The epidemic is imposing fresh challenges every day with leaders facing imperfect information, unpredictability, and the need to identify responses quickly and keep in mind the risks.
Adaptive leadership is the need of the hour and it involves mastery over the 4As'
- Anticipation
- Articulation
- Adaptation
- Accountability
This requires that one should anticipate future needs while managing unknowns and uncertainties. These identified needs should be articulated to both internal and external stakeholders to keep them informed and gain their support over the future actions planned. They need to adapt the business model and partnerships to meet the uncertainty faced. Finally, the company should set up proper accountability to ensure that not only the stakeholders but also the community they serve taken care of.
The following five common principles can provide a guideline for adaptive leadership especially at times of uncertainties.
Ensure evidence-based learning and adaptation.
Teams and leaderships need to constantly assess their actions while understanding that they need to constantly adapt as they learn about the outcome of their decisions. This requires a clear process to be set up for deciding the best action to take, collecting and acting on the data, and defining the measures to identify success or failure and setting out a process to set triggers for changes in action based on data. This process should be open and diverse to be effective.
Test underlying theories, assumptions and beliefs
The assumptions and hypothesis guiding the response should be subject to rigorous examination, including several scenario simulations.
One of the most systematic approaches has been developed by BCG based on the military approach to strategy learning. This advocates that firms establish an integrated model that will be the basis of business decision making. This has been adopted for use by automotive, fashion, luxury goods sector.
Streamline deliberate decision making
In times of uncertainty, the data keeps changing all the time and many times it may be contradictory. In such a scenario, managers are likely to play safe to ensure a degree of safety from narrowly defined targets.
Managers should be clear about what they are basing their assumptions on. They need to explain to the team, what is being done, why and how the decision was made and when errors are found out the team will retain trust in the decision-maker.
Being open and transparent helps improve integrations across different systems and result in planning, information sharing and coordination across the organisation.
Strengthen transparency, inclusion, and accountability.
Crisis and uncertainties require major changes in behaviour and at times impose significant costs to society, businesses and governments. hence there is a need to examine earlier decisions made keeping in mind the data available at that time. Again the current response to the crisis has to be assessed in real-time to maximise learning.
It is best to recognise that mistakes are likely to be made and it is necessary to identify shared learning opportunities. It is essential to assess what has been achieved to date, identify strategic priorities and exchange lessons learned. hence managers and leaders must commit to share their thoughts at every stage and act in an open and transparent way, seta benchmark how to engage with stakeholders. By acknowledging their vulnerability, leaders create a climate of openness and mutual trust that is vital for effective response.
Mobilise collective action
Responses to crisis need to build on collaboration across different sectors, industries and professional between international, national and local levels, which in reality may prove to be difficult to put in practice.
The collective action may be in the form of coordination, partnerships among different interest groups and dialogues among various stakeholders. Identify shared alignment of objectives and scope for collective action across different departments and levels of response. these interactions enrich debate and improve ownership of decisions.
What we do in a crisis will have its impact for years and decades to come. these five principles are not just vital to guide our immediate responses but also vital for shaping long-term recovery and resilience plans.
5 Principles to Guide Adaptive Leadership
by Ben Ramalingam, David Nabarro, Arkebe Oqubuy, Dame Ruth Carnall and Leni Wild
HBR 2020/09
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