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Enabling adaptive space between the administrative and the emergent.
Mary Uhl-Bien (BNSF Endowed Professor, TCU Neeley), with Russ Marion (Clemson) and Bill McKelvey (UCLA Anderson), published the field's definitive complexity leadership framework in 2007. Her subsequent work with Michael Arena on adaptive space — developed inside GM — turned the theory into an operating manual for organizational adaptability. She also co-developed LMX theory with George Graen.
Uhl-Bien and colleagues distinguished administrative, adaptive, and enabling leadership in knowledge-era organizations. Enabling leaders open 'adaptive space' where the entrepreneurial and operational systems productively collide — leadership for organizational adaptability.
The era: Distributed & Complex — Distributed, dispersed, interdependent, embedded in interaction; leadership as learning; global competencies; combine all theories.
Enabling adaptive space between the administrative and the emergent.
Where this work feeds the Open Sky frameworks.
Fellow travelers on these threads:
Protect adaptive space where operational and entrepreneurial systems collide productively.
Lead in three modes — administrative, enabling, adaptive — and know which you're in.