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

adaptive leadership, you have to believe that your intervention is absolutely the right thing to do at the moment you commit to it. But at the same time, you need to remain open to the possibility that you are dead wrong.

ORCHESTRATING CONFLICT is a discipline. It requires seeing the process as a necessary step in the journey toward a better future, tolerating the moments your people are not working well together, and believing that working through some rough patches will help to solidify their collective effort and commitment.

If you are not in an authority role, you can still protect dissenters by taking them seriously and listening to them, trying to find the useful insights in what they’re saying without necessarily endorsing their perspective.

But getting people to share what seems unspeakable is essential for an organization that hopes to move forward in the face of changing priorities or external conditions. Only by examining the full range of perspectives can a group of people increase their chances of developing adaptive solutions.

Giving the work back in organizational life often requires going against the grain of expectations that you’re supposed to maintain equilibrium or restore it quickly when people get knocked off balance. When you have authority, people expect you to provide direction, protection, and order, which includes delineating their individual roles and respo

We borrow the term orchestration from music because of the way composers approach the uses of dissonance and consonance in the creation of harmony. Composers treat dissonance as an essential component of harmony.

Adaptation relies on diversity. In

To mobilize stakeholders to engage with your change initiative, you have to identify their strongest values and think about how supporting your program would enable your stakeholders to serve those values.

Beyond selection, leadership development is a line manager’s daily responsibility.