On this page you’ll find a range of ideas about adaptive learning, conversational capacity, and organizational performance. What do we mean by adaptive learning? It’s the ability to work with others to diagnose complex problems, to identify the most elegant strategies for dealing with them, and to then successfully implement those strategies.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,” says Alvin Toffler, “but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” In today’s crazy world, where disruptive change is ever more commonplace, conversational capacity and adaptive learning – the ability to think smarter, faster, and together about tough problems – will increasingly separate the high performers from the rest of the pack.
Some organizations consistently achieve technical excellence; many more do not. Why? With technology advancing at an ever-accelerating rate – and as the cost of getting it wrong makes it ever more important to get it right – this is a critical question for any technology-based organization. And while there are many contributing factors, there’s one pivotal aspect of technical excellence that doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Mental toughness—sometimes referred to as grit, gumption, or resilience—is key to effective leadership and adaptive learning. Why? Because whether you’re engaging thorny issues others fear to face, making important but undiscussable issues productively discussable, resolving heated conflicts, or striving to build more effective working relationships with people who aren’t making it easy, confronting the status quo in the service of meaningful progress is always hard work.
One way to dramatically improve how your team works is to develop a conversational code of conduct; a shared set of agreements for how you’ll work together, how you’ll hold each other accountable, and how you’ll catch yourselves and self-correct whenever someone loses discipline and starts to slide back into old habits.
“It doesn’t do any good to have a lot of really smart people around the table if you can’t access their smarts”
Effective Teamwork And Conversational Capacity
For twenty years I’ve been conducting workshops, advising organizations, and coaching leaders on the importance of conversational capacity – the ability to engage in open, balanced, nondefensive dialogue about difficult subjects and in challenging circumstances. It’s a pivotal competence. A team robust conversational capacity can address its toughest issues in a responsibly rigorous, nondefensive way. A team with anemic capacity, by contrast, can see its performance derailed by a trivial disagreement.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’
Conversational capacity is the ability to converse in an open-minded, even-handed, evidence-based, and learning-focused way under pressure. It requires those who are participating in a discussion to balance their candor with curiosity, and their courage with humility. It’s a foundational competence. A team with high conversational capacity can address their most pressing challenges in a healthy, productive way. A team with low conversational capacity will derail over a minor difference of opinion. Conversational capacity isn’t just another aspect of teamwork—it defines it. A team that cannot talk about its most pressing issues isn’t really a team at all. It’s just a group of people that can’t work together effectively when it counts.
In our world of mounting complexity and rapid-fire change building teams that work well under pressure is more important than ever. But while it’s easy to put together a team that works when facing simple problems, building a team that performs when things get tough remains an elusive and frustrating task. The reason is that traditional team building overlooks the most important piece of the puzzle.
Trust is a matter of huge importance in a healthy team, project, or organization. But when it comes to the issue of trust and its relationship to teamwork, most people get it backwards. They see trust as being necessary for good teamwork – as something that must be in place before a group can work together and communicate well.
