Transformative Conversations can lead to Adapting and Co-creation

People engaging in conversations where transformation has the potential of occurring are people who can help form adaptive interactions.  Adaptive responses to the status quo can help create futures focused on the common good.  Yes, the word “can” is used because there is no assurance that the common good will be the shared focus.

Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in their book: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (2009) write about adaptive leadership.  Their definition: Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive (page 14) sounds like the kind of leadership many of us might want to experience

Lipton and Wellman suggest ‘mobilizing people’ by focusing on developing “rich, meaningful collaboration (which) is both complex and challenging. Three compelling reasons for meeting these demands (of mobilizing people) include:

1. The lone genius is a myth. Significant studies are no longer produced by a lone genius like Einstein or Darwin. The group is the unit of work. Insight and innovation emerge from interdependent thinking.
2. The most interesting mysteries lie at the intersection of minds. Novel solutions are necessary to address increasingly complex problems. The collective imagination is more expansive than any individual vision.

3. Accountability grows out of co-creation. Collaborative construction of understanding around data, problems, and plans inspires commitment to action. A greater degree of participation in the genesis of decisions produces a greater likelihood of follow-through.

Each of us has to ask ourselves questions like the ones below to insure that we are will to engage across differences to attempt to further the common good. 

It is worth our effort to begin and continue a journey toward developing our abilities to work well (very well) with people who are different from us?

Is the challenge of being intentional about connecting mind-to-mind worth accepting or is the time invested in listening, learning about, and appreciating those who think differently just too big of an investment?  

Can we adapt and grow across differences or are the stakes so very high that we each should be focusing ourselves as individuals and like-minded- groups on being winners and let the losers loose and forget this “common good” focus?

Creating Communities of Thought by Laura Lipton and Brice Wellman in The Power of the Social Brain: Teaching, Learning and Interdependent Thinking by Arthur L. Costa and Pat Wilson O’Leary, 2013, Teacher’s College Press