I want to open with a story. A young woman prepares a pot roast while her friend watches. She cuts off both ends of the roast, adds the spices and puts it in the pan. The friend asks, "Why do you cut off the ends?". The woman replies, "I don't know, my mother always did it that way and I learned to cook it from her." Later the young woman gets curious about her pot roast preparation and calls her mother and asks, "Why do you cut off the ends?" Perplexed, the mother responds, "I don't know, my mother always did it that way and I learned it from her." The next week at her weekly visit, the mother asks her mother why she cuts off the ends of the pot roast. The grandmother's eyes lit up as she remembered. "Well, the roasts were always bigger than the pot we had back then, so I had to cut off the ends to fit in the pot that I owned."  

How often do we do things and don't even ask why we do it or whether it make sense given the situation. I was reminded me of this while backpacking. For example, in the desert it's all about the water, and we had to orient our hikes around where we know there "should be" water. We learned the hard way that you don't hike in the hottest part of the day- and adjusted our schedule to wake up early, hike a couple of hours before breakfast and then take a siesta during the day. One afternoon when we did this, we looked at the map and had about 10 hours of hiking until the next guaranteed spot for water. My typical rhythm would be to go a few more hours, then set up camp, have dinner, and then relax. But there was no water in the next stretch. It felt like an adaptive leadership moment when I suggested to Jon that instead of leaving at 4:00 p.m. as we had planned, we eat dinner here (using the spring water), guzzle down as much water as we can, then hike a few hours, set up a new camp and go to sleep, without having to use our water reserve so that the next morning we could leave camp with full water bottles. It was an out-of-the-box moment, and felt a little weird, but it served us well.

What about you? Are there any habits or ways of doing things that might not serve you anymore? See below for ways to think about it.

This often-cited book is an important contribution to the leadership field. According to Heifetz, leaders are confronted with two types of problems: technical problems, which can be solved by expertise and good management, and "adaptive" problems, such as poverty, war and racial issues, which require innovation and learning. Heifitz asserts that traditional management strategies are useful in dealing with technical problems, but in situations where beliefs and values come into play, technical "fixes" tend to exacerbate the problem. It's a good book to change the narrative that there's a "right way" to do leadership.