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

the function of leadership is to mobilize people—groups, organizations, societies—to address their toughest problems. Effective leadership addresses problems that require people to move from a familiar but inadequate equilibrium—through disequilibrium—to a more adequate equilibrium.

At least five key hungers conspire to create what is increasingly recognized as a growing crisis in leadership.

itself. Images used as metaphors help to hold complex and disparate elements. Conflict and chaos are clarified, simplified, and unified with fitting metaphors, and thus, we should expect to find a distillation of useful metaphors at the core of the practice of the art of adaptive leadership.

Another third come to sort out career challenges and prospects: Do I have what it takes to move into a larger arena? Which path should I take? Can I learn how to address problems in ways that make a significant difference? (Or simply: Can I get the next promotion or win that office? Can I get people to follow me? Can I prevail?)

Our job is to hold people through a process. We structure the course so people can learn from their experiences and from the experience of others.

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

When Heifetz speaks of “wasteful pain,” it suggests that the criteria for identifying adaptive work and assessing progress include attention to levels of unnecessary pain—whether one is attempting to lead within a corporation, a community, or a society as a whole.

Adaptive leadership requires knowing how to give the work back to the group—that is, to the social system that has to learn, change, and adapt.

Donald Schon eloquently argued that people cannot simply be told what they need to know in the complexity of practice. They must learn to see for themselves.