Adaptive leadership
Adaptive leaders influencing people by supplying purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.
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Adaptive leadership is a style that encourages sharing, listening to suggestions, seeking out uncomfortable opinions and ideas. Sometimes, saying, “Tell me what you think I do not want to hear.” With collective wisdom decision-making, the combined cognitive differences can uncover hidden problems and opportunities, leading to perspective-shifting conclusions.
The Next Generation of Computing Architectures
In the future, a combination of powerful technologies will deliver an order of magnitude change in digital disruptions. The Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, 5G Communications, Security Technologies, and Artificial Intelligence will impact every industry.
The book describes why adaptive leadership, vision, digital transformation and winning the talent war are strategic imperatives. Demanding attention, understanding, and action. They cannot be delegated; they must be led.
In an environment of disruptive change, strategic planning as we know it is no longer workable. Accelerating change makes the future less knowable and impossible to plan for, which is why organizations must be flexible, resilient, and innovative.
Today’s form of planning involves a process of progressive realization, the concept that knowledge, understanding, and perspectives are transient over time. Adaptive organizations are creating team-based business models designed to experiment, prototype, learn, and discover the future.
How to manage disruptive change starts with the question -
Why do organizations fail?
Traditional organizations fail – if
Organizations resist change with a powerful bias toward the status quo.
Organizations fail when the leadership focuses on the status quo, the current operational effectiveness, efficiency, and quarterly earnings. They think they have all the answers. They do not understand digital transformation. Even though it is impossible to plan for an unknowable future, they use a traditional top-down strategic planning control and decision-making process.
Failure comes from not understanding digital transformation, not creating an adaptive business model.
Adaptive Organizations
Adaptive organizations think differently and act differently. The success of adaptive business models comes from adaptive leaders, with a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and a willingness to give up control to get results.
Adaptive leadership is challenging. Adaptive leaders must simultaneously manage the core business operations, and at the same time, they understand that you cannot plan for an unknowable future.
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Adaptive leaders use progressive realization that comes from the wisdom of cross-functional teams, prototyping, experimenting, learning, and discovering the future. The cross-functional teams utilize cloud computing and API/microservices to create new innovative products, services, and customer value propositions.
​The advantage of cloud computing and API/microservices lies its ability to evaluate innovative ideas and then scale up the workload for those projects selected and funded by management.
Get a set of management guidelines, concepts, and principles for succeeding amid digital disruptive change with the wisdom, lessons, and insights in this business guidebook.
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Bob Shafto took over a failing computerization project at New England Mutual Life Insurance Company and transformed it into a leader in this area in subsequent decades. He has much to teach today’s leaders about adapting to disruptive digital transformations.
JoAnne Yates
Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management
MIT Sloan School of Management
