Getting on the balcony definition
Getting on the balcony. , which means being able to step back and observe reality
Getting on the balcony means to be able to see the big picture. Business leaders should see patterns as if they were on a balcony. They should not be swept up in the field of action. They should identify what is good about the company’s history and what should be left behind in the light of an analysis of the present market scenario and the possible future developments. They should understand all conflicts over power and values, spot patterns of work avoidance, recognize all the other dysfunctional reactions the employees might have to change. They must be able to move back and forth between the field of action and the balcony, as in several ways a company’s habits can obstruct adaptive work. If a leader is trapped in the battlefield, he/she will become a prisoner of the system and would never be able to mobilize people to do adaptive work (Heifetz and Linsky, 2002). In the literature some articles give examples of what this means in practice. When the person who would have become current CEO of Netflix met CEO of Blockbuster some years ago and proposed him to start a partnership to make films available online to a worldwide audience, as he had understood times were changing, CEO of Blockbuster refused, confident of the sales they were doing at that time. He could neither see the big picture nor identify the adaptive challenge, and after few years the company went bankrupt (Myran and Sutherland, 2016). When Turbitt was a chief superintendent in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, he was given the responsibility to manage the annual Drumcree Sunday demonstrations in Northern Ireland between 2002 and 2004. Together with Benington, who was teaching leadership at Warwick University MPA degree, he designed his policing strategy based on the six adaptive leadership principles, which implied getting on the balcony, a mix of sophisticated future thinking and scenario planning, with close attention to operational and logistical details. He kept moving “between the balcony - which provides a strategic overview of the whole field of action and of all the different stakeholders -, and the battlefield - where people are in the trenches and up to their necks in the muck and the bullets’’ (Benington, Turbitt, 2007, p.393). Hence, ‘getting on the balcony’ is crucial for putting in practice the next five principles.