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COVID-19 was an adaptive challenge & we did not have adaptive leadership, and that is (part of) why so many more people are dying than had to, why places that started to flatten the curve are now busting out of hospitals, why it’s so much harder than it needed to be. 1/x thread.
Adaptive leadership is a concept developed by Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz. I’m not an expert in this, but a rough paraphrase is that it’s in part about helping people to manage their grief so that they can better meet necessary change.
They talk about the difference between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical fixes are ones where the solution can be known; you maybe need to call in the right expert, but there’s clarity to be had about what to do. Adaptive challenges are ones that put us onto +
Entirely new terrain. Nobody had ever solved this problem before, not in this way, with these factors. Or maybe it’s just new terrain for us, but there’s an existential change in there, something that alters our identity. If I remember correctly (it’s been a minute),
Linsky talks about helping an elder reckon with the fact that they can’t drive anymore as an adaptive challenge. Technical solutions seem clear: just take the bus! But without reckoning with the loss and identity shift this person is experiencing, that won’t work. They’ll get +
Behind the wheel of the car again. At some point soon maybe I’ll write up my theory that the Golden Calf story was an attempt to find a technical solution to an adaptive problem. Maybe if we just do this we won’t be afraid and traumatized anymore!! Doesn’t work.
The denial that has characterized so much of the failure around COVID is profound. People’s denial and grief is real—both economic and all the social stuff. People who wanted to reopen wanted things to go back to how it was before. They did not like sitting in the discomfort +
Of this level of seismic change. So much loss. And our leadership needed to lead in that moment, to help people face this loss, handle it, manage it, and do what needed to be done to adjust to a new reality moving forward. But of course they did not.
Obviously I’m glossing over the nefarious choices Trump made in January and February that could have prepared us and saved lives rather than protecting his sense of self and enriching his friends, or worse. And the racism in all of this—the fact that whites people+
Started clamoring for things to reopen the second they discovered that Black people were being hit so much harder (because systemic racism that both led to underlying conditions and when seeking COVID care). But it’s all connected.
Good adaptive leadership maybe could have helped us meet this moment—a crisis to be sure—as an opportunity to shift so much of how our society functions, for the better. Maybe. Maybe I’m just dreaming here. But I know it didn’t have to he how it is now.
Cases in many places are skyrocketing. Because reopening. Because no mask. Because letting the rhetoric of individual rights trample any consciousness that ever could exist of care for the collective. Which, yeah, is a toxic ethos that runs way too deep here, maybe we couldn’t +
Ever bridge that.
Except that we had started to. That’s what kills me.
Except that we had started to. That’s what kills me.
This is the graph I was looking at earlier. That dip, right there, right before we started reopening everywhere and the cases started to climb again? It’s the leadership there that we needed and didn’t get. That’s what I’m on about.
https://twitter.com/phrozen_/status/1275939971170398210?s=21 https://twitter.com/phrozen_/status/1275939971170398210
https://twitter.com/phrozen_/status/1275939971170398210?s=21 https://twitter.com/phrozen_/status/1275939971170398210
So part of what I guess is standard adaptive leadership training is that you have a group of people, and the trainer, and the trainer just sits there, silent. For hours. Occasionally interjecting with some provocative comment, but mostly just sitting there, letting +
Participants just... talk to each other. About nothing. There are breaks, but you come back after lunch and it’s... more of the same. It’s like being trapped in a 6 hour-long Seinfeld episode. (I confess, I super duper did not enjoy it.) But the point of that is +
If I remember correctly, to create a leadership void. We’re so conditioned to looking at the person with positional power (the trainer, the teacher, the boss) for direction, what happens when there’s no direction? What does taking leadership look like, what can it look like?
Guess what, y’all. With COVID, we have a tremendous leadership void. Individual leaders of cities, some states, some other kinds of communities (clergy, schools, etc) May be showing powerful, useful leadership now. But we’re not getting enough of it, and the stakes are so high.
In this void, how can you lead? How can you show up and help create the culture shift that we still need? Where can you be useful, where can you help others navigate their feelings of loss now, or your own? I know many of you have been doing this for a long time, but there’s+
More work ahead of us. The curve is not flat. We’re used to this new normal, the media got bored with reporting on it—and things are now very bad in many places. Very bad. While many of us went into March with an attitude of short term emergency measures, it’s time to+
Figure out what the adaptive work is that needs to be done now. That needed to already be done, but certainly now is better than not yet.
We are in this together.
We are in this together.
