For Wizard Kim - W1DP

lexicon, was in pole position to become the master of the revolution too” (Figes & Kolonitskii 1999, 1–2). Of course, what particular future is embodied in the flag is still up for debate, so it is not that the flag leads because of what it symbolizes but rather that its followers attribute to the flag a future that they find attractive—even if that attribution is not consciously agreed on by the followers.

Yet, one could still argue that nonhuman leader- ship fails because the nonhuman element of the net- work does not instigate the changes and does not act as a mobilizer of networks: Human leaders are not naked, but naked technologies cannot lead because they do not instigate the vision or mobilization. Thus, it is the pivotal creative role played by humans in these collaborative hybrids that distin- guishes them primus inter pares (first among equals). However, this is a little like saying the driver is the most important part of a car; in some sense that might be true, but without a car a person cannot drive. Precisely what is the creative force of the network is debatable: God, alcohol, human emotion, destiny, culture, and genes are all potential culprits here. Moreover, because invented futures have to be inscribed and communicated, and because humans are never without technological supports, one might still argue that human-nonhu- man networks are critical for leadership. One might suggest that the search for an essence is irrelevant because the important element is the hybrid, and neither the elements that comprise the hybrid nor any alleged network is the essence.

If this is right, then people should reconsider how people strengthen the links in the hybrid networks because, of course, this also means that people can- not consider the nonhuman as a leader in isolation either, not because nonhumans do not embody voli- tion but rather because nonhuman leadership is as mythically pure as human leadership. There lies the rub—according to ANT it isn’t the consciousness of leaders that makes them leaders; it’s their hybridity.

—Keith Grint

Further Reading Branigan, T., & Vidal, J. (2002, July 22). Hands up or we strip!

Guardian, p. 7.

Callon, M. (1986). The sociology of an actor network. In M. Callon, J. Law, & A. Rip (Eds.), Mapping the dynamics of science and technology, pp. 19–34. London: Macmillan.

Edwards, R. (1979). Contested terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. London: Heinemann.

Figes, O., & Kolonitskii, B. (1999). Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The language and symbols of 1917. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Grint, K., & Woolgar, S. (1997). The machine at work. Cam- bridge, MA: Polity Press.

Latour, B. (1988). The prince for machines as well as machina- tions. In B. Elliot (Ed.), Technology and social process, pp. 20–43. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Law, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds.). (1999). Actor-network theory and after. Boston: Blackwell.

Warry, J. (1980). Warfare in the classical world. London: Sala- mander Books.

! ADAPTIVE WORK

Our language fails us in many aspects of our lives, entrapping us in a set of cultural assumptions like cattle herded by fences into a corral. Gender pro- nouns, for example, corral us into teaching children that God is a “he,” distancing girls and women from the experience of the divine in themselves.

Our language fails us, too, when we discuss, ana- lyze, and practice leadership. We commonly talk about “leaders” in organizations or politics when we actually mean “people in positions of managerial or political authority.” Although we have confounded leadership with authority in nearly every journalistic and scholarly article written on “leadership” during the last one hundred years, we know intuitively that these two phenomena are distinct when we complain all too frequently in politics and business that “the leadership isn’t exercising any leadership,” by which we actually mean that “people in authority aren’t exercising any leadership.” Whether people with for- mal, charismatic, or otherwise informal authority actually practice leadership on any given issue at any moment in time ought to remain a separate question answered with wholly different criteria than those used to define a relationship of formal or informal authority. As we know, all too many people are

8———Adaptive Work

skilled at gaining authority, and thus a following, but do not then lead.

Moreover, we assume a logical connection between the words leader and follower, as if this dyad (pair) were an absolute and inherently logical structure. It is not. The most interesting leadership operates without anyone experiencing anything remotely similar to the experience of “following.” Indeed, most leadership mobilizes those people who are opposed or who sit on the fence, in addition to allies and friends. Allies and friends come relatively cheap; the people in opposition have the most to lose in any significant process of change. When mobi- lized, allies and friends become, not followers, but rather activated participants—employees or citizens who themselves often lead in turn by taking respon- sibility for tackling tough challenges, often beyond expectations and often beyond their authority. They become partners. When mobilized, opposition and fence-sitters become engaged with the issues, pro- voked to work through the problems of loss, loyalty, and competence embedded in the change they are challenged to make. Indeed, they may continue to fight, providing an ongoing source of diverse views necessary for the adaptive success of the business or community. Far from becoming “aligned” and far from having any experience of “following,” they are mobilized by leadership to wrestle with new com- plexities that demand tough trade-offs in their ways of working or living. Of course, in time they may begin to trust, admire, and appreciate the person or group who is leading, and thereby confer informal authority on the person or group, but they would not generally experience the emergence of that appreci- ation or trust by the phrase “I’ve become a fol- lower.”

If leadership is different from the capacity to gain formal or informal authority, and therefore different from the ability to gain a “following”—attracting influence and accruing power—then what can anchor our understanding of it?

Leadership takes place in the context of problems and challenges. Indeed, it makes little sense to describe leadership when everything and everyone in an organization are humming along just fine, even when processes of influence and authority will be

virtually ubiquitous in coordinating routine activity. Leadership becomes necessary to businesses and communities when people have to change their ways rather than continue to operate according to current structures, procedures, and processes. Beyond tech- nical problems, for which authoritative and manage- rial expertise will suffice, adaptive challenges demand leadership that can engage people in facing challenging realities and then changing at least some of their priorities, attitudes, and behavior in order to thrive in a changing world.

Mobilizing people to meet adaptive challenges, then, is at the heart of leadership practice. In the short term, leadership is an activity that mobilizes people to meet an immediate challenge. In the medium and long terms, leadership generates new cultural norms that enable people to meet an ongoing stream of adaptive challenges in a world that will likely pose an ongoing set of adaptive realities and pressures. Thus, with a longer view, leadership develops an organization’s or community’s adaptive capacity.

Adaptive work may be described in seven ways. First, adaptive work is necessary in response to

problem situations for which solutions lie outside the current way of operating. We can distinguish techni- cal challenges, which are amenable to current expert- ise, from adaptive challenges, which are not. Although every problem can be understood as a gap between aspirations and reality, technical challenges present a gap between aspirations and reality that can be closed through applying existing know-how. For example, a patient comes to his doctor with an infec- tion, and the doctor uses her knowledge to diagnose the illness and prescribe a cure.

In contrast, an adaptive challenge is created by a gap between a desired state and reality that cannot be closed using existing approaches alone. Progress in the situation requires more than the application of cur- rent expertise, authoritative decision making, standard operating procedures, or culturally informed behav- iors. For example, a patient with heart disease may need to change his or her way of life: diet, exercise, smoking, and the imbalances that cause unhealthy stress. To make those changes, the patient will have to take responsibility for his or her health and learn a new set of priorities and habits. (See Table 1.)

Adaptive Work———9

Second, adaptive work demands learning. An adaptive challenge exists when the people them- selves are the problem and when progress requires a retooling, in a sense, of their own ways of thinking and operating. The gap between aspirations and real- ity closes when they learn new ways. Thus, a con- sulting firm may offer a brilliant diagnostic analysis and set of recommendations, but nothing will be solved until that analysis and those recommenda- tions are lived in the new way that people operate. Until then, the consulting firm has no solutions, only proposals.

RESPONSIBILITY SHIFT

Third, adaptive work requires a shift in responsibil- ity from the shoulders of the authority figures and the authority structure to the stakeholders (people with an interest in an outcome) themselves. In con- trast to expert problem solving, adaptive work requires a different form of deliberation and a differ- ent kind of responsibility taking. In doing adaptive work, responsibility needs to be felt in a far more widespread fashion. At best, an organization would have its members know that there are many technical problems for which looking to authority for answers is appropriate and efficient but that for the adaptive set of challenges, looking primarily to authority for answers becomes self-defeating. When people make the classic error of treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical, they wait for the person in authority to know what to do. He or she then makes a best guess—probably just a guess—while the many sit back and wait to see whether the guess pans out. Frequently enough, when it does not pan out, people get rid of that person in authority and go find

another one, all the while operating under the illu- sion that “if only we had the right ‘leader,’ our prob- lems would be solved.” Progress is impeded by inap- propriate dependency, and thus a major task of leadership is the development of responsibility tak- ing by stakeholders themselves.

Fourth, adaptive work requires people to distin- guish what is precious and essential from what is expendable within their culture. In cultural adapta- tion the job is to take the best from history, leave behind that which is no longer serviceable, and through innovation learn ways to thrive in the new environment.

Therefore, adaptive work is inherently conserva- tive as well as progressive. The point of innovation is to conserve what is best from history as the commu- nity moves into the future. As in biology, a success- ful adaptation takes the best from its past set of com- petencies and loses the DNA that is no longer useful. Thus, unlike many current conceptions of culturally “transforming” processes, many of which are ahis- torical—as if one begins all anew—adaptive work, profound is it may be in terms of change, must honor ancestry and history at the same time that it chal- lenges them.

Adaptive work generates resistance in us because adaptation requires us to let go of certain elements of our past ways of working or living, which means to experience loss—loss of competence, loss of report- ing relationships, loss of jobs, loss of traditions, or loss of loyalty to the people who taught us the les- sons of our heritage. Thus, an adaptive challenge generates a situation that forces us to make tough tradeoffs. The source of the resistance that people have to change isn’t resistance to change per se; it is resistance to loss. People love change when they

10——— Adaptive Work

Table 1: Technical and Adaptive Work Solutions and Primary Locus of

Kind of Work Problem Definition Implementation Responsibility for the Work Technical Clear Clear Authority Technical and Adaptive Clear Requires Learning Authority and Stakeholders Adaptive Requires Learning Requires Learning Stakeholder > Authority

Source: R. A. Heifetz (1994, 76).

know it is beneficial. Nobody gives the lottery ticket back when he or she wins. Leadership must con- tend, then, with the various forms of feared and real losses that accompany adaptive work.

Anchored to the tasks of mobi- lizing people to thrive in new and challenging contexts, leadership is not simply about change; more profoundly leadership is about identifying that which is worth conserving. It is the conserving of the precious dimensions of our past that makes the pains of change worth sustaining.

IMPROVISATION

Fifth, adaptive work demands experimentation. In biology, the adaptability of a species depends on the multiplicity of experiments that are being run con- stantly within its gene pool, increasing the odds that in that distributed intelligence some diverse member of the species will have the means to succeed in a new context. Similarly, in cultural adaptation, an organi- zation or community needs to be running multiple experiments and learning fast from these experiments in order to see “which horses to ride into the future.”

Technical problem solving appropriately and effi- ciently depends on authoritative experts for knowl- edge and decisive action.

In contrast, dealing with adaptive challenges requires a comfort with not knowing where to go or how to move next. In mobilizing adaptive work from an authority position, leadership takes the form of protecting elements of deviance and creativity in the organization in spite of the inefficiencies associ- ated with those elements. If creative or outspoken people generate conflict, then so be it. Conflict becomes an engine of innovation rather than solely a source of dangerous inefficiency. Managing the dynamic tension between creativity and efficiency becomes an ongoing part of leadership practice for which there exists no equilibrium point at which this tension disappears. Leadership becomes an improv-

isation, however frustrating it may be to not know the answers.

Sixth, the time frame of adaptive work is markedly different from that of technical work. People need time to learn new ways—to sift through what is pre- cious from what is expendable and to innovate in ways that enable people to carry forward into the future that which they continue to hold precious from the past. Moses took forty years to bring the children of Israel to the Promised Land, not because it was such a long walk from Egypt, but rather because it took that much time for the people to leave behind the dependent mentality of slavery and generate the capacity for self-government guided by faith in some- thing ineffable. (See Figure 1.)

Because people have so much difficulty sustain- ing prolonged periods of disturbance and uncer- tainty, people naturally engage in a variety of efforts to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible, even if it means avoiding adaptive work and begging the tough issues. Most forms of adaptive failure are a product of our difficulty in containing prolonged periods of experimentation and the difficult conver- sations that accompany them.

Work avoidance is simply the natural effort to restore a more familiar order, to restore equilibrium. Although many forms of work avoidance operate

Adaptive Work ———11

Source: Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie

Figure 1. Technical Problem or Adaptive Challenge?

across cultures and peoples, two common pathways appear to exist: the displacement of responsibility and the diversion of attention. Both pathways work all too well in the short term, even if they leave peo- ple more exposed and vulnerable in the medium and long terms. Some common forms of displacement of responsibility include scapegoating, blaming the per- sistence of problems on authority, externalizing the enemy, and killing the messenger. Diverting atten- tion can take the form of fake remedies, such as the Golden Calf of the Bible’s Book of Exodus; an effort to define problems to fit one’s competence; repeated structural adjustments; the faulty use of consultants, committees, and task forces; sterile conflicts and proxy fights (“let’s watch the gladiator fight!”); and outright denial.

Seventh, adaptive work is a normative concept. The concept of adaptation arises from scientific efforts to understand biological evolution. Applied to the change of cultures and societies, the concept becomes a useful, if inexact, metaphor. For example, species evolve, whereas cultures learn. Evolution is generally understood by scientists as a matter of chance, whereas societies will often consciously deliberate, plan, and intentionally experiment. Close to our normative concern, biological evolution con- forms to laws of survival. Societies, on the other hand, generate purposes beyond survival. The con- cept of adaptation applied to culture raises the ques- tion, “Adapt to what, for what purpose?”

In biology the “objective function” of adaptive work is straightforward: to thrive in new environ- ments. Survival of the self and one’s gene-carrying kin defines the direction in which animals adapt. A situation becomes an adaptive challenge because it threatens the capacity of a species to pass on its genetic heritage. Thus, when a species multiplies its own kind and succeeds in passing on its genes, it is said to be “thriving” in its environment.

Thriving is more than coping. Nothing is trivial in biology about adaptation. Some adaptive leaps trans- form the capacity of a species by sparking an ongo- ing and profound process of adaptive change that leads to a vastly expanded range of living.

In human societies “thriving” takes on a host of values not restricted to survival of one’s own kind. At

times human beings will even trade off their own survival for values such as liberty, justice, and faith. Thus, adaptive work in cultures involves both the clarification of values and the assessment of realities that challenge the realization of those values.

Because most organizations and communities honor a mix of values, the competition within this mix largely explains why adaptive work so often involves conflict. People with competing values engage one another as they confront a shared situa- tion from their own points of view. At its extreme, and in the absence of better methods of social change, the conflict over values can be violent. The U.S. Civil War changed the meaning of union and individual freedom. In 1857 fulfilling the preamble to the Con- stitutional goal “to insure domestic tranquility” meant the return of escaped slaves to their owners; in 1957 it meant the use of federal troops to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Some realities threaten not only a set of values beyond survival, but also the very existence of a society if these realities are not discovered and met early on by the value-clarifying and reality-testing functions of that society. In the view of many envi- ronmentalists, for example, our focus on the produc- tion of wealth rather than co-existence with nature has led us to neglect fragile factors in our ecosystem. These factors may become relevant to us when finally they begin to challenge our central values of health and survival, but by then, we may have paid a high price in damage already done, and the costs of and odds against adaptive adjustment may have increased enormously.

Adaptive work, then, requires us to deliberate on the values by which we seek to thrive and demands diagnostic inquiry into the realities that threaten the realization of those values. Beyond legitimizing a convenient set of assumptions about reality, beyond denying or avoiding the internal contradictions in some of the values we hold precious, and beyond coping, adaptive work involves proactively seeking to clarify aspirations or develop new ones, and then involves the hard work of innovation, experimenta- tion, and cultural change to realize a closer approxi- mation of those aspirations by which we would define “thriving.”

12——— Adaptive Work

The normative tests of adaptive work, then, involve an appraisal of both the processes by which orienting values are clarified in an organization or community and the quality of reality testing by which a more accurate rather than convenient diag- nosis is achieved. For example, by these tests serving up fake remedies for our collective troubles by scapegoating and externalizing the enemy, as was done in extreme form in Nazi Germany, might gen- erate throngs of misled supporters who readily grant to charlatans extraordinary authority in the short run, but they would not constitute adaptive work. Nor would political efforts to gain influence and author- ity by pandering to people’s longing for easy answers constitute leadership. Indeed, misleading people is likely over time to produce adaptive failure.

—Ronald A. Heifetz

Further Reading Foster, R. (2001). Creative destruction: Why companies that

are built to last underperform the market—and how to suc- cessfully transform them. New York: Doubleday.

Freud, S. (1959). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. New York: Norton.

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers (p. 76). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1988). Mobilizing adaptive work: Beyond visionary leadership. In Conger, Spreitzer, & Lawler (Eds.), The Leader’s Change Handbook: An Essen- tial Guide to Setting Direction and Taking Action. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Kuhn, T. A. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

May, R. (1975). The courage to create. New York: Bantam. Pascale, R. T., Milleman, M., & Gioja, L. (2000). Surfing the

edge of chaos: The laws of nature and the new laws of busi- ness. New York: Crown.

Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. New York: Harper & Row.

Tucker, R. C. (1981). Politics as leadership. Columbia: Univer- sity of Missouri Press.

Wildavsky, A. (1984). The nursing father: Moses as a political leader. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.

! AFRICA See Apartheid in South Africa, Demise of; Haile Selassie; Harris, William Wade; Kenyatta, Jomo; Lumumba, Patrice;

Mandela, Nelson; Mau Mau Rebellion; Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Nkrumah, Kwame; Nyerere, Julius; Shaka Zulu; Suez Crisis of 1956; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions; Tutu, Desmond

! AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADERSHIP See Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights Movement; Du Bois, W. E. B.; King, Martin Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Robinson, Jackie; Russell, Bill; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

! AKBAR (1542–1605) Mughal emperor

Akbar was the grandson of Babur (1483–1530), who founded the Mughal rule (1526–1857) in India. Babur was succeeded by his son Humayun (1508–1556), during the first portion of whose reign (1530–1540) the territories conquered earlier by Mughals was lost to the Afghans. After an interreg- num of rule by the Afghan dynasty of Sur, the Mughals were again able to set foothold over Delhi in 1555; yet until his death in 1556, Humayun was fighting on many fronts to recapture the empire. After Humayun’s death the Afghans under their Hindu Prime Minister Hemu reoccupied Delhi. It was left to Akbar, Humayun’s son, to build up the empire from scratch and raise it to glorious heights. Akbar was only fourteen years old when he was coronated, and under his command, Mughals defeated Hemu in the second Battle of Panipat (November 5, 1556) that is considered landmark in reestablishment of Mughal rule in India.

Akbar’s leadership skills were not limited to war or to the expansion and consolidation of the Mughal empire; indeed, his most important contribution was the way that he molded the Mughal empire and cre- ated legitimacy for his rule that was based not on brute force, but on the consent of the governed. Despite Mughals being Sunni, Akbar refused to

Akbar———13