Adaptive Leadership: The Heifetz Collection (3 Items)

64 Diagnose the System

as a system—and its adaptability. Defaults are the ways of looking at

situations that lead people to behave in ways that are comfortable and

that have generated desirable results in the past. Organizations fall

back on defaults because they are familiar and they have proved useful

for explaining reality and solving problems in the past. When people in

an organization find that a certain response to a particular type of situ-

ation worked well previously, they will likely repeat that response

whenever they encounter an apparently similar situation. After all,

why tamper with success? But the more a default continues to work,

the more it gets repeated. And the harder it is for the organization to

change when new realities requir ...