The Idea in Brief

What presents your company with its toughest challenges? Shifting markets? Stiffening competition? Emerging technologies? When such challenges intensify, you may need to reclarify corporate values, redesign strategies, merge or dissolve businesses, or manage cross-functional strife.

These adaptive challenges are murky, systemic problems with no easy answers. Perhaps even more vexing, the solutions to adaptive challenges don’t reside in the executive suite. Solving them requires the involvement of people throughout your organization.

Adaptive work is tough on everyone. For leaders, it’s counterintuitive. Rather than providing solutions, you must ask tough questions and leverage employees’ collective intelligence. Instead of maintaining norms, you must challenge the “way we do business.” And rather than quelling conflict, you need to draw issues out and let people feel the sting of reality.

For your employees, adaptive work is painful—requiring unfamiliar roles, responsibilities, values, and ways of working. No wonder employees often try to lob adaptive work back to their leaders.

How to ensure that you and your employees embrace the challenges of adaptive work? Applying the following six principles will help.

The Idea in Practice

1. Get on the balcony. Don’t get swept up in the field of play. Instead, move back and forth between the “action” and the “balcony.” You’ll spot emerging patterns, such as power struggles or work avoidance. This high-level perspective helps you mobilize people to do adaptive work.

2. Identify your adaptive challenge. Example: 

When British Airways’ passengers nicknamed it “Bloody Awful,” CEO Colin Marshall knew he had to infuse the company with a dedication to customers. He identified the adaptive challenge as “creating trust throughout British Airways.” To diagnose the challenge further, Marshall’s team mingled with employees and customers in baggage areas, reservation centers, and planes, asking which beliefs, values, and behaviors needed overhauling. They exposed value-based conflicts underlying surface-level disputes, and resolved the team’s own dysfunctional conflicts which impaired companywide collaboration. By understanding themselves, their people, and the company’s conflicts, the team strengthened British Airways’ bid to become “the World’s Favourite Airline.”

3. Regulate distress. To inspire change—without disabling people—pace adaptive work:

  • First, let employees debate issues and clarify assumptions behind competing views—safely.
  • Then provide direction. Define key issues and values. Control the rate of change: Don’t start too many initiatives simultaneously without stopping others.
  • Maintain just enough tension, resisting pressure to restore the status quo. Raise tough questions without succumbing to anxiety yourself. Communicate presence and poise.

4. Maintain disciplined attention. Encourage managers to grapple with divisive issues, rather than indulging in scapegoating or denial. Deepen the debate to unlock polarized, superficial conflict. Demonstrate collaboration to solve problems.

5. Give the work back to employees. To instill collective self-confidence—versus dependence on you—support rather than control people. Encourage risk-taking and responsibility—then back people up if they err. Help them recognize they contain the solutions.

6. Protect leadership voices from below. Don’t silence whistle-blowers, creative deviants, and others exposing contradictions within your company. Their perspectives can provoke fresh thinking. Ask, “What is this guy really talking about? Have we missed something?”

To stay alive, Jack Pritchard had to change his life. Triple bypass surgery and medication could help, the heart surgeon told him, but no technical fix could release Pritchard from his own responsibility for changing the habits of a lifetime. He had to stop smoking, improve his diet, get some exercise, and take time to relax, remembering to breathe more deeply each day. Pritchard’s doctor could provide sustaining technical expertise and take supportive action, but only Pritchard could adapt his ingrained habits to improve his long-term health. The doctor faced the leadership task of mobilizing the patient to make critical behavioral changes; Jack Pritchard faced the adaptive work of figuring out which specific changes to make and how to incorporate them into his daily life.

A version of this article appeared in the December 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review.