Adaptive Leadership in a Global Economy

Perspectives for Application and Scholarship

Mohammed Raei, Harriette Thurber Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000523171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo organizzativo
• Index: Business

With the entire world experiencing the global pandemic and its aftermath, VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) conditions have never been more extreme and the need for adaptive leadership never more urgent. But how is adaptive leadership applied outside Western cultures? How can it be taught through leadership development programs? Which tools enhance its practice and its teaching? How does adaptive leadership relate to other key theories and practices?

This volume answers these questions and more as it illustrates how adaptive leadership practices address some of the world's most pressing challenges-political and cultural division, remote work, crisis management-across a variety of sectors. Adaptive leadership has been explained as a key leadership approach for dealing with adaptive, as distinguished from technical or predictable, problems, especially prevalent in complex environments. However, adaptive leadership scholarship has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity and casual application of its core concepts. It remains solidly Western in its prescriptions. This book will expand readers' understanding of adaptive leadership and its potential to solve local and global adaptive challenges and will explore its relevance and application to cultures outside the United States.

Aiming to increase conceptual clarity about adaptive leadership to enhance future scholarship and application and illustrate novel approaches and perspectives, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of leadership, strategy, and organizational studies.

Part I Foundations

1 Adaptive and Complexity Leadership: Stronger Together

Mohammed Raei and Cheryl LeMaster

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099109-1

The third decade of the 21st century has erupted in a multitude of momentous events: a worldwide pandemic exposing the ugly disparities that lurk just below society's surface; the Black Lives Matter movement highlighting the consequences of centuries of American inequality; the rise of insurrectionists shocking the world with a politically induced attack on the United States Capitol; pandemic-related economic instability disproportionately effecting the most vulnerable; and finally, weather-related effects of climate change, a threat likely to inflict irreversible damage to our planet. Equally fearsome, according to Freedom House's annual report, Freedom in the World 2020, world democracy has been in retreat for 14 consecutive years (Repucci, 2020). The politics of fear and rage gave rise to the election of “strong man” leaders in established democracies around the world: Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course, former President Trump in the United States.

The world feels precarious and the search for a better way bears intense urgency. To survive and thrive in this radically altered landscape demands the skill to adapt. It calls for innovative thinking and new mental models. It requires the capacity to shed the old and embrace the new. It makes essential the ability to harness the conflict and tension that fear, ambiguity, and difference can generate. We believe that the promise of a brighter tomorrow demands that we cast hate and zealotry aside, embrace opposition and criticism with truly open minds, listen closely to our perceived adversaries, reject the power of self-interest, and work together for the greater good. Above all, adapting to our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world means that we must embrace new approaches to leadership and change.

Leadership scholars Uhl-Bien and Arena (2017) argue that we must learn to enable adaptive, rather than ordered, responses to complexity. In this chapter, we compare and contrast two leadership models with the capacity to help transform our thinking from mechanistic to adaptive and create the organizational agility necessary to survive and thrive in today's world.

The chapter is divided into four sections: first, we look at Heifetz's adaptive leadership (AL) framework; second, we review complexity leadership (CL) theory and one of its key models; third, we compare and contrast the two approaches. Finally, in closing, we posit how these approaches can be used synergistically in organizations to harness change and spark innovation.

Adaptive Leadership

Heifetz (1994) distinguishes between adaptive challenges and technical problems. Technical problems have an existing solution and do not require much learning to solve; frequently, one can hire an expert to resolve the problem. Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, require both the stakeholders and leaders to engage in learning as no clear solution exists for the problem. Adaptive problems are generally not clearly defined and a technical solution is insufficient. Consider that developing emotionally intelligent leaders in a large engineering firm is an adaptive challenge, but improving cyber security in the company is a technical challenge.

Heifetz et al. (2009b) explained that adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexities of beliefs, values, and loyalties rather than technical complications; they stir intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. For these reasons, organizations often avoid the value-laden facets of a problem and try to solve the issue through technical means (Heifetz et al., 2009b).

Adaptive leadership (AL) encourages learning by asking tough questions and by reframing expectations. This type of learning, which Heifetz (1994) calls adaptive learning, moves beyond learning new skills or knowledge; it involves learning new ways of acting and being, and learning to resolve “conflicts in the values people hold” (Heifetz, 1994, p. 22). Moreover, it is a learning that requires unlearning (Heifetz & Laurie, 2003).

Adaptive learning is difficult and can result in negative feelings, including psychological pain and a sense of loss (Heifetz, 1994), as well as feeling incompetent, irrelevant to others, and betrayed (Heifetz et al., 2009b). Because of these negative feelings, stakeholders resist change and engage in adaptive work avoidance. Work avoidance can be seen through a propensity to focus on technical issues instead of the adaptive challenge, blaming positional leadership, other stakeholders, or external enemies for the problem or absence of a solution, denying that problems exist, or jumping to conclusions. Thus, one of the main responsibilities for an adaptive leader is to overcome adaptive work avoidance and keep the focus on the adaptive issue.

In AL, the leader uses interventions—such as encouraging frank conversation about conflicting opinions or strategies—to create progress on adaptive challenges. However, adaptive challenges can lead to distress and if the stress is too high, stakeholders might “fight, flee, or freeze” (Heifetz et al., 2009a, p. 66). Therefore, a leader must maintain the pressure of adaptive work within a tolerable zone. Conversely, if the stress is too low, there is little action on the adaptive challenges. Heifetz (1994) has employed the metaphor of a pressure cooker to describe this dynamic: When pressure is too high, the leader decreases the heat; when inertia is detected, the leader increases the heat.

The psychological environment in which adaptive work takes place is called a holding environment (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of the interior condition required to create the holding environment). It is a place to hold the distress caused by adaptive work, where the conflicts between the various stakeholders are surfaced in a psychologically safe manner. The holding environment provides a structure to discuss specific perspectives, values, and ideas vis-à-vis adaptive challenges (Heifetz et al., 2009b). Leaders strengthen the holding environment by establishing lateral bonds of affection, trust, and camaraderie along with vertical bonds of trust with those in authority. The conflicts around adaptive challenges are not interpersonal conflicts, though they might initially present themselves as such. The goal, then, of AL is to allow for disagreement on issues, perspectives, or values (Heifetz et al., 2009b) instead of attacking personal character.

For Heifetz (1994), leadership was strictly defined in relationship to adaptive work and dealing with adaptive challenges. The strategies that leaders employ to create movement on an adaptive issue depend on whether they possess or lack authority (Heifetz, 1994). Leadership with authority comes with advantages and limitations. The advantages are an ability to create and control a holding environment, access to the systemic issues surrounding the challenge, and knowing the different issues facing an organization or community. Additionally, authority allows a leader to “(a) direct attention to the issues; (b) gather and test information—perform reality testing; (c) manage information and frame issues; (d) orchestrate conflicting perspectives; and (e) choose the decisionmaking [sic] process” (Heifetz, 1994, p. 113).

According to Heifetz (1994), a leader with authority also:

• identifies the adaptive challenge and diagnoses “the situation in light of the values at stake, and unbundles the issues that come with it” (p. 128);
• keeps the distress level within an endurable range;
• keeps attention on ripening issues and not distractions, and responds to work avoidance;
• gives the work back to the group at a level they can handle; and
• protects “voices of leadership without authority” (p. 128), providing cover to those who ask tough questions and create distress.

AL intervention strategies include asking questions regarding problem definition and possible solutions, showing the reality of external threats, disorienting people from their existing roles, allowing for conflict, and challenging norms.

Complexity Leadership

CL is a model that provides guidelines and tools for navigating a VUCA landscape. Derived from the physical realm and common to all life forms, complexity theory is an approach that suggests an organic process originating from interacting systems and the rich connectivity of a system's parts. It offers a fundamentally different perspective on leadership and the processes for how leaders can structure and manage adaptation and innovation in organizations. With a complexity systems perspective, leaders can channel the power of self-organization and emergence to produce adaptive responses.

Complexity theory is concerned with the emergence of order in dynamic nonlinear systems. Ralph Stacey was the first to apply the theory to organizations (Burnes, 2005). Burnes mapped the complexity course ahead when he shared others’ convictions that leaders would need to “rethink the nature of hierarchy and control, learn the art of managing in changing contexts, promote self-organizing processes, and learn how to use small change to create large effects” (Burnes, 2005, p. 82). Derived from the study of complex dynamical systems known as complexity science, CL is a form of organizational “governance” that moves from top-down, command and control, heroic leadership to a more organic form of shared leadership practice.

To fully appreciate CL, it is helpful to understand the fundamental principles of the originating science. The following section describes basic complexity constructs that are evident in adaptive organizational practices, and provides a powerful metaphor for how leaders may increase organizational agility by enabling adaptive (versus ordered) responses to complexity.

Complexity Science

Complexity science is a theory about the interaction dynamics among multiple, networked agents (people, technology, information, resources), and how emergent events—such as creativity, learning, or adaptability—arise from these exchanges (Marion, 2008). We note that the term “complexity” does not mean complicated or intricate. The meaning is based on the Latin form of the word complexus, as in comprehension and wholeness. It refers to the dynamical interaction of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS) and it speaks to the emergent properties at work in the (whole) system. Simply put, complexity is about rich interconnectivity.

The emergence of an organizational theory based on complexity has enabled new ways of examining and theorizing about organizational activities (Styhre, 2002; Tsoukas, 1998).

According to Olson and Eoyang (2001), “Rather than focus at the macro ‘strategic’ level of the organizational system, complexity theory suggests that the most powerful processes of adaptation occur at the micro level, where relationships, interactions, small experiments, and simple rules shape emerging patterns” (p. xxxiii).

According to Wheatley (2006), the growth of complexity science has seen the merging of natural sciences with business management to tell a story about the nature of how people interact. Through the use of metaphor and the lens of complexity, Wheatley sees systems rather than isolated players and parts that transform themselves from machines to dynamic, interconnected living systems, possessing the capacity to adapt and grow.

In 2021, Wheatley's interconnected and interdependent systemic challenges are on full display in the global pandemic. A powerful illustration of the author's message is offered by Tufekci (2020) as she considers complex systems thinking and its role in our response to glo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• List of Contributors
• Forward
• Introduction
• PART I: Foundations
• PART II: Adaptive Leadership in Action
• PART III: Adaptive Leadership Across Cultures
• Index