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Hi, I'm Martin West.
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My company is called Janars we are a SaaS product and coaching company focused on enabling adaptive conscious teams respond effectively to adaptive challenges by developing adaptive conscious practices.
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My talk today is why evolve with adaptive conscious teams.
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We start with the premise that there's a leader who's looking to facilitate a shift in value with a set of teams that they work with and that the constraints in the way of that value is an adaptive challenge. In the next 16 minutes.
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I'll cover what it means for a team to be adaptive and conscious.
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Then what are some actionable strategies including discussing the role for leaders and then outline a path for you and your team's evolution that will result in increased resilience, creativity and innovation.
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I'll answer some questions at the end and I'm hoping that we can get into a good conversation.
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Please put some hearts in the chat.
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If that aligns with your expectations.
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Thank you.
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The question I get is that this sounds very interesting.
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But where do I start to learn, attending an event?
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Like this is a great start.
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I have a newsletter with three long form articles in it that provide a good background of key principles of involving adaptive conscious teams, holding space for team conversations.
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And my latest article is on embracing generative AI as an adaptive challenge.
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It also provides a theoretical framework which I'll cover in part today.
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The Janars.com website is also useful.
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It has a description of a learning journey for a leader or change maker which aims to give you the overall picture of our vision.
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For that journey.
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I do free workshops every two weeks, starting next week where we as a group explore a specific adaptive practice together.
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And finally, for those who are ready to invest, we have a workshop series for teams that want to explore an adaptive challenge together.
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My request today is that if you're interested in starting that journey and want to learn more about adaptive conscious teams, please DM me on linkedin with the word journey, I will message you back and I will guide you through this journey.
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The phrases adaptive leadership and adaptive challenge were introduced by Ronald Heifetz from Harvard around 25 years ago.
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I assume he was influenced by the conflict resolution work of Robert Fisher and William.
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Getting to.
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Yes as as they were in Harvard at the same time.
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But what he did was apply it to the organizational setting and he didn't use the conflict resolution words. An adaptive challenge can be defined as a gap in capacity required to adapt from current reality to a state of thriving adaptive leadership is doing the work to help teams adapt from the current reality to the state of thriving with the rise of complexity theory and terms like VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
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We start to see an adaptive challenge as something that's result from VUCA.
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And that its resolution has complexity, competing needs interrelated variables, mindset change or making it very difficult to predict an outcome or to find a path to reach such an outcome.
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The value of defining an adaptive challenge is to be able to differentiate it from a technical challenge.
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Technical challenges may have many elements of complexity, it may be not easy to solve, but the methods and processes are known.
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So you can have a predictable outcome, best practices if applied tend to work better.
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Ronald Heifetz
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He says that the number one problem that drives management failure is the application of technical solutions to an adaptive challenge.
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So let me wrap up this part about adaptive saying that an adaptive team brings the collective intelligence of the group is not directed as part of a top down exercise, but nor is it best practice led.
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Although it may be informed by best practice, I'm curious whether teams that you work with would have the ability to push back when required to be able to fully sense what needs to be changed, what needs to be brought forward, especially if there was a top down mandate to talk about your specific scenarios, please DM me on linkedin with the word journey and I'll message you back and I'll guide you through this journey.
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So now adding the word conscious, we can use integral theory by Ken Wilber to introduce consciousness into adaptive practices.
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It provides us with two key concepts, the four quadrants, the inner self, our habits, how we relate and how we organize.
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And then secondly, the state of consciousness.
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So, working on our awareness about who we are in a change or situation increases our state of consciousness.
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There are many ways in which teams can choose to bring in personal work that they want to do in our meta process.
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We cross reference that these methods against the four quadrants.
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Some examples are the enneagram, atomic habits, unwinding anxiety.
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The work by Byron Katie ,Interest based resolution, relational presencing, shadow work, the responsibility process.
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And one that we use in our workshops brave which is the five pillars of identity.
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Some of these methods may mean something to you and for others, it may not.
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I just just wanted to cross reference the way that we think about tools and these different methods in our meta process. In an adaptive change.
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It's important to understand ourselves, our inner self, our habits in the change.
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For instance, doing an introspection to understand how we feel about this new direction.
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What's exciting, what's frightening, what does it bring up for us and how does it impact our identity?
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It's also important to look at relationships that we have individually and between groups as they can be a constraint on our ability to thrive.
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We also want to explore systemic constraints and tensions and have the opportunity to work with stakeholders related to resolve these constraints.
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We introduced a phrase from Kegan and Leahy in the, in their book and Everyone culture and they use the phrase "we are the work".
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This acknowledges that more often than not we as individuals and our mindset is often the first priority for constraint removal.
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The key principle here is that we own the system collectively.
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We created it collectively and we are part of it and we protect it.
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It is our mindset that will help it change somebody.
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Somewhere in the organization is the stakeholder supporting the current state resolving the issues with that person and resolving the issues with that person is what is required.
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Thus, changing the underlying reason for this is the work.
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Hence, we are the work, whether we're dealing with personal development, a relational or systemic issue, we're still the work.
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So the question is how do we we bring in consciousness to a particular flow or a particular adaptive practice?
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My example here really is the workshop series.
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It explains how we bring in consciousness.
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The flow for the workshop series strings together a series of adaptive practices in the same way as a team can choose to.
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These are actionable strategies for development of adaptive conscious teams.
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Our role in this workshop series is to guide the learning journey and coach facilitators, leaders and coaches who facilitate teams through the series.
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They're scaling our offer and ensuring adaptive practices and the skills related to that are transferred to our clients.
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These adaptive practices for developing adaptive conscious teams are described on Janars.com.
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If you want to learn more about such practices, please dm me on linkedin with the word journey and I'll message you back.
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This is an offer that I'm making currently.
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So please consider it time limited in our workshop series.
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The first workshop involves observing others and discussing it.
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We use the movie Crimson Tide with Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington to observe how individual identity within a system leads to specific actions that leads to conflict.
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It aims to reinforce that mindset is a critical driver of our behaviors, conscious and unconscious.
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In the next workshop, we explore the intent, the outcomes to be achieved by overcoming the adaptive challenge in reaching the state of thriving.
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And when looking at where we are today, we start identifying gaps to break them down into elements that are adaptive and elements that are technical.
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We take forward into the next workshop, a subset of adaptive challenges for further investigation and understanding.
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In the next workshop, we organize around specific adaptive challenges.
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Each group of diverse stakeholders takes one challenge and we have role based discussions and identify constraints, intentions.
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We use these conversations to understand the core interests of the various stakeholder groups.
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In the fourth workshop, we explore who we are in the context of these constraints, tensions and core interests.
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The tool we use is called the Five pillars of identity.
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This is from Daniel Shapiro, also part of the Harvard Negotiation program.
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In his book, Negotiating The Non Negotiable.
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He introduced the acronym Brave for the five pillars of identity, beliefs, rituals, which is our processes and habits, allegiances and values and emotional experiences, emotional experiences are where we've had an experience that reinforces certain beliefs or changes our beliefs.
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But it, it's, it's driven from a deep experience and this is where our beliefs, rituals, alliances and values are often reinforced.
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We ask groups to create a collective identity for a stakeholder from their own introspection about themselves and then create a joint problem statement of the constraints that they face.
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The fourth workshop is the toughest.
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The key saying is that you can't solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that it was created.
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The work in the fourth workshop, hopefully moves the needle on that account.
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The fifth workshop, we target the leading constraint and related tensions and needed capabilities and identify options that would resolve that leading constraint, these options become potential experiments.
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The sixth workshop is about building the hypothesis and the experiments and selecting ones that we want to do.
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First.
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It also involves people volunteering for these particular experiments on the janara.com page.
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There was a video I did describing the workshop for your reference.
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If you want to run this or similar type series of workshops as a paid engagement or just by yourself, please DM me on linkedin with the word journey and I will message you back and I will guide your journey.
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In the last section, I want to talk about setting the path the role leadership has in responding to adaptive challenges and the development of adaptive conscious teams in terms of five key themes.
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Firstly, nothing happens without trust and safety.
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It's important for leaders to lead with vulnerability and help establish a culture where team members feel safe to take risks and express ideas.
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There's no surprise here.
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In fact, this is a key element that gets you out of the gate and much more is needed.
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Provide the team permission to be effective and not necessarily efficient.
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Modeling.
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The slowing down of conversations to ensure deep and more meaningful conversations occur is a key leadership role.
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This is important for connection, ensuring participants feel heard and understood and for building better and greater understanding.
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Number three is ensuring leadership time is set up for the group to co evolve leadership practices.
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And styles lined with overall intent of the organization to be adaptive.
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Number four, building a development, culture requires an active decision to agree that this is the path they want to go.
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And secondly, as this will require higher levels of transparency, openness and vulnerability as a norm. last is setting the pace.
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This is something he flex talked a lot about.
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We are undertaking collaborative co evolution as a basis for change.
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And I've called this volute, it's important that adaptive leaders sense and respond to the changes made, ensuring that they are uncomfortable creating the necessity for change.
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But the change isn't paralyzing ie it's so threatening that teams go into or individuals go into freeze or flight.
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Let me wrap up my talk with a bit of a conclusion.
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The significance of adaptive conscious teams is that they provide a way to address complex change and foster adaptability across the organization.
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Leadership have a critical role to play in establishing trust, psychological safety, a development first culture, setting the pace of covolute i.e. change and determining how leadership wants to be present in the organization.
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In the day of va generative A I, we can only expect increased demand for adaptability, which really means embracing the collective intelligence of all and working as an organization collectively and collaboratively by embracing adaptive conscious teams, cultivating adaptability and resilience so that you can sustain success together.
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We can support you to drive this meaningful process and help you position yourself as an adaptive leader in a constantly evolving business landscape.
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Thank you.
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I'm open to questions you may have.
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But before I open it up to questions, I just want to repeat my request from today, which is to DM me the word journey in the chat today.
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If you're interested in learning more and have us help and guide you through this journey of adaptive conscious teams.
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Thank you.