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

Adaptive leadership is not about meeting or exceeding your authorizers’ expectations; it is about challenging some of those expectations, finding a way to disappoint people without pushing them completely over the edge.

Thoughtful framing means communicating your intervention in a way that enables group members to understand what you have in mind, why the intervention is important, and how they can help carry it out. A well-framed intervention strikes a chord in people, speaking to their hopes and fears.

No stakeholders operate solo. They have external loyalties, to people outside their group and to the people behind the ideas that matter to them.

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

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.

The prevailing interpretation reduces conflict.

Review the following list of potential losses to begin getting some ideas: • Identity • Competence • Comfort • Security • Reputation • Time • Money • Power • Control • Status • Resources • Independence • Righteousness •Job • Life

Good interventions also take into account the resources available in your organization.

Finally, spending time with the opposition enables you to assess firsthand how much pressure they feel from your initiative. You can then calibrate your tactics accordingly.