Crises are inevitable, but your response to them can shape your legacy.
In a world where crises seem to be the new normal, leadership that adapts is more vital than ever. In his new book How Not to Waste a Crisis, bestselling author Tod Bolsinger offers a refreshing perspective on turning chaos into opportunity.
Unlike a typical leadership book, How Not to Waste a Crisis is an invitation to rethink and redefine your approach to leadership in times of upheaval. What sets the book apart is its vibrant storytelling, engaging illustrations, and practical exercises. Each chapter brings to life real-world examples and transforms complex concepts into digestible insights.
Whether you’re leading a church, nonprofit, or any mission-driven organization, How Not to Waste a Crisis provides:
Wisdom for Navigating Crises: Learn to lead with adaptability, not sheer effort.
Practical Advice: Enjoy insights from bestselling leadership author Tod Bolsinger.
Engaging and Digestible Chapters: Experience storytelling at its best.
Exercises and Case Studies: Apply what you learn immediately with team exercises and real-life examples.
Discover how to turn challenges into opportunities for growth. Don’t just read about leadership – experience transformation through the pages of How Not to Waste a Crisis.
In a world where predicting the future is increasingly difficult, adaptive leadership offers a powerful alternative: Don’t predict. Prototype. By embracing diverse perspectives, asking powerful questions, and engaging in thoughtful experimentation, leaders can guide their organizations through even the most turbulent times.
In today’s rapidly changing world, traditional leadership approaches often fall short when faced with complex, adaptive challenges. To thrive in this environment, leaders must embrace a new paradigm: adaptive leadership. This article explores the key components of adaptive leadership and how they can be applied to navigate uncertainty and drive meaningful change.
The Power of Diverse Interpretations
One of the cornerstones of adaptive leadership is the ability to gather and synthesize diverse interpretations of a situation. While it’s tempting for leaders to rely on their own perspectives or create echo chambers of like-minded individuals, true insight comes from embracing a variety of viewpoints.
Consider these examples:
- A decline in donations to a non-profit organization could be seen as a failure in fundraising skills or an opportunity to explore new investment models.
- Decreased church attendance might indicate a lack of commitment from members or a chance to reach a younger, digitally-savvy audience.
- Students who seem “glad to be together” may actually be masking deeper issues of belonging and inclusivity.
By actively seeking out and listening to diverse interpretations, leaders can uncover hidden patterns and themes that might otherwise go unnoticed. This process allows for a deeper understanding of the challenges at hand and opens up new possibilities for action.
From Observation to Interpretation
The journey from observation to interpretation is a critical one in adaptive leadership. While the observation stage focuses on gathering as much data as possible, the interpretation stage is about making sense of that data through multiple lenses. This shift requires leaders to:
- Look for recurring themes across different perspectives.
- Consider whether certain voices are dominating the conversation or if important viewpoints are being overlooked.
- Identify the underlying emotions and energy behind the words being spoken.
As leaders engage in this process, they often discover a “song beneath the words” – a unifying theme that ties together seemingly disparate interpretations. This might manifest as:
- A tension between preserving cherished values and embracing necessary change.
- A gap between stated organizational values and actual practices.
- An underlying anxiety or enthusiasm that permeates the entire system.
By tuning into these deeper currents, adaptive leaders can gain invaluable insights into the true nature of the challenges they face.
The Art of Formulating Learning Questions
A key shift in adaptive leadership is moving away from the “expert expectation” – the assumption that leaders should have all the answers. Instead, adaptive leaders become expert questioners, focusing on formulating powerful questions that drive learning and exploration.
Effective learning questions are:
- Open-ended (using “how,” “what,” and “why”)
- Genuinely engaging (demonstrating care for both the people answering and the answers themselves)
- Designed to dig deeper beneath surface-level responses
Some universally useful questions include:
- “What do you think about this?”
- “What else?” (Asked repeatedly until all ideas are exhausted)
- “What life experience shaped you to think, believe, or see the world that way?”
By embracing curiosity and humility, leaders create an environment where complex challenges can be explored more fully, and new insights can emerge.
Playful Interventions: The Power of Prototypes
In a world of constant change, the ability to adapt quickly is crucial. Adaptive leaders embrace a “bias for action” – not by stubbornly repeating past behaviors, but by engaging in thoughtful experimentation. This is where the concept of prototypes comes into play.
Prototypes are safe, modest, and inexpensive experiments designed to test ideas and challenge assumptions. They allow organizations to:
- Explore critical questions formulated in earlier stages of the adaptive process.
- Challenge default behaviors and mental models.
- Learn valuable insights with minimal risk and investment.
The key to effective prototyping is focusing on learning rather than immediate success. Instead of asking, “Does it work?” the primary question becomes, “What will we learn?” This shift in mindset encourages more frequent experimentation and reduces the fear of failure.
Interestingly, research from companies like Google has shown that significant insights can be gained from surprisingly small sample sizes. Their famous Design Sprint process revealed that 80% of necessary information could be gathered from just five respondents. This finding should embolden leaders to embrace prototyping as a low-risk, high-reward strategy for navigating uncertainty.
Principles for Healthy Interventions
As organizations engage in the adaptive process and experiment with prototypes, it’s crucial to keep three key principles in mind:
- Solutions must align with the organization’s core values or “DNA.”
- There must be clarity on what aspects of the organization will “never change” before initiating transformative efforts.
- Leaders must be prepared to leave behind outdated practices, even if they were once effective.
These principles ensure that adaptive efforts strengthen the organization’s identity rather than diluting it. The goal is not to become something entirely new, but to evolve into the healthiest version of the organization in a changing environment.
Embracing the Iterative Nature of Adaptive Leadership
Adaptive leadership is not a linear process but an iterative one. Leaders must be prepared to cycle through observation, interpretation, questioning, and experimentation multiple times as they navigate complex challenges. Each iteration brings new insights and learnings, allowing the organization to continuously adapt and improve.
This ongoing process also serves to prepare the organization for inevitable changes and losses. By engaging in regular experimentation and learning, team members become more comfortable with uncertainty and more resilient in the face of change.
Tod Bolsinger
The new mindset of leading through a world of “permanent crisis” is not how to bring your expertise, education, and mastery to bear on the challenges before you, but training differently in how to learn to lead all over again – in real time – in the midst of the crisis.
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