Adaptive Action Leveraging Uncertainty in Your Organization [Paperback]

Rooted in the study of chaos and complexity,Adaptive Actionintroduces a simple, common sense process that will guide you and your organization into reflective action.This elegant method prompts readers to engage with three deceptively simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The first leads to careful observation. The second invites you to thoughtfully consider options and implications. The third ignites effective action. Together, these questions and the tools that support them produce a dynamic and creative dance with uncertainty. The road-tested steps of adaptive action can be used to devise solutions and improve performance across multiple challenges, and they have proven to be scalable from individuals to work groups, from organizations to communities.In addition to laying out the adaptive action framework and clear protocols to support it, Glenda H. Eoyang and Royce J. Holladay introduce best practices from exemplary professionals who have used adaptive action to meet personal, professional, and political challenges in leadership, consulting, Alzheimer's treatment, evaluation, education reform, political advocacy, and cultural engagementreadying readers to employ this new toolkit to meet their own goals with a sense of ingenuity and flexibility. Adaptive Actionoffers new ways to think about the limitations in traditional planning: it enables you to name and explore the uncertainty in your systems; it promotes shorter cycles of action and feedback, enabling you to respond to unexpected events and take corrective action more quickly. Staying a step ahead is very difficult, butAdaptive Actionprovides the tools and questions that every leader should ask at work and at home. Presenting a simple, flexible, and iterative approach that includes inquiry, discovery, shifts, and action, this book provides a blueprint for everyone looking to increase organizational capacity and creative thinking. Adaptive Actionintroduces readers to a probll“+