Mary Uhl-Bien on Leading in Complexity and Enabling the Adaptive Process in People and Organizations

In this talk and a Q&A session open to the global audience, Professor Mary Uhl-Bien (Texas Christian University, USA) discusses the challenge of leading in the context of complexity. All who have experienced the global pandemic of 2020 know that we live in a changed world. People no longer question whether we are in complexity, that reality has been made explicitly clear. What they want to know now is, what do we do about it, and what does it mean for how we need to lead differently?

Prof. Uhl-Bien discusses leading in complexity from the standpoint of enabling the adaptive process in people and organizations. The adaptive process happens when individuals and systems engage tensions between pressures for change (e.g., innovation, novelty, learning, growth) and pressures for stability (e.g., current performance, short-term results, status quo) through conflicting and connecting to generate adaptive outcomes. It is a fractal dynamic, meaning that the same process occurs across any level. Once you know the process, you can enact it in any situation that requires adaptability.

The talk begins by focusing on the adaptive process at the individual level (cognitive process), applies it to the organizational level (system-level change), and concludes by discussing implications of the adaptive process model for leadership and followership behaviors, skills and mindsets. This event is part of the series of talks on Strategy, Organization, and Complexity hosted by Cranfield University and moderated by Professor Andrey Pavlov and Dr Ibrat Djabbarov.

https://www.neeley.tcu.edu/DirectoryP...
https://www.cranfield.ac.uk/som/exper...