Creative Agility

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘Leadership Agility – Five levels of mastery for anticipating and initiating change’, (Joiner and Josephs, 2007). 

In my recent blogs I’ve been working through four mutually reinforcing competencies that Joiner and Josephs believe contribute to leadership agility. The third mutually reinforcing competency is creative agility.

Being a successful leader requires us to turn actual or potential problems into desired results. And as we’ve often discussed, in today’s environment these problems are frequently tangled and complex, or ill-structured, meaning it isn’t as well defined as perhaps we would like. In other words these are ‘adaptive problems’ rather than ‘technical problems’. These problems have multiple plausible solutions which start with the challenge of defining the problem in and of itself as it won’t present as a problem we’ve commonly seen before. Often there is missing information, cross disciplinary, organsiational and cultural boundaries and to top it off, need to be solved in conjunction with with other problems.

Get experimental!

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). 

Heifetz and Linsky point out that everything you do in leading adaptive change is an experiment. Framing it this way offers you space to try new strategies, ask questions and discover what’s essential, what’s expendable and what workable innovation is. Framing this way also allows some protection when you fail in your educated guesses.

We’ve had quite a bit of discussion around this already.. run multiple experiments to increase innovation, make midcourse corrections, audition ideas and so on. It seems to me this is a central theme and critical component to Heifetz and Linksy’s adaptive leadership. Certainly I have shared examples of how it has been applied in my current organisation and how it could have benefited previous organisations to take this stance.

What is different in this chapter in reference to experiments is Heifetz and Linsky clarify how you might need to communicate the fact you are running experiments.