Leading the Adaptive Challenge - Development

There are times when the people’s advancement is dependent on their capacity to develop their latent capabilities take advantage of opportunities. The development of those capabilities will allow the people, or their organization, to prosper at a higher-level than they would be able to otherwise.

The leadership task faced with the development challenge is to orchestrate a learning process design that cultivates the group’s latent capabilities.

The development challenge is the core challenge of all human endeavors. Without the appropriate development that allows people to take advantage of the amazing array of opportunities that are available today, groups and organizations will stagnate. Stagnation inevitably leads to decay, and decay leads to death. Leaders therefore must be vigilant in diagnosing the shifting terrain to discover emerging threats and opportunities.

A development challenge is when the group or organization must build new capabilities –competencies, practices, and processes –to ensure the survival and progress of the group or organization.

A development challenge requires complete dedication from the leadership team to support and steer the process.

It is a volatile activity as it involves willingness to experiment and considerable conflict and anxiety as people struggle to build new capacities, deal with threats, accommodate new realities, and take advantage of emerging opportunities. 

The condition of the people is that they are incompetent in regard to the requirements of responding to a changing context. The people must face their incompetence and develop what latent capabilities they have and grow new competencies to respond to the new context and deliver on the promise. The raw material is available in the people but needs to be developed.

The barrier that impedes progress is the lack of confidence of the people, their attachment to values and practices that have worked for them in the past, their unwillingness to take risks, and their reluctance to embrace new practices and priorities. The reality that people are avoiding is that the world around them is changing and adherence to old skills, habits, and practices will render them mediocre performers at best and obsolete at worse.

The promise or aspiration (vision) on the other side of the barrier:

If latent capabilities and new competencies can be developed, the group or organization will enjoy a more prosperous, satisfying, or rewarding future.

Leadership for development challenge is about orchestrating processes to enhance the capacity of the entire system in order to make it more resilient, responsive, and relevant. The process is much like evolution in the development consists of formulating new capacities through a lot of trial and error. These new capacities allow for a higher level of functioning in changing contexts such as dealing with the new predator competitors were taking advantage of a new terrain markets.

Unlike evolution, a development challenge is a more active, guided, and intentional process in which leadership tries to identify a new challenge early, and to intervene before the challenge becomes a threat of crisis.

A way to think about the function of leadership for development challenge is to think of it as a perturbing force. Borrowing from the idea of an ecosystem, it is helpful to consider an organization as a species that will generally remain stable until some drastic change in the environment challenges the ability of the species to cope. The drastic change exerts a perturbing force on the species, and unless it involves a successful adaptive response, it will die off. 

When the equilibrium of the system is punctuated by perturbing force, a new adaptive opportunity results. Whether or not the species adapts is dependent on many factors, but the opportunity is there. In response to the economic, social, and cultural pressures the, responsible leaders must themselves act as a perturbing force to energize a developmental process that enhances the health and performance of the people and the enterprise.

The point is that a healthy enterprise must think ahead to stock up on the resources it will need to survive, grow, and take advantage of the special opportunities that might emerge in the desert of hard times ahead.