Leading Adaptive Change

Leading Adaptive Change

Introduction

There are many organizations which fail to achieve their goals due to technical reasons but there is even greater number of organizations failing to achieve their goals due to adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges are identified when loyalties, beliefs, and habits of people changes. Organizations often do mistakes when they treat an adaptive problem as technical problem. Technical challenges are issues for which there is knowledge to implement a solution.

The health care industry in the United States is in turmoil and constant change. Spending for health care has outpaced economic growth, putting consumers and businesses in the position of inability to afford the costs. The providers of health care are fatigued with trying to address the problems, pushing them to the edge of their coping mechanisms. The issues facing health care providers include access barriers, payment challenges, waste, rising operational costs, and poor productivity gains. With the expectation of increased demand on health care providers by the influx of need from an aging population, the problems are going to increase (Kegan, & Lahey, 2009). These threats create adaptive challenges in the organizations.

The positive outcome for an organization is to successfully navigate these unanticipated changes through adaptation. Through developing strategies to support adaptation, a company has the skills and experience to handle the unforeseen(Lalonde, 2007). The opportunity in the health care industry is for its leaders to understand the positive results of adaptation, and in particular adaptive challenges. This understanding will improve the likelihood of other organizations doing the same. Heifetz has developed a classification of challenges facing organizations and described them as technical and adaptive. All challenges are a gap between what the organization aspires to achieve and its reality. When the challenge is technical the organization has existing knowledge that can be applied to bridge the gap. In an adaptive challenge the organization does not have the experience or knowledge to plan a course of action (Heifetz, & Linsky, 2009).

While all areas of health care are facing adaptive challenges, medical practices are the most vulnerable. In the United States medical practices are service organizations providing health care, often privately held corporations with ownership by the physicians through a partnership. Based on reports from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States has 661,400 physicians, with 53% of these doctors working in private practices. The total number of medical practices in the United States is not known (Cawsey, & Deszca, 2008). Little research has been done with regard to understanding the leadership of medical practices or how these organizations adapt to change. Operating without support of empirical evidence adds to the risk for medical practices. This study provides information to health care leaders, medical practices in particular, on the key aspects of successful navigation of adaptive challenges. In this paper we are going to focus on adaptive challenge faced by health care organization and the going to focus on one change that causes these challenges.

Discussion

Health care is a compel adaptive system because it ...