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

How do you strengthen your capacity to embrace the tough decisions that come with leading adaptive change?

The only reason we can imagine you would want to do this kind of work is to serve purposes that matter to you deeply. Identifying your higher (orienting) purpose—figuring out what is so important to you that you would be willing to put yourself in peril—is a key element in the process of understanding yourself as a system.

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.

We suggest that you can have both ambitions and aspirations, and you can actively serve both.

Having purpose provides the focus for that meaning. But effectuating that meaning, putting it into practice, bringing it to life, requires two difficult diagnostic steps. First, since most people have multiple important purposes, clarifying your priorities among them is essential in giving you the focus this work requires. Clarifying your prioritie

Distinguishing between your roles and yourself also helps you ward off unwarranted flattery, which is often designed (consciously or not) to lull you into inaction.

Important purposes take time. You are not abandoning your purposes when you take an angled step toward them rather than move along a straight line.

Your purposes provide the inspiration and energy you need to survive leadership’s choppy ride. But they can also become a constraint if you fall into one or more common traps.

A question permeates this book: “In what new ways of thinking and acting are you willing to engage on behalf of what you believe most deeply?” That question in turn raises the corollary: “What will you not do on behalf of what you believe most deeply?”