Balancing comfort and urgency in transformation

I’ve long been a fan of Dr Ronald Heifetz’s (of the Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University) delineation between what he frames as ‘technical change’ and ‘adaptive change’. In his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and elsewhere he describes how technical change is typically that which relates to more tangible or visible things including products, processes, or procedures, whilst adaptive change encompasses more human and more intangible aspects including beliefs, values, behaviours and thinking.

The two types of change have differing time scales. Whilst the level of short term disturbance may be high with technical change, the organisation can typically deal with it rapidly because it is able to draw on existing stocks of knowledge or assumptions and experience to find a solution. Adaptive challenges however, are more likely to require potentially broad-based behavioural change in the organisation. And since they can’t be solved using existing expertise they may well require a more emergent approach and greater experimentation.

The response required to these different types of change is very different and yet, says Heifetz, we are often pretty bad at distinguishing between them. Technical change typically involves simpler challenges and fixes that don’t require a change to underlying system in which they exist. Adaptive change however, may well involve more fundamental revisions to the environment in which the company operates, and may well require more fundamental revisions to the system.

This is very akin to my writing around optimisation vs transformation, and first order and second order change. Technical change is all about responding in a way that maintains the status quo, and consequently may well be an easier for people within the organisation to grasp and enact. Adaptive change is more fundamental, potentially more disruptive, and requires new or different thinking. It’s harder to acheive because the system itself often resists making changes to the system.

Any change or transformation process will likely involve elements of both technical and adaptive change, but it’s the latter which will likely be more challenging. For this reason there’s a huge risk that the business focuses more on the technical change (adaptations to products and services perhaps) rather than the more fundamental adaptive change which is required (shifts in behaviour, outlook, approaches, mindsets). Staff will need to evolve behaviours, ways of working, and maybe even become more comfortable with uncertainty or ambiguity.

Successful adaptations, says Heifetz, are both ‘conservative and progressive’ in that they require careful thinking to distinguish between what from the past is worth keeping, building upon or optimising, and what needs to be discarded. ‘Adaptive leaders’ as he calls them, need to be both patient and persistent to ensure that the system doesn’t slip back into it’s old ways.

Acheiving real change therefore requires not only a vision for the kind of organisation/business that you want to become but a healthy sense of urgency to overcome the inevitable initial inertia. It needs impetus to get the flywheel going, but the wrong kind of pressure creates unhappiness and chaos.

This brings us to Heifetz’s idea of a ‘productive zone of disequilibrium’. The idea here is that positive urgency and pressure needs to be high enough to generate forward momentum and engagement in the change, but not so high that it leads to chaos or unhappiness.

In my first book I used this idea to talk about how managing an effective adaptive change process means working within these boundaries. There needs to be enough urgency and sense of change to break inertia, move beyond complaency, and generate forwards momentum in a new direction. But too much of the wrong kind of disturbance may move people beyond the limits of tolerance which may generate unnecessary stress, unhappiness, and result in poor outcomes and even chaos.

The ‘productive transformation zone’ as I’ve called it above is where change happens. So what are the signals that you may not have gone far enough to challenge the business and generate a foundation for change? I think we can categorise them into five broad areas:

1. Behaviour —  there are no demonstrable changes to behaviour, and no enthusiasm or ownership for change
2. Inertia — the change is happening too slowly, there are no visible signs that old priorities, ways of working, and relationship capital has been modified
3. Drift —  the business starts to drift immediately back to the old ways of doing things
4. Innovation — is focused on marginal improvements to existing propositions rather than breakthrough innovation aligned to a new direction, there is no change to the rate of innovation or experimentation
5. Complacency — people are still within their comfort zone, and not demonstrating any urgency in implementing new strategies or priorities

There may also be signals that the type, scale or pace of change is causing you to exceed the limit of tolerance. Again, we can categories these into some specific areas:

1. Morale — is on a downward spiral, staff are dispirited, there is a lack of belief in the leadership
2. Performance — outputs suffer, the performance declines rapidly, there is a lack of attention to key business priorities
3. Behaviour — becomes overly pressurised or unpredictable, or characterised by unwanted shortcuts or politics
4. Talent — the most talented people start to leave, and there are challenges in retaining the best staff
5. Focus and governance —  focus is disjointed, there is a breakdown in governance processes and structures, innovation initiatives start to become unfocused or poorly thought through

One final thing from Heifetz. I loved the way that he describes how the workings of an organisation can be like dancing on a dancefloor where you only really notice what is immediately around you. The adaptive leader needs to periodically ‘move from the dance floor to the balcony’ in order to appreciate the wider picture of what’s going on. This helps them to gain a true perspective, and avoid applying technical solutions to adaptive challenges.

Leading change is delicate balancing act that requires perception, judgment and empathy. Understanding relevant signals and patterns is a critical part of this.

A version of this post was also published on my weekly Substack – To join our community of thousands of subscribers you can sign up to that here.

To get posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, drop your email into the box below.