This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Practice of Adaptive Leadership" by Ronald A. Heifetz. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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An adaptive leadership style is a leadership approach oriented towards tackling adaptive problems—challenges that are brought about by unexpected circumstances, that have no known solutions, and that require a fundamental change to solve.
Leaders who adopt an adaptive leadership style constantly assess the landscape within which they operate and the adaptive capacity of their organization to make sure they have what it takes to adapt effectively. In this article, we’ll take a look at the three main qualities of adaptive problems, the traits of adaptive leaders, and some tips for practicing an adaptive leadership style.
Originally Published: September 7, 2021
Last Updated: January 9, 2026
What Is Adaptive Leadership?
An adaptive leadership style is marshaling people to tackle problems with unknown solutions and thrive while doing so.
- (Shortform example: When a sales company expanded into a new region, adaptive leaders marshaled people to figure out what sales processes—or what completely new procedures—would work best in the new region’s market.)
These problems with unknown solutions are called “adaptive challenges.” The only way to solve them is for the people in organizations to learn and change. (Challenges with known solutions are called “technical problems” and can be solved using existing workflows and expertise.) Adaptive challenges have the following qualities:
- Loss. To move forward, old ways have to be left behind.
- Resistance. People resist change because they fear the loss that comes with it.
- Discomfort. Since the solution is unknown, addressing adaptive challenges involves experimentation, iteration, failure, disorientation, and conflict, all of which must often be uncomfortably endured for a long time.
(Shortform note: Leadership experts have largely come to agree that effective leadership isn’t about control, but instead is about empowering your team to make decisions themselves. Some credit this to the importance of context in any given situation, particularly ones involving change. They argue that in complex, rapidly shifting environments, the person working closest to the problem is usually best placed to solve it, rather than a manager with a more distant reach and a less up-to-the-minute understanding of nuances. In these cases, a leader’s role is not to provide direction, but to provide access to information and resources, leaving the responsibility for finding and executing solutions in the hands of those with the most potential to succeed.)
Four Tips for Practicing Adaptive Leadership
Here are some tips to keep in mind throughout the process.
Tip #1: Get help from a partner or a team. This is for two reasons: It’s less lonely, and it’s easier for people to resist or stop a single person (you) than a group.
There are three reasons people try to lead alone even though it’s a bad idea:
- Their opponents isolate them. For example, an opponent might tell you how brave you are to be striking out alone, manipulating your positive feelings around courage to keep you isolated.
- Their friends let them be the guinea pig and only follow once it’s safe. (Shortform example: Your allies might hold off publicly supporting one of your interventions until they know that their bosses don’t oppose it.)
- Their passion gives them tunnel vision. For example, you might believe so strongly in your cause that you under-communicate, thinking the same things that are obvious to you are obvious to everyone.
Tip #2: Practice every time the opportunity arises. Anytime you get a chance to practice adaptive leadership, whether that’s in your personal or professional life, take it so that you’re regularly learning. Don’t let the opportunity pass because you’re “too busy,” or for any other excuse. Even if this only makes you spend 5% more time practicing, that’s enough to make a significant difference to your skill level.
Tip #3: Reflect before acting. It’s very common to want to take action to solve an adaptive challenge right away. Leaders are often under pressure and have been trained to address problems quickly, so they’re predisposed to cut diagnosis and observation short and move straight to intervention. However, this is a mistake: Adaptive challenges take time to even fully understand, never mind address effectively. Before acting, consider the risks, whether they’re worth it, and whether you’re the right person to lead.
If you hold a high position, you can hold back prematurely starting the intervention stage yourself. If you don’t hold a high position, you’ll have to use some of the following non-confrontational techniques (lest you be accused of negativity or blocking progress) to slow down the people above you:
- Veto action indirectly by withholding your support.
- Schedule extra time into meetings so that you have extra time to address adaptive challenges.
- Add to the list of people whose permission must be sought before an action is taken.
- See through cover-up arguments (such as scapegoating) and take time to determine the real cause of conflict (such as values).
- Ask questions instead of giving orders, and spend time discussing the answers.
Tip #4: Embrace adapting yourself. When you’re a leader, to get through a particular challenge, you’ll need to change yourself. This is difficult because, as noted, all changes involve loss, and, in a leader’s case, the loss can include abandoning deeply held values.
- (Shortform example: Angela requires her employees to wear formal attire but she’s losing people to other companies that are more casual. If Andrea agrees to change the dress code to retain people, she has to give up the value of formal attire, which for her goes much deeper than appearance—for her, formal attire stands for professionalism and dependability.)
| Adaptive Changes as Part of an Infinite Game In The Infinite Game, motivational speaker Simon Sinek also examines how an organization can adapt to an ever-changing world. He argues that for a business to survive over the long run, its leaders have to see themselves as part of a constantly evolving, never-ending game: an infinite game, as opposed to a finite game that’s concerned with short-term wins and win-or-lose ending points. One of the tenets of Sinek’s discussion is that to successfully navigate ever-changing conditions, you must be prepared to go through what he calls an existential flex—a pivot that brings extreme, disruptive changes to your business model or strategic vision. An existential flex changes your behavior on a deep, structural level. He cites, as an example, Walt Disney’s pivot when he decided to leave his own company to start a new venture. Frustrated by the increasing focus of his animation company on cost-cutting and other short-term concerns, he left and built Disneyland, a radically new type of customer experience that has endured since its founding in 1955. Although Sinek doesn’t use the phrase adaptive challenge, his existential flex can be seen as a response to an adaptive challenge: a proactive response to a shifting landscape. Like adaptive challenges, these kinds of pivots are also frequently met with emotional resistance, as people tend to prefer the processes that have brought them their current success and that they’ve grown accustomed to. However, Sinek’s existential flex idea differs from Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s adaptive challenge concept in one important way: Sinek maintains that an existential flex is always, and only, an offensive move—it’s not a reactive response to current pressures but instead anticipates future changes. Thus, if a newspaper company trades its paper-based business model for a digital platform in response to changing reader habits, Sinek doesn’t consider this an existential flex, because it’s a necessary response to existing conditions. On the other hand, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky would consider this an adaptive challenge, since it involves implementing fundamentally different behaviors, products, and priorities. Sinek also doesn’t draw a distinction between technical and adaptive challenges like Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky do. However, his definition of finite games aligns in many ways with the characteristics of technical problems. Finite games (where games are interactions between two or more people or groups) have defined knowns—the players, rules, resources, and timelines are clear, obvious, and agreed upon by all participants. Sports games are examples, as are run-of-the-mill business problems. Like technical challenges, finite games have solutions that draw from known skills and practices. Like Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, Sinek argues that leaders must adopt a mindset of change, accept the discomfort it brings, and then apply appropriate solutions when the status quo isn’t sufficient. |
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Practice of Adaptive Leadership summary :
- How to deal with unknown solutions that require innovation, experimentation, and adaptation
- How to determine if a problem is technical or adaptive
- Five tips for launching initiatives to address adaptive challenges
