How to lead adaptively when there are no clear answers | Farayi Chipungu | TEDxKlagenfurt

Key Concepts

• Adaptive Leadership
• Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges
• Loss Aversion
• Internalized Code/Programming
• Holding Space
• Diagnosis of Challenges
• Systemic Change
• Learning Organizations
• Keep, Let Go, Innovate

Grandmother's Leadership: Rewriting the Script

The speaker begins by sharing the story of her grandmother, Gorggo, born in rural Zimbabwe in 1928, whose life was pre-scripted by tradition: marriage, children, and adherence to patriarchal norms. After her grandfather's death, Gorggo faced pressure to marry one of his brothers, which would have jeopardized her daughters' education. Instead of passively accepting this fate, she exercised leadership by challenging the tradition.

• The Challenge: Gorggo faced an adaptive challenge, requiring her to rewrite the future within a rigid patriarchal system.
• Her Approach: She didn't confront the brothers directly but engaged in emotional and political groundwork: cooking, listening, debating, and building alliances.
• The Turning Point: When presented with the traditional bowls of water, she refused, stating, "This is not my water to carry," creating space for community debate and change.
• Adaptive Leadership in Action: Gorggo held space for the community to do the difficult work of changing their own system, demonstrating adaptive leadership.

Adaptive vs. Technical Challenges

The speaker, a leadership professor at Harvard, introduces the concept of adaptive leadership, contrasting it with technical problem-solving.

• Technical Problems: These have known expertise and can be resolved with knowledge.
• Adaptive Challenges: These require learning, unlearning, and often involve changing deeply held beliefs and behaviors. The work resides "in the head and in the heart."
• The Danger of Misdiagnosis: Treating adaptive challenges as technical problems (applying more force, structure, or instructions) is a major threat to progress.
• Human Element: Adaptive challenges are difficult because they involve loss – loss of identity, power, position, or tradition.

Five Lessons from Gorggo's Story

The speaker outlines five key lessons derived from her grandmother's experience:

1. Get the Diagnosis Right: Differentiate between technical and adaptive challenges. If progress is stalled, consider the values, loyalties, and relationships people are being asked to risk.
2. Change is Slow, Layered, Political, and Emotional: It takes time and persistence, especially when things stall.
3. Heat is Part of the Job: Challenging beliefs and facilitating learning/unlearning generates "heat." Leaders must "walk through the fire" and create space for others to do the work.
4. No Title Required: Leadership is about mobilizing people to do difficult work, not about formal authority.
5. Check Your Code: Understand your own internalized code (patterns of behavior, instructions internalized from a young age). If you don't know what's running you, you can't lead the system.

The Global Fund Case Study: Adolescent Girls and HIV

The speaker presents a case study involving Lyndon Morrison from the Global Fund, illustrating the application of adaptive leadership in global health.

• The Problem: Despite progress in combating HIV in a particular country, infection rates were increasing among adolescent girls and young women.
• Initial Response: The problem was initially treated as a technical glitch, with people pointing fingers (parents, teachers, bar owners, police), ultimately blaming the girls themselves.
• Reframing the Problem: The speaker and her colleagues recognized that the issue was deeply human and systemic. Ruth, a representative girl, was pointing to the underlying problems: lack of communication about sex and HIV, absent fathers, police unwilling to enforce laws, and doctors facing moral dilemmas.
• The Solution: They opened space for conversation, bringing together parents, adolescents, chiefs, pastors, and bar owners. This allowed the community to recognize the patterns and relationships contributing to the problem.
• The Outcome: The community started to evolve, with parents talking to their children, teachers addressing difficult topics, and treatment rates increasing. They began to "recode their own wiring."

Adaptive Leadership in the Military

The speaker extends the concept of adaptive leadership to military organizations.

• The Challenge: Technology and geopolitical shifts are changing the nature of warfare, often making soldiers on the battlefield more knowledgeable than their commanders.
• The Question: Senior leaders are grappling with how to lead when they don't have all the answers, and how to develop soldiers who can speak up and contribute.
• The Goal: To create a learning organization, not one dependent on a single leader for all the answers.
• Not Throwing Out the Old: The speaker emphasizes that command and control still have value, but leaders must identify the situations that require a different approach.

Keep, Let Go, Innovate: The Adaptive Framework

The speaker concludes by emphasizing the need to sift through what to keep, what to let go of, and where to innovate to create a different future. She uses the analogy of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, highlighting nature's adaptive process.

• The Question: How do you sift through what to keep, what to let go of, and where must you innovate to bring about a different future?
• Nature's Example: Nature, in transforming a caterpillar into a butterfly, asks the same three questions: What do I keep? What do I let go of? And where do I need to innovate?

Conclusion

The core message is that adaptive leadership is essential for navigating complex challenges that require changing deeply ingrained behaviors and systems. It involves understanding the human element, creating space for dialogue, and being willing to challenge the status quo while acknowledging the value of tradition. The "keep, let go, innovate" framework provides a practical approach to driving meaningful change in any context.