PDF Summary:The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, by Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky

When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. But for leaders to successfully guide their organization through the process, they need to themselves adopt a new mindset. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky offer practical strategies to help leaders navigate these kinds of complex challenges—challenges that require innovation, experimentation, and a departure from techniques you’ve grown accustomed to.

In this guide, we’ll look at how Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky define adaptive challenges as well as their advice for diagnosing them in the context of your organization’s needs. We’ll also discuss some of their strategies for guiding your organization through these kinds of challenges. Along the way, we’ll compare their ideas to those from other experts on leadership, business strategy, and psychology, including Simon Sinek, Daniel Kahneman, and Angela Duckworth.

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The problem with people defaulting heavily to their habits is that while new challenges require new solutions, habits encourage people to view problems, even novel ones, through a familiar lens. Because of this, they often fail to see that solutions they’ve used before won’t work this time. This can lead to two consequences: First, they’ll end up using an ineffective solution. Second, their competitors will be able to anticipate their next move.

Randomness as a Way to Counter Habits

In The Art of Strategy, game theorists Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff also argue that you should try to break out of your predictable habits—not only because habits hold you to outdated solutions, but also because randomness can give you a competitive edge. They write that any game—including business—is a match-up of opposing predictions: Each player is trying to guess the others’ next moves. If you can keep your opponent from detecting patterns in your behavior, you can make their job harder.

Dixit and Nalebuff caution that you shouldn’t push randomness too far, however. While being unpredictable can give you an edge in things like marketing strategy and product launches, many business relationships thrive on predictable reliability—negotiators, for example, don’t usually appreciate surprises. This suggests a limit to Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s argument: Though shaking up habits can spark ideas and innovation, it also has the potential to make people uncomfortable. When examining the habits of an organization, you may not want to view all established procedures as negative, and don’t insist that people abandon habits that help them work more efficiently and effectively.

Examine The Challenge

After examining your organization, you’ll need to properly assess the challenge you face. This means assessing the elements of your challenge and correctly interpreting the problem—identifying its underlying causes. You’ll also decide if the challenge is worth resolving by measuring it against your organization’s higher purpose.

Identity the Problem

The authors write it’s imperative that you properly identify what kind of a problem you face. The most common reason change initiatives fail is because people confuse technical problems with adaptive problems, and they then attempt to apply the wrong kind of solution.

It can sometimes be difficult to recognize when you’re facing an adaptive challenge rather than a technical one, as complex problems often have elements of both. The authors cite corporate acquisitions as an example: Merging departments from two companies poses technical challenges, but the overall success of the merger depends on larger, adaptive challenges, such as merging differing corporate cultures—challenges involving human elements that require people to adjust their worldviews and mindsets.

Once you’ve identified the adaptive challenge you’re facing, examine the details of the issue:

• Is the challenge caused by external changes (for example, changing market conditions) or internal changes (for example, changing company values)?
• Who is affected by or invested in the challenge and what do they think about it?
• Where are people running into conflict? Do they disagree about the mission or values of the group, or about the strategy and goals, or about tasks?

Searching for the Less Obvious Answer

In Think Like a Freak, psychologists Stephen Levitt and Steven Dubner write that a key reason people fail to implement workable solutions is that they identify the wrong problem, then set out to solve that instead of addressing the true, core issue. This can happen because we’ve evolved to quickly identify the most obvious problem, a strategy that historically helped us survive. If there’s a tiger hiding in a bush, for example, our lives depend on us quickly identifying that danger, not carefully considering alternative explanations.

However, more complex questions have more complex, less obvious answers. And because we’re hard-wired to look for the obvious problem, we often mistakenly address what seems like the problem rather than the actual problem.

A more modern example of this evolutionary trait playing out might be seen in a clothing store examining their declining sales. To tempt customers to buy more, company leaders might jump to identify the problem as the most simple, obvious one: Their prices are too high. They might then try to address that by running sales and advertising price cuts. However, the true problem might be more systemic, complex, and harder to spot—for example, changing fashion trends the company isn’t keeping up with. If they spend their time and energy trying to “fix” the pricing problem, they may miss the window to address the style problem that’s the actual key to increasing their sales.

In this example, the company might have had more success identifying the true problem by running through the questions Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky propose. In this case, the core issue might be external changes—shifting market conditions due to fluctuating customer tastes.

Levitt and Dubner write that people typically miss the true cause of a problem when it’s a new development but they’re still asking the same questions and blaming the usual causes. In the terminology of Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, this means you’re looking to solve technical problems that require existing expertise, rather than realizing you’re faced with an adaptive challenge that requires new insights.

Levitt and Dubner advise that to avoid this path, you should try to view your problem from different perspectives and look for alternative causes. The questions recommended by Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky provide a framework to get you there, prompting you to search for the broad causes underlying the superficial symptoms.

Levitt and Dubner also suggest you try to think like a kid. Children inherently see the world from a new angle, which allows them to spot things adults overlook. To do this, question beliefs and processes you’ve come to rely on but haven’t thought about for a while. This can help you see beyond the common knowledge that often leads to an obvious answer, so that you can instead figure out a less-obvious solution.

Interpret the Problem

When you’ve identified the problem, you may be tempted to dive in with solutions, but the authors advise that you first pause to fully analyze the issue. This will prevent you from interpreting the problem wrongly and then trying to implement ineffective solutions.

An accurate interpretation is one that pinpoints the key issues underpinning the problem and helps people see how they’ll need to change. This step is important because a person’s brain typically interprets events unconsciously, automatically, and often wrongly. For example, people frequently focus on details that paint themselves in a good light and leave out details that don’t. As a result, people may misinterpret adaptive problems and their own roles in them—for instance, one person may blame the mistakes of the legal department but ignore the procedures that their own marketing department established that led to those mistakes.

You’ll also need to guide your team to correctly interpret the issue so you can all be aligned.Your team members may resist accurate interpretations of a problem because they reflect poorly on them or will require them to think and act differently. As an adaptive leader, your job is to guide people’s interpretations toward what’s most accurate, not what’s easiest to accept.

To help make this process effective, encourage people to see that challenges are usually systemic, not personal—adaptive problems rarely involve just one person, and even when they are caused by certain people’s behavior, those behaviors are likely influenced by operational structures and frameworks. When people see things through this lens, they can distance themselves from the problem emotionally, which increases the likelihood they’ll accept the changes that need to happen.

Cognitive Biases Distort Decision-Making

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky’s advice echoes that of other psychologists who caution that quick reactions can lead to poor decisions due to automatic and unconscious thought processes. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman defines these thought processes as heuristics—mental shortcuts your brain uses to quickly interpret a situation.

We’ve evolved mental shortcuts to help us survive; they allow us to react to stimuli we’ve encountered before (such as, to return to an earlier example, a rustling in the bushes at night) without having to slowly consider it. The problem is that shortcuts can lead us to overlook new details of a situation, so that we don’t properly assess the cause behind the stimuli (in this example, the rustling might be a friend looking for a lost object, not a tiger). This type of shortcut creates cognitive biases—errors in thinking.

There are many types of cognitive biases, each springing from a different survival-related instinct. The issue Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky refer to is known as a confirmation bias, when people selectively pay attention only to information that confirms what they want to believe.

An adaptive leader trying to get people to overcome their cognitive biases will have a hard task—Kahneman notes that even when we’re aware of our biases, we still struggle to see past them. Like Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, Kahneman recommends slowing down and thinking things through carefully as well as distancing yourself emotionally from a situation by viewing it in broad, not specific or personal, terms.

Judge the Problem Against Your Purpose

The authors caution that adaptive leadership will upset people and could potentially jeopardize your job. Thus, you should be careful not to take on every adaptive challenge possible—focus on the ones that will help you fulfill your organization’s purpose.

To determine what your organization’s purpose is, ask what you’re ultimately trying to do. This may be an abstract goal, such as “helping the environment.” Identify, then, more concrete purposes by asking “how” you can achieve that abstract purpose. In this example, you might say a more concrete purpose is designing toys that leave a very small environmental footprint. An even more concrete purpose might then be that you’ll design toys from recycled materials.

(Shortform note: In Grit, Angela Duckworth proposes a different approach for coming up with purpose statements; instead of starting with an abstract goal and then repeatedly asking “how” to craft more specific goals to support it, she advises starting with a specific goal and repeatedly asking “why” until you’ve arrived at your most abstract, high-level vision. For example, say you have a specific goal to arrive at the office on time every day. Ask why—is it so you can be respected at work? Why? To be given more responsibilities? Why? To obtain more decision-making power? Why? So you can make a difference in the world? Why? Once you’ve arrived at an answer of “Just because,” you’ve found your ultimate “why”—your purpose.)

The authors write that you should move up and down these levels of abstraction to continually determine if all your strategies are pulling in the same direction. Then, use these stated purposes to determine if the adaptive challenge you’ve identified is worth resolving—will it make a meaningful difference to one of these purposes?

(Shortform note: Duckworth likewise advises examining all levels of your goals to make sure they’re aligned. If a low-level goal isn’t moving you closer to a high-level goal, stop pursuing it, and instead switch it out for a different low-level goal. In this framework, adaptive challenges can be viewed as low-level goals that must support your ultimate high-level purpose—and if they don’t directly move you toward that high-level purpose, they’re not worth your time.)

Stage 2: Take Action

Once you’ve assessed all aspects of the challenge, you’ll need to develop a plan of action—a set of strategies to address the problem. The authors outline a number of techniques to help you do this effectively.

Choose the Right Level of Difficulty

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write that you should aim to make your solutions difficult enough to kick people out of their comfort zones, but not so difficult that they become overwhelmed. If you do this properly, you’ll end up in what they call the “productive zone of disequilibrium.” This is a level of instability and discomfort that is motivating but not paralyzing—enough stress to engage people’s interests and focus, but not so much that they break down.

(Shortform note: In Brain Rules, John Medina provides scientific insight as to why people function well under some, but not too much, stress. He explains that acute, short-lived stress can enhance our memories and sharpen our thinking by temporarily boosting the hormone cortisol, which helps our brains retrieve memories faster. It’s chronic, long-term stress that’s problematic—when our brains are exposed to excessive, ongoing cortisol, our neural networks get disrupted, hampering our ability to learn and remember. This is why the zone of “disequilibrium” the authors refer to is a productive one: Our ability to learn is neurologically enhanced under the right stressful conditions.)

Step Back Whenever Possible

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky advise that to foster a culture of independent thought, resist the urge to solve problems unless it’s absolutely necessary. Instead, whenever possible, ask questions but don’t suggest answers. Encourage multiple interpretations of the challenge by asking what-if questions and seeking multiple perspectives. Your goal is to develop the ability of others to figure out solutions themselves. To nurture a feeling of empowerment, encourage your team to consider, when making decisions, what the best course of action is to advance their mission, rather than what they think their manager would want them to do.

(Shortform note: In Conversational Intelligence, Judith Glaser defines open-ended questions as ones that don’t seek a specific response, as opposed to closed questions that typically offer “yes” or “no” as the only optional answers. Glaser argues that yes/no questions are really just statements disguised as questions, because the asker is typically expecting a certain response. These kinds of questions often prompt responders to focus on what the question-asker wants to hear, rather than what they truly think. Open-ended questions, in contrast, lead to discovery and learning—for both the asker and the answerer. This can create the feeling of empowerment that Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky encourage.)

Expect Pushback

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write that as you move forward with changes, you may encounter resistance from all levels of the group. We’ve already discussed why lower-level employees may push back—emotional discomfort brought about by the potential loss of things they’ve grown comfortable with—but the authors caution that management may also put up resistance.

Since adaptive problems don’t have known solutions, you won’t be able to fix them by following pre-existing directions and protocols. Therefore, the very people who gave you power may come to feel their expectations are not being met.

For example, if a company hired you to run a department, they’ll want you to follow their directions and run the department in the way they expect. They’ll expect you to stay within your scope of authority and defer to them—even if this isn’t effective. Thus, changing your leadership style to face an adaptive challenge may upset your superiors.

(Shortform note: In Leadershift, John C. Maxwell addresses the possibility of widespread resistance from multiple levels of your team. He recommends that you try to understand everyone’s needs and desires instead of simply imposing orders without considering their perspectives. People who implement change sometimes mistakenly assume they understand their team’s thoughts without asking them, and as a result, team members may feel out of sync with the company’s goals and the tasks they’re assigned. Then, even if those employees don’t outright resist, they may complete their work but without full commitment, affecting its quality. This is a more silent form of resistance but can be just as detrimental.)

Harness Political Power

The more political power, particularly informal authority, you have, the easier it will be to implement adaptive changes. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky offer some recommendations on how to increase your political clout:

• Increase your informal authority by bolstering your relationships with people, gaining credibility by achieving small successes, and helping people with their problems.
• Recruit allies by teaming up with people who will benefit from your intervention, have the same values as you, have non-conflicting interests, owe you, or have a history with you.
• Warn senior leaders about the chaos you’re about to unleash. Then, when people complain, the leaders won’t be tempted to remove you because they’re prepared for sabotage attempts.
• Empathize with the opposition and accept responsibility for casualties (people who will be harmed) by the change. This will make people less hostile and show that you’re accountable for causing them harm.

The Basis of Influence Is Character

In Leadershift, Maxwell agrees that to be effective, you must develop your influence over others. He writes that the best way to do this is to enhance your moral authority—respect and recognition for exemplary personal qualities, values, and actions. Having a leadership position may force people to follow you, but earning moral authority makes people want to follow you.

This is a broader perspective on how to increase your authority, and it suggests that before embarking on specific steps like the ones outlined by Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, you have to establish yourself as a person with authoritative character. This increases your informal authority, which is based on how people feel about you on a personal level. All the other techniques you might use depend on this. Other people must agree to a fundamental understanding of you as someone appropriate for a leadership role, or your efforts to, for example, recruit allies and bolster relationships with others won’t bear fruit.

To develop moral authority, Maxwell suggests you:

Demonstrate excellence. Prove to your team members that you’re committed to producing excellent work even with the smallest of tasks. By regularly producing quality work, you’ll establish a reputation for competence and earn others’ confidence and esteem. This can help you empathize with your opposition, as Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky recommend—if you show that you’re willing to work as hard as others, they’ll see you as one of them, and will view you with less opposition.

Be consistent in your actions and values. Be steady and reliable by living according to good character traits like integrity, authenticity, humility, and love. This shows people that you mean what you say, which builds trust and security within your team.

Face challenges courageously. Maxwell writes that leaders should be prepared to face difficult realities and to be the first to take action. Recognize that success doesn’t come without sacrifice, and demonstrate bravery and resilience when confronting challenges. By demonstrating courage, you can inspire others during crises and energize them to perform at their best.

Encourage Dissent

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky note that adaptive challenges often pit values and perspectives against each other. They advise that you don’t suppress this conflict—instead, openly discuss it so everyone can see all disagreements. You can’t solve an adaptive challenge until all parties involved understand the challenge’s underlying issues.

Openly discussing dissent not only helps get everyone on the same page, but it’s also an important way to surface potential problems: When people name their concerns, they can provide early warning signs about potential problems that others may have overlooked or were reluctant to raise.

(Shortform note: In Thanks for the Feedback, Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen write that it’s crucial for both individuals and organizations to listen to feedback, as the ability to succeed is directly tied to the ability to seek, understand, and incorporate feedback. Hearing how you’re doing from others is often the only way you can know how to improve—or what to improve.)

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky discuss a number of ways you can encourage competing parties to discuss their perspectives openly. These include:

• Set up a meeting for the purpose of voicing dissent, and ask everyone to give their opinion on the adaptive challenge. Voice your own concerns and point out areas of conflict—if you model this behavior, others are more likely to follow suit.
• Remind everyone of their shared purpose. Frame the problem in terms of achieving your organization’s overall mission.
• Ask everyone to think about the losses each of the other parties may have to accept.
• Be sure that you yourself remain tolerant of other people’s ideas, even when you disagree greatly. Be careful not to seem judgmental of others’ thoughts.
• Pair various members of the group to consult with each other moving forward.

Managing Feedback

In Thanks for the Feedback, Stone and Heen write that most organizations, when encouraging their team to seek and absorb feedback, train how to give feedback better. However, Stone and Heen argue that they should instead train how to receive feedback better. In any feedback transaction, it’s the receiver who controls whether any piece of feedback is understood, accepted, and adopted, so training people to manage their resistance to negative feedback and to find insight in feedback that feels wrong can significantly enhance a group’s ability to improve.

While Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky don’t specifically frame their advice through this lens, their recommendations align with this mindset. The techniques they suggest are largely aimed at encouraging people to listen to the views of others with open minds. By doing things like reminding people of their shared purpose and asking them to consider the losses of others, leaders are encouraging people to step out from their narrow perspectives and see problems from other points of view.

Stone and Heen also advise that you get people to step out from their own perspective, noting that instinctively, everyone sees themselves as the main character of their own story, and sees everyone else as supporting characters (or worse, villains). By getting people to understand situations from other viewpoints, we can start to overcome that instinct, which can help us see value in other people’s opinions. Pairing people and giving them a shared goal can help foster wider perspectives as well, as it forces people to work with—not against—others who may hold different opinions on the problem.

Encourage Experimentation

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write that you can help your group get past their differences by encouraging them to devise and run experiments for how to deal with the adaptive change. Experimenting is a great way to encourage continued learning and to foster a feeling that employees’ input is valued during your process of change.

The authors offer a few tips on how to run a program of experimentation:

• Encourage employees to run many small experiments rather than fewer, larger ones. Small experiments can yield fast lessons without risking a lot of capital and other resources.
• Encourage risk-taking by adding experimentation goals to employees’ performance reviews.
• Take risks yourself, so as to model the behavior to your subordinates.
• Acknowledge and celebrate experiments whether they were successful or not.

(Shortform note: Robust experimentation also corresponds to advice from Stone and Heen, who recommend that if you encounter resistance to feedback, run small experiments with low stakes. This can also allow people who may not have fully committed to proposed changes to test possible solutions before signing on to major adjustments. An example on a personal level might be: If you’ve been told to exercise but joining a gym is a big commitment, try jogging once a week. In the workplace, a small, low-stakes experiment might be testing new marketing messages before committing to a new product line.)