Nordea is going through a transformation to respond to the rapidly changing demands of the market and industry. To succeed we need to nurture and grow our adaptive leadership capabilities, strengthen our resilience and expand our resourcefulness to be more at our best. We also know that there's no business transformation without human transformation.
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Adaptive Leadership and Cultures
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Few doubt that leaders matter and that leadership matters more. An individual leader makes good things happen. And a leadership capability throughout an organization sustains long-term success. Abo…
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
A useful reference for the development of leadership frameworks. Good to see the inclusion of complexity (adaptive leadership) under the element of Strategist. I may be getting hung up on words/terminology, but I'm not sure if a person can 'master complexity to create simplicity'. The complex is complex. mastering it, isn't about making it simple, it is about building the capacity to think and work in ways that make it possible to embrace and thrive in complexity. It requires a broader world view. 
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Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Shifting mindsets From and To for Innovation, Collaboration and Value Creation
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Understanding the principles that confer robustness in complex systems—such as tropical forests, stock markets, and even companies—can mean the difference between survival and extinction.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Principles for building adaptive capacity to help organisations survive and thrive in a time of speed and complexity.
Organisations are complex adaptive systems (CAS) nested in a business ecosystem, which is nested in the broad societal environment.
Complexity therefore exists at multiple levels, not just within organizational boundaries; and at each level there is tension between what is good for an individual agent and what is good for the larger system.
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Too often the thinking falls back into simplistic and mechanistic ideas.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Seeing resilience as an adaptive challenge. Rather than simply coping, resilience is about building capacity and inter-connectedness.
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We’ve been talking a lot lately about what key capacities leaders might need to lead well during these VUCA times. We don’t want to create a whole lot of new competency tables, but we are wondering about the particular moves Complex Adaptive Leaders (call them CAL) need to be able to make if they are to lead themselves and others into the unknown.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Some practical examples and guidance for learning from the balcony and the dance floor. This skillset is part of helping build capacity (i.e. vertical development) and offers me a new term - Complex Adaptive Leaders (CAL).
CAL capacity 2 - Courage to take sensible risks and to lead others to do so is available here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cal-capacity-2-courage-take-sensible-risks-lead-do-so-garvey-berger/
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This simple approach—with these powerful questions—can literally transform the way your team thinks and learns together. It also opens up great ne
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
A complexity check in is a great way to help teams develop their ability to see the system(s) and each other in new and helpful ways.
1. Start the meeting by asking a question (i.e. What surprised you this week? Where are we failing that we didn't expect to?) 2. Give everyone time to consider their response (think/write/post-it) 3. Allow everyone to share their answer 4. Ask the group what they noticed in the responses. What patterns did they see? What things were common? 5. Determine the outlier (perspectives/responses). 6. Ask the group to identify what we're not seeing or what we're not talking about.
Questions 5 and 6 are harder, but as the group gets used to exploring these questions, they will get better at seeing patterns and understanding human systems.
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A video series based on the book "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux. This videos series called captures emerging insights into the question: "how can existing organizations adopt radically more soulful and meaningful management practices?"
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
A video series focusing on how we can reinvent our organisations, so they can be more effective at unleashing the potential of people to grow and contribute and for organisations to thrive in a world of speed, complexity and limited resources.
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Find out what metaphors, journeys and anxiety have to do with communicating in complexity.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
How leaders can communicate when the future is uncertain:
1. Communicate direction and welcome people on the journey 2. Make it emotionally resonant - admit vulnerabilities and invite others to do the same, be excited about the possibilities 3. Use strong metaphors - bring ideas together 4. Make your audience the hero - call them to action, to adventure so they can collectively create
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Many of our deeply held leadership assumptions were informed and formed by traditional leadership frameworks primarily developed and written in the 20th century. Now, we shift focus to develop organizational frameworks rooted in nature.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Letting go of control to unleash the untapped energy of our organisations...
'When you think of your organization as a living system, the system is dynamic and already filled with energy. It doesn’t need an outside power source to get it moving, it is already in motion. Therefore, when we focus on controlling an organization that is a living system, it interferes with the energy that is naturally flowing through and within the system'.
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Why organisations change? One reason is increasing complexity (the C in the acronym VUCA). This infographic explains the impact of complexity on business.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
A fun and really effective way to explain complexity and reinforce why traditional management practices will be ineffective. reinforces different mindsets and ways of working required to respond to complex challenges. It also reinforces the need to work out loud across networks as part of a growth culture.
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When you have been through a transformational change in an organisation, where has your organisation focused its attention?
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
The role of structural, social and individual levers in enabling cultural evolution in organisations
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Companies that adopt mindfulness and practices for employees see positive returns for individuals and the organizational, write two BCG consultants.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Mindfulness as an enabler of agility - the ability of individuals and the organisation to deal with uncertainty
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Insights from a group of coaches reflecting on the complex (adaptive) challenges of their clients in comparison to their own.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
I could easily put every single Jennifer Garvey-Berger post in here. She shares openly, beautifully and with great care. If you don't follow her, then DO SO IMMEDIATELY!
Two really interesting points that resonated with my own experience: 1. The ease at which we can identify other people's adaptive challenges, but the difficult we have in recognising our own 2. The extension of this, which links strongly to some of my own big assumptions (immunity to change) is expecting myself to get on with it, solve it and be pretty unkind to myself for not. Jennifer reinforces the importance of being more gentle with ourselves once we do recognise an adaptive challenge and applying the practices (i.e. experimenting) to respond accordingly. Good opportunities to reframe....
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Like strategy, culture can be easily misunderstood. In this article, get to know the key concepts surrounding culture.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Some really good insights and practical tips in here. I love this quote, 'Culture — shared values, beliefs, and behaviours — is an organisation’s execution engine'. Culture is our capacity to deliver on what our strategy asks of us. I think there are huge opportunities to reframe the way leaders view and embrace culture and their role in defining and enabling the aspirational culture.
The focus on purpose is critical to motivating people to be and help the organisation achieve its greatest potential to impact the world. The ways of being paint a picture of success and help embed language of the aspirational culture.
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Cultures are shaped by the existence - or lack of - a specific set of skills
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Daniel Coyle, author of the bestseller The Culture Code, says culture in organisations is not about, “values and mission and accountability. Culture is not about soft stuff - it’s about signalling. Because human brains are incredibly good at perceiving signals that we are safe (or not); whether we are being vulnerable by sharing accurate information (or not), and whether we are moving in the same direction (or not).”
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Basic introduction to Adaptive Leadership, courtesy of Adaptive Change Advisors.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Technical vs. Adaptive challenges and Authority vs. Leadership
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An evolving evolutionary purpose is essential to a Teal Organization, and this method reinvents the future of work to arrive at a statement of purpose that is truly for next-stage organizations.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Facilitation tips for identifying an organisation's purpose, in a way that removes ego and helps identify the desire/need to evolve, which becomes critical to identifying the aspirational culture required
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From
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Perhaps you think, as I do, that the world is in a troubled place these days. If so, then maybe you’ve observed what I have. Something’s going badly wrong in our organizations. At every scale…
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
'Organizational leadership today means building an organization that is a model for the world it hopes to create. That models ...the better world that it hopes to spark. As exactly and precisely as it can. It’s not just about your products, services, goods — but the marrow of your very organization itself, how it works, what it does, whom it benefits, why it exists'.
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In turbulent times like these, developing leaders truly matters – yet more than half of executives we talk to say their leadership development initiatives fail. What does it take to unlock an organization’s leadership potential?
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Bringing leadership development to life through a series of leadership journeys, culture change initiatives and performance management integration.
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An overview of Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations and how it applies to Lean and Agile Adoption.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
How paradigms have evolved to shape new types of organisation, equipped to respond to different types of challenge.
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How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Immunity To Change is a wonderful book that has really challenged me to approach my work differently. Technical solutions only get us so far. If we really want to support performance, then we need to tackle adaptive challenges. I'm exploring how to use the collective immunity to change process to help uncover the barriers to team performance. Here is a link to the HBR article on the same topic - https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change
In this 1 hour, 15 minute You Tube Video, Lisa Lahey (one of the researchers/authors) explains the challenge of real change and the immunity to change - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reQY1MIBA8
Andrew Gerkens's curator insight,
March 30, 2017 8:32 PM
Immunity To Change is a wonderful book that has really challenged me to approach my work differently. Technical solutions only get us so far. If we really want to support performance, then we need to tackle adaptive challenges. I'm exploring how to use the collective immunity to change process to help uncover the barriers to team performance. Here is a link to the HBR article on the same topic - https://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change
In this 1 hour, 15 minute You Tube Video, Lisa Lahey (one of the researchers/authors) explains the challenge of real change and the immunity to change - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reQY1MIBA8
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Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change process (which is more fully described in their book of the same name, and in their first book How the Way You Talk Can Change the Way You Work). You can find that post here. The follow up to their process—the question of what do you do after you’ve discovered your Big Assumption is explored in this post,
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Creating the immunity map is a powerful and enlightening process, but it is only the start. The real work comes in testing your big assumptions - creating experiments that allow you to test whether your assumptions are valid and your immune system is right in protecting you from realising your fears, OR more than likely, your assumptions are not valid and your immune system is limiting and preventing you from realising/unlocking your potential.
I'm working on this now and it is tough. I've spent decades embedding these behaviours, so unpacking them and then testing them is not easy. I'm naturally drawn to maintaining the status quo, so I have to actively challenge myself to test, to observe, to reflect, to understand and most difficult for me, accept the evidence.
Would I stop. No bloody way. This is the discomfort required for real growth.
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A major premise of the Adaptive Cultures Maturity Model is that organisations adapt and evolve through stages of maturity. How can organisations humanely evolve their organisations?
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
Cultural Maturity and the role of structural, social and individual in enabling evolution
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Matt Auron explains the shadow concept in culture and how to shine a light on it within your organization.
Andrew Gerkens's insight:
The shadow versus the espoused culture...
Addressing cultural shadows is quite difficult. The best thing to do is to simply talk about the undiscussables. Talking about the gap between what one says and what they do – and most importantly – why there is a gap or what belief drives the behavior.
A good definition of org culture too - ' culture is organizational anthropology – a system of interactions that governs how work gets done'.
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A sample of how Nordea is working to build adaptive capacity as part of enabling transformation