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

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

The need to go beyond what you are authorized to do, both formally and informally, is what distinguishes adaptive leadership from good management.

Equally important, you must identify each stakeholder’s: • Values. What are the commitments and beliefs guiding the behaviors and decision-making processes? • Loyalties. What obligations does the person have to people outside his or her immediate group (such as long-standing customer or supplier relationships)? • Losses at risk. What does the perso

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 ha

Step 1: Watch for Gaps Between Your Words and Actions

But being open to learning is a critical capacity for anyone seeking to enable their organizations to adapt. People at all levels in the enterprise must be able to acknowledge what they do not know and need to discover.

Distinguishing between your roles and yourself also helps you ward off unwarranted flattery, which is often designed (consciously or not) to lull you into inaction.

People at the top of an organization are always sending out clues that indicate what behavior is acceptable. And that is nowhere more critical than in naming elephants.

Establish ground rules. Propose rules making it safe to discuss the conflict, such as committing to confidentiality, staying in the room with PDAs and computers off, depersonalizing the conflicts, and brainstorming. Set the agenda.