1. Leadership Theories with a Systemic Perspective
Heifetz, Adaptive Leadership
Senge, the Learning Organization

2. Adaptive Leadership
Heifetz

3. Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges
Technical Challenges
Existing strategies work.
You know what you need to know
You apply your process, skills or problem-solving strategies to a new context and it fits
Adaptive Challenges
Existing approaches no longer work
Experimentation, adjustment from many angles
Change our way of understanding ourselves in relation to the problem

4. Adaptive Leadership
Learn to be on the dance floor and the balcony at the same time.
Monitor interpersonal dynamics (are people being silenced, marginalized, encouraged)
Listen for the emotion beneath the words
Read authority figures for clues
Do not be so distanced in your observations that you are not also participating in the dialogue

5. Identify the Adaptive Change
Look to internal and external stakeholders – what is their experience here? What are their assumptions? Find out “where they are at.”
Examine recurring problems and conflicts, treat them as clues
Examine yourself. What are your assumptions?

6. Regulate Distress Balance the tension of challenge and support
Create a holding environment
Make choices and prioritize in order to sequence/pace the work
Frame the adaptive challenge, make meaning of the journey, conflicts, problems in a way that promotes resilience and learning
Represent a steady presence the group can trust

7. Maintain Disciplined Attention
Do the work
Work avoidance can look like: blaming, scapegoating, personal attacks, denial, restoring balance too quickly, focusing on technical issues, political games, etc.
Doing the work means
Having awareness of avoidance: am I/ are we avoiding an issue because it makes me/us uncomfortable?
Facilitating authentic dialogue (not debate) about issues and conflicts
Uncovering people’s hidden assumptions and working to address them

8. Avoid Top-Down Approaches
Give the work back to people
Protect voices of leadership from below
Don’t fixate on whether the strategy is right, focus on whether the people in the organization have the structure, skills and trust they need to learn and create an adaptive response

9. “Leadership is an improvisational art
“Leadership is an improvisational art. You may have an overarching vision, clear, orienting values, and even a strategic plan, but what you actually do from moment to moment cannot be scripted. To be effective, you must respond to what is happening… you have to move back and forth from the balcony to the dance floor, over and over again…. You take action, step back and assess the results of the action, reassess the plan, then go to the dance floor and make the next move. You have to maintain a diagnostic mindset on a changing reality.” - Heifetz, Leadership on the Line

10. The Learning Organization
Senge

11. The Learning Organization
continuously transforming itself
able to be nimble, flexible, adaptive to a constantly changing environment
uses an interconnected way of thinking; people continually learning to see the whole together
grounded in member commitment to the shared vision; a sense of being part of something larger than themselves; belonging; mattering
people continually expand their capacity to create the results they desire and better understand their purposes
learning is seen as a process, not an event

12. Learning Adaptive learning Generative learning
Expanding our ability to respond to changing environment
Generative learning
Learning that enhances our capacity to create
A shift in seeing people not as reactive to their reality, but as shaping their reality. Able to create their future.

13. Features of Learning Organizations
Systems Thinking
Personal Mastery
Mental Models
Shared Vision
Team Learning

14. The new role of Leaders
Old view: leader sets the direction, makes the decisions, and energizes the troops.
New view:
Designers – creating a space for individual and tea learning, shared vision, questioning of assumptions and systems thinking
Stewards - shaping the narrative, holding the larger story of the organization, holding the vision
Teachers – focusing attention, defining reality in a systemic way, and helping members truly understand how to think this way
If you are the leader of an ocean liner – what is your role? Captain deciding direction? Navigator moving ship in that direction? Engineer providing energy? No the one who designed the ship.

15. New beliefs about Change
Change starts small and grows organically
Change is only sustainable if it involves learning
Develop the mindset of conducting experiments – an inquiry approach. Try multiple strategies and take intentional time to reflect on the lessons learned from them.
Pilot groups are incubators for change
Bird on a wire metaphor. Go back to systems thinking maps. There is no silver bullet solution there. Name five small changes you could implement that would leverage a butterfly effect.

16. Team Learning
Involves dialogue and the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine “thinking together.”
Dialogue: free-flowing of meaning to discover insights not attainable individually
NOT Discussion: heaving ideas back and forth competitively
Recognizing patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning (defensiveness, competitiveness, etc.)
Any examples of being in a group that felt like team learning? Checking competitiveness at the door and being honest about what you know and don’t know? How do we address group culture where posturing is the norm? People trying to set themselves up as knowing it all? Afraid to admit what they don’t know.

17. Challenges to Creating a Learning Organization
Fragmentation
Problems are broken into pieces and considered separately (budgeting, technology, marketing..)
Competitiveness
Members try to out do each other rather than collaborating
Reactiveness
Organizational change only occurs in response to external forces rather than a spirit of continual creating
How do we address these?

18. Not a New Idea? Lao-tzu: The bad leader is he who the people despise
The good leader is he who the people praise
The great leader is he who the people say “we did it ourselves”