The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

PART TWO

DIAGNOSE THE SYSTEM

IN MEDICINE, DIAGNOSIS COMES BEFORE treatment. As in the television show House, teams of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, and other health-care professionals devote extraordinary talent, skill, and energy to identifying the problem. Occasionally, the illness is identified backward by trying a particular treatment and seeing whether it works, but more often, tests, time, thought, and discussion are devoted to assessing the problem first. Treatment comes second.

In organizational and political life, people often jump to treatment without stepping back to clarify the nature of the problem itself, making enormous investments in solutions, rolling out large-scale new strategies and programs, without knowing ...