Mobilizing Adaptive Engagement: From Disequilibrium to Innovation Paul T. Crawford and Diana L. Robinson

This presentation demonstrates community engagement skills drawn from literature and practices associated with adaptive leadership. The practice of community engagement frequently reveals adaptive challenges that resist easy resolution.  Adaptive challenges occur when formerly predictable environments are altered and prompt people and organizations to change. Adaptive challenges are distinguished from technical problems, which are much easier to diagnose, lend themselves to “cut and dried” solutions provided by expert authorities, and do not require fundamental changes in one’s worldview or ethos.  An adaptive challenge, by contrast, is much more difficult to diagnose and often requires changes in one’s values, beliefs, relationships and social roles if it is to be surmounted.  Whereas the solution to a technical problem can be confined to a specific area, solutions for adaptive challenges require changes throughout and between organizations and communities.  Finally, whereas people are generally receptive to technical solutions they typically resist acknowledging the presence of an adaptive challenge and avoid the ambiguity, disequilibrium and tension that accompanies learning processes needed to facilitate change.

Because solutions to adaptive challenges are generated by individuals, transformational learning theory provides an additional framework for understanding how solutions can emerge as a result of disorienting dilemmas that prompt individuals to critically reflect on their assumptions, validate new insights and respond adaptively.  Adaptive challenges are analogous to disorienting dilemmas: both call status quo values and behaviors into question and both require learning before creative responses can be formulated.

The presenters review three Northern Illinois (USA) community engagement projects associated with the PASCAL Universities’ Regional Engagement (PURE) in order to offer concrete examples of adaptive challenges and practitioner tactics for responding to them at both the organizational and individual level.  These include an effort to increase the college-going and success rates of Latinos, a second to enhance “end-user” access to data-informed resources that  improve individual and regional economic and workforce development decision-making, and a third to improve access to tertiary education for students in short-cycle career and technical education programs. 

Adaptive challenges fall into four categories: gaps between organizationally espoused values and actual behavior; competing organizational commitments; concealed diagnostic interpretations that impede collaboration; and work avoidance.  Individuals and organizations are tempted to treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems that can be resolved by appealing to established sources of authority or existing forms of knowledge.  When the complexity of an adaptive challenge is engaged, predictable forms of resistance arise because organizing values are called into question.  These forms of resistance, which are designed to restore equilibrium and maintain the status quo, include marginalization, diversion, attack and seduction.

The presenters posit that the adaptive challenges reviewed in this presentation are displayed in analogous forms in many, if not all, cultures.  A similar claim holds that similar types of resistance are present in cultures throughout the globe. A discussion among session participants will be facilitated to discover cross-cultural examples of adaptive challenges, strategies used to address them, and ideas for further research and inquiry.

Proposal paper follows Powerpoint presentation below: