Building Adaptive Capacity: The Rise of The Dilemma

“The dilemmas of the future will be more grating, more gnawing, and more likely to induce feelings of hopelessness. Leaders must be able to flip dilemmas around and find the hidden opportunities. Leaders must avoid oversimplifying or pretending that dilemmas are problems that can be solved. Dilemma flipping is a skill that leaders will need in order to win in a world dominated by problems that nobody can solve.”  -Bob Johansen Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World

In an age proliferated by the exponential rise of adaptive challenges and unsolvable dilemmas, we still find that our organizational environments and cultures remain awash in a sense of solutionitis. In the face of these challenges and dilemmas, we see leaders and organizations inevitably switch to choosing veneer answers and short-term solutions, when, in fact, deeper questions and long-term considerations are not only what is needed, but are in their best interest for future relevance in a world aimed at accelerated obsolescence.

Too often we treat these adaptive challenges and dilemmas as problems to be quickly dismissed and solved, we jump to simplicity without gaining a full grasp of their complexity, we shape a solution without diving deeper to determine the depth of the challenge, and we continue to formulate our answers before we truly comprehend whether or not we are asking the right questions.

In a sense, we thrive on this want and need to provide certainty in a time of great uncertainty.

Unfortunately, the more we try to provide this sense of certainty to these challenges, the more we tend to jump into solutionitis mode. And yet, what we find is that the more we work to engage short-term fixes to these dilemmas we now face, the more we create individual and organizational confusion, frustration, dysfunction and disconnection are created.

Rather, in the midst of these dilemmas and adaptive challenges, we must move from being solution-focused to opportunity-open.  

In the fog of this uncertainty, complexity and even chaos that arrives with these challenges, we must learn to be open to the new opportunities that they create for us and our organizations. As Bob Johansen shares in Leaders Make the Future, “The challenge for leaders is to flip a dilemma into an opportunity.” Or, for which he adds, “Dilemma flippers have the ability to make their way through hopelessness into hope.”

Which often starts when leaders building their capacity and ability to more effectively determine whether they are facing a problem, or a dilemma or adaptive challenge. Understanding the difference between the two and engaging strategies and processes to approach them more effectively can lead to greater individual and organizational clarity and coherence in moving forward into the future.

Google shares that “the difference between a problem and dilemma is that problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while dilemma is a circumstance in which a choice must be made between two or more alternatives that seem equally undesirable.” In Leaders Make the Future, Bob Johansen adds that “dilemmas of the future have the following characteristics: unsolvable, recurrent, complex and messy, threatening, confusing, puzzling, and potentially positive.” While, Ronald Heifitz reminds us as we approach this work of dealing with dilemmas is that, “The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.”

In Leaders Make the Future, Ingar Skaug from the Center for Creative Leadership, shares a few techniques in dealing more effectively with dilemmas and complex challenges…

1. “Stand in different places: I can change my point of view by turning the problem upside down.”
2. “Using lenses from other domains: If I am a scientist, I may visualize the dilemma from the point of view of a policymaker.”
3. “Ask powerful questions: I can immerse myself in possible scenarios and “what ifs.”
4. “Foster new knowledge: I can spend time with others who are impacted by this dilemma and understand their point of view.”
5. “Create an innovation journal: It can be public or private way to think through my questions.”
6. “Change the pace of attention: I can change the speed at which I approach the dilemma.”

In the end, greater clarity and coherence is created when we truly understand whether we are facing a problem or an adaptive challenge or dilemma, as well as being able to create the appropriate individual and organizational expectations towards the outcomes we are seeking to each one, which is incredibly important in times of greater uncertainty and complexity.

Which often starts by understanding that what worked in the past will not necessarily work in the future, and may just be the first step in understanding this tremendous and exponential shift from technical problems to a world now awash in dilemmas and adaptive challenges.

“Making the future starts with listening and making sense.”  -Bob Johansen Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World

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The Hive Mind: Moving Past Conformity To Greater Capacity And Collective Intelligence

“The speed and interdependence of the modern environment create complexity.  Coupling shared consciousness and empowered execution creates an adaptable organization able to react to complex problems.”  -via Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World

We live in a time when we are truly seeing the importance of greater organizational adaptability and overall agility to not only parallel pace the turbulent pace of change, but to hold onto some semblance of relevance in a world that is bent on discontinuity and the speed of next.

The greatest risk in our modern world is often our inability or unwillingness to take a risk. It is this type of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment that not only necessitates, but requires an enhanced ability to work more effectively in team settings, collaborate at a much higher and efficient level, as wells as create and utilize more expansive internal and external networks to leverage greater learning and idea flow throughout the organization, at all levels.

Especially if the concept of continuous improvement is our focus…

We can no longer entrench ourselves in the successes of the past, mire ourselves in outdated strategies, practices, processes and structures, or allow the overwhelming pace and speed of change to stagnate us in decision paralysis, especially if we are to remain relevant to the exponential shifts that are occurring across the entirety of our societal ecosystem.

The disruptions we are witnessing, driven by this technological transformation, are emerging not as events but rather, as daily occurrences.

As is shared in Team of Teams, “An organization should empower its people, but only after it has done the heavy lifting of creating shared consciousness.” Unfortunately, too many organizations err too far on one side or the other: they either provide autonomy without creating the capacity to fully utilize that autonomy, or they build up individual and organizational capacity and fail to provide the autonomy or empower their people effectively. Both of which end in frustration at all levels of the organization, doing little to enhance individual or organizational adaptability or agility.

Today’s leaders need to look to ways to not only engage the collective intelligence that resides in an organization, but amplify that “shared consciousness” towards greater collective capacity in an environment that empowers people to make better decisions as they adapt to the complex conditions they face on a daily basis.

Thomas Seeley, Professor at Cornell University, provides a five ways (via Wired and HBR) we can tap into this “hive mind” for enhancing greater collective intelligence in our teams and organizations:

• Create groups with mutual respect, shared interests and foster mutual respect.
• Minimize the leaders influence on group thinking. 
• Seek and explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option.
• Aggregate the group’s knowledge through frank debate.
• Use quorum responses for speed, cohesion, and accuracy, balancing interdependence and independence. 

Our ability to tap more effectively into the knowledge and ideas that exist within our teams, groups and networks will allow us to create deeper and more expansive collective capacity that will enhance our ability to not only amplify this organizational idea flow, but empower our people to adapt to this new knowledge with the autonomy to implement and utilize ideas that improve an organization’s ability to work towards and emerge more effectively as a culture of continuous improvement.

Connecting Dots In Real Time

We’ve built the ship for efficiency, stability and sustainability…

The question now becomes, can we rebuild and recreate it for speed, agility and adaptability?

Have we noticed the world has changed, and not in subtle, but often exponential ways?

Are we aware that the speed and turbulence of change has and is accelerating at an unprecedented rate?

Can we see how disruptive this technological (fourth industrial) revolution has been and will be in the future?

In a world that often supports that tagline adapt or die, nothing less than organizational transformation is sufficient for survival in a world gone VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous).

We cannot bury our head in the sand and believe that the disruption that stands at our doorstep will pass us by unnoticed. The shifts are too enormous to be ignored.

If we are not careful, if we remain more lethargic than proactive to the changes we do and will face, we may find our future mirroring the Parable of the Boiled Frog. Or as Hemingway states, “gradually, then suddenly” may very well define the discovery of just how disruptive “1” degree can shift the environment in which we exist.

The ambiguity of today’s world is leaving us awash in anxiety. Fear and uncertainty often makes us recoil from the plethora of unknowns we face, further entrenching us in status quo thinking and doing. The permanence of the past is an illusion in today’s turbulent and accelerated world.

We can’t conquer the ambiguity and uncertainty that this new world creates, but we can learn to adapt ourselves to it. We can learn to parallel pace this heightened speed of change by becoming more agile, in adjusting quicker and more effectively to the shifts that it provokes in our individual and organizational lives.

To attain the level of adaptability and agility necessary to deal more relevantly with these exponential shifts and the new levels of complexity that accompany them, it will ultimately require us as individuals and organizations to engage in learning that: builds greater individual and organizational capacity, is more strategic and intentional, provokes intrinsic motivation, is continuous and evolving, leverages ‘best’ practices while engaging in ‘next’ practices, creates greater idea flow through the use of internal and external collaborations and networks, is based in a want for better, while being focused on the tenets and principles of continuous improvement.

Technology isn’t just driving innovation, it’s changing our mental models and disrupting the entire ecosystem of the future.

To keep pace in this new world, we will have to become much better in connecting dots in real time, and to do this, we will ultimately find that our ability to learn, and to connect that learning in new and novel ways, becomes our best advantage.

“Though we know far more about everything in it, the world has in many respects become less predictable. Such unpredictability has happened not in spite of technological progress, but because of it.”  -via Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World