Adaptive Space and Yin/Yang
Complexity and Dao Series #8
Foundational Concepts
Adaptive Space and Complexity Leadership Theory
The term “adaptive space” originates from complexity leadership theory/CLT, the theoretical framework I dedicated my doctoral studies to. It serves as a platform for practicing enabling leadership, which integrates entrepreneurial and operational leadership, fostering change and emergence. Within the CLT framing, leadership is about influencing change. This definition further highlights the importance of adaptive spaces, the intentional space to influence change.
Dao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to everything.
— Dao De Jing
The three types of leadership in the CLT framework align perfectly with the Yin/Yang principle in Daoism. As the Daoist quote goes, “Dao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to everything.” In the language of organizations, an intention or vision (Dao) gives birth to an organization, a human collective (One). Each organization must contend with two forces (Two): the force for change and innovation (Yang, represented by entrepreneurial leadership in CLT) and the force for standardization and stability (Yin, represented by operational leadership in CLT). Enabling leadership acts as the third harmonizing force (Three), balancing the dynamic interplay between entrepreneurial and operational leadership and supporting the flourishing of organizations. Organizations that fail to integrate these two forces can become stuck, as bottom-up innovative efforts remain localized and fail to produce tangible benefits, while old patterns no longer serve the changing reality.
Yin/Yang and Dao
Yin/Yang describes a pattern of change where Yin contains Yang, and Yang contains Yin, with each capable of transforming into the other as contexts shift. This concept highlights the relative and complementary nature of these forces, suggesting the potential for a dynamic balance. To use an analogy, Yin and Yang always live in the same house. They coexist in the same house in the United States just as they do in Singapore. One never needs to travel far to integrate the pair. When examined closely, each unfolds into further pairs, reflecting increasing complexity, as seen in the I Ching, which incorporates patterns of change with four Yin/Yang pairs.
Conventional value judgments often fragment and separate Yin and Yang, overemphasizing their oppositional nature while neglecting their complementary potential and ability to transform into each other. When Yin and Yang are separated and fragmented, opportunities for learning are lost, the potential to influence change is missed, and stagnation occurs.
Integrating Adaptive Space with Yin/Yang
A simple scan of the social spaces in organizations tells us everything. Many leaders follow the rule of thumb to “praise in public, criticize in private.” This often results in two types of meetings. One type celebrates successes, brags about achievements, and showcases progress, which can sometimes feel like “sweet nothing.” Clayton Christensen’s book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” aptly illustrates how success can lead to failure, with many stories of executives celebrated on the cover of Time magazine, only for their companies to later face bankruptcy for the very reasons they were celebrated. The “criticize in private” type of meetings usually fail before they even start because they trigger ego defensiveness, fear, and stuckness — a normal reaction to underlying scarcity beliefs such as “you are not enough” and “you are to blame.”
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. — Rumi
In both instances, “success” is viewed as separate from “failure,” and “positive” is seen as having no relationship with “negative.” We have few social spaces that foster the conditions for openness, curiosity, and trust necessary for learning from both successes and failures. This is the purpose of adaptive spaces.
Creating Adaptive Spaces
The question then becomes: how can we create more adaptive spaces that enable people to relate from above the line? What enabling conditions can leaders establish to foster these intentional environments?
Some examples
Post-Action Review
I recently hosted a post-action review for an all-hands meeting of a large cross-disciplinary team I work with. Upon reflection, I realized that this one-hour meeting can be seen as an example of an adaptive space in the workplace.
Sensing resistance and fear of judgment from my team members, I started the meeting with a check-in on why such reflections are needed. Perspectives included enhancing team effectiveness, integrating learning, and calibrating objectives. This check-in created shared intention of learning that set the tone for the interactions. The meeting proceeded with answering three inquiries: Rose, bud, and thorn regarding how the meeting was executed; team member acknowledgement and feedback using Non-Violent Communication skills; and lessons to bring into the future. Each of the four team members felt seen and heard, and both willingness and confidence to work together in the future were high at the closing of the meeting.
This post-action review occurred against the backdrop of role confusion among the hosting team leading to the all-hands meeting, and a high level of frustration from mishaps and misalignments during the execution of the meeting. It helped restore healthier team dynamics, although there is still much follow-up work to do. I recommend teams make it a habit to host intentional reviews, or retrospectives in agile terms, after any major endeavor. These reviews can be seen as repeated adaptive spaces serving the same purpose.
I regret to say that in my personal experience, meetings like the post-action review are rare and far between. More often than not, meetings are unconscious. I often advocate for meeting organizers to answer four questions for each meeting:
- Why: What is the purpose of the meeting?
- What: What are the objectives and deliverables for this meeting?
- Who: Who should be there? What roles do they play for this meeting, and for the project that provides context for the meeting?
- How: How might this meeting be facilitated?
These four questions help bring meetings to a more conscious and intentional place.
In my observations, the type of meetings that drain the most energy are unconscious (or conscious) demonstrations of power: “I want you to be in this meeting simply because I have power over you.” Unfortunately, this often triggers passive aggressive behaviors from employees such as not taking responsibility, not sharing information, not being present. This is likely why employee engagement is low despite the proliferation of meetings on everyone’s agenda.
Team Launch
Team launches are a routine activity when I start working with a new team. Their purpose is to help teams begin with a clear understanding of key team functions, structures, and processes. Some main topics include team purpose, member assets, roles and responsibilities, team norms, asynchronous and synchronous communication, and decision-making processes. The output of the meeting is usually a written document called a “collaboration plan” or “team charter” that is meant to be a living document, reviewed every six months or a year.
I consider team launches to be adaptive spaces because they are intentional spaces for designing a new team. This is important for many reasons. First, it levels the relational playing field. In most new projects, some team members know each other while others are brand new. Without an intentional team launch, an in-group/out-group dynamic can easily emerge. Second, it is important to clear assumptions. Most team members I work with are academic scientists, and their default assumptions about organizations involve top-down leadership, as is the norm in most academic settings. However, for scientific collaboration to work effectively, a much more collaborative type of leadership is needed, and a team launch is the space to discuss this.
Skills Coaching
I think of skills coaching as a step further than workshops on the adaptive space trajectory because it produces change more effectively. In my experience, most workshops focus on the thinking level, with little room for embodied practice. The conceptual knowledge imparted is subject to the forgetting curve and is often forgotten within a few days, resulting in minimal intended change. The assumption that knowledge equals action does not hold true.
Skills coaching helps to bridge the knowing-doing gap. I am currently coaching facilitation skills to a small group of staff members in a translational science center funded by the National Institutes of Health. Every session focuses on one specific meeting brought by a team member. We weave different skills together as I guide participants in thinking through how meetings can be redesigned and reimagined. This process makes the skills relevant to their context, and the space for practice with close attention from the coach gives participants the confidence to make changes in their own contexts. Coaching helps move skills from the mind to embodiment, leading to real change in the real world.
Other Examples
I also appreciated the KickStart Innovation Workshop from Adobe Systems, a story I read about in the book “Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours.” Participating employees receive a red box containing a step-by-step startup guide and a pre-paid credit card with $1,000 in seed money, and are given forty-five days to experiment with and validate innovative ideas. These innovators have access to coaching from some of the company’s top innovators, and the rest is up to them. In 2013 alone, as I read in the book, nine hundred of Adobe’s 11,000 employees participated in the workshop.
Efforts like this establish a measurable funnel through which promising ideas and concepts can be identified and pursued in a systematic and comparable way. This also sets the tone that top-down support for innovation is the “norm,” not the “surprise,” making bottom-up innovation a game the majority can participate in, rather than one reserved for a few unicorns.
Another example would be the long-running SDG Leadership Lab program at the United Nations, offered by the Presencing Institute. The objective of these leadership ‘laboratories’ is to develop and build the collaboration and innovation capabilities needed by the UN and their partners to improve humanitarian preparedness and response, and to accelerate progress towards the SDGs. The approach taken by the Labs is based on the acknowledgment within the UN that more of the same approaches won’t deliver the outcomes the world needs. Such adaptive spaces maintain a constant presence in organizations as a reminder of new possibilities.
Conclusions
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi
Opportunities for adaptive spaces abound within organizations. They require intention, effort, and skills to create, but the positive changes they bring make the effort worthwhile. Ultimately, adaptive spaces is the field beyond right and wrong, as in Rumi’s poem, integrating them for learning and transformation. A simple indicator I often use to gauge the level of consciousness within a space is the extent to which a person can speak their truth, whether positive or negative. In adaptive spaces, individuals can always express what is true to their hearts. I hope to meet you there.
