Make Interpretations: Helping Your Team Recognize and Deal with Adaptive Challenges

By: Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: When a problem is identified, people gravitate toward interpretations of the problem that are technical rather than adaptive, benign instead of conflictual, and individual rather than systemic. These kinds of problems are seen as having easy, painless solutions. Your job in exercising adaptive leadership is to wean people away from these interpretations and nudge them towards recognizing adaptive elements of the challenge, with the ultimate goal of getting people into the habit of interpreting events systematically and politically rather than at the individual and interpersonal level. This chapter provides guidelines for leading your group toward more effective interpretation of challenges which, ultimately, will lead to more creative solutions. This chapter was originally published as chapter 8 of "The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World."