Encouraging Adaptive Thinking

Finding and supporting the talent that drives innovation

Do you encourage questions or answers from your team? As a management consultant, I was always told to bring answers. Our clients usually brought the questions. The problem with that approach is that it encourages fixed-mindset thinking: If your teams don’t know the answer, hire someone to tell them.

Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School, once pointed out that even the management consulting elite — those with degrees from the most prestigious schools getting paid significant sums of money to help their clients think differently about their challenges — are more fixed in their thinking than they would like to acknowledge.

Argyris coined the terms “single loop” and “double loop” learning. Essentially, single loop learning assumes there is a single right answer. He used the example of a thermostat to demonstrate his point. One might believe that a thermostat should be set at 68 degrees, as if that was a universally agreed upon temperature for all people — or at least the average of their various preferences. In reality, the right temperature for everyone may not be 68 degrees. Instead, a double loop learner would ask questions, such as: What is the right temperature for this room now? How often should it change? What should it change to? Why? The questions imply that not only is there not a single correct answer, but the answer may change over time with the introduction of new factors. Double loop learning requires questioning all aspects of the problem, improving adaptability in the present and the future.

Carol Dweck’s 2006 book “Mindset,” discusses a very similar phenomenon related to an individual’s attitude about the ability to learn. Individuals who have a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are immutable. From intelligence to athletic ability, a fixed mindset implies that you are limited to the gifts that you are given and no amount of hard work can help you improve. In contrast, those with a growth mindset believe the opposite: With hard work and determination, any individual can change and improve. Other researchers, such as Angela Duckworth, the author of the 2016 book “Grit,” support this idea, suggesting that success is driven by passion and perseverance more than raw talent.  

Now that these ideas have been popularized over the past 30 years or so, companies are looking for ways to crack the code and find adaptive employees. I was recently asked by a change management consultant to help put together a survey that would help a client determine who in an organization was an adaptive thinker. I have to pause here: Do you see the irony of the question? It takes a real fixed mindset to think that a test will help a company figure out who is adaptive. Isn’t the definition of adaptive that there is not a fixed answer? I obviously declined to take on this work, but the question has sat with me. Here’s how I probably should have answered it.

How do you identify who in your organization is inquisitive? These may be the employees who ask challenging questions in meetings, but not every culture encourages challenging questions or even speaking up (which is a separate issue for another time). They may be people who are more adaptive outside of work, where they feel they have the freedom to explore. For example, do you know who on your team reads books about the work they do? Or is learning a new hobby? People who seek out new ideas and challenge themselves to improve are often the ones who are (or have the potential to be) the most adaptive. They are often looking to figure out how to improve themselves or the world around them.

What makes people adaptive is that they want to learn. They want to push themselves. They want to evolve. In Robert Sapolsky’s fantastic book “Behave,” he shares an example about the evolution of giraffes. He notes that, over time, giraffe’s necks (and hearts, etc.) grew as members of each generation stretched their necks farther and farther to reach leaves, altering their DNA in the process, and passing that genetic change down to their offspring. As the cycle continues, giraffes evolve to have longer necks over many, many generations.

People may very well be the same way. Scientists haven’t figured out why IQ scores and standardized test scores have been rising over time. Our adaptive natures may be an explanation. If each generation is adding to the collective performance ability on those standardized tests, then we as a species may in fact be getting smarter. Having an adaptive mindset is not only essential, it’s core to how we thrive.

What makes this topic near and dear to my heart is that it’s about changing how we work together. Insights require questions. If we are going to learn to bring our collective best to every problem, we need to be open-minded. We need to bring questions and challenge ideas with the goal of making them better — evolving them if you will. We need to stop telling our teams to set the temperature at 68 degrees. Rather, we need to encourage them to develop smart solutions, like the Nest thermostat, which determines how and when to use the HVAC to adjust the temperature based on a variety of factors, which could range from who is in which room to the outside temperature.  

If you are trying to figure out how to make members of your team adaptive, there really is only one way: Understand what drives them (the MAGpie framework can help with that) and use those insights to challenge them. Ask them to bring you the questions they think will help them do better work. Challenge them to question why they take the steps that they take in everything they do. Reward them for finding ways to do things more effectively and efficiently without being asked or required to. All of those little steps will start encouraging them to become more adaptive instead of following a routine. Over time, their confidence will build. Once they have mastered the concept of questioning and understand that questioning and challenging helps them become more accepted in the organization and not rejected for trying, their fears will fade. You’ll be amazed at how, in a matter of months, team members can transform from fixed to adaptive.