Commit and Adapt

By Jamie MorleyMay 28, 2023

I was speaking recently at a meeting on the concept of leading change and the overall importance of fully committing to a decision. After I made this statement a member of the audience made the point that this can be quite a difficult concept for a dentist or orthodontist to fully embrace.

He made the point that as a dentist or orthodontist it is important to be ready to adapt from a specific treatment plan as and when things occur during the treatment.

This really made me reflect on this whole concept as I don’t think I was able to articulate it clearly enough at the time on how this applies to leadership and leading change.

In summary we need to be able to commit and adapt. It is not one or the other, it is about doing both. In my opinion this is true for many different aspects of leadership. There is a great book by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin called the Dichotomy of Leadership where he talks about multiple dichotomies of leadership.

When it comes to leadership you have to really inspire and engage those around you to get behind a new direction or make a change happen. When you don’t fully commit to a decision you are not providing that clarity to those people around you who we are leading so that they can get fully behind it. It you are kind of continuing on with another option at the same time in the background this creates confusion. An example of this could be the use of a remote monitoring service. If you say you are going to start using it but then you only use it very occasionally this creates confusion, it also means that people are still engaging with the old way of doing things and so have to switch between these different options which makes learning the new way more difficult. If you commit fully it allows people to be fully present and focused in doing that task, as they are not wondering whether or not doing that task was the right choice. They are clear on that and can focus on doing it to the best of their ability.

But what happens if it doesn’t ‘work’?

To me, this is part of the point. One of the reasons that these changes don’t ‘work’ is that often people are not fully committing to it and not learning how to improve it and do it in a better way as a result. When you make a change it will not be perfect to start with and so you will have to make changes and learn how to improve it, but this doesn’t mean you abandon the overall commitment to remote monitoring and go back to the old way. What were you reasons for doing it in the first place? You maintain your commitment to the overall area of change but you adapt exactly how you are doing it and people have freedom to adapt how they are doing it in order to make it work. This requires commitment to the overall ‘strategy’ and the ability to adapt to make it a success.

The other element that comes into this is building in structures of reflection where you know that you will take a step out to reflect on the overall progress of the strategy and to ask that question about whether the change to the overall strategy is the right one and giving you what you were wanting it to give you. Having clear measures of success for the new strategy in the first place gives you specifics to reflect on whilst also continuing to consider the broader external environment  and any changes that may have occurred. You can step out and reflect on this. Challenge if it is the right strategy, before then committing again to it fully by being present in your actions, knowing that you will reflect and review on this later down the line. This specific review or reflection could for example be done monthly and/or quarterly as it is for a broader strategy, whilst we can be reviewing the specifics of how you are delivering that strategy on a weekly, daily and ad hoc basis.

There are different levels of decisions that you make. Some are small and specific, where you cannot drill down too much from it and so you have to adapt these regularly as you are going along. Other decisions are broader where there are lots of different ways in which you drill down from this broader decision to make that broader decision a reality. Commit to these broader decisions by putting in reflection structures to review these at a time in the future.