To counteract the personalization of problems, start with diagnosing and acting on the system (“moving outside in”) and then do the same for the self (“moving inside out”).

The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way.

Your goal should be to keep the temperature within what we call the productive zone of disequilibrium (PZD): enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement, and forward motion, but not so much that the organization (or your part of it) explodes.

As people in your own close-in group begin to discuss your intervention, pay attention to who seems engaged, who starts using your language or pieces of your idea as if it were their own. Listen for who resists the idea. Use these observations to help you see the contours of the factions the various people represent on the issue.

Many organizations get trapped by their current ways of doing things, simply because these ways worked in the past. And as tried-and-true patterns of thinking and acting produced success for the organization, they also produced success for the individuals who embraced those patterns.

To maximize the chances of success, move the members of the group into peer consulting, where they begin systematically to consult to one another on the leadership headache they have just given each other.

Executives encourage pure reflection as well as more disciplined processing of complex dynamic situations.

The third reason that you may end up too far out there by yourself is a function of your passion and commitment. Your belief in what you are doing is indispensable to your willingness to take the risks of leading adaptive change. But that same belief can also make you vulnerable.

Acknowledging that you have opted not to exercise leadership because there’s something more important to you is a step toward self-knowledge, Socrates’ definition of virtue (as reported by his student, Plato). When you take responsibility for the choices you make, you understand a little more about who you are. Choices between multiple deeply held