Q #74: For both organizations and individuals, why is “adaptability” so important?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Opinions vary about that. My own opinion is that significant changes are occurring in the business world faster now — and in greater number — than ever before. Although no one I know has read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), most business executives are familiar with his concept of natural selection. Darwin defined it as the “principle by which each slight variation [of a trait], if useful, is preserved.” This concept of natural selection among species also applies to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change initiatives that originate elsewhere?

In their recently published book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus on the relationship of adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills, experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time, patience, and persistence.

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, “There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way…As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, ‘There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.’”

In Q&A #75, I summarize some key points about organizational adaptability that William Rothschild makes in his recently published book, The Secrets to GE’s Success: A Former Insider Reveals the Management Strategies of the World’s Most Competitive Company.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

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