Morning. You bought the tool. You rewrote the process. Six months on, the same problem is sitting in the same chair.
Leadership.
The Adaptive Challenge
Which problem keeps coming back to you — the one you've already reorganised around, bought software for and written a process for — and if the perfect answer landed on your desk tomorrow, free and fully formed, who would have to work differently rather than harder for that problem to be gone in a year?
Ronald Heifetz trained as a physician before he taught leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School, and the medicine shows in his thinking. In Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994) he sorted situations by two questions: is the problem definition clear, and is the solution clear or does it have to be learned. In the first, both are clear and the work sits with the expert: the arm is broken, the doctor sets it. In the second, the diagnosis can be written but the prescription cannot: it is found with the patient, and holds only if they change how they live, so the work is shared. In the third, the definition itself has to be learned first, and the work sits mainly with the people who have it. Only the first is purely technical. The second is technical and adaptive at once, and it is where most of management actually lives. In Leadership on the Line (2002), written with Marty Linsky, Heifetz named the failure: the most common source of leadership failure is people in authority treating adaptive challenges as technical problems. The trap is that the technical half is the half you can buy, so it is the half that gets funded — and the money goes where the problem isn't.
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