Adaptive leaders are creative leaders

May 30 is National Creative Day, meant to celebrate the unique experiences that living creatively inspires. The term “creative” means many things to many people, though: for some, it paints an artistic, expressive, and imaginative picture; others connect it to being a critical, original, and resourceful thinker.

To me, being creative means being adaptive – an interpretation I have the Staley School of Leadership Studies and the authors of “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” to thank for. It’s the ability to separate yourself from the action happening on the dance floor, so you can build a balcony on which to see the bigger picture and devise new ways of developing it. It’s pushing back on the defense of “this is the way we’ve always done it” when faced with inefficiency, even if simply for the sake of experimentation.

For context, adaptive leadership is the ownership of mobilizing people through a challenge that can’t be solved by technical solutions or current knowledge. It requires us to diagnose external and internal systems in a culture mired with misaligned values and behaviors, competing commitments, unspeakable truths, and active disengagement.

An example of an adaptive challenge could be a nonprofit trying to solve the problem of low part-time and volunteer retention rates by creating more incentive and training programs for new hires, while never acknowledging the negative (or often non-existent) exit interviews that called out the administrative staff for its lack of day-to-day support for their ground-level partners.

Such situations call on us to creatively uncover diverse interpretations and dissenting voices, so we can find new and transformative solutions that encourage ongoing growth. This is exactly what I documented the Snyder Leadership Legacy Fellows doing during their retreat last week, as they worked through a practice session on Communication, Continuous Improvement and Assessment. For one hour, these Kansas State University students creatively tackled the adaptive challenge of passing one or more balls to every person in room in the shortest amount of time possible after unknowingly establishing a system.

Below are some highlights of these adaptive leaders in action:

Mikaela selecting a deflated ball made it easier for everyone in the room to participate, regardless of their catching abilities.

Tom suggesting everyone reorganizes the circle by passing order, so they could quickly move the ball around the room instead of across it.

Fellows lining up to run past and touch a stationary ball as fast as they can.

The last idea was to push the ball across the floor hard enough so every finger could graze it as it passed.

The Fellows final times for their Communication, Continuous Improvement and Assessment activity.

Thanks for your interest in this story! You can see more photos from the Snyder Fellows retreat by following @poppephotos on Facebook and Instagram!