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HOW SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAMS DO OR DON’T MEET ‘THE ADAPTIVE CHALLENGE’
Stephen Mugford, QQSR
Email: stephen.mugford@qqsr.com; Twitter: @StephenMugford
Overview: adaptive leadership teams deliver organisational benefit
The core proposition of this short paper is that adaptive leadership teams deliver benefits to
organisations and that this type of leadership team can be purposively developed to harness these
benefits. In order both to elaborate the proposition and explain what sorts of activities are relevant
to the process of harnessing benefit five questions are asked and briefly answered. These are:
1. What is adaptive leadership?
2. How does adaptive leadership grow performance?
3. How come that leadership falters in this regard?
4. What activities can enhance leaders as individuals?
5. What activities enhance the leadership team?
1. What is adaptive leadership?
The phrase ‘adaptive leadership’ is usually associated with the work of Harvard leadership expert
Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues. In his work, Heifetz distinguishes between technical or mechanical
problems, which have a known and established solution and those where a complex adaptive system
is in place (most human systems have this character). The adaptive type of problem arises from
interdependent elements with open boundaries and is increased in scope by the number of
elements, their diversity and so forth. This results in a situation which is unpredictable, open-ended,
hard to decipher and contains various ‘feedbacks’ which defeat simple approaches. As a result:
• rules keep changing;
• one can’t be sure what the consequences will be of any action or event;
• one can’t be sure what actions to take to bring about desired outcome;
• one can’t be sure what actions to take to avoid unwanted outcome;
• it is difficult to translate higher level goals into concrete objectives needed for action;
• and with respect to information – there is both:
o too much (what to look at?); and
o too little (important aspects are hidden).

2. 2
A neat overview of the way that adaptive leadership responds to such problems is:
The problem definition is not clear-cut and technical fixes are unavailable. It calls for adaptive
leadership where the leader does not have the answers. Instead, the leader has to orient people to
their places and roles, control conflict, and establish and maintain norms in order to orchestrate
people working together to find new solutions that will succeed.
http://www.conservationleadership.org/joomla/content/view/14/8/
The following table develops this concept in more detail, contrasting two models of leadership:
MECHANICAL ADAPTIVE
Attention is focused on activities. Attention is focused on value-added outcomes.
Job descriptions are long, detailed and constraining. Job descriptions are intentionally broad-based to allow
for flexibility.
Role expectations are narrow and rigid. Roles are fluid. Within limits, people are expected to
substitute for one another.
Contacts are confined and communication is channeled
by higher management.
Contacts are open and networks are encouraged to form.
Policies are mostly oriented toward control, what people
can't do.
Policies encourage people to take a "can do" mindset to
find solutions.
The organizational structure is bureaucratic and
fragmented into many departments.
The structures are more fluid and of shorter duration.
Changes in design are aimed at enhancing flexibility and
responsiveness.
Authority is based on rank, and it is expected that
influence will equate with formal authority.
Authority is accorded a place, but reliance on it is played
down. Greater influence is accorded people who
demonstrate ability to add value.
Efficiency and predictability are sought and reinforced. Achievement, innovation and change are sought and
rewarded.
Cooperation among departments is subject to a lot of
formalization and clearances. Turf guarding prevails.
Cooperation is a highly regarded value in the
organization and is far more easily gained.
Information is kept close hold. Information is widely available to facilitate work
accomplishment and permit more opportunities for more
people to add value to operations.
Traditional values are fostered such as unit loyalty and
obedience to the effect that they stifle initiative and
hamper teamwork across departments.
Newer values such as cooperation, and responsiveness
along with treating other units as internal "customers."
It will be apparent that the left column is nearer to the traditional ‘command and control’ model
used in many contexts—especially by uniformed forces such as the military or police—but also in
many workplaces in manufacturing industry, mining, etc. It is ‘transactional’ in character and is
highly effective for managing a range of activities, such as emergency responses, armed conflicts
with a known enemy and so forth. It is important to note that occupations that include such work
ought to develop skills in this left column and be able to draw upon them when relevant.
The right column is nearer to the concept of transformational or servant leadership. Skills in this area
are very important for most organisations at least some of the time and for organisations where
action in the left column is more common at the junior to middle levels of management, a major
challenge exists as people are promoted. On promotion and with seniority, such managers really
need to be able to operate well in the right hand column but, for various reasons, this does not

3. 3
always happen. When people do not learn this new set of skills and deploy them effectively, several
negative consequences follow:
• at the individual level, the senior leader is a less effective and less respected ‘boss’,
commonly see to exhibit flaws such as abrasive behaviour, micro management, etc.;
• at the collective level, when the skill deficit is shared across the group, it is frequently
‘dysergic’ (that is, the whole is less than the sum of the parts.)
On the other hand, when adaptive leadership is well understood and present it shares:
• An understanding of context—"We know what it is we face"
• A sense of destiny—"We know what we have to achieve"
• Values and purpose—"We are all in this together"
• Optimism and efficacy—"We can get this done"
2. How does adaptive leadership grow performance?
An extensive literature on this exists. One excellent strand is that of Bruce Avolio and his colleagues
and their argument, which stands for the whole corpus, is well represented in this diagram:
The conceptual framework for authentic leader and follower development
William L. Gardner, Bruce J. Avolio, Fred Luthans, Douglas R. May, Fred Walumbwa, “Can you see the real me?” A self-
based model of authentic leader and follower development, The Leadership Quarterly Volume 16, Issue 3, June 2005,
Pages 343–372

4. 4
The ‘Avolio’ model can be linked to
broader models of trust building in
organisations and society in general.
Harold Jarche expresses this simply
and elegantly (see the diagram at
right.)
A large body of research indicates
that peak performing organisations
can be identified and characterised
effectively. For example, Jon R
Katzenbach [(2000) Peak
Performance, HBR Press], using a
Maslow ‘hierarchy of needs’
approach, found that he could
identify some need-satisfaction
patterns strongly associated with high
performance. While there was no
difference with respect to basic needs
(if you don’t meet these the
Harold
Jarche
Networked individuals trump organizations http://bit.ly/Zfimh7
organisation founders altogether) at levels above this there are some that were met only in the peak
performing organisations. These were grouped into four areas
Structure and control
• Control your own destiny
• Know what is expected
• Know why things happen
Identity and Purpose
• Stand out from a talented crowd
• See value in your work
• Pride in skill and ability
• Do good for others
Belonging
• Part of a respected group
• Feel part of something special
• Feel like an owner
Opportunity
• Learn and grow as a person
• Be challenged
• Try something new and different

5. 5
The best kind of
organisation—which
delivers on all
organisational functions
and meets these needs—
displays ‘resilient
synergy’.
Resilient synergy can, as
argued above, be
enhanced by emotionally
intelligent leadership and
leader role modeling.
Again we can show the
flow diagrammatically
(see right)
The shaded area at the top of this diagram indicates the area where, in practice, the main effort of a
leadership development project should focus. By concentrating on the senior leaders, it aims to
make the maximum impact on the routine business of the organisation, increasing both collective
attributes (high trust and thus low transaction costs; cooperative and collegial discussion, synergy
across silos, etc.) and at the same time growing and sharpening the skills of the individual leaders.
This is well understood and, in colloquial terms, is “not rocket science”. However, while delivering on
this may not be rocket science it IS enhanced by a scientific understanding of how people operate.
The next two sections look respectively at how it can fail and, drawing on some good science, how it
can work.
3. How come that leadership falters in this regard?
When the situation calls for adaptive leadership, but the emphasis in on mechanical leadership, then
we can expect systematic sub-optimal patterns. An excellent summary of this is found in a paper by
leading Canadian management specialist Roger Martin, Dean of the Business School at Toronto (see
www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/walkerton.pdf ). He shows that under pressure for
accountability in association with a ‘blaming’
culture, typical when mechanical management
is applied to complex problems, the feedback
loop shown at the bottom of this diagram
comes into operation.
This leads to failure, secrecy and cover up.
When major problems are finally exposed,
there is an orgy of recrimination, an increase in
accountability mechanisms, promises that it
“will never happen again” … and then the
whole cycle starts over again.
In contrast, in a positive culture characterised
by good adaptive leadership and trust based

6. 6
teamwork, the top loop operates. Under these circumstances, the organisation thrives because
problems result in productive feedbacks into the ‘steering mechanisms’—that is, healthy discussions
result in changes to policies and procedures (‘formal’), trust and cooperation within the team grows
(‘interpersonal’) and the shared sense of ‘how we do business round here’ advances (‘cultural’).
It is important to note that failures in this area are not to be explained by any one person’s poor
character: people do the best they can. However, they do not always recognise the challenge of
growth needed for higher order work, that “what got me here, won’t get me there”. And even if
they do, they don’t always know how to get the additional skills.
Dietrich Dorner’s—author of the Logic of Failure1
— has developed a model of individual processes
that do and do not lead to improved outcomes and which at worst lead to disaster. The following
diagram shoehorns his argument into
the same format as the one presented by
Martin. Once more there is a top loop
which leads to a virtuous outcome and a
bottom one that is a vicious cycle.
While the overall argument is complex,
the take away is simple: under pressure,
needs for certainty and for self-perceived
competence readily take people towards
the bottom loop. In some of the
simulation experiments described in the
book, as many as 90% of participants
caved in under pressure and moved into
the lower cycle.
The importance of these two arguments—and the reason for showing them in visually congruent
diagrams, is to show that failure is layered—the leader alone, the leadership team as a group and
the wider culture (especially if distorted by poor leader behaviour) can all tend towards the vicious
cycles rather than the virtuous ones.
4. What activities can enhance leaders as individuals?
Let me start with what does not work well, even though it is often relied upon. In seeking to enhance
leadership teams and their functions, two common and interrelated problems are found in much of
the literature and practice. These are:
• reliance on organised ‘common sense’; and
• excessive emphasis on ‘education’.
3.1 Reliance on organised ‘common sense’
A large literature exists on topic such as team building, managing change and so forth. Classic
examples of these are works such as
1
The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, Basic Books, 1991

7. 7
• John Kotter (1996) Leading Change, HBR Press
• Jim Kouzes & Barry Posner (2002) The Leadership Challenge, Jossey-Bass
Both of these books have generated an enormous literature and following. Yet, on close
examination, both are (highly organised) common sense syntheses of a wide variety of stories and
examples. Ask lots of business leaders what they did and how, sift the stories for themes and then
collate these into key principles such as “build a change coalition”. There is nothing wrong with
organised common sense: much as one does not need knowledge of chemistry to know what makes
a cake rise nor understand photosynthesis to choose a good location for the lemon tree, a lot of
good practice can be generated by the common sense model. Yet understanding how the generation
of CO2 makes a cake rise, or how that same CO2 is converted with water into complex sugars by the
action of sunlight takes common sense a step further.
In the case of human behaviour, this is even more important, since much ‘recipe’ knowledge derived
from common sense is often questionable, not least because research shows how often the firm
inner conviction that individuals have about themselves and others seems to be misplaced in
fundamental ways2
.
3.2 Excessive emphasis on ‘education’.
Directly linked to this weakness, is the fact that far too much emphasis is placed on education as a
panacea for change. Operating under the illusion that (some version of) ‘the truth will make us free’
large amounts of money and effort are expended to tell people important things which they either
do not register or, more often, register but remain unaffected by. Thus, for example, the current
epidemic of obesity in the West is not based upon the fact that no one knows we should eat well,
reduce fast foods and exercise more. But somehow, the knowledge has little or no impact. There is a
myriad of such examples: people know speed is dangerous, but they speed, they know they should
moderate their alcohol use, but they don’t. They understand what condoms do, yet girls get
pregnant and STDS get transmitted. And so on, ad infinitum.
Both of these problems—excessive reliance on common sense and education—can be remedied if
we understand more about the basis of human behaviour. Here good models exist which point to
the same end and which can be expressed in two powerful metaphors.
3.3 Metaphor 1: The Rider and the Elephant
Introduced into psychology by a leading US author—Jonathan
Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis—this metaphor
originates with the Buddha who argued that our frequent
experience of being ‘torn’ between what we want to do and what
we know we ought to do can be understood if we think of a rider
on a domesticated elephant. The elephant, though ‘tamed’,
remains a 6 ton beast with ‘beastly’ desires which means that the
efforts of the rider to direct it are always liable to challenge and
require continual effort. The rider, meanwhile, may have many
skills but is dwarfed by the size and strength of the elephant.
2
see e.g., Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist,
54, 462-479

8. 8
Haidt, following in a scientific mode the initial idea of the Buddha, equates the rider with the higher
order, ‘cortical’ brain processes and the elephant with lower order brain processes, especially those
that arise in the limbic system. The rider thinks itself in charge—and sometimes is—but all too often
it finds itself excusing what the elephant has done, a process technically known as ‘confabulation’.
While the term is most usually associated with problematic response, such as those who experience
dementia, in fact we all confabulate every day. We ‘explain’ what triggered us to think about things,
to do things (or not do them) and so fort while remaining blind to numerous triggers (internal and
external) that demonstrably affect us and yet of which we are not consciously aware. So prevalent is
this that some have even argued that consciousness is an aftereffect of action, calling it “the user
illusion”.
The Rider/Elephant metaphor has been brilliantly applied to change by the Heath brothers Chip and
Dan in a book called Switch (see www.switchthebook.com for an overview). This is the only book on
managing change which has a scientific basis rather than common sense. They argue a tri-partite
approach, which, using their terms looks like this:
Domain Problem and Action Frame
The Rider
What looks like resistance is often lack of clarity. When people know exactly what is needed, they are
much more likely to ‘play ball’.
Therefore one must Convince and direct the Rider
The Elephant
What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. When someone ‘just does it the old and easy way’ it may
well be that they have ‘run dry’ in their ‘self -control tank’.
Therefore one must Motivate the Elephant
The Path
What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. People respond to situational cues more
than they and we realise. One can mistake a cued response for the ‘kind of person s/he is.’
Therefore one must Shape the Path
This change model may be adapted to a training and development model. In this model the response
needed to enable the Rider focuses on enhancing cognitive and metacognitive skills, while the
development of the Elephant lies in enhancing emotional intelligence skills.
3.4 Metaphor 2: The Triune Brain
MacLean created the idea of the ‘triune brain’ in the early 1970s. He was pointing to the fact that
the brain has three clearly defined zones which correspond, in broad terms, to the long term
evolution of humans: the neo-cortex or ‘primate brain’ represents that cluster of brain structures
involved in advanced cognition, including planning, modelling and simulation; the ‘reptilian brain’
refers to those brain structures related to territoriality, ritual behaviour and other ‘reptile’
behaviours; and the ‘mammalian brain’ refers those brain structures, wherever located (mainly
limbic) that area associated with social and nurturing behaviours, mutual reciprocity, and other
behaviours and affects that arose during the age of the mammals.

9. 9
Darcia Narvaez, a US psychology professor with an interest in ethics, has argued that each of these
brain areas corresponds to an ethical set of responses, as shown in the table below.
REPTILE BRAIN
SECURITY
(Instinct)
MAMMAL BRAIN
ENGAGEMENT
(Intuition)
PRIMATE BRAIN
IMAGINATION
(Deliberation & Narrative)
Characteristics Focus on routine and
tradition, territoriality,
following precedent,
struggle for dominance and
status
Seat of emotion, memory
for ongoing experience,
sense of reality/truth,
emotional-self-in-present,
more right brain
Logical and imaginative problem
solving, foresight, planning, learning,
self-in-past, self-in-future, more left
brain
Malleability Closed system; subject to
conditioning
Initial brain wiring,
shapeable intuition
Learned, constructed understanding;
can be limited by other ethics
Basic emotions Imitation Fear, rage, seeking,
sorrow/ panic, (dominance
Care, lust, play, awe Coordinator of subcortical emotional
areas
Learning Response
to stress
Little flexibility Fight or
flight)
Some flexibility Great flexibility
Basic human needs Personal autonomy (goal
driven) instrumental efficacy
Tend and befriend Disassociation (emotions and memory
disengage)Understanding, purpose self-
enhancement
Moral dispositions
(typical)
In-group loyalty, hierarchy,
purity, concrete reciprocity,
tradition, rules, rituals,
symbols
Trust people, belonging,
social efficacy
Cognitive empathy, abstract reciprocity,
reasoning, creative response
Morality Self-protective (afferent)
Self-assertive (efferent) Self-
concerned interpersonal
relations
Love and fellow feeling,
justice, reciprocity, shame,
responsiveness
Inclusive of non-immediate other,
human heartedness when linked with
Engagement Ethic
Dispositions that can
harm self and others
Deception, control of others,
aggression, mob –
superorganism, goal seeking
can be ruthless
Inclusive of immediate
other, in-group membership
tied to emotional meaning
Bandura’s detachment (no connection),
delusions (imagination with no logic),
hyper-rationality (logic and no
imagination)
Power Can shut down other brain
areas, follows precedent
Addictive dependency Subvert instinct, overcome poor
intuitions, alter emotions with cognitive
framing, free “won’t”
These two models—Rider/Elephant and Triune Brain are highly complementary. Indeed they are two
ways of grouping the same underlying sets of neurocognitive processes into useful heuristics for
action. In simple terms, individual managers and leaders can be taken forward by:
Required intervention for development
A compelling story that shapes ‘where we are heading’ to establish
orientation, then new forms of cognition and metacognition (esp. critical
thinking skills and mindfulness) developed over time.
The Rider
Imagination
(Deliberation&
Narrative)
Increased self-awareness and self-reflection, leading into a steady
development of ‘people skills’, involving empathy, listening, crucial
conversations, conflict management, communication and motivation of
others.
The Elephant
Engagement
(Intuition)
Shared development of binding norms and, where relevant, new
organisational processes (e.g. reporting, performance management, 360
feedback, promotion, etc.) which shape the path on a daily basis.
The Path
Security
(Instinct)

10. 10
While the table presents these without any reference to sequence, the research evidence clearly
points to the fact that the best sequence involves starting with the Elephant and ‘engagement’,
moving through the path shaping and ‘security’ issues and, with the exception of the story at the
start, coming last to the Rider and the questions of ‘deliberation’.
In simple terms, until people ‘feel’ different and have new habits that they follow daily, there is only
a small chance of getting any successful purchase on complex issues about deliberating differently
and expanding complex decision making skills.
5. What activities enhance the leadership team?
The previous section has developed a detailed argument about what to do and where to start as far
as individual change is concerned. What then of the group? There are four considerations here:
1. Groups are enhanced additively by increased individual skills—if the whole equals the sum
of the parts, then increase of the parts increases the sum;
2. Groups are enhanced by a multiplier effect resulting from increased individual skills—if
individuals relate to other team members more effectively, there is a form of synergy
underway and the sum increases;
3. Groups are enhanced imitatively by good role modelling from the top: when the most senior
leader(s) change, others follow suit;
4. Above all, groups are enhanced synergistically by increased cooperation and trust—if the
whole can become more than the sum of the parts because of group interactive properties
‘the rising tide lifts all boats’.
While these four steps do not amount to a recipe, they do offer a guide to selecting the kinds of activities—of
the myriad of offer—that can and do work. What is largely absent, and for good reasons, is the plethora of
cheap and ineffective tricks that are the stock-in-trade of many ‘change managers’—the glossy posters, CEO
video messages, glib slogans, wall charts of mission and values and so on.