April 1998 No. 9Leaders and Learning: Leadership Without Easy Answers1By Gerry Campbell
In the last issue of this newsletter, we looked at learning organizations and their leadership. We identified learning as a real shift in thinking not just taking in information. Here we look at the link of leadership and learning as illustrated in the recent book, "Leadership Without Easy Answers" by Ronald Heifetz2. After many years working in the Harvard University's Kennedy School Leadership Education project, Hiefetz encourages us to look at leadership as an activity. . . the activity of a citizen from any walk of life mobilizing people to do something. Hiefetz asks us to see leaders not as people who are leading us toward their vision for solving our problems, but as people who can influence the community to face the complex problems and be part of their solution. He refers to leadership in terms of adaptive work--work in learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, work in learning to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. This adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior. The exposure and orchestration of conflict within individuals and constituencies can provide the leverage for mobilizing people to learn new ways of defining and confronting the problems they face. Leaders can help us see our own contradictory beliefs. For example, I believe that my children deserve the best education that money can buy, and I also believe teachers in the local schools are overpaid. There appears to be a conflict here, an opportunity for learning. People want lower taxes and good public parks, are these in conflict? Adaptive work will examine and pull apart these conflicts and reshape their consideration. Heifetz explains that one of the most important elements in examining appropriate leadership, is understanding three very different situations: 1. situations where existing authority/expertise can both define and remedy a problem; 2. situations where the problem is definable, but no clear cut solution is available, and expert and client must learn together to create a solution; and 3. situations where learning is required both to define the problem and discover and implement solutions. In the last two situations, leadership, which induces learning, is clearly needed. Our tendency is to think that most of our problems fall into the first situation. Thus, we often look to expert authority to both diagnose and solve our problems. In this mode, we are tempted to seek out experts as leaders who can understand the problem and provide a technical fix. Heifetz points out that the key question, which separates technical and adaptive situations, is: Does making progress on this problem require changes in people's values, attitudes, or habits of behavior? If making progress requires changes in values, etc., then the expert authority, with a quick fix, is no longer an appropriate leader. In these situations, leaders, experts and others, must consider how they can help lead learning to create an adaptive solution. Heifetz says: "We see leadership too rarely exercised from high office, and the constraints that come from authority go far to explain why. In public life, people often look to their authorities to solve problems with a minimum of pain, and where pain must be endured, they often expect their officials to find somebody else to bear the costs." p.183. Our failure to demand that our elected leaders to engage us in the tough adaptive work of change makes us dependent on those without formal authority. Those without authority can exercise some capacities that those in authority cannot. Those without authority can more readily raise disturbing questions. Those without authority can focus hard on a single issue. Those without authority are usually closer to the detailed experience of some stakeholders in the situation. They have what Heifetz calls frontline information. Each of these advantages can become part of the learning strategy employed to exercise leadership. If we are to understand our roles both as leaders and as followers we must continue to work to understand how we can bring our friends, colleagues, neighbors, and fellow citizens into the hard work of learning. We must also have the courage to act without authority to help our leaders know what we learned about the problems and their solutions.
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