Adaptive People for Adaptive Management

Publication review

Adaptive management needs people within organizations that can learn flexibly and be adaptive. Unfortunately, people are not generally very good at changing thinking or understanding or translating such change into doing things differently.

Insights into the sorts of characteristics that make people adaptive can be found in educational psychology, including work on how people improve performance and the personal beliefs they hold about the nature of knowledge and how they come to know something.

These fields of research help understand how adaptive expertise can be developed and how people can deal more effectively with uncertain and messy real world problems. Doing adaptive management provides the kinds of circumtances highlighted in educational psychology that are likely to help develop adaptability of individuals.

These contexts, however, are only likely to assist development of the ability of people to learn flexibly if appropriate attention is given to the structure and culture of the organizations in which adaptive managers are embedded.