See yourself as a system

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

Perhaps the Christmas break gave you some time for self-reflection on the year past and the role you played in it be it leadership or other. Certainly understanding yourself as a system helps you make the personal changes needed to lead adaptive change. It requires an insight into your fears, interests and various loyalties and how they affect your behaviours and decisions. Essentially Heifetz and Linsky summarise this as understanding your ‘default settings’. Understanding these gives you a new freedom to respond in more effective ways (rather than continuing to ‘react’ based on unconscious settings – it puts you in the driver’s seat so to speak).

Heifetz and Linsky focus on three types of default settings; loyalties, your personal tuning and your bandwidth.

Your loyalties are where you feel obligated towards, be it colleagues, community, important people past and present. These can create conflict when dealing with an adaptive challenge.