After my last post on the differences between technical and adaptive work, I immediately started thinking about the challenges we see around us and tried to pick apart the technical and adaptive aspects. Here are my brief and random thoughts on these.
“[T]he single most common source of leadership failure we’ve been able to identify — in politics, community life, business, or the nonprofit sector — is that people, especially those in positions of authority, treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.”
Heifetz, Linsky – Leadership on the Line
In my post about escaping the scapegoat, I briefly mentioned that a leader must be able to distinguish the technical from the adaptive challenges. This is one of the greatest challenges and exactly where things begin. It can be the difference between a deeply moving, positive and long lasting change, or one that works for a while and then crops up again to haunt you.
So, what is the difference between a technical and adaptive challenge and how do you recognise it?
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When problems hit, we like to fix them. There are many reasons we do this … some people don’t like the stress of an unsolved issue, some are trying to keep their jobs, others like to keep their boss happy, or some are trying to turn the focus away from themselves. Mostly though, we have this amazing natural ability to bring things back to the way they were. Living systems (of which we are one) strive to reach equilibrium. In times of stress we very quickly resort to restoring balance and making things the way they were before the stress came along. Understandable, but not highly effective.
When trying to deal with deep rooted problems, it is easy to focus on technical things that need fixing. I don’t mean technical in the IT/technology sense but rather problems which have a definite answer and can often be solved with experts. This simpler, more logical and easier problem to solve is simply a scapegoat, a cloud that takes our attention comfortably away from the real problem.