The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

diagram? How resilient and ready are people to tackle the issue? An issue is ripe when the urgency to deal with it has become generalized across the system. If only a subgroup or faction cares passionately, but most other groups in the system have other priorities on their mind, then the issue is not yet ripe. Determining ripeness is critical becau

Factions within groups will be attracted to the interpretations that favor their own interests.

While technical problems may be very complex and critically important (like replacing a faulty heart valve during cardiac surgery), they have known solutions that can be implemented by current know-how. They can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organization’s current structures, procedures, and ways of

Through sabbaticals and leaves of absence, senior people are encouraged to get away from the office to refresh themselves and gain new perspectives.

An interpretation is only a guess, although the more you practice this activity, the better your guesses will be.

People make attacks personal specifically to divert you from your message. The next time someone tells you that you’re “too aggressive” or “uncaring” when you’re representing a difficult point of view or change initiative, remind yourself that you (as a person) are not your role (as someone seeking to lead change). Though an attack may feel persona

Your goal should be to keep the temperature within what we call the productive zone of disequilibrium (PZD): enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement, and forward motion, but not so much that the organization (or your part of it) explodes.

To what degree do people feel responsible for the whole organization where you work, as distinguished from their own piece of that whole (such as their team, department, business unit, or division)?

Expect that your team will find ways to avoid focusing on the adaptive challenge in doing their diagnosis as well as in taking action. Resistance to your intervention will have less to do with the merits of your idea and mostly to do with the fears of loss your idea generates.

First, in most organizations, people feel pressure to solve problems quickly, to move to action. So they minimize the time spent in diagnosis, collecting data, exploring multiple possible interpretations of the situation and alternative potential interventions. To counteract this drive toward a quick-fix response based on a too swift assessment of