Sublime

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

Exercising adaptive leadership requires that you be willing and competent at stepping into the unknown and stirring things up. Most people prefer stability to chaos, clarity to confusion, and orderliness to conflict. But to practice leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict, for yoursel

one of the most seductive ways your organization rewards you for doing exactly what it wants—to provide operational excellence in executing directions set by others—is to call you a “leader.”

The most effective leadership anchors change in the values, competencies, and strategic orientations that should endure in the organization.

Adaptive challenges can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative expertise to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating the new capacity to thrive anew.

To practice adaptive leadership, you have to take time to think through your interpretation of what you observe, before jumping into action.

Once you’ve identified the opposition, stay close to them, spend time with them, ask for their input on your initiative, listen closely to their reality (especially where it differs from yours),

By analogy, leadership on adaptive challenges generates loss. Learning is often painful. One person’s innovation can cause another person to feel incompetent, betrayed, or irrelevant.

The practice of leadership, like the practice of medicine, involves two core processes: diagnosis first and then action. And