Tamsen Webster reflects on finishing her first year at Teachers College, Columbia University, exploring Ronald Heifetz's distinction between adaptive and technical challenges. She explains why misdiagnosing a problem as technical when it's actually adaptive leads to failed solutions, and how this matters for leadership and messaging.
I'm just about to finish my first year of my doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University. And funny story, my professor recently said to me, "I keep seeing you on LinkedIn and I don't see you actually talking about school." All right, Dr. Fowler, this one's for you. This past year at school has been amazing. I've been introduced to so many concepts and insights that will help me help you help other people make transformational change. So I wanna capture my 5 favorite concepts from school so far as a little way to wrap up this year. And to make my advisor happy. First up, the difference between adaptive and technical challenges. This distinction between adaptive and technical challenges was first identified and named by a guy named Ronald Heifetz, who was talking specifically about leadership. And what he meant by adaptive versus technical challenges was what was needed in order to solve them. Many challenges, as he described, are what he calls technical. Meaning they can be solved with authority or expertise. We already have the knowledge on how to solve them. We just either need to impart that knowledge or make it happen. That's the expertise or authority part. But then there are adaptive challenges, which are increasingly present in today's complex world, where the solution does not yet exist. Mere expertise isn't the way to get there. In order to solve these challenges, we have to change how we think about the problem in the first place. So this is why Heifetz said that diagnosing the problem was a really, really key aspect of this. We really need to understand when we go into something whether or not we are dealing with a technical challenge that can be solved with information, training, or just say and do it, or if it's an adaptive challenge where we have to change not just what we do, but how we think about what we do or help somebody else do that. One of my big insights through this work was to realize that many of the things that I do, the models that I've developed, the Red Thread, the Core Case, are a way to take a technical approach to an adaptive problem. In other words, narrowing down the things that we have to figure out in order to solve something new. When you understand this difference between adaptive and technical challenges, not only does it help you understand what best to do, but maybe why something that has been done isn't working. It may also tell you whether or not some of the solutions you've tried are going to work or not. So when you're thinking about putting your messages together, this is an important distinction because when you are just trying to solve a technical problem, It's an explanation. But when you're trying to suggest a strategy to solve an adaptive problem, then your explanation needs to go one step further. It needs to be an argument, a well-supported case based on beliefs that people already agree with about why this new way of thinking is a new way to attack this new kind of adaptive problem.
