Importance of "I don't know".

The success of our leadership depends on our ability to distinguish challenges that are technical- problems that can be solved by authoritative and managerial expertise- from challenges that are adaptive, and thus require the building of new capacities. We can't effectively mobilize people to work through an adaptive challenge unless we are able to recognize when a challenge is adaptive or has adaptive parts.

Like in medicine, if you get the diagnosis wrong, you'll get the treatment wrong. The most common source of failure in leadership is a diagnostic failure. People treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. When people make this mistake, they approach an adaptive challenge in a problem solving mode, failing to recognize that what they need to provide is the mobilizing and organizing of people to create new capacity to meet the challenge.

The tendency to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges is, the primary cause of low implementation rates of even good ideas and potential solutions. Challenges don't come with their technical and adaptive components labeled and flagged for us. And often, we are under a lot of pressure to provide solutions quickly with a minimum of disruption. So properly diagnosing the situation can be very difficult, even for people who are familiar with this distinction.

For people in positions of authority, perhaps the most powerful reason to diagnose adaptive challenges comes from the dynamics of the authority position itself. When you attain a position of significant authority, people inevitably expect you to treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical, to provide for them a remedy that will restore normalcy with the least amount of pain and in the shortest amount of time. That puts enormous pressure on people in authority to have the answers rather than raise the tough questions. 

The second reason people in positions of authority tend to address adaptive challenges with technical solutions is personal. They pride themselves on being able to fix the problems that other people can't solve. It's part of their identity and pride to be competent and capable of taking problems off of other people's shoulders and giving them back solutions. That's what authoritative expertise means.

So in the face of an adaptive challenge, it's hard for them to acknowledge that they've come to the edge of their expertise, that they no longer have the capacity to provide answers, and that the best they can do is to frame up the right questions, identify the key realities that need to be addressed, and then challenge people to take responsibility for tackling those problems. We all take pride in knowing rather than not knowing. Being able to step back to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony and notice when and how you are being pushed to see a challenge as the technical problem when it may not be is a crucial skill in providing effective leadership.

First, you have to be able to diagnostically distinguish that part of the problem that is amenable to technical expertise and that part of the problem that requires new capacity. Most problems come bundled. So yes, leadership begins with a whole diagnostic task of, how do we distinguish the parts of the challenge that are technical from the parts that are adaptive? What are the diagnostic indicators? And then how would you begin to break the adaptive challenge component into parts? Now that begins to move us into the domain of action. How would you then begin to mobilize people to develop that capacity? Which is also beyond your own capacity. I don't know. But that's a good place to start, even to be able to say, I don't know. 

#Exercising Leadership: Foundational Principles.