Adaptive Leadership Workshop

The development of the skills necessary to support Adaptive Leadership requires exposure to the framework and the language plus the opportunity to learn, hone, practice, and apply those skills to specific challenges. Through this approach, people seeking to lead adaptive change develop the capacity to work through the inevitable resistance elicited by changes to deeply embedded values and patterns of behavior. Adaptive work is the work that helps people bridge the gap between values they stand for and aspire to (the preferred and proposed future) and current conditions.

Adaptive Leadership is difficult work, difficult because it involves helping individuals make hard value choices and difficult because it challenges what people hold dear, and thereby generates resistance from many of those affected. When people resist adaptive work, their first goal is to preserve what they have, and that means shutting down those advocating and leading the change.

But Adaptive Leadership is also inspiring because it connects to the human spirit and reconnects people to what they care about the most. Taking the risks involved in Adaptive Leadership only makes sense in the service of an important purpose.

To develop Adaptive Leadership capacity in an individual or an organization requires an understanding of several key assumptions:

• Adaptive vs. technical issues. Technical problems are the ones we can define clearly and know how to solve; they usually fall to someone with the authority to address them. Adaptive issues are often hard to identify clearly, require changing hearts and minds, and often are championed by someone who cares but may not have the authority to effect change. When adaptive issues are involved, people have to learn new ways and must choose among what appear to be contradictory values.
• Exercising authority vs. exercising leadership. Technical issues can be managed. Adaptive issues require leadership to resolve them.
• Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is not inherent. Even highly talented people have critical things to learn to increase the odds of success as they move across contexts.
• Those in authority are part of the problem. If any organization is to make any deep change, key members of the organization, including the top team and the senior authority figure, often need to make their own adaptive change as well.