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Adaptive Leadership and Climate Change

LIFE LEADERSHIP DIGEST – Article by Steve Trivett – 23/08/2019

Today’s leaders have a new responsibility –  to promote initiatives that support adaptive action to address the vulnerabilities and opportunities presented by climate change.  Mitigation strategies will not be enough. Leaders must learn how to make more than adjustments in infrastructure, agriculture, urban and regional planning, issues of nature conservation and preserving energy supply. Action depends on the commitments made by people and this means winning over heart and minds.

Leaders must be able to communicate an urgent need for collaborative action, at both an individual and collective level. It’s about ensuring that conversations and complementary actions are well informed and integrated for maximum impact. Effective conversations will be the main vehicle for coordinating action at different levels and among many actors and sectors.

Climate change initiatives will need to take into account the regenerative capacity of human beings with regeneration needs of ecological systems. This will involve:

  • POLICY – Developing and implementing acceptable, well-researched adaptation policies
  • CONNECTIVITY – Making connections across different disciplines, levels and partner organisations
  • COMPLEXITY – Increasing the innate human capacity and skills of employees to take adaptive action in dynamic environments.
  • SUSTAINABILITY – Anticipating the long term impact of climate change on the organisation’s future.

Problem-solving should be the result of a collaborative process in which all relevant stakeholders have the opportunity to express their concerns, interests and ideas about climate change and adaptation initiatives. There is a need for clarity about the purpose, scope and focus of cooperation. What do we care about?

Attention can be given to information needs and critical roles for managing processes and finding resources. Capacity building is needed to fully engage stakeholders in deciding what needs to be done before developing action plans. 

Having faced the facts and explored possibilities, many uncertainties remain that can impact on the effectiveness of particular adaptation options. Climate change adaptation will require an understanding of systems and incorporate the insights and lessons learned in reviewing and updating policy objectives and strategies.

Adaptive capacity is an emergent property of leadership in complex adaptive systems. It requires a collaborative change to regenerate the patterns of interaction between the different players. This makes adaptive leadership is a systems-led rather than a person-led (although people are important agents in the system). This is more of a bottom-up, networked style of leadership that seeks collaborative action.

This differs from a traditional notion of leadership as actions taken by bosses in formal managerial positions. That is a form of top-down, hierarchical, leadership which is based on authority.

The final challenge is to learn from natural systems. ecosystems are emergent processes. It’s not about the intentions of individuals as much as their interactions.

A balance needs to be struck between structure and stability with the need for emerging new ideas and adaptability. There is always going to be a tension between the number and variety of conversations which are required for learning to develop, and the need for taking decisions which inevitably are based on an incomplete understanding of complex systems.

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