CHAPTER 9: ADAPT—SEEK EVOLUTION FOR REVOLUTION
CHAPTER 9 SUMMARY
The strange and often exasperating outcomes we often see in response to our best attempts to solve complex problems – should be expected.
When faced with these cloudy, crazy-making problems, we are thrust into their E4 Vortex, which can be dizzying.
But research on decision making in these contexts suggests that how we respond to them can make all the difference – and that playing the long game is key.
Learning to respond adaptively to dynamic problems is critical. This often entails learning to fail smart and fast, and then making slight adjustments to your course of action.
It also often involves testing small nudges to the system – slight shifts in our thinking and approach that help us to test the waters and learn about the rules of the system.
This chapter offers several learnable competencies that we have found to help us better navigate these environments – and they begin with learning how to learn (not perform) in the face of new problems.
CHAPTER 9 EXERCISES AND ASSESSMENTS
Learn more about your own adaptive leadership skills, and receive a personalized feedback report by taking our Adaptive Decision Making Assessment (ADMA).
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CHAPTER 9 IMPLICATIONS
Implications for your Community
Implications for You
Enhance Your Adaptive Competencies:
Build up your ability to respond to unfamiliar, complex, uncertain, or ambiguous situations without becoming overly anxious or destabilized.
Strengthen your capacity to differentiate among the multiple perspectives and sources of information regarding a complex problem and identify common patterns.
Bolster your ability to experience and tolerate a broad range of positive and negative emotions simultaneously.
Increase your ability to enact a range of different, even contrasting roles and behaviors required to engage effectively with complex systems
Redouble your ability to balance short-term demands with your long-term visions for change
Increase your capacity to take a learning orientation to new problems, that is to accept failure as a step toward learning as much about the problem as fast as possible.
Practice proximal change experiments to identify, test and then make small adjustments to aspects of dysfunctional social interaction patterns that have large potential.
Practice, practice, practice the many actions associated with more adaptive decision-making processes when addressing complex problems.
Ultimately, you want to locate other individuals and groups that have managed to institutionalize these various adaptive competencies into their visions, policies and practices – and join them in common cause.