Adaptive Leadership: Experiential Approaches to Leadership Education

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

Adaptive leadership implicitly requires leaders to reinterpret their understanding of what it means to lead. This workshop will explore the assumptions leaders bring to the problem-solving process, assumptions that in fact may be part of the problem. Helping learners understand the distinctions between leadership for technical vs. adaptive work is a critical step, setting the stage for advanced leadership practices. A series of experiential activities will simulate adaptive and technical challenges, allowing participants to more deeply understand — and gain insight into experiential methods for teaching — leadership that enables teams to suspend judgment and engage in curiosity, risk taking, and innovation.

Detailed Abstract

Target Audience
This workshop is for those who work with emerging leaders. Helping students of leadership understand the distinctions between leadership for Technical vs. Adaptive work is a critical step in their education. This foundation sets the stage for advanced leadership practices, e.g., holding space for others to step up to leadership when working on a poorly understood problem, convening a multi-stakeholder collaborative, and leading across the cultural diversity of a team.

Relevance to the Conference Theme
Leadership in turbulent times is an invitation to explore what it takes to lead others through the ambiguity of a shifting landscape. It also calls for leaders to be open and curious in their own approach to the practice of leadership. Broadening one’s leadership to include the ability to exercise “leadership without easy answers” is a vital step in growing the leadership we need to:
• Solve novel and ambiguous problems
• Bring disparate stakeholder perspectives into focus around common concerns
• Remain curious when old paradigms/approaches/assumptions no longer serve
• See change and disruption as the opportunity for innovation.

Outcomes for this Workshop
• An overview of of Heifetz, Larson and LaFasto’s applicable scholarship of leadership and teamwork
• Participation in experiential problem solving activities that illustrate leadership for tactical and adaptive problem solving
• Analysis of adaptive problems and links to leadership that has enabled a shift of perspective as the key to effective problem solving
• Experience of paradigm disruption in problem solving as a means to better understand what leadership for adaptive work feels like. This will no longer be a theoretical concept.
• New knowledge and skills for teaching leadership for teamwork across a spectrum of problem types, from Technical/Tactical to Adaptive/Collaborative.

Program Description
This experiential workshop is in two parts. First we will explore the implications of the scholarship of Ron Heifetz (1994) and Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto (1989). In a brief overview of these leadership and teamwork theorists, we will see that Heifetz’s typology of problems (ranging from Technical to Adaptive) has a functional correspondence with Larson and LaFasto’s typology of teams (ranging from Tactical to Collaborative). We bring these together in the Do-Be Model for Leadership and Teamwork sm. With this model, participants will gain an understanding of the duality of task orientation and process development as inter-dependent functions of leadership for adaptive problem solving.

Experiential Activities
Using simple initiatives (experiential activities), participants will explore how technical/tactical problems rely primarily on an orientation to task in order to improve performance, i.e., the development of best practices, benchmarking for performance, and role specialization within the team. Conversely, another initiative will show how adaptive problem solving calls for leadership that supports a group’s ability to have and use process agreements to work through an ambiguous challenge. This includes having norms for communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution; commitments to feedback, analysis, and learning; and the establishment of group identity and inspiration that enable motivation and persistence.

Discussion and Practice
In part two, participants will bring greater focus to the leadership required for solving Heifetz’s definition of adaptive problems. This may be a problem that is wholly new and, in its novelty, requires us to undertake a shift in perspective before we can solve it. Or, it may be a problem with interdependent, moving parts that make it hard to solve without taking into account the problem’s broader dynamics. A final example of an adaptive problem is when there are divergent perspectives held by stakeholders, each with their own approach to the problem solving process.

In all of these cases, we will see that adaptive problems can’t be solved until the problem solvers engage in a shift of perspective. Leadership for such problem solving must thus support an inquiry into – and disruption of – pre-existing paradigms for taking action.

Heifetz defines “Type III” problems – where the problem is unclear and the solution is also unclear – as those that are hardest to solve or indeed, that may seem beyond our grasp to solve. We will draw on participants to give their own examples of such intractable problems and the underlying challenges they pose for leadership. We will discuss how solutions to such real-life problems often have their roots in exercising a particular kind of leadership, one that creates space for shifting perspectives away from what may have been believed to be a fixed “reality.”

Finally, we will draw on workshop exercises – examples of adaptive problem solving – to cement the feeling of having “broken through” to a new paradigm. In doing so, we will lay the groundwork for new awareness of how experiential activities serve to bring deeper understanding to the practice of adaptive leadership. What was it like to lead a breakthrough process? What was it like to feel the change of perspective move through the group? How did letting go of assumptions enable to group to take different, more effective action?

Time permitting, workshop participants will work on other initiatives that simulate – and require leadership for – adaptive problem solving. Activities will vary depending on the experience of the participant cohort (this is highly scalable and would allow participants to grow their tool kit of experiential activities in a pre- or post-conference setting).

We will close with a reflection and review of new knowledge and take away skills. Participants will be encouraged to incorporate workshop concepts into their work as leadership educators, as well as their own leadership.

Activities
A sample of workshop activities includes:
1. Technical problem solving
a. Card Sort. Participants sort a deck of 52 cards
b. Key Punch. Participants touch a set of 30 numbered pieces in sequence
2. Adaptive problem solving
a. Three Way Pull. A three-way “tug-of-war”
b. Diminishing Resources. A challenge to “get your feet into a new square”
c. Zoom. Participants must order a set of pictures
d. Color Blind. Find the missing piece to a puzzle
e. Pitfalls and Possibilities. Teams work to secure resources

Sub Unit

• Leadership Education

Presenters

• Paul D. Duba, Point-B

• Sarah Chace, Christopher Newport University