The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

1. Adaptive Leadership: Mobilizing People to Tackle Tough Challenges

Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive.

Thriving in change. Adaptive leadership is a practical framework for navigating complex challenges that have no easy solutions. It's about mobilizing people to tackle tough problems and thrive in a changing environment. Unlike technical problems that can be solved with existing knowledge, adaptive challenges require new learning, innovation, and changes in values or behavior.

Key principles:

• Distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges
• Engage stakeholders in the problem-solving process
• Focus on learning and experimentation
• Embrace discomfort and uncertainty as part of growth

Adaptive leadership is not about having all the answers, but rather creating the conditions for people to discover and implement solutions collectively. It requires leaders to step back, observe patterns, and intervene strategically to help the organization adapt and flourish.

2. Diagnose the System: Understand the Organization's Dynamics

Every organization is not only one overall system but also a set of subsystems.

Systemic perspective. To lead adaptive change effectively, leaders must develop a deep understanding of their organization's structures, culture, and default behaviors. This involves getting on the "balcony" to observe patterns and dynamics that may not be visible from the ground level.

Key areas to diagnose:

• Formal and informal power structures
• Cultural norms and values
• Communication patterns
• Decision-making processes
• Resistance to change

By mapping the system, leaders can identify leverage points for intervention and anticipate potential obstacles. This diagnostic approach helps in designing more effective strategies for mobilizing people and resources towards adaptive work.

3. Manage Disequilibrium: Balance Stress and Change

Expect that your team will find ways to avoid focusing on the adaptive challenge in doing their diagnosis as well as in taking action.

Productive zone of disequilibrium. Adaptive change requires creating enough disequilibrium to motivate people to change, but not so much that they become overwhelmed or paralyzed. Leaders must learn to regulate the temperature, raising the heat when people are too comfortable and lowering it when the stress becomes counterproductive.

Strategies for managing disequilibrium:

• Pace the work
• Create a holding environment
• Sequence and time interventions
• Protect voices of dissent
• Give the work back to the people

The goal is to maintain a level of productive stress that keeps people engaged in the adaptive work without pushing them beyond their capacity to learn and adapt.

4. Orchestrate Conflict: Harness Tension for Progress

Conflict is an essential resource in getting to the real, as opposed to superficial, harmony.

Constructive tension. Adaptive challenges often involve competing values and perspectives. Instead of avoiding or suppressing conflict, effective leaders learn to orchestrate it productively. This means creating spaces for different viewpoints to be heard and facilitating difficult conversations that lead to new insights and solutions.

Steps to orchestrate conflict:

1. Surface competing perspectives
2. Create a holding environment for tough conversations
3. Facilitate dialogue and deep listening
4. Help people identify shared purpose amidst differences
5. Guide the group towards creative problem-solving

By skillfully managing conflict, leaders can help their organizations tap into diverse ideas and emerge stronger and more adaptive.

5. Give the Work Back: Empower Others to Solve Problems

To practice adaptive leadership, you have to help people navigate through a period of disturbance as they sift through what is essential and what is expendable, and as they experiment with solutions to the adaptive challenges at hand.

Distributed responsibility. A key principle of adaptive leadership is resisting the temptation to solve problems for others. Instead, leaders must develop the capacity of individuals and groups to tackle adaptive challenges themselves. This involves creating opportunities for learning, experimentation, and collective problem-solving.

Techniques for giving work back:

• Ask questions instead of providing answers
• Create forums for group problem-solving
• Encourage experimentation and learning from failure
• Develop leadership capacity throughout the organization
• Resist the pressure to provide quick fixes

By empowering others to do the adaptive work, leaders build a more resilient and capable organization that can thrive in the face of ongoing challenges.

6. Protect Voices of Dissent: Embrace Diverse Perspectives

The voices of dissent are naysayers, the skeptics, who not only question this initiative but question whatever is on the agenda for today. They are princes of darkness, often resting on the negative. But they are valuable for implementing adaptive change because they are canaries in the coal mine, early-warning systems, and because in addition to being unproductive and annoying much of the time, they have the uncanny capacity for asking the really tough key question that you have been unwilling to face up to yourself or that others have been unwilling to raise.

Embrace contrarian views. Dissenting voices often provide valuable insights and early warnings about potential problems. Rather than marginalizing or silencing these perspectives, adaptive leaders create space for them to be heard and considered.

Ways to protect dissenting voices:

• Actively seek out diverse viewpoints
• Create psychological safety for expressing unpopular ideas
• Use devil's advocate techniques in decision-making
• Reward constructive criticism and questioning of assumptions
• Model openness to feedback and alternative perspectives

By valuing dissent, organizations can avoid groupthink, identify blind spots, and develop more robust solutions to adaptive challenges.

7. Lead with Purpose: Connect Actions to Values

Identifying your part of the problem, what we call "your piece of the mess," has two key benefits. First, doing so creates the opportunity to fix at least one element of the problem, the one that is more or less under your own control. Second, it models the accountability you are asking others to demonstrate in tackling the adaptive challenge at hand.

Purpose-driven leadership. Adaptive leadership requires a deep connection to one's values and purpose. Leaders must be able to articulate why the adaptive work matters and how it aligns with the organization's core mission. This involves not only clarifying one's own purpose but also helping others connect their work to a larger sense of meaning.

Steps to lead with purpose:

1. Clarify your personal and organizational values
2. Articulate a compelling vision for change
3. Help others see their role in the larger purpose
4. Model accountability and personal commitment
5. Regularly revisit and reinforce the shared purpose

By grounding adaptive work in shared purpose and values, leaders can inspire greater commitment and resilience in the face of challenges.

8. Engage Courageously: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

Adaptive leadership takes you out of your daily routine into unknown territory, requiring ways of acting that are outside your repertoire, with no guarantee of your competence or your success.

Embrace discomfort. Leading adaptive change often requires leaders to step outside their comfort zones and take personal risks. This might involve having difficult conversations, making unpopular decisions, or challenging long-held assumptions. Engaging courageously means being willing to experience incompetence and vulnerability in service of growth and progress.

Strategies for courageous engagement:

• Identify and confront your own adaptive challenges
• Practice difficult conversations and skills in low-stakes settings
• Build a support network for personal resilience
• Reflect on and learn from failures and setbacks
• Cultivate a growth mindset that embraces challenges

By modeling courage and vulnerability, leaders inspire others to engage more fully in the adaptive work.

9. Inspire Others: Communicate from the Heart

Inspiration is not an innate capacity reserved for the rare and gifted charismatic individual. To see that everyone already has this capacity, take a walk through the children's unit of a hospital, and the everyday ability of people to inspire will surround you.

Authentic communication. Inspiring others to engage in adaptive work requires more than logical arguments or technical expertise. It involves connecting with people's emotions, values, and aspirations. Leaders must learn to communicate authentically, speaking from the heart about what really matters.

Elements of inspiring communication:

• Share personal stories and vulnerabilities
• Connect the work to shared values and purpose
• Use metaphors and vivid language to paint a compelling vision
• Listen deeply and empathetically
• Acknowledge the difficulties while maintaining hope

By communicating with authenticity and passion, leaders can mobilize people's energy and commitment for tackling adaptive challenges.

10. Run Experiments: Embrace an Iterative Approach

Everything you do in leading adaptive change is an experiment.

Iterative learning. Adaptive challenges rarely have clear solutions from the outset. Leaders must approach them with an experimental mindset, willing to try new approaches, learn from failures, and adjust course based on feedback. This iterative process allows for more rapid learning and adaptation.

Principles of experimental leadership:

• Frame interventions as hypotheses to be tested
• Start with small, low-risk experiments
• Gather data and feedback systematically
• Reflect on and learn from both successes and failures
• Scale up successful approaches incrementally

By embracing an experimental approach, leaders can navigate the uncertainty of adaptive challenges more effectively and build their organization's capacity for ongoing learning and adaptation.

Last updated: February 4, 2025