Adaptive Challenges and Holding Environments

1. Adaptive Challenges and Holding Environments October 2010 Calev Ben Dor

2. Closing the Gap: Adaptive Work Leadership is an activity to mobilize adaptation (Ron Heifetz) Solution: Clear Solution: Requires Learning Problem: Technical Problem: Adaptive Responsibility: Authority Figure Responsibility: Constituency

3. Work Avoidance People fail to adapt because of the stress provoked by the problems and the changes it demands. They resist the pain, anxiety or conflict that accompanies a sustained interaction with its situation. Holding on to past assumptions, blaming authority, scapegoating, externalizing the enemy, denying the problem, jumping to conclusions or finding a distracting issue may restore stability and feel less stressful than facing and taking responsibility for a complex challenge. These patterns of response to disequilibrium are called “work avoidance mechanism.”

4. Orchestrating Conflict To orchestrate conflict effectively think of yourself as having your hand on the thermostat and always watching for signals that you need to raise or lower the temperature in the room. Your goal is to keep the temperature – that is, the intensity of the disequilibrium created by discussion of the conflict – high enough to motivate people to arrive at creative next steps and potentially useful solutions, but not so high that it drives them away or makes it impossible for them to function. The harder the adaptive work, stronger holding environment must be to contain divisive forces

5. Raising and Lowering the Temperature Address aspects of the conflict that have most obvious and technical solutions Draw attention to tough questions Give people more responsibility than they're comfortable with Provide structure by breaking problem into parts Temporarily reclaim responsibility for tough issues Bring conflicts to surface Employ work avoidance mechanisms (taking a break / telling a joke) Tolerate provocative comments Use dynamics in the room to illustrate some issues facing the group Slow down the process of challenging norms and expectations