How Adaption-Innovation theory can help with workplace wellbeing and staff retention

As life returns to a new normal after the Covid-19 global pandemic, organisations can now consider how best to reverse the trend that began in 2021, with the ‘great resignation’. That is, where record numbers of people left their jobs for new roles that would better satisfy their needs. So, what can employers do to tackle this continuing problem? How can managers and leaders improve the wellbeing of their workforce to prevent them from leaving?

The research indicates, first and foremost, that successful team members need to be in a safe space for sharing ideas without being judged personally for those ideas. Rather the ideas are judged on their own merit (e.g. see Google’s Project Aristotle). This safe space leads to dependability, structure and clarity, making meaning from work, and impact to create change. This elemental brick of a safe space for idea generation is a hallmark of Kirton’s Adaption Innovation (KAI) theory. Developed by Dr Michael Kirton, the KAI inventory measures how each employees prefers to solve problems. His work helps teams recognise how differences in problem-solving style contributes to the cognitive diversity existing in workplaces. By understanding this diversity of thought, and learning new ways to communicate with colleagues, individuals can work together to solve problems more easily – thus resulting in improved team cohesion and an improved sense of wellbeing at work.

It is estimated that full-time workers spend an average of 50% of their waking hours at work, or around 1/3 of their life in total, so it is important that employers recognise that people need to feel satisfied and valued at work to prevent them looking elsewhere. A key way to ensure a sense of value and belonging is to spend time helping workers to understand how they fit in to the organisation and how their unique preference to problem-solving can benefit the organisation. This is where KAI can be particularly useful as it measures whether people prefer to solve problems in a structured way, using existing or tried and tested solutions or processes – thus taking a more adaptive approach; or whether they solve problems in a more radical way, coming up with different ideas and thus taking a more innovative approach.

A KAI practitioner can take the average of KAI results in a particular team to identify a team cognitive climate, which may be more adaptive or more innovative. Individuals falling outside of this cognitive climate may not feel a fit with the team. This lack of fit, may lead the individual to believe their ideas are not appreciated and should look to a different organization to work. However, they offer the most diversity of thought with respect to problem-solving style and should be valued. Their ideas will be needed at some point, and may be the individual that saves the day.

Working together to solve complex problems

One’s problem-solving style is not related to intelligence, learned skills, motivation, values, or culture; and there is no ideal problem-solving style, in general. Teams face complex problems every day that require team members to work together, with mutual respect of the advantages and disadvantages each person brings to the safe space. Once employees recognise where they sit on the KAI continuum and where their colleagues sit, they often experience lightbulb moments that enable them to understand why issues have arisen in the past and how the theory can be used to improve teamwork in future. They also see how their individual approach to problem solving is valuable to the organisation.

This need to feel valued is a key factor that helps with personal wellbeing, especially at work. Recognition at work can come in many different forms. It can come in the form of praise from colleagues or customers, from having your ideas taken forward to the next stage, or from the satisfaction of delivering a piece of work that makes a difference to the success of the organisation. All these situations tend to happen more easily once KAI is introduced.

Understanding how colleagues prefer to solve problems leads to acceptance of the cognitive differences that exist and a recognition that sometimes a problem requires a more adaptive solution and other times a more innovative solution. This fosters a greater sense of belonging within the team and within the wider organisation. Since belonging is one of the key drivers that keep people in their current job it is easy to see how this can benefit the individual and help organisations to reverse the trend where people are leaving their jobs in droves.

Using KAI to relieve workplace tension

A good example of where KAI has been introduced into a workplace and improved the wellbeing of individuals in the team comes from a large pharmaceutical manufacturer with over $1billion annual turnover. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic there were tensions between the senior team and the manufacturing operations team that were exacerbated by the pandemic when the employees were no longer able to meet face-to-face. An external KAI practitioner was bought in to advise on what might be done to relieve these tensions and they found the senior team was highly innovative, yet the operations team was much more adaptive.

The KAI practitioner helped the company to recognise that the senior team needed to switch their behaviours and spend more time thinking about how the adaptive decision makers in the operations team thought about the problem. As a result, the senor team’s communication style and decision-making processes were shifted to enable better collaboration with the manufacturing decision makers. This facilitated better communications, better decision making and a better understanding of differences. This, in turn, resulted in a reduction of tensions between the two different parts of the organisation. The company was naturally delighted with the insight provided by the KAI practitioner which resolved the previous difficulties and ensured that team members remained part of the organisations.

Without the expertise of a KAI practitioner, the disagreements between the senior team and the operations team could have been mistakenly attributed to the perception of an out-of-touch group of supervisors and an uninspired group of operation managers. Instead, it was discovered that everyone was capable, skilled, and involved in the problem-solving process; but disagreed on how best to solve the problem due to their cognitive diversity.