“Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”
Leadership When the Answer Is Not Known
Most leadership books assume that the leader’s task is to find the right answer and persuade others to follow it. “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” begins from a more unsettling premise: sometimes no one knows the answer — not the chief executive, the experts, or the consultants.
The answer has to be discovered through change.
Technical Problems and Adaptive Challenges
The book’s most useful distinction is between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
A technical problem may be difficult, but the knowledge needed to solve it already exists. An engineer is needed for a damaged engine. A legal dispute needs a lawyer. Better procedures or technology can improve an inefficient process.
An adaptive challenge is different. You can’t solve it simply by applying existing expertise. It requires people to reconsider assumptions, change habits, acquire new capabilities, or surrender something they value.
This distinction helped me understand experiences I had lived through without possessing the language to describe them.
When the financial crisis reached Romania in 2008, our plans at UniCredit Bank included expanding the network to 300 branches. The strategy had been designed for a world that was disappearing. Canceling the expansion was a technical decision. We could revise budgets, renegotiate contracts, and redirect resources.
The deeper challenge was adaptive. Managers who had learned how to expand had to learn how to consolidate. Expectations formed during years of rapid growth had to be abandoned. Optimism had to become caution without turning into paralysis. The organization had to reconsider what success meant under entirely different conditions.
No spreadsheet could do that work for us.
Change Means Loss
People do not resist change merely because they are stubborn or uninformed. They often resist because change threatens something important: status, competence, loyalty, identity, or certainty.
What looks like resistance may therefore be a response to loss.
A leader who fails to recognize this will try to overcome opposition through explanation or authority. But more information does not remove the pain of leaving behind a familiar role. An employee may recognise the need for a fresh approach yet still fear becoming irrelevant.
Adaptive leadership begins with an uncomfortable question:
What would people have to give up to move forward?
Until leaders understand the answer, they cannot understand the resistance.
Leadership Is an Activity
The authors challenge another common assumption: that leadership belongs to people at the top.
Authority and leadership are not the same. Authority provides a position, resources, and permission to act. Leadership is an activity.
Someone with authority may avoid leadership by protecting people from hard realities. Someone without formal authority may exercise leadership by raising a question everyone else would prefer to ignore.
People normally expect those in authority to provide direction, protection, and order. Yet during an adaptive challenge, too much protection becomes part of the problem. If leaders absorb every difficulty and settle every conflict, the organization never develops its own ability to respond.
The authors therefore tell leaders to “give the work back.”
That short instruction runs counter to one of our strongest managerial instincts. We want to intervene, demonstrate competence, and provide answers. However, people who need to change must perform adaptive work themselves. Giving the work back does not mean abandoning people. It means letting them accept responsibility for their part in the problem.
From the Dance Floor to the Balcony
One of the book’s most memorable instructions is to “get on the balcony.”
While dancing, we experience the surrounding movement. From the balcony, we can see the entire floor: who is participating, who is standing aside, which alliances are forming, and what pattern is emerging.
Leadership requires both perspectives. We must act within the system while occasionally stepping back to observe it.
I have often found the second task harder. Senior positions surround us with activity. Meetings, reports, and decisions create the reassuring feeling that we are leading. Yet constant involvement can prevent us from seeing the organization we are trying to influence. We become so absorbed in the dance that we fail to notice that the music has changed.
Getting onto the balcony is therefore not withdrawal. It is an attempt to see what participation alone conceals.
Keeping the Pressure Bearable
Adaptive work creates tension because it exposes the gap between people’s aspirations and their present capabilities.
Too minor discomfort, and nothing changes. Too much, and people retreat into old loyalties, search for someone to blame, or attack the person raising the hard questions.
The authors describe part of the leader’s work as learning to “regulate distress.”
This does not mean removing distress. Without some pressure, people have little reason to abandon familiar behavior. The leader must keep the discomfort within a range that encourages learning without overwhelming the organization.
That balance is extraordinarily difficult. Leadership requires enough urgency to generate movement, but enough stability to keep people engaged.
The Courage Not to Know
Perhaps the most demanding lesson in “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” is that leadership is not about carrying people towards a destination already visible to the leader.
It is about helping them develop the capacity to travel through territory that no one fully understands.
Technical competence remains necessary. Organizations still need expertise, discipline, and sound management. But when the environment changes faster than our inherited answers, competence alone is insufficient.
The leader’s responsibility is then not to pretend to know.
The aim is to help people confront what they would rather avoid, preserve what remains valuable, release what no longer serves them, and learn their way towards a future that cannot yet be clearly seen.
If you’re interested in exploring this book further, you can find it available here on Amazon.
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