Adaptive Persistence

OVERVIEW

In this episode, Simon unpacks the vital leadership disposition of adaptive persistence – the ability to stay committed to long-term goals while flexibly adjusting to challenges. Drawing on insights from Professor Viviane Robinson and real-world improvement work, he explores how calm, steady leadership helps teams navigate setbacks without losing direction. It’s not just about grit – it’s about knowing when and how to adapt while keeping the bigger goal in sight.

TRANSCRIPT

Well, today I want to explore a little bit about the importance of the leadership disposition of adaptive persistence. I’m going to define adaptive persistence here is your ability to persistently pursue goals while adapting flexibly. We often talk in this podcast about certain knowledge and skills, but here I want to focus on leadership dispositions.

I’ve learned a lot about leadership dispositions from the work I’ve done in partnership with Professor Viviane Robinson. And she’s really helped me understand a disposition as an enduring character trait that is learned throughout life. And that together, dispositions shape perceptions and motivate behaviour. And I do think that often we can sort of jump to, especially in my work, what do you need to know? And what is the skill you’re trying to enact? And perhaps what’s the tool that can help you do that?

Often, I’ve overlooked and want to start to re-emphasise the importance of leadership dispositions and how we actually need to actively and proactively really try to activate these in our own leadership work. Because if long-term school and system improvement journeys are complex and messy, you know, if they’re a little bit like a very steep and challenging climb,

If they’re like a long sailing journey where you know where you’re starting, where you know roughly where you want to be, you know, the context you’re going to have to navigate all the way through are going to be complex and never changing. Or maybe school improvements a little bit like an endurance adventure race, like some sort of long, tough mudder type of race where people are working together and sometimes it’s going well. And other times, you’re in the mud and dragging your colleagues up over some sort of obstacle. School improvement is tough.

And we’re going to face along the way, not will we, but we will, if you’re leading this work, all sorts of human challenges, challenges around managing cognitive overload and initiative fatigue, getting some active and persistent passive resistance. Maybe you’re going to experience changing staff and even the staff that were really, you were basing your improvement work on their capability and their leadership and they move on somewhere else.

We’re going to have to face challenges, challenges around people defaulting to older practices, even though we’ve done rounds of work, we’re going to have to respond to the disruptions we’ll experience through unexpected events or policy changes or budget shifts. You know it better than I do. And this is where this idea of activating the leadership disposition of adaptive persistence is crucial. know, Professor Viviane Robinson speaks around similar concepts in her work around perseverance in school leadership. She talks about this being a voluntary continuation of goal-directed action in spite of the obstacles, difficulties or discouragement. She’s helped me understand that this is really motivated by a deep internal commitment to the improvement goal.

We shouldn’t expect that if we’re trying to move things in reading and writing, in numeracy and mathematics, in attendance and wellbeing and behaviour and culture, we should expect that these are going to be simple linear things to work on. In fact, no, we’re going to need to this deep commitment to move that goal forward, to solve for that goal. Because we’re going need to know it’s often going to take several conscientious attempts before difficult problems will be resolved. And even when we think early days that it looks like they’re gonna be resolved, often we’ll uncover other layers of the onion of the challenges we’re trying to work on. So adaptive persistence is gonna involve maintaining a commitment to your long-term improvement goals.

But here’s the thing whilst remaining flexible and responsive to changing conditions. There’s a real need to go into our improvement work and not say we will if we could, if it stays calm and everyone comes with me, but if it kind of, you know, doesn’t go as we planned or we get some obstacles or people aren’t all that keen, I’m not sure whether we’ll follow through. No, we’ve got to attempt this work with full and utter sort of awareness from the outset that actually the long-term work is going to involve multiple iterations, a lot of learning, some frustrations, some mistakes, some errors, some course correction.

And so we’ve got to balance that determination of where we’re heading with that agility, that willingness to adjust strategies. And this is the key. This adaptive persistence, this agility, this perseverance, whatever you want to call it, is crucial for leaders as they lead their team and their broader staff towards these longer term valuable improvement outcomes that they want to see.

Psychologists tell us that ⁓ when things go wrong for a child, when, for example, there’s maybe a threat of danger, maybe a vicious barking dog comes up towards the gate as you’re going for a walk around the street or something like that, psychologists tell us that children don’t necessarily look directly then at the source of danger. They actually look straight up at their parents’ eyes and they want to know in their parents’ eyes, have we got this? Have you got this under control?

Is this okay? Or if the parents start to freak out and their eyes tell the story, they’ll know, well, we’re really in trouble. Well, in a similar way, when we’re leading long-term improvement and we get disruptions and frustrations and things coming up, I want to say your team, your staff are going to look at your eyes and say, have we got this? Is this okay? Or are we kind of disrupted now? Is this kind of like over?

Is this kind of like, well, we kind of drop our long-term aspirations and maybe wait for the new school improvement sort of time and we’ll just kind of rewrite a new plan of some sort with a different aspiration. We as leaders need to be really conscious around what we’re modeling and whether or not as frustrations and discouragements and obstacles pop up. As our staff look to us, do we have that sense of adaptive persistence? Hey, we’ve got this. We’re expecting things like this to happen. Yeah, okay. We’re a little bit short of resources or that key person’s moved on.

Or there’s another thing we’ve got to somehow fit around that. Yep. Yep. We were expecting all part of this. There’s no surprises. We’ve got this is that overarching sense of calm that leaders with adaptive persistence can inculcate in their team. heard one person say, try to have the lowest heart rate in your team when things go right. So when things go wrong, try to have the lowest heart rate in your team when things go wrong.

I don’t know, personally, I find this really challenging. But I guess underneath it is that sense of, we’ve got this, we’re heading in our long-term direction, and we’ve got the adaptive persistence to flexibly adjust until we hit that long-term goal. And so you don’t necessarily spike in that sense of, oh my goodness, it’s all stuffed. No, no, we’ve got this. We’ll find a solution. We’ll find a way through. So I wonder how you’re going as you think about the last six months or so of your leadership. How are you going in systematically activating this leadership disposition of adaptive persistence? How could you in the leadership work that you’re leading, as you hit obstacles and frustrations and resistance and discouragements coming up, how could you lead your team in that active persistence of your long-term goals whilst adaptively and flexibly solving problems as they come up?

Adaptive persistence is one of the key leadership dispositions that set apart leaders who can go on long-term complex but important meaningful improvement journeys.