Managing Change

2‐2Steps in Organization Development

How to Deal with Adaptive Challenges

As explained in the previous section, Organization Development is an approach that takes into account the human side of an organization or a workplace in order to improve it. Most of the issues that arise in the human side are ambiguous in nature, and the causes and solutions are not easily identifiable. As stated on page 43, the human side not only deals with technical problems, it usually involves adaptive challenges as well.

For these more obscure problems, it's hard to tell what exactly is going on within the organization or workplace (these are problems on the human side). Unlike with technical problems, directly applying existing solutions to these types of problems usually doesn't work. According to Heifetz, dealing with adaptive challenges requires the people involved to study and learn from the situation through discussion. By experiencing these types of situations, people's perceptions, assumptions, and habits can change.

Let's go back to the story for a bit and think about what happened. In the story, the store manager, Sakigake, tried to solve the lack of communication in their store by increasing the frequency of morning meetings and trying to hold a vision drafting workshop. However, these solutions didn't work. He treated the lack of communication as a superficial human‐side problem and ...