1. Legislative Leadership
Minnesota 2013
Ronald Heifetz
Harvard Kennedy School 1

2. Technical and Adaptive Work
Distinguish
Technical and Adaptive Work

3. Persistent conflicts are symptomatic of a bundled set of issues that are in part technical problems and in part adaptive challenges. 3

4. The Classic Error Diagnosing and treating adaptive challenges
as if they were technical problems 4

5. Essential Questions of Adaptive Work
What cultural DNA do we keep?
What cultural DNA do we discard?
What innovative DNA will enable us to thrive in the new and challenging environment?

6. Properties of Adaptive Work
Adaptive work demands responses outside the current repertoire.
To thrive in changing conditions, adaptive organizations must be responsive to the environment.
Successful adaptations are conservative as well as progressive.
The people with the problem are the problem, and they are the solution. Solutions often lie within the society.

7. Properties of Adaptive Work
Success requires local adaptations to local environments
Solutions involve direct and indirect loss as people re-fashion loyalties and develop new competencies
Adaptive work takes more time than technical work
Innovation toward adaptive change is experimental
Adaptive work generates disequilibrium and avoidance

8. Social and Political Tension
Social and political tension and disequilibrium are part of social learning and adaptive change 8

9. Technical and Adaptive Work
DISEQUILIBRIUM
TIME
LIMIT OF TOLERANCE
THRESHOLD OF LEARNING
ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE
WORK AVOIDANCE
TECHNICAL PROBLEM
PRODUCTIVE RANGE OF DISTRESS

10. Avoiding Adaptive Work
Societies and Organizations Tend to Avoid Adaptive Work
Why?
To restore equilibrium and avoid losses
How?
By diverting responsibility or attention

11. Displacing Responsibility
Externalize the enemy
Attack authority
Divide the top team
Kill the messenger
Scapegoat

12. Diverting Attention Fake Remedies
Define the problem to fit your competence
Misuse structural adjustments
Misuse consultants, committees, task forces
Denial
Unproductive Conflict
Gladiator fights with spectators

13. Discussion Question
How can you reduce rather than amplify the constituency pressures that will constrain your ability to collaborate? 13

14. The Politics of Leadership
ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE 14

15. Discussion Question
In meeting adaptive challenges, social contracts of trust between authorities and citizens need to be “renegotiated.”
How can you help each other challenge and disappoint your constituencies at a rate they can tolerate? 15

16. Properties of Authority
A service contract
Formal or informal
Power entrusted for service
Key components of the contract
Power
Trust
Service

17. Services of Authority Direction Protection Order Orientation to roles
Control of conflict
Norm Maintenance 17

18. Trust
Predictability
Values
Competence

19. People will trust you when you fulfill their expectations for service
The Paradox of Trust
People will trust you when you fulfill their expectations for service
So what happens when you:
Deliver information that conflicts with those expectations?
Tell people what they may need to hear, but not what they want and expect to hear?

20. A Strategy of Leadership: Mobilizing Adaptive Work
Get on the Balcony
Think Politically
Regulate Disequilibrium
Distribute Leadership and Responsibility
Infuse the Work with Meaning

21. Get on the Balcony Unbundle Technical from Adaptive challenges
Distinguish ripe from unripe issues
Frame the key challenges
Keep the key issues at the center of attention

22. Think Politically Find allies Keep the opposition close
Own your piece of the problem
Acknowledge losses
Model the changed behavior
Accept casualties

23. Regulate Disequilibrium
Strengthen the holding environment for cross-boundary work
Depersonalize the conflicts: distinguish role from self
Maintain a productive level of disequilibrium
Pace the work
Take the heat and hold steady
Maintain a collective sense of purpose

24. Distribute Leadership and Responsibility
Place the adaptive work where it must be done
Encourage widespread social and policy experimentation
Refashion loyalties to move from dependency to distributed initiative and responsibility
Cascade leadership responsibility to local levels
Protect unauthorized voices of leadership

25. Infuse the Work with Meaning
Develop a narrative that:
Manages expectations
Helps people comprehend the developments in their lives
Builds from and conserves the past
Names the losses and sustains people through transitional pain
Engages people in their adaptive work
Calls forth people’s resourcefulness