Thankfully, most organizations do well at managing what they know how to do. The trouble is that the challenges defining this century - climate, healthcare, AI, income inequality, misinformation, unaffordable housing, and more - are "we don't know how" problems that lie beyond the reach of good management.
The Fundamentals of Adaptive Practice lays out the rigorous, proven principles, disciplines, and methods for taking on exactly those challenges. Drawing on the authors' decades of experience working with leaders across more than seventy industries and fields in the private, non-profit, and governmental sectors, this book offers both the understanding and the practical tools needed to move forward when the path isn't clear.
The book is organized around seven core adaptive practices:
- Framing challenges with the right questions
- Using team discipline to drive shared performance
- Collaborating appreciatively across differences
- Keeping focus on outcomes, not process
- Building the "we" that figures out the how
- Converting assumptions into real knowledge through design/do cycles
- Shaping and pursuing a "story of we" that invites participation
Each chapter draws on real case examples from manufacturing, journalism, urban development, education, and more, alongside exercises designed to be used with your team.
Adaptive practice is not a critique of management. It is the necessary and essential companion to it. When people in organizations and purpose networks have the courage to say "we're not really sure we know how to do this," they take the first step on a journey that leads to new knowhow - and eventually back to the stable ground where traditional management can work again.
Both/and. Not either/or. Today, the future of people and the planet depends on how well organizations and purpose networks learn to use both. This book shows the way.
