II. Introduction to Adaptive Leadership

We’ve just talked about the practice of adaptive foresight in organizations, a practice that begins with careful, open-minded learning, then devo (anticipation) and evo (innovation) thinking, then appropriately strategic thinking, and then rest of the Eight Skills. In Chapter 2 (Personal Foresight), we’ve also described the practice of these skills on ourselves.

Seeing the Evo Devo nature of the world, and applying the Eight Skills will go a long way to making you a good manager of yourself and others. But to become a good leader, of yourself and others, you also need to have the right values, and be able to influence the use and balancing of those values with yourself and your teams. As you may recall, our current social values model is the Five Goals and the Ten Values.

In our leading complex systems, the universe is continually creating, and seeking to create more of both evolutionary and developmental goals, as follows:

Evolutionary Values: Freedom, Creativity, Insight, Diversity, Empathy.

Developmental Values: Order, Truth, Power, Security, Ethics.

These Ten Values represent each of the Five Goals, in groups of evo devo pairs, as follows:

Ten Values of Social Systems – An Evo Devo Model

Here again are the five evo devo pairs, with a bit more of the qualities of each:

1. More Empathy (love, compassion, understanding, connectedness).
2. More Ethics (morality, fairness, synergy, positive-sumness, interdependence).
3. More Insight (dematerialization, virtualization, modeling, consciousness, intelligence).
4. More Power (densification, wealth, speed, STEM compression (exponential production efficiency & density).
5. More Diversity (information, individuation, specialization, difference, independence).
6. More Security (awareness, protection, safety, risk management, immunity).
7. More Freedom (bottom-upness, indeterminacy, options, uncertainty).
8. More Order (top-downness, structure, regulation, constraint).
9. More Creativity (unpredictability, novelty, imagination, fiction, experiment, innovation).
10. More Truth (predictability, optimization, accuracy, inertia, sustainability).

Pursuing these skills and values for ourselves can called Adaptive Self-Leadership (Chapter 2), and pursuing them on teams is the values-foundation of Adaptive Leadership (this page) as we would presently define it. Recall also that we classified these ten values into the Three Values Sets of Adaptive Leadership in Chapter 4 (see picture right). This is our Three P’s model,  which is equivalent to Kirton’s management model and diagnostic test for the three types of people in organizations. We call these three types the Innovator-Experimenter-Creators, the Strategist-Planner-Managers, and the Protector-Investigator-Anticipators in the Guide. Leaders who learn about, measure, and use good foresight to steer their teams and themselves toward these values, and values sets, and who consciously balance them against each other, are going to be much better leaders, in my view.

This evo devo-derived leadership model is by no means a final word on leadership values, but I find it useful enough to apply and critique it in my own life, and perhaps it can help you as well. It is not the aim of this Guide to teach strategic management or leadership. What we will do for the rest of this section, is to say some preliminary things about management and leadership from an Evo Devo perspective. It is my hope that you find these preliminary thoughts on Adaptive Leadership helpful in your journey to become a better leader.

There also many good textbooks available on those topics. A favorite of mine is Hamel and Pralahad’s Competing for the Future (1996), which portrays both management and leadership as a race to continually envision more preferred and adaptive futures, for yourself and your organization. It is full of good advice and takes a particularly foresight-oriented approach to the leadership challenge.

Lewin On Leadership – A Basic Evo Devo Model

As scholars like Peter Drucker argue, good management, of ourself and others, is a prerequisite for good leadership, but it is not enough. Leadership requires more, including a vision for where should go, and the ability to help others adopt their own version of such a vision for themselves. We’ve offered some evo devo-based visions of social progress and adaptiveness with the Eight Skills, the Five Goals, and the Ten Values. These models offer solid foundation for leadership skills and values.

Authoritarian leadership example, from the film
Experimental Studies in the Social Climates of Groups (1940s) (Prelinger Archive, and YouTube, 29mi

But there is much more to leadership than this, so let’s look now at one classic leadership model, Lewin’s Leadership Styles, and see what else we can learn. Psychologist Kurt Lewin first described three basic leadership styles in an ingenious experiment started in 1939. He later went on to found the field of group dynamics. Lewin’s experiment involved young boys, assigned to three Boy Scout-style after school clubs, led by adult leaders instructed to use these three styles to lead group activities. Each child was rotated through all three styles, six weeks at a time, and their reactions and interactions were meticulously documented and filmed. 

The three classic styles Lewin found are are autocratic (authoritarian) leadership, democratic leadership, and laissez-faire leadership.His study made clear that leadership style is often a powerful determinant of group culture and the kind of work that occurs, independent of the personalities of group members. Later work by others has independently found that each style has advantages at times, but each also has a cost. One of the styles, democratic, is particularly general purpose, being most adaptive for most environments, most of the time.

Autocratic leaders are command-and-control oriented. They allow little to no decisionmaking input from their supervisees, and constantly give top-down guidance, and may micromanage. Democratic leaders elicit ideas from group members, and at times also offer their own guidance. They encourage group interaction and often follow group consensus but retain the right to final say. Laissez-Faire leaders offer little guidance, near-complete freedom for their supervisees most of the time, delegate extensively, and expect independence, self-motivation, and bottom-up decisionmaking. They may also cull low-performers based on their pre-agreed performance metrics in their very infrequent leadership interventions, something that didn’t happen in Lewin’s research, which was just the beginning of our understanding of these three basic styles.

Lewin’s experiment found that autocratic leadership, and its top-down accountability elicited the most work, and “tension” (stress, fear) from the boys, but only when the leader was monitoring group activity. As the leader’s energy and focus flagged, so did the group. Creativity was greatly restricted, moving at the pace of the leader, and in-group conformity was high. Mini-autocracies, factions run by power-seeking subordinates emerged, political infighting was high, and the group was rather unhappy. If the autocratic leadership had run longer than six weeks, we might expect the most burnout (most work and least sense of control) as well. In situations when what needs to be done is well understood (needing execution, not creativity), when short term speed is important, or the group needs to be temporarily united, autocratic leadership may be best, as a way to get back in control, and get it done. But the high costs of this style for any extended period of time are important to understand.

Laissez-faire leadership, being entirely evolutionary or bottom-up, was the most chaotic. The boys did a lot less work than under each of the other styles, it was of poorer quality, and again they were unhappy with their experience. Creativity, without any top-down or group accountability, turned to distraction. As each group member imitated the hands-off qualities of the leader, members communicated with each other the least usefully as well. Lewin’s experiment argues strongly that the holacracy governance experiments that we find today at companies like Zappos and Valve will remain rare, and have many ways to fail. This style may need highly self-actualized group members to work well. Small groups of highly self-accountable individuals that need to maximize their creativity might find this group leadership style works best for them at times. Laissez-faire leadership may also be ideal at the beginning of learning activities, as a form of creative exploration, prior to in-group competition or cooperation. But again, the high costs of this style for any extended period of time are important to understand.

Democratic leadership, as in our democratic political systems, is an evo devo mix of top-down (leader) and bottom-up (group and majority) accountability. Lewin found the boys worked less hard than under the autocratic group, but more than the laissez-faire group, and the creative quality of their work and play was considerably higher under this style. Group members also felt the most valued in this style, and were happiest. They mimicked the qualities of their leaders, as in other styles, which meant they listened to and praised each other more frequently, and more often sought consensus with others, rather than either issuing edicts or ignoring them, as in other styles.

Lewin used this experiment to explore the critical features that make democracy work for individuals, and he began to build a case that the democratic style is most adaptive most often. To this hypothesis I would further argue, using the 95/5 rule that we find in evo-devo biology, that like living systems, it probably makes most sense to empower our people to work bottom-up 95% of the time, and to restrict our top-down decisions, praise, punishment, rules, and other leaders interventions to a very minor, and carefully chosen, 5% of the time. In other words, good leaders probably spend most of the time resisting being managers, and staying out of the way of their team, and looking for those minimum interventions that will have maximum benefit.

There are many substyles of democratic leadership, with different mixes of top-down and bottom-up policies and priorities. Let’s mention just three that seem particularly important. A very effective democratic style is servant leadership, in which the leader puts the needs and goals of their group members first, including their emotional needs. Transformational leadership, where leaders seek to help group members achieve their own personal potential and fulfill their own largely self-determined values and goals, is another approach, and is a particularly well-studied democratic style. Another very effective style has the clunky name “Leader-leader” leadership. It focuses not only on self-development, but encouraging group members to interact with others as leaders, moving from leader-follower to leader-leader interactions.

All three can be very helpful in different contexts. For a good book on servant leadership, start with Greenleaf and Spears Servant Leadership (2002). For a classic on transformational leadership, see James Burns, Transforming Leadership (2004). For a great example of the leader-leader style, see David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! (2013). Finally, for an ingenious book that combines transformational leadership and exercise, see Carol Himelhoch’s Transformational Leadership and High-Intensity Interval Training (2014). Exercise is a critical kind of “good stress”, improving our ability to handle stress of all types, and it gives us an immediate sense of control over our energy and mood. Stress-recovery cycles, as found in interval training, are in turn key ways to quickly build physical and mental energy stores.

What insights can we gain for self-leadership from Lewin’s three styles? On self-reflection, it’s clear we all talk to ourselves and resolve disagreements within our own mind using autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire styles at different times. Autocratic thinking, enforcing one single way of thinking and doing on ourselves, may make the most sense at times, and we can get a lot done for short periods, but we should be mindful of its costs in creativity and self-actualization. We can say the same for laissez-faire thinking, which can be a great thinking style when we need rest, recreation, imagination, and play.

But as with group leadership, it seems likely that most of the time, an evo devo approach to self-leadership, where our executive mind lets all our valid different ways of thinking argue with each other, with ambiguity and creative conflict, may be the best way forward, especially when we face poorly structured problems and rapid environmental change. Author Abigail Adams once said “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.”As poet Walt Whitman says in his Song of Myself, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” Computer scientist Marvin Minsky, in The Society of Mind (1988), offered a theory of mind which argued are each of us are a “society of mindsets”.

In other words, it may be most adaptive, most of the time, to understand ourselves as a “mental democracy” in which each of our unique mindsets gets adequate “representation” by our executive mind. Our conscious mind should seek to maximize creative interchange, trust, and mutual empathy between all the usefully different points of view we can see on a topic. That in turn may improve our empathy with others, and our ability to see more of the opportunities and risks in front of us at any point in time.

This is not to deny the great value of top-down thinking, which must be regularly exercised as well. For example, on occasion, certain biased, flawed, addictive, or harmful ways of bottom-up thinking need to be extinguished by our executive mind. We can do this, for example, by enforcing substitute behaviors and thinking habits on ourselves whenever the undesirable kind of thinking emerges. That kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy will cause the undesirable mindset to eventually attenuate to extinction.

About.com has a quick quiz that will help you understand which of Lewin’s leadership styles you use most often. It might be most helpful to ask all your supervisees to take an anonymous version of this quiz that allows commentary, with a mutually trusted third party or software platform administering it while maintaining confidentiality (anonymous 360 degree feedback). You can also take the quiz yourself, but the difference between your and your supervisees perspective is what will really be interesting. You may think you’re always democratic, for example, but many or your supervisees, if free to speak their mind, might classify you as an autocrat or an absentee leader in various ways. Find out, and adjust if necessary.

For a deep dive on organizational behavior, leadership and group dynamics in organizational settings, Natemeyer and Hersey’s Classics of Organizational Behavior, 4^th Edition (2011), with fifty-four classic papers, is a great resource for understanding what some of our best-known scholars have learned over the last century and a half on leadership, motivation, and group behavior.

Evo Devo Thinking and the Eight Skills

Let’s zoom back out to the Big Picture for a second. In both our Evo Devo model of complexity and in the Do loop of foresight practice, divergent (evolutionary) and convergent (developmental) thinking and actions are always in balance with and opposition to each other. But while each of the Eight Skills mixes divergence and convergence, a few are dominantly one or the other. Can you guess which?

Skill 1, learning, is a balanced mix of both types. It is usually initially divergent, exploring many possible paths to useful knowledge, then it is convergent on deep learning of a subset of what has been surveyed. Skill 2, anticipation, is dominantly convergent. While it may begin with divergent scanning, it primarily seeks to narrow our thinking down to the most useful, evidence-based forecasts, predictions, and certainties. Skill 3, innovation, is dominantly divergent, as it explores many possible futures, creative options, and uncertainties, it also converges a variety of creations (imaginations, ideations, inventions) a small subset of which will typically become actual innovations.

Skill 4, strategy, or preference foresight, which is the topic of this section, starts again with some divergence, weighing various strategic possibilities, but not nearly as much as in the previous skill. Strategic thinking and analysis are dominantly convergent, as the team narrows in on just a few optimal strategies and plans. Skill 5, execution, is also dominantly convergent. After we’ve found our best strategy, we want to focus on getting useful action done. The best executors will diverge from their mental plans only just long enough to deal with a new complication or contingency, getting back on track as fast as they can.

Like Skill 1, Skills 6, 7, and 8, influencing , relating, and reviewing, are also an even mix of both divergent and convergent thinking. For example, good reviewing is both initially divergent (auditing, sampling, looking broadly for feedback), then it becomes convergent on what recently worked and what didn’t, in a way that feeds us right back into Skill 1, with new learning.

The better you see these divergent and convergent shifts in thinking with respect to each skill, in your own thinking and in others, both as you run your Do loop, and within each skill, the better you can consciously judge when it is appropriate to shift thinking, discussion, analysis, and action between divergence and convergence, and when it is the best time to move yourself or your team to the next skill in the loop. This “evo devo awareness” at the level of your own and your group’s thinking, will help you become a great facilitator of adaptive foresight.

We can call Skills 4 and 5 together the heart of the Do loop, because they are the only two skills in a row that are dominantly convergent. This double convergence tells us the Do loop is most critically concerned with executing adaptive strategy. Execution (tactics, action) and strategy (prioritization, goals, models, plans) are intimately connected. As Sun Tzu says, “Strategy without tactics (good execution) is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Both are central to adaptiveness.

Leadership Using the Eight Skills

We’ve previously defined Adaptive Foresight as the practice of all Eight Skills of the Do loop in the specific production and review of foresight work. Many foresight professionals, and particularly consultants, are often not responsible for the Execution, Influence, Relating and Reviewing activities that their foresight recommends. If they are only responsible for those skills in relation to their foresight work, and they don’t lead others in that production activity, they are foresighters, but not necessarily leaders. If they have wider responsibilities, they need to think about how to be good leaders.

Kouzes & Posner (2012)

Adaptive Leadership can be defined as the practice of all Eight Skills in any formal or informal leadership position, for any organization or group. Adaptive leaders who are in executive roles not only try to build competency across the Eight Skills, they also need to understand as many of the Twenty Specialties as possible, and be able to get advice and guidance in those functions when it would be helpful to the organization.

An excellent primer on organizational leadership that is categorically convergent with the Eight Skills is Kouzes and Posner’s The Leadership Challenge (TLC)  (2012). TLC is built around five top leadership disciplines, but the content of their professional development curriculum covers all Eight Skills, so we particularly recommend for leadership development. The TLC Chapter titles and topics that parallel the Eight Skills are given in parentheses below:

Learn

1. Learn (Foster Collaboration, The Leadership Challenge’s/TLC’s Chapter 9)

See

2. Anticipate (Envision the Future, TLC’s Chapter 5)
3. Innovate (Experiment and Take Risks, TLC’s Chap 8)
4. Strategize (Search for Opportunities, TLC’s Chap 7)

Do

5. Execute (Find Your Voice, 3; Strengthen Others, TLC’s Chap 10)
6. Influence (Be Credible, 2; Set the Example 4; Enlist Others, TLC’s Chap 6)
7. Relate (Recognize Contributions, TLC’s Chap 11)

Review

8. Review (Celebrate Victories [and Learn from Mistakes], TLC’s Chap 12)

Integris Performance Advisors,
LPI Administrators

Notice that just as Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People puts more emphasis on the relating skill, The Leadership Challenge puts a bit more emphasis (three of eleven chapters) on influence than the other seven skills. That is to be expected in a treatise on leadership development, yet I would argue that all Eight Skills are equally important to great leadership.

Leaders in training can also benefit from Kouzes and Posner’s online Leadership Practices Inventory, available both as a self-assessment ($40) and a 360-degree team assessment ($150). Also of value is The Leadership Challenge Workbook (2012), with tips for putting their model into action.

Our 33^rd president, the plainspoken pragmatist Harry Truman, once called leadership “that quality which can make others do what they do not want to do and like it.” This definition underscores the visionary, persuasive, and dangerous nature of leadership in comparison to management. It reminds us of the need for foresight, inspiration, and ethics in our leaders.

Those qualities are just the start. The more one leads, the more one is tested by one’s responsibilities and the group, and the list of qualities that will help you thrive as a leader grows longer the more experience you gain. Some leadership qualities that seem particularly important include:

• Foresight/Vision (internal and facilitated)
• Inspiration/Persuasiveness
• Ethics/Integrity/Honor/Sense of Justice
• Trustworthiness/Credibility
• Communication Ability/Clarity/Tact
• Tenacity/Strength/Firmness/Self-Discipline
• Delegation Ability/Trust
• Ability to Praise/Recognize Excellence
• Service-orientation/Leader Development Ability
• Intelligence/Creativity
• Compassion/Empathy
• Decisiveness/Self-Confidence
• Drive/Ambition/Need to Excel
• Stability/Consistency
• Loyalty/Ability to Follow
• Hope/Optimism
• Experience
• Humility
• Patience
• Likeableness

Growth-oriented leaders should even strive to have good posture. This is because the way one sits, stands, and walks conveys social signals. Studies have shown that people who consciously improve their posture prior to and during interviews, talks, and performance evaluations actually are more confident and are seen as more confident and able to lead. See Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about so-called power poses, Your body language shapes who you are (2012).

A few of these are addressed by Gallup in their useful Strengths-Based Leadership (2009). Kouzes and Posner’s Credibility: How Leaders Gain and Lose It, Why People Demand It (2011) is another good outline of leadership qualities, as is Johnson and Harper’s Becoming a Leader the Annapolis Way (2004), on the Navy’s well-known approach to leadership training. Pursuing self-development of all these qualities, and taking leadership opportunities when they present themselves, will steadily improve your abilities.

Leadership is an endless and rewarding journey of human development both for yourself and for those you lead, and help become leaders. If you remember that all leadership begins with self-leadership, including prioritization, focus, self-motivation, integrity, humility, credibility, and service-orientation, you will be on a proven path of self-development, and will likely lead your team well and far.