Here is a typical example of a senior director at a large financial services firm who has been given the digital transformation brief. He builds a meticulous project plan — technology milestones, training schedules, compliance checkpoints and impressive looking Gantt charts. After 6 months there are no significant changes in adoption which is confusing and anxiety-provoking.
If asked to assist in this situation, I would ask him to split the introduced changes into two columns. On the left: everything technical. New software, redesigned workflows, updated compliance processes. On the right: everything adaptive. Letting go of expertise in legacy systems, the loss of status for senior staff who had mastered the old way, fear of incompetence during the learning curve, a deep cultural belief that “the way we have always done it” is safer.
It would be usual to see that 95 percent of his energy and action is in the left column. The right column would typically have little or nothing.
A critical distinction for effective change
In the mid ‘90s Heifetz’s research at Harvard’s Kennedy School introduced one of the major distinctions in leadership theory: the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems, however complex, can be solved with existing knowledge and established procedures. Adaptive challenges require people to change their values, beliefs, habits, or outdated ways of working.
The critical leadership error is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. Applying expert solutions to situations that in fact require learning, transformation, and a new way or approach to doing things.
Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky expanded on this with research in 2009 which showed that the majority of change failures go back to undone adaptive work — the technical solution was fine; the human dimension was ignored. For example, when a hospital merges with another, integrating IT systems or improving stock control is relatively straightforward. The real challenge is in building trust across previously competing teams, reviewing established ways of working, and engaging in looking for new ways of working together.
Work avoidance: the system’s favourite defence
Linked to the above, Heifetz also identified a pattern he calls “work avoidance” — the defensive tendency of people to deflect adaptive challenges back toward technical fixes. A leadership team that responds to low engagement scores by redesigning the performance management system are likely to be engaging in work avoidance. They are addressing a technical symptom while ignoring the adaptive reality that trust between managers and their teams has broken down.
As a psychologist, I recognise this pattern from clinical work. It is the organisational equivalent of treating symptoms while avoiding the real underlying issue. The presenting problem is rarely the actual problem.
In my experience across sectors — from heavy industry to financial services to healthcare — certain organisational cultures default more heavily to technical solutions. Engineering cultures gravitate toward process redesign. Financial services reach for new systems and metrics. Government departments produce policy documents. Each response looks productive. But it is more likely that each is a sophisticated form of avoidance.
The Gestalt lens
My training in Gestalt psychology offers a useful perspective here. The paradoxical theory of change holds that transformation occurs when people become fully aware of what is, rather than straining toward what should be. Applied to the adaptive-technical distinction, this means that leaders who rush to fix the technical problem often do so precisely to avoid the discomfort of the real need for adaptation.
Sitting with that discomfort — acknowledging that the real challenge is about identity, meaning, competence, loss and adaptation — is the beginning of real change. It is also the part that most leaders are least equipped for, because their entire career has rewarded them for the known realm of problem solving, rather than managing the uncomfortable and unknown.
How this approach would look in practice
Back to the earlier example of the financial services firm, it would be necessary to sit with the director and design a parallel adaptive strategy alongside a technical plan. Facilitated conversations about what was being lost. Coaching for managers struggling with the identity shift from expert to learner. Visible leadership modelling of vulnerability during the learning process — the director would ideally more openly share his own struggles with the new system, in this way modelling an authentic, adaptive and engaging approach to the change. Experience and research would show that this approach, adaptive alongside technical, is much more likely to succeed.
A diagnostic you can use tomorrow
At Thornhill Associates, we now build this two-column diagnostic into the start of every significant change engagement. Left column: technical, and right column: adaptive. The ratio of investment between the two columns predicts the outcome more reliably than the quality of the project plan.
If your change initiative is stalling and you have checked every technical box, stop looking at the plan. Start looking at the people. Ask them what they are afraid of losing and what beliefs need to shift. Ask them where the identity threat lives in this change.
The answer is not technical.
Thornhill can help you to develop effective leaders and improve their performance through 360° assessments and feedback coaching.