The Stability Myth

As advantageous as equilibrium may be at the project level, it is a serious threat to the survival of an organization at the strategic level. Prolonged stability tends to make a system less responsive to change, whether it is caused by a lack of competition or by management intent through excessive use of detailed standard operating procedures.

Rigid process management, the very structure that managers tend to use to ensure quality products and services, can be the death knell for an organization by eliminating the requisite variety needed to withstand shocks to the system.

When motivated by competitive threats, or new opportunities, complex adaptive systems self-organize and move toward the "edge of chaos,"where increased levels of experimentation tend to lead to new solutions that improve the survivability of the organization.

As an adaptive leader, your job is not to direct the organization along a linear path. That sort of arrogance assumes predictable change. Your job is to disturb the equilibrium in a manner that would tend to encourage desired outcomes and discourage undesirable outcomes. Some of the tactics you can use to achieve this include, communicating the urgency of the problem, establishing why traditional solutions are not sufficient to meet the challenge and developing a system-wide understanding of the roots or causes of the problem. This is not a single-item agenda. The adaptive leader must sustain disequilibrium by holding stress in play until other adaptive leaders start to emerge, self-organize and begin experimenting with potential solutions.

You can create artificial stress in an organization by taking it out of its comfort zone: overload the organization, use short deadlines or other actions that tend to force the organization towards the edge of chaos. Where traditional managers might tend to identify an issue, develop a plan and step in to fix the problem, an adaptive leader identifies the issue, but then does NOT step in to fix the problem. Rather the adaptive leader communicates the urgency of the issue and creates disequilibrium so that the entire system can self-organize to develop solutions.

This is tough and counter-intuitive for most organizations. "Leaders-as-head"are expected to have all of the answers, provide all of the solutions. Adaptive leadership is part of a strategy that looks to the entire living system to develop innovative solutions so that the whole organization can thrive.

There will be organizational resistance to adaptive leadership. In the "leaders-as-head" model, members of an organization tend to look to their leaders to protect them from fear, uncertainty and doubt. Adaptive leaders must hold all members of the organization accountable for its success and regulate the stress on the organization so that you maintain disequilibrium without descending into dysfunction. You will have to use all of your soft skills to ensure that passive-aggressiveness and other avoidance mechanisms are defeated before they become an institutional defense against adaptive leadership.

Bottom line: beware the myth of stability. It has its uses at the project level and is a very useful tool in quality management. However, at the strategic level you require requisite variety and adaptive leadership in order to sustain disequilibrium and survive shocks to the system. You must create an environment where the complex adaptive system will self-organize in order to find new and exciting ways for the organization to thrive.

Bruce Borup