Ingenuity Arts: Adaptive Leadership and the New Science

Most of us want to be able to successfully embrace organizational complexity and to successfully navigate the challenges of our lives. We also want to feel truly engaged in our work and to feel proud of what we have invested our lives in. We want to be part of a real team that does real work that actually matters.

Adaptive leadership is about developing capabilities that include both deep analysis and broad environmental scanning. It isn’t that reductive analysis has been fruitless - it has simply been a partial answer that has too often been treated as the final word. Demanding environments are proving the inadequacy of reductive thinking. We live and lead in settings that are deeply connected, highly populated and therefore complex. And in navigating this landscape, straight lines aren’t possible.

The number of people alive today, the increased pace and proximity of our social and other interactions, as well as the inequities that exist globally, all drive a rapidly widening ingenuity gap. If I had to walk across an empty room, the ingenuity required is minimal. If that same room was filled with snipers, tigers, mines and banana peels, the ingenuity required to safely cross to the other side would be much greater. Thus Homer-Dixon reminds us that we must be realistic about the challenges and then get past the faulty notion that steam-powered strategies for institution building are sufficient for a rocket fuel era.

A few key terms that frame the dynamics of complexity theory will be a starting point for further study and further reflection on how complexity theory can increase our awareness of organizational dynamics and the nested systems of change that constitute life and change.

There is no single grid or map for us. We must find our way in part through experience-honed intuition and in part through intelligent collaboration. The art in Ingenuity Arts is not about developing a methodology or a technique or a program. It is instead a conscious commitment to develop an adaptive mind and thus, for leaders, an adaptive style of leadership that will enable us to more capably navigate changes that we can’t possibly see from our present vantage point but which will inevitably come.

Exhaustive is usually a euphemism for tedious, authoritative generally means a failure to listen and professional has become a way of saying safe, predictable, boring and flat.