How well do you zoom out in your leadership?
As our challenges have become more complex, interconnected, and messy, it's become necessary for us to reconsider the way we lead in an effort to address them. We need to zoom out more to appreciate the interdependence of different parts within the system rather than zooming in on the system's separate parts.
Leadership has traditionally been studied and taught as an individualistic exercise; that is, we have zoomed in on one person's behaviour. However, leadership is never done alone. We always work with other people, but modern Western societies have focused on the individual's behaviours and traits. Its as if we have assumed that 'the leader' can look at the system and change it at will (see the left-hand illustration below).
As the challenges become more complex and messy, we need to respond in different ways to make a difference to them. An individual claiming to know the answers and leading the way is not helpful with a complex challenge.
It's not helpful for two fundamental reasons.
The first is that even if the individual does know the answers, the solution requires other people to do things differently. For them to shift their beliefs and do things differently requires more than someone telling them to do so. People need to work it out for themselves. It’s not just a psychological or habitual transformation but one underpinned by a physiological change, too. Physically, we develop new neural pathways in our brains as we 'work it out'. Telling someone the answer rarely enables the creation of such pathways.
Secondly, it is highly unlikely that any one individual can know enough or have enough perspective to solve a ‘complex problem’. Complex problems involve a whole heap of participants within the system. It requires all the perspectives of the system to even understand the challenge, let alone work out a way forward. "The leader" is just one of those people and one of those perspectives (see the right-hand illustration below).
So, leadership in complex and uncertain circumstances requires us to work with groups of people, and it demands something different from the person who might consider themselves the ‘leader’. If they're trying to mobilise a group of people to see and do things differently, then they are posing questions or pointing to challenges that need to be resolved by the group rather than just providing solutions they've come up with earlier.
This brings us to the Adaptive Leadership Framework. It has been evolving for 40 years at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University under the leadership of Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky. The group there have developed a framework underpinned by an understanding of complex adaptive systems (or living systems), but it's just a framework that actually helps you work in these challenging and uncertain environments without necessarily having to understand all of the theory of complex adaptive systems. I believe the framework is pure genius. I love it and find it really helpful. There's a certain simplicity to it on the other side of all of that complexity.
I've developed a scorecard for my understanding of the Adaptive Leadership Framework. Everyone's interpretation is a little bit different, but it certainly retains a lot of the original framework and ideas from Heifetz and Linsky. I invite you to try the scorecard out by clicking the button below.
I hope that it's useful for you to start assessing your strengths and perhaps some areas for development or blind spots. In working with complexity, I certainly don't expect it to all be new to you because we all live daily in complex systems. In many senses, this is just articulating something that you already know.
I’d love to hear any feedback you might have about the scorecard.