Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World

on action: the practices of leadership on adaptive issues from preparation to implementation. Whatever form your interventions take, if successful, they are likely to have certain qualities: • Pointing to a long-term solution (rather than a quick fix) to the adaptive challenge • Framing the challenge and offering interpretations of the issues and t

These are what we call adaptive challenges, gaps generated by bold aspirations amid challenging realities. For these the world needs to build new ways of being and responding beyond the current repertoires of available know-how. What is needed from a leadership perspective are new forms of improvisational expertise, a kind of process expertise that

adaptive leadership as an art, not a science, an art that requires an experimental mindset.

Leadership is a difficult practice personally because it almost always requires you to make a challenging adaptation yourself. What makes adaptation complicated is that it involves deciding what is so essential that it must be preserved going forward and what of all that you value can be left behind.