Is My School Facing an Adaptive Challenge

Just like we want to identify the underlying needs of students before deciding how to respond to student behavior, we want to do the same for the system. Before we rush to action to solve an identified problem, we need to truly diagnose the challenge. To inform our diagnostic process, let’s use some of the core concepts from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by Heifetz, Linksy, & Grashow. Adaptive leadership is specific to adaptive challenges, the ones that cannot be solved with a quick fix.

How do I know my school is dealing with an adaptive challenge?
Heifetz and colleagues contrast adaptive challenges with technical challenges. Whereas a technical challenge can be addressed by sharing new information, perhaps holding a Professional Development session for all staff, adaptive challenges require much deeper work.

One indicator of an adaptive challenge in schools is repeated failure. All the PD you have thrown at the problem is not working. Another indicator is looking to the leader (e.g., principal or superintendent) to solve the problem. When the same person(s) has been trying to solve the problem without success, it is time to bring in other stakeholders.

Another indicator you are dealing with an issue that goes deep is when you see “disproportionate reactions to proposals”. For example, if asking a teacher to attend a staff meeting about racism leads to that teacher yelling or crying, there is something deeper going on.

The essence of adaptive challenges can be captured in this sentence of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s book: “Adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis,” (Loc. 1283).

How might adaptive challenges show up in my school?
The authors identify four main types of adaptive challenges that often overlap with one another. See if you can identify any of these within your school and need adaptive leadership.
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• Our actions do not line up with what we say we value. In the context of racial justice work, this can take the form of white liberalism. This might look like “celebrating diversity” but not interrogating school policies or practices to root out structural racism. It might be tone policing passionate responses to injustice, conflating the absence of tension with justice. To address this type of adaptive challenge, take stock of how teachers, students, and administrators spend their time. Look at what metrics the school uses to judge teacher, student, and organizational success. Do these practices align with the school’s stated values? We can ask why more has not been done to advance the necessary change.
• We hold competing commitments. To address long-standing adaptive challenges in schools, we may need to forgo allegiance to a long-standing commitment that has inhibited real change. The first step here is to identify those competing commitments. Bring them to light. Choosing to prioritize a commitment to racial justice over high test scores will certainly disrupt the status quo. It will probably cause increased tension, but in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice." Furthermore, until we address adaptive challenges like racism in our schools, we can’t raise test scores for all students, and if we can, we must return to archetype #1 and ask: Does the pursuit of high test scores force us to sacrifice living out our values?
• There are things that must not be named. If we cannot speak about the real issues happening in our schools and the real feelings and impacts that accompany those issues, we cannot address the issue itself. Dr. Cherie Bridges Patrick has written about the necessity of a liberating dialogic environment in racial justice work, and this is true for all adaptive challenges. To diagnose what is really going on beneath the surface, we need to be able to say it out loud. This is tough work, so Heifetz and colleagues suggest having individual stakeholders journal during a meeting: What were you thinking during the meeting vs. what did you actually say? The differences between each category may help identify what is “unspeakable.”
• It’s easier to avoid the subject. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky say this shows up in two ways. The first is “diversion of attention.” They say this could look like changing the subject, making a joke, denying the problem exists, making it personal to deflect from the real issue, discounting solutions because it’s not how we do things here, or only focusing on technical fixes (e.g., “Let’s do a Professional Development workshop”). Another form of avoidance is “displacement of responsibility.” They say this could be creating a scapegoat, externalizing the problem to something we cannot control, or hiring a consultant to fix the problem without putting in the work and applying adaptive leadership. To address avoidance, you might challenge teachers and administrators to identify avoidance behaviors as they come up in meetings or conduct interviews with various stakeholders to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on (e.g., What are the fears or competing values that lead us to avoidance?)

My school has an adaptive challenge we need to tackle. What can I do about it?
Set up structures of shared leadership. The first step is recognizing you cannot do this work alone. Shared leadership structures are powerful because they are not temporary solutions. They are not ad-hoc committees, separate from the rest of the organization. Shared leadership is the heartbeat of the organization. It is how all decisions are made.

Shared leadership is more about the how than the what. By setting up ongoing mechanisms for all stakeholder voices, shared leadership systematizes the process of diagnosis for adaptive challenges. You do not need to start from scratch each time you need to collect data or stakeholder experiences on one specific topic. The system will already exist.

Furthermore, shared leadership as a form of governance is preventative rather than reactive. Much of the conversation in education is about fixing problems or policies that already exist. Certainly, this is important and necessary work. However, in improving our decision-making and policy creation processes, we can reduce our future needs to react to poor decisions and policies because we are more likely to get it right the first time. For more details on how to set up the structures of shared leadership, read this blog post.

Each stakeholder is going to approach the situation with a unique set of values, loyalties, fears, and desired outcomes. To effectively engage stakeholders in the work of tackling an adaptive challenge, leaders must “diagnose the political landscape.” To do this, we can ask each stakeholder (or ask representatives of stakeholder groups as long as the system of representation is effective):

• How are you affected by the challenge and/or proposed solution?
• What are your desired outcomes?
• What are your core values (and how do they come to bear on this challenge)?
• What are your loyalties? (to your stakeholder group, but also hidden loyalties you may not realize you have—e.g., maintaining white comfortability or white silence)
• What are you afraid of losing? (e.g., comfort, time, control, status, independence, life)

Once you have gathered all of this information, you may want to identify common points of connection across stakeholder groups. Heifetz and colleagues call these “hidden alliances” as groups who may initially seem in opposition to one another’s proposed solutions may have a shared value or desired outcome that when illuminated can help them work together.

To help you get started on the process of diagnosis, I’ve made a mini workbook for you with activities and guiding questions.

Get the Diagnosing Adaptive Challenges Mini Workbook