By Carl Sanders-Edwards & the Adeption Insights Team
“You need to go to the kitchen!”
This advice inspired a strategy to boost leader engagement on our leadership development platform Adeption.io – a great idea that ended up becoming a frustrating game of “Whack-a-Mole”.
‘Go to the kitchen’ is inspired from putting on a party. You set up the living room, the seats, the music, and the tables for snacks. However, two hours into the party everyone is in the kitchen. Why? That’s where you are, it’s where the drinks are, and it’s where the snacks are coming from. Smart!
You want the party to be in the living room... but it’s in the kitchen. Adeption’s version of ‘go to the kitchen’ was to build an interface to our leadership development platform directly in MS Teams and Slack. Most of the busy leaders we support are already in these channels – so rather than try and get them to come to our platform, we would take Adeption to them.
We took this on as a technical challenge with a sequence of tasks. 12 months of R&D, engineering and testing. Eventually we got it working. I expected that within a few months 1OOO’s of happy leaders would start reporting on how great it was to use – after all, it was exactly what they had asked for.
This didn’t happen. Instead we got months of “Whack-a-Mole”. A client wanted it but there was a technical glitch. We fixed that but now our people were nervous to share it with other clients. We fixed that, then technical people, without the context for “why integrate?" got bogged down in the final step. We fixed that but then… You get the gist. Every time we solved one challenge, another popped up.
We had fallen into one of the most common leadership failures in business. As researcher Ronald Heifetz says: using a technical approach to an adaptive challenge. The work of getting an Adeption interface into MS Teams or Slack is the very definition of an adaptive (or complex) challenge; it is novel, there is no pre-existing playbook and therefore the work falls in the gaps between existing defined roles.
What the research says - our default leaning to simple, technical approaches
We analyzed the challenges shared by thousands of leaders across our platform, and while 62% of their challenges are ‘adaptive’, only 2.3% of leaders take a strongly adaptive approach to these problems. Instead, just like us, over 6O% of leaders are taking steps better suited for a more simple, ‘technical’ challenge. Heifitz was correct - the majority of leaders are taking a technical, simple approach, to something that is actually adaptive and complex.
It seems that when facing a complex challenge we try to simplify the situation and our response. But the outcome of that simple solution often becomes a complex, frustrating game of “Whack-a-Mole”.
Getting on the balcony
The advice we had to ‘go to the kitchen’ was good. But now we had to get out of the kitchen we had created and onto the balcony. From up here, it was clear: our rollout was actually a mix of technical tasks and adaptive challenges. Technically, we had owners for each of the tasks that needed doing. Adaptively, we needed to appreciate that no single function or person held the complete answer. Technically, we had laid out all the tasks in a linear sequence, adaptively, we needed to work together in parallel. We all needed to collaborate in experimenting and learning simultaneously.
So, we launched an all-hands, three-month focus on these integrations to force our collective attention on the challenge.
We learnt that a successful integration requires every person who touches the customer journey to be knowledgeable, and have the initiative and courage to step beyond their defined role and take action. Making the integration work isn’t anyone else's job, it’s everyone's job.
We are now making progress, I can see the momentum. We have accepted that it is hard, and are leaning into that. Thousands of leaders will soon be benefiting from the integrations.
The good news - it doesn’t have to be hard
Research has suggested that taking the balcony view required for adaptive challenges can be long and tortuous. However, we have found that a simple technical-to-adaptive reframe can be almost instantly helpful.
How? Create a balcony to get on
To get on the balcony we first need to create the balcony. Do this by giving leaders the space and a few nudges to help them see their challenge and reframe their approach. It happens almost instantly. In a 1-hour session we saw leaders shift their planned approach to complex challenges from 17% Adaptive to 67% Adaptive.
These leaders created instant shifts.
| From Technical approaches focused on | To Adaptive approaches focused on |
|
Role based tasks Sequential steps Pre-prescribed outcomes |
Collaborating to experiment and learn Progressing together in parallel Discovering the way forward |
Time after time we see similar results. Not all development needs to be long and tortuous.
So how about trying this yourself? Next time you notice a game of “Whack-a-Mole” is happening take a break, step onto the balcony. From here try to embrace the complexity, experiment and learn to help the system get the result you want.
Who knows, we could even help you do this from the kitchen, aka MS Teams or Slack!
Deep dive resources
- Read: Growing adaptive mindsets (part 1 and part 2) by Carl Sanders-Edwards to learn more about diagnosing problems and building adaptive capacity.
- Download: Embracing Experimentation, a position paper by Dan Lake. It explores why asking experts and high achievers to experiment can often feel like an identity threat, and provides a practical roadmap to make navigating uncertainty feel safe.
- The data: % of adaptive challenges Adeption insights series report: How to develop adaptive leaders. % of technical approaches. Adeption Internal Insights Summary Report: Adaptive-Technical Challenge Framing (Sample size: N=1,532 leaders). Shift from adaptive to technical approaches. Adeption B3 Live Lab impact results May 2O26 session