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

People think of themselves as holding many values simultaneously. But they will focus on only a few of those values when the going gets rough. Those are their core values.

are their expectations? What key issues are they worried the off-site will ignore? What would success look like?

Finally, spending time with the opposition enables you to assess firsthand how much pressure they feel from your initiative.

You may need to pace the work of distributing the burden of uncertainty.

One way you know that there is an adaptive challenge facing your organization or community is that the problem persists even after a series of attempted technical fixes.

Send the Right Signals to Your People

Watch the initial event. Pay close attention to what happens first as the event begins. A joke, a casual comment, a request for information, whatever it is may signal something important about the group’s mood and the issues that are alive in the room.

EFFECTIVE VISIONS HAVE accuracy and not just imagination and appeal. Providing thoughtful, accurate interpretations that get at the essence of the complex reality you observe in your organization is enormously helpful to people. An incisive statement of the key issues that underlie a messy, complexified discussion orients people and helps focus att

typically ask the balcony person to tell the group initially what he or she observed, just the facts, without any interpretation, as if the group were watching a videotape of a soccer game without any commentary.