The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

Course Overview:
The Practices of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World asks trainees to act courageously and engage in continued reflection as they seek to become agents of change. It explains authentic leadership as “the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive”. At the heart of adaptive leadership practice is the idea that if a system is broken, it must be diagnosed and remedied by taking risks and challenging the status quo in order to provoke change. throughout.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is an interactive course that provides many strong examples from the field. It incorporates more than advice, but also tools and guidelines that help apply the content to specific scenarios relevant to the trainee’s life.


Course Objectives:
It focuses on raising performance, working with clients and enhancing efficiency. The course advances the need for change, the decidedly Darwinian approach that provides the foundation for their approach to leadership. This course is described as a “field book.”

Target Audience:
Professionals that use the course to respond to pressing issues at their organization and for it to be “of day-today utility”. Professionals who are seeking to create change in their workplace. Some of the lessons are certainly applicable to other scenarios but there is a decidedly corporate tone throughout much of the course. Published by Harvard Business Press.

Course Outline:


Part one: Introduction: Purpose and Possibility
1- Adaptive Challenges and Adaptive Capacity
2- Theory behind the practice
- The Illusion of the broken system
- Distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges
- Distinguishing leadership from authority
- Living in the disequilibrium
- Observe, interpret, intervene
- Experiment and take smart risks smartly
- Engage above and below the neck
- Connect to purpose
3- Before you begin
- Don’t do it alone
- Live life as a leadership laboratory
- Resist the leap in action
- Discover the joy of making hard choices

Part two: Diagnose the system
4- Diagnose the system
- The elegance and tenacity of the status quo
- Discover structural implications
- Surface cultural norms and forces
- Recognize default interpretations and behavior

5- Diagnose the adaptive challenge
- Determine the technical and adaptive elements
- Listen to the song beneath the words
- Four adaptive challenge archetypes
6- Diagnose the political landscape
- Uncover values driving behavior
- Acknowledge loyalties
- Name the losses at risk
- Realize hidden alliances
7- Qualities of an adaptive organization
- Name the elephants in the room
- Share responsibility for the organization’s future
- Value independent judgment
- Build leadership capacity
- Institutional reflection and continuous learning


Part three: Mobilize the system
8- Make interpretations
- Notice when people are moving toward the left side of the chart
- Reframe the group’s default interpretation
- Generate multiple interpretations
- Audition your ideas
- Generate diversity of interpretations
9- Design effective interventions
- Get on the balcony
- Determine the ripeness of the issue in the system
- Ask who am I in the picture?
- Think hard about your framing
- Hold steady
- Analyze the factions that begin to emerge
- Keep the work at the center of people’s attention
10- Act politically
- Expand your informal authority
- Find allies
- Stay connected to the opposition
- Manage authority figures
- Take responsibility for casualties
- Protect and engage the voices of dissent
11- Orchestrate conflict
- Create a holding environment
- Select participants
- Regulate the heat
- Give the work back
12- Build and adaptive culture
- Make naming elephants the norm
- Nurture shared responsibility for the organization
- Encourage independent judgment
- Develop leadership capacity
- Institutionalize reflection and continuous learning

Part four: See yourself as a system
13- See yourself as a system
- Your many identities
14- Identify your loyalties
- Prioritize your loyalties
- Name your unspeakable loyalties
15- Know your tuning
- Know your triggers
- Hungers and carrying water
16- Broaden your bandwidth
- Discover your tolerances
17- Understand your roles
- What roles do you play?
- Identify your scope of authority?
18- Articulate your purposes
- Prioritize your purposes
- The story you tell yourself

Part five: Deploy yourself
19- Stay connected to your purposes
- Negotiate the ethics of leadership and purpose
- Keep purposes alive
- Negotiate your purposes
- Integrate your ambition and aspirations
- Avoid common traps
20- Engage courageously
- Get past the past
- Lean in to your incompetence
- Fall in love with tough decisions
- Get permission to fail
- Build the stomach for the journey
21- Inspire people
- Be with your audience
- Speak from the heart
22- Run experiments
- Take more risks
- Exceed your authority
- Turn up the heat
- Name your piece of the mess
- Display your own incompetence
23- Thrive
- Grow your personal support network
- Create a personal holding environment
- Renew yourself