to thrive in a new reality. This phase of adaptation is particularly difficult, as we embark on a new path for which we do not yet have the maps; on this path, the recipes of the past and our previous experiences not only do not help us, but also prevent us from seeing the new reality.

Therefore, in this second adaptive phase there are no easy answers or definitive solutions. New challenges require adaptation processes that are not yet obvious to our organizations. In today’s conversation we are going to explore the keys to leadership that will not only allow our organizations to overcome the crisis, but will also help us face the adaptive challenges posed by the new Era of Collaboration.

Redefining the work of leadership

If our growth model is no longer useful, it is clear that we cannot rely on our current leadership model either. We must be able to redefine it, but that is not easy. The proof is that, although we are all aware that leadership has changed and “is no longer what it used to be”, we continue to cling to the recipes of the past: hierarchical organisational models and ways of doing things based on “command and control”. We are still determined to use anachronistic tools to respond to a completely new time, a time marked by accelerated change and the presence of more and more complex social structures.

If there is one thing that is clear at this point, it is that the answers cannot come from the top of the organizational pyramids. The problems are too complex for the answers to be in the hands of a few. The starting point must necessarily be an exercise in humility. We must accept that, as individual leaders, we do not have the capacity to find the answers we need. To face the complex challenges we now face, the response must be collective.

In the Age of Collaboration, leadership has become an art that combines improvisation and experimentation. The challenges we face are exceptionally complex, and that is why the leader no longer has a concrete answer capable of solving everything. Today, the role of the leader is precisely to explore the new reality to identify those key questions that will allow us to anticipate the impact of changes in our organization. The leader must also be able to mobilize all the people in the organization to assume a collective responsibility that allows us to face the problems.

We can say, therefore, that leadership 2.0 is more of an art than a science. It is the art of exploring the future in search of the emergence of innovative solutions that will allow our organizations to flourish in the new era. The 2.0 label is an explicit recognition that the leadership of the future requires a new version that, as with technologies, must reach our organizations through experimentation, based on management models that improve in each iteration with the new reality.

The need for a new balance

Perhaps the time has come to seek a new balance between the need for scalable and effective organizations and the increasingly present need to build truly people-centered organizations. This new balance must combine the priorities of tasks and the priorities of people.

We must be able to coordinate the efforts of our people without being forced to create bureaucratic, hierarchical and inflexible organizations. We have to manage to control results and maintain efficiency without sacrificing people’s creativity. Finally, we must find a new balance between the personal needs for freedom and autonomy and the organization’s needs for prediction and control.

To achieve all these goals, we have no choice but to introduce major changes in our organizations. I think Gary Hamel sums them up very well in his book “Leadership of the Future”:

Our companies not only have to be operationally efficient, but they also have to be agile and capable of responding to the changes we are experiencing. Leadership and innovation cannot be the heritage of a few, but must be a work shared by all.

And if we are preparing for the future, we cannot leave out the new generations of young people: the only way to attract and retain
new digital talent
– that of the generations that have been born and raised surrounded by digital devices – we must create truly people-centric organizations.

In short, it is a matter of creating a new operational culture where the new values of cooperation, participation, collaboration and transparency are a reality, and do not end up becoming mere management rhetoric.

A Question of Mental Models

We must begin the exploration of the leadership of the future by recognizing that what we know as “modern” management – in reality it was born at the end of the nineteenth century – is not a mere set of management tools and practices, but is a real paradigm, a set of beliefs strongly rooted in our thinking, a mental model that tells us what is possible and what is not possible. That is why, because it is an internalized and assumed mental model, resistance to change is so difficult to overcome. That is why, when we try to change something, we hear so often that “No, we have already tried that”, or “No, we know that it does not work”.

It is not, therefore, a question of technologies or tools. The reality is that we have built our organizations following the patterns of the Industrial Age. That is why they are scalable, efficient and productive; that is why they are not designed or designed for people to give the best of themselves, which is what we need in this new Era of Collaboration.

As an example of this gap, we can expose two basic premises of modern management that we must necessarily review:

The first is the belief that leading is about knowing what our people have to do, and getting them to do it in the most economical and productive way possible. If we start from the premise that, in times of uncertainty, the leader is no longer in possession of the answer, it is clear that his main role cannot be to impose his individual vision. The key is to seek the initiative, creativity and passion of each of the people who make up the organization, to build a collaborative solution.

The second is a premise that underlies modern management, and which tells us that leadership must necessarily be “oligarchic”. That is, it must be exercised by a small group of people who have control over the others. If the only possible response to complex challenges is a collective response, it makes no sense to defend the preponderance of a few. Unlike in the past, leadership and innovation must become a shared work for all.

Adaptive leadership

“One of the most common mistakes in leadership is to treat adaptive problems as if they were technical problems.” Ronald Heifetz

In his book “Leadership Without Easy Answers,” Ronald Heifetz identifies two broad categories of problems within leadership: technical problems and adaptation problems.

Technical problems – to which we are already accustomed – are easy to define, and to address them we usually have a clear and established solution. That does not imply that they are simple, but they can be solved within the framework of our previous experience, simply by using knowledge, methodologies and tools that already exist. Solving a technical problem does not require changes in people. The only thing we need to modify is the process.

When faced with a technical challenge, the problem and the solution are already known. We are facing a challenge for which they have already developed a successful adaptation. So the job is really about aligning people and mobilizing them to do their best and diligently do something they already know how to do.

On the contrary, adaptive challenges are unclear and difficult to identify. They are closely linked to the habits and customs most ingrained in the members of an organization, so they go unnoticed. We have internalized them in such a way that we are not able to see them. They seem invisible because they are part of us. And that is precisely where the key lies: in adaptive challenges, the people involved are part of the problem and, at the same time, we are part of the solution.

Therefore, the resolution of an adaptive challenge requires that the actors involved modify our behaviors, our skills and our mental schemes. And we know from experience that this is one of the most complicated tasks to carry out in any organization.

In biology, an adaptation process is a situation that demands a response that is outside the organism’s current repertoire. In an evolutionary sense, the organism must distinguish between the DNA it must maintain, the DNA it must discard, and the innovations it must introduce in order to take advantage of and thrive in the new environment. Applying this biological metaphor to leadership helps us understand that the work of adaptation is both conservative and progressive.

The challenge of adaptive leadership it is about knowing how to make the most of the history and capabilities of the organization, without allowing oneself to be enslaved by the previous legacy. It is not a matter of completely “shaking up” an organization so that none of the above makes sense anymore. The process of adaptation is as much about conservation as it is about reinvention. It is about making specific modifications in the values and new capabilities that the organization requires to face the challenges of the future. It is, in short, about
change a little to change everything
.

The search for emergency

In organizations, as in living systems, change always happens through an emergency process. It’s something that not everyone knows, and it’s worth emphasizing. Large-scale changes, those that really make a significant impact, don’t come from grand visions, or from plans and strategies designed at the top of organizations. Most of the time, changes begin as small personal initiatives located on the periphery of organizations.

These initiatives tend to remain isolated, and in most cases have no influence on the rest of the organization. However, when these small local initiatives connect with each other, the exchange of information and learning that takes place produces a multiplier effect; an effect that triggers emergence: starting from separate, seemingly irrelevant efforts, significant changes suddenly emerge, changes capable of altering the course and functioning of the entire organization.

This sudden emergence of innovative solutions – the result of small interconnected initiatives – allows us to face the complex challenges of organizations, and this is what we know as an emergency. The key is that the emerging process always brings new levels of capacity to organizations, much higher than the sum of local efforts alone. This is what happened, at the time, with exceptionally complex challenges both politically and socially. Such is the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union or, more recently, the arrival of
Barack Obama
to the presidency of the United States.

Where to start?

Here are five simple steps for you to start exploring the new realities of the Age of Collaboration today. This exploration will allow you to seek the emergence of a new life both personally and professionally, a life that allows you to develop your potential to the fullest:

1. Get out of your “Comfort Zone”. Spend some of your time exploring the new reality and finding the trends that will affect your life, your markets, and your organization in the near future.
2. Develop the habits of adaptive leadership. Learn to differentiate technical problems, which you already know how to solve, from adaptive challenges, which require questioning what you already know.
3. It mobilizes collective attention towards future challenges, creates the freedom and space for people to contribute and explore the future, turning innovation into a shared work for all.
4. It builds the organization’s capacity to deal with adaptive challenges. It encourages courageous conversations. It protects critics. The most difficult and thorny issues need to be taken out of the “coffee machine” environment to discuss them openly.
5. Manage the uncertainty that any change causes within a productive range. Bring your emotional self to work as well. If the adaptation demands painful adjustments, show your empathy with the people affected.

When we face the unknown, the key to finding the answer we need is not in the previous answers – the solutions of the past – but in asking the right questions. Those new questions are what will allow us to explore the current situation to find, together, the new solutions we need. We are helping organizations explore the future and new models of value creation through
Discovery Workshops
with a very specific objective: to develop the capacities of organizations to face adaptive challenges and innovate in people management.

It is about getting out of the “day-to-day” for a few hours to observe what is happening around us; reflecting on the impact of changes in our value creation models; and defining new business and leadership opportunities in people management. In short, it is about finding the new questions that will allow us to discover innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the Age of Collaboration.

Einstein formulated it brilliantly:

If you had to solve a problem in an hour and your life depended on it, you would spend 55 minutes finding the right question, and 5 minutes for the answer.