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

you have a specific scope of authority (see figure 2-2) that derives from your authorizers’ expectations and that defines the limits of what you are expected to do. As long as you do what is expected of you, your authorizers are happy. If you do what you are supposed to do really well, you will be rewarded in the coin of the realm,

Find partners who will share the dangers and the exposure. Together, you’ll stand a far better chance of avoiding attacks from opponents and keeping your initiative alive.

Many people avoid this process of negotiating purposes entirely. Compromise feels like disloyalty to their purposes and to the individuals who share and support those priorities. They know that by negotiating, they will probably have to give something up and thus disappoint people whose esteem matters greatly to them.

Who is most likely to oppose what you’re trying to do? Potential opponents are stakeholders who have markedly different perspectives from yours and who stand to risk losing the most if you and your initiative are go forward. Once you’ve identified the opposition, stay close to them, spend time with them, ask for their input on your initiative, list

Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it.

Anybody operating with a theory of leadership that assumes that experts know what is best, and that then the leadership problem is basically a sales problem in persuasion, is in our experience doomed at best to selling partial solutions at high cost.

Finally, in designing an intervention, consider the skills and resources in your own tool kit.

• Address interests unconnected to the adaptive challenge.

Another way to foster reflection and continuous learning is not only to run experiments, but also to reward learning from them, particularly when the experiments fail. Experiment widely enough, and you increase the odds of hitting on some great new ideas.

“When I was commissioned an officer many years ago, they told me that I was a leader. Now I realize I’ve been an authority figure, and I’m not sure I’ve exercised any leadership at all.”