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

How do you know whether you and your team are confronting an adaptive challenge? Look for two characteristic signals: a cycle of failure and a persistent dependence on authority.

Identify a behavior that would make the enterprise more adaptable, and design a ritual that you think would encourage that behavior. For example, to foster an environment where people felt safer taking risks and making mistakes, Marta, a manager in a large sales organization, created a “best failure” ritual. At every Monday-morning staff meeting, t

Sounds easy and obvious, but we have seen over and over again how people who are trying to do the right thing end up out on a limb all alone. It is not only lonely out there; it is dangerous.

If the peril is so obvious, why do so many people end up going it alone? Three reasons: first, their opponents will do whatever it takes to make them vulnerable.

In an organization with a high capacity to adapt, people share responsibility for the larger organization’s future in addition to their identification with specific roles and functions.

The issue is not yet ripe. Subgroup members avoid dealing with an issue they are not ready to address.

Sometimes, those conversations will reveal that your assumptions about these loyalty groups and their expectations of you are mostly in your head.

societies, those who have moved up the hierarchy into senior positions of authority are naturally socialized and trained to be good at taking action and decisively solving problems. There is no incentive to wade knee-deep into the murky waters of diagnosis, especially if some of the deeper diagnostic possibilities will be unsettling to people who l

Identifying the losses is not easy. Often people hide them because they sound embarrassingly self-serving and self-protective.

We suggest that you can have both ambitions and aspirations, and you can actively serve both.