Identify a leadership challenge that you’ve experienced and respond to the provided prompts. Your example can be from ANY perspective or context that is relevant to your goals for this course.
- What was the purpose of your organization or group (goal, value proposition)?
- What was the work to be done? What challenge did you take on?
- Did the challenge emerge from changing aspirations, values, or priorities within the organization, or from changing conditions externally?
- How did the challenge change over time?
- How did you frame the challenge at the time?
- In retrospect, what do you think were the adaptive components of the challenge?
- What were the technical components?
- What was your job?
- What formal authority did you have?
- What informal authority (trust, respect, credibility) did you have?
Example summary
“I was working in a health maintenance organization (HMO). In my country, an HMO pays for the healthcare expenses for all of those people who enroll in the HMO. Each individual pays some money, but then the risk of catastrophic healthcare expenses hitting one person is distributed over the whole group. With the population in our HMO getting older, it was becoming more and more expensive to provide good health services, because more people had higher expenses.
As a result, the CEO of the company set a goal of recruiting new members for the plan, preferably insurees younger than our average, to balance our high spending on the older insurees. Specifically, the CEO required every employee of the company to contribute to this initiative, by making marketing phone calls, participating in recruiting events, and bringing up the subject during medical or para-medical appointments. At the time, I was a Nurse Manager, and many of the nurses on my team did not like this requirement. They told me that they were not trained in marketing or sales and it was not the mission they came for, which was treating patients humanely and ethically…”
- describe the work/problem of this case. What is technical and what is adaptive?
- list some of the potential stakeholders for this challenge.
- Which of the following problem statements is closest to your assessment of the gap in the example case?
- Which of the following problem statements is closest to your assessment of the gap in the example case?
How do I get my staff to fall in line?
How do I incentivize my nurses to do this part of the job?
How can I make marketing and sales own this problem?
None of the above
Example – Stakeholders
Head Nurse
The protagonist in this story. It is easy to see the challenge from this perspective only. This is a good place to start, but don’t stop here.
Nurses
They report to the Head Nurse. It is tempting to see their problem as primary.
Management
Who owns the problem? Who owns the solution?
Marketing and Sales
How might people in this department feel disempowered by the company’s change? How could you use their expertise?
Patients
It is easy to forget about this most important stakeholder group. How might they view the work?
- How has creating this list of stakeholders changed your understanding of the work to be done in your own case?
- For stakeholders, who did you find that hadn’t been included in your first narrative of the challenge?
- list the stakeholders for your case
- Does listing the stakeholders change your understanding of the work to be done? If so, how?
- What perspectives do you think you need to investigate more? How will you do that?
- How might you apply this process to your personal leadership challenge? How were conflicts acknowledged and what might you have done differently?
- Describe the relationship you might expect to see between time and disequilibrium for a technical problem. It’s worth noting that the exact pattern will vary, but the general aspects should be the same.
- Describe the relationship you might expect to see between time and disequilibrium for an adaptive challenge. How might it differ from technical work? Try thinking about an adaptive challenge that you’ve encountered (either from your leadership challenge case or another source).
STRATEGY 1
A Process for Mobilizing Learning
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Prepare before bringing factions together. Do you understand their perspectives? What do they stand to lose? What learning, i.e., changes in stakes and perspective, need to occur? Speaking with individuals separately can also provide invaluable insight and help you gain informal authority.
GATHER ALL VIEWS
Let each faction speak for itself. How do they view the work of resolving the shared adaptive challenge? What are their perspectives and commitments, and to what extent do they own the need to change, too?
CREATE, SHARE, AND ENFORCE GROUND RULES
Establishing or asking for clear and consistent ground rules can help depersonalize the process and keep the work at the center. Try to get rules and norms for the group established early. For example, what information is confidential? Who sets the agenda and how?
ORCHESTRATE CONFLICT
Share out the competing perspectives, values, and competencies. As perspectives emerge, factions will recognize the conflicts and the heat will increase. Part of being an orchestrator involves recognizing when participants are avoiding conflict. Look for the clues. Are individuals minimizing the differences among factions? Are they ignoring the issue entirely using common work avoidance strategies like blame or scapegoating? Remind participants that it’s your role to surface and discuss these tensions.
PROMOTE HONESTY ABOUT LOSSES
Rather than minimizing loss, help the group recognize and reflect on what each faction stands to lose and what the implications might be for their various constituents. How might constituents react?
EXPERIMENT
How will you address the challenge? Generate multiple experiments to test out potential solutions. Remember to build consensus around what will be tested and don’t grow too attached to any one idea or solution. The goal is to learn as much as possible, and a failed experiment can teach you a lot.
HARNESS THE POWER OF PEER CONSULTING
We learn better together. Encourage individuals to seek out the advice of peers throughout the Get on the Balcony process. By modeling this behavior, you help establish new norms of collaboration that value diagnostic work and action equally.
- How might you apply this process to your personal leadership challenge?
- How were conflicts acknowledged and what might you have done differently?
STRATEGY 2:
Strategies for Increasing the Heat
DIRECT THE FOCUS OF ATTENTION TO THE TOUGH ISSUES
Imagine being in a meeting where the most important decision or topic keeps getting delayed or ignored. This habit of ignoring the difficult conversations is all too common.
SURFACE CONFLICTS
Resist the temptation to conceal or minimize disagreement. Surfacing different perspectives is an essential part of understanding the distribution of work around the different stakeholders — the different adjustments and new ways of thinking or behaving that each party may need to do.
ALLOW PROVOCATIVE STATEMENTS
Language can be a powerful tool for managing the heat. Don’t be afraid of statements that will stimulate strong responses.
KNOW AND USE THE ROOM’S DYNAMICS
Rather than ignoring or operating in fear of the potential stresses that may emerge in the room, use it to your advantage. This starts with listening and observing. If certain parties appear especially at odds, use that to highlight the core issues.
EXCEED COMFORT LEVELS
Turning up the heat means challenging individual comfort levels. This is especially true for allocating responsibility. Encourage others to not play it safe when it comes to owning their part of the work to be done.
- Select one strategy from the list and examine how you might apply it.
- What challenges might you encounter? How will you know when to use it?
STRATEGY 3:
Strategies for Decreasing the Heat
REDIRECT FOCUS TO TECHNICAL WORK
Most challenging situations are a mix of technical problems and adaptive challenges, so you can reduce the heat by returning the focus of attention to the technical components of the problem situation.
ASSUME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE TOUGH ISSUES
If you have an authority position, you can assume responsibility for solving the situation and buy time for people to acclimate to the tough issues (and time for you to find a new approach to engage them in their role in meeting the challenge).
DIVIDE, DISTRIBUTE, AND PACE THE WORK
People need time to do adaptive work — time to emotionally accept the losses they may need to sustain, and time to experiment through trial and error to find a successful and innovative adaptation. So breaking the work into smaller parts, distributing it differently according to the capacity of each party, and pacing the rate of change are all ways to reduce the level of stress.
PAUSE AND TAKE BREAKS
Adaptive work is taxing because emotional and innovative work is stressful. As a consequence, people need pauses and rest. There is a reason why many religious traditions have a means to pause and reflect through daily practices or a weekly sabbath. As it is said in surgery, you move faster by moving slower and more carefully.
CREATE MORE STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES FOR WORKING ON THE CHALLENGE
People generally feel less stressed when they feel oriented in a stressful situation to their role or job, so creating more structures and processes for problem-solving will calm people down.
- Select one strategy from the previous list and examine how you might apply it.
- What challenges might you encounter? How will you know when to use it?
- What new insights did you gain about your stakeholders and how they viewed the work (their perspectives)?
- What strategies listed could help you mobilize parties in your system to meet the needs of the situation and do adaptive work, i.e., to make progress on the adaptive challenge?
- How has this course changed your understanding of your leadership challenge?
- How has this course changed your understanding and approach to leadership?
- What do you plan to do next?
