GB600 Unit 9 Adaptive Challenge Plan Example

Probes the Reporters Proposed: A Unit 9 Adaptive Challenge Plan for a Court Reporting Firm

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB600: Leadership Strategies for a Changing World

Unit 9 Adaptive Challenge Plan

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The firm, its people and every figure are composite and illustrative; the frameworks and sources cited are real.

A Question Expertise Cannot Settle

The firm faces a question no consultant or technology vendor can answer for it: what a certified record means, and who a stenographer is, when a machine produces the first draft. Heifetz et al. (2009) set apart problems that current know-how can fix from challenges that ask the affected people to give up habits, roles or loyalties. Licensing a speech recognition system is technical. Deciding whether a stenographer's certification still means what clients think it means, and whether stenographers want to become editors of machine drafts, is adaptive. Only the reporters themselves can work that out, because the answer lives in how they do their work.

Why Probes Before a Plan

Snowden and Boone (2007) place situations like this in the complex domain, where causes become clear only after the fact. In that domain, leaders should not impose a plan; they should run safe-to-fail probes, watch what emerges, and amplify what works while dampening what does not. A rollout would assume the firm already knows what the new job should look like. A set of probes accepts that it does not.

Three Limits No Probe May Cross

Every certified transcript is reviewed by a certified stenographer. No probe may release a transcript that a certified reporter has not checked and signed.

No probe changes anyone's pay or employment. Participation is voluntary, and the two-year pledge described in Unit 8 continues to apply.

No client receives a service without knowing how it was produced. Any transcript involving machine drafting is labeled as such to the client.

Probes the Reporters Proposed

The director invited all stenographers and scopists to propose experiments. Nine proposals came in, and a group of five reporters chose three.

Probe 1: Stenographers editing machine drafts of depositions they attended. Proposed by a team of three stenographers. The reporter writes the deposition as usual, and speech recognition produces a parallel draft. Afterward, the reporter edits the machine draft instead of their own and records the time taken and the errors found. The question: is editing a machine draft faster, and does attending the deposition make editing more accurate? Duration: three months, about 20 depositions.

Probe 2: A realtime feed sold to trial counsel. Proposed by two senior stenographers. Stenographers already produce realtime text during proceedings; this probe offers trial lawyers a live feed combining the stenographer's realtime output with a machine draft of side conversations, at a premium price. The question: will lawyers pay for a richer realtime service that only a skilled stenographer can supervise? Duration: two trials, both commercial cases expected to run more than a week, so the feed is tested under real pressure.

Probe 3: Scopists paired with digital reporters. Proposed by two scopists, who edit stenographers' transcripts. A scopist works alongside a digital reporter on recorded depositions, editing the audio-based draft. The question: does pairing produce transcripts that meet the firm's accuracy standard faster than a digital reporter alone? Duration: three months.

Signals to Expand or Stop

Probe 1. Amplify if editing time falls by at least 20 percent with no increase in errors found at final review. Dampen if participants report that editing a machine draft feels like proofreading someone else's poor work and accuracy falls.

Probe 2. Amplify if at least one law firm asks to use the service again. Dampen if lawyers find the combined feed distracting.

Probe 3. Amplify if paired transcripts meet the accuracy standard in fewer total hours than the current process. Dampen if scopists report that audio drafts require more correction than stenographic ones.

A probe that fails tells the firm something true; a plan that fails tells it only that it guessed wrong.

What the Director Will Not Do

The director's role is to hold the boundaries and keep the work with the reporters. Heifetz and Laurie (1997) caution leaders not to take the adaptive work away from the people who must do it. So the director will not pick which probe succeeds before results come in. The director will not present results to clients or the press until the participating teams have reviewed them. And the director will not convert any probe into a firm-wide practice without a meeting where every stenographer can see the results and respond.

Reporting and Timeline

Each team reports monthly to the whole firm in a short written note: what was tried, what happened and what surprised them. At the end of three months, the founder, the director and the five reporters who chose the probes will decide which to expand, which to stop and whether new probes should start. The budget for all three probes is about $45,000, mainly for software licenses and the time participants spend on reporting.

References

Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.

Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1997). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), 124-134.

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68-76.