can dream. When he spoke of his dream, the very next phrase was, “A dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” He spoke to the American dream of equality and respect for human dignity and freedom of opportunity—values already in the hearts and minds of most Americans—and he challenged people to face up to the internal contradiction between the values they said they stood for and the ways they were actually living. In Jewish life, we can build upon the precious, essential parts of our tradition that anchor us and provide us with spiritual sustenance in the same way that the American dream of freedom and equal opportunity continues to inspire most of us, even as that dream remains an unrealized aspiration. What other mistakes should leaders try to avoid as they oversee change?
Many change initiatives are driven into the ground because of a faulty understanding that “the organization needs to change because it’s broken.” An organization may be struggling to survive, and from an outsider’s perspective it may seem self-destructive, so in those senses you might say it’s broken, but the current way it’s operating has an internal logic. Any social organization—including a family—is the way it is because the people in that system, or at least those with the most leverage, want it that way. They prefer the current situation to trying out something new, where the consequences are unpredictable and likely to involve losses. Leadership would be an easy enterprise if it were all about gains, but it rarely is. It’s not a positive sum game; it involves real losses. The best approach is to go into it thinking that your objective is more to protect what people value most than to change what they already have. Work to reawaken in people the values you’re going to conserve. Change is much more palatable when people realize it is being done to preserve what they love. What can leaders expect in terms of the pace of change?
Adaptation takes time. From a biological vantage point, most adaptations that have greatly enhanced a species’
capacity to thrive unfolded over thousands, even millions, of years. Organizational and political adaptations are lighting fast by comparison, but they also take time to consolidate into new sets of norms and processes. Significant change is the product of incremental institutional experiments built up over stages. That timeframe will differ depending on the urgency of the challenge: whether you’re taking on an issue that’s ripe, by which I mean it’s already generating anxiety within the community, or unripe, meaning one segment of the community cares a lot about it but it isn’t on the radar screen of others. You teach that evolutionary biology sheds some light on the properties of successful adaptation. How so?
In both biological and social systems, the same three conditions are necessary: Conserving the DNA essential for the species’ continued survival “Discarding” the DNA that no longer serves the species’ current needs Creating DNA arrangements that give the species innovative abilities to flourish in challenging environments and take the best of their history forward. In biological adaptations, the actual amount of DNA that changes to radically expand the species’ capacity to thrive is miniscule. More than 98% of our current DNA is the same as that of a chimpanzee: it took less than a 2% change of our evolutionary predecessors’ genetic blueprint to give humans extraordinary range and ability. From a leadership perspective, adaptation is as much, if not more, a process of conservation as one of loss. Successful change builds upon the past. The challenge is to distinguish what is essential from what is expendable in the organization’s heritage, making the best possible use of previous wisdom and know-how. How do good adaptive leaders navigate the diverse and conflicting viewpoints they are going to encounter when discussing what is expendable?
There’s an old Jewish story: Two people are having an argument over a reform judaism
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Torah interpretation and go to the rabbi to decide who is right. The rabbi listens carefully and declares, “You are both right.” A bystander interjects, “How can they both be right?” and the rabbi says, “Well, you’re right too.” Good adaptive leaders say to the group, “Listen, there’s wisdom in all of your points of view, but all of your points of view cannot prevail in their current form, so something’s got to give. Progress is going to require compromise. Each person may be right, but sometimes only 80% right. We’ve got to take advantage of the wisdom of each of our points of view.” As you go around the table, people begin to realize, “Wow, we’re all right, but we’re not all 100% right. Now let’s figure out what’s really essential and what is negotiable in each of our points of view, so we can hold together as a community.” You follow this by trying out different solutions. Sol the skeptic is going to say it’s not going to work, which is fine because we don’t know if what we’re doing will succeed anyway. So let Sol keep us honest, and in six months from now we’ll evaluate if the innovation has merit and if not, how it might be revised in version 2.1 or 2.2. Leadership then becomes an evolving process of managing adaptation in which, to use a metaphor from the technology industry, you’re always debugging the system; you’re always coming up with the next upgrade. This brings us to another leadership error: not having an experimental mindset. The most effective way to institute adaptive change is to actively commit to an intervention you’ve designed while also not letting yourself become wedded to it—so if it misses the mark, you don’t feel compelled to defend it. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” You have to believe that your invention is absolutely the right thing to do at the moment you commit to it—while simultaneously remaining open to the possibility that you are dead wrong. An adaptive mindset opens you up to that great unanticipated possibility.
summer 2014
4/29/14 8:28 PM