But the constant in the midst of the change, and the reason why the course is important, is that people come here to make a difference out there. People bring passions and purposes. We help them be more effective. We help them develop discipline, analytic awareness, and strategic action.

action. Leadership education is intended to affect significantly the actual practice of professional life however, so the critical question is, “What endures?”

It has become almost a cliché among leadership theorists to disavow a heroic command-and-control model of leadership. But the heroic image of leadership that prevails in the conventional mind is more than a model. It is a deep and abiding myth.

in dispelling the aforementioned, fatalistic illusion of leadership as a trait one is either born with or without. Related to it is the Myth of Charisma, captured by images of a Charlton Heston atop the mountain, a grand figure who dwarfs others. Charisma, as a leadership factor, has been a false front, and it is a term that I have made it a point

Leadership for today’s world requires enlarging one’s capacity to see the whole board, as in a chess match—to see the complex, often volatile interdependence among the multiple systems that constitute the new commons.

This approach provides an unusual degree of repetition of concepts and metaphors as they are used to interpret recurring phenomena that arise in the often emotionally charged work of the course—especially when the group itself functions as a case-in-point. Repetition acknowledges that most learners either initially resist new ways of seeing or simp

A major reason for resistance to adaptive work is that it almost always includes loss and grief.

what expectation does somebody in authority need to meet in order to maintain or gain credibility?”

As we have seen, most who experience this pedagogy and then use it in their own work as a teacher, coach, or consultant take on an adaptive challenge of their own—learning to think and to teach in a new way. Inevitably, all adaptive work is a creative act. Every modification or further development of the approach has consequences pro and con and af