Book SummaryThe Practice of Adaptive Leadership, by Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

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.

Ronald Heifetz has taught leadership studies at the Harvard Kennedy School since the 1990s. He coined the term adaptive leadership in his 1994 book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, which positioned him as a pioneer in crisis management and organizational change. He went on to coauthor Leadership on the Line, which also addresses leadership in times of change, with Marty Linsky, another Harvard faculty member and cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates. Alexander Grashow, leadership advisor and founder of consultant group the Good Wolf Group, joined Heifetz and Linsky on The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

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.

What Are Adaptive Challenges?

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write that in our increasingly globalized world, organizations of all types—whether they’re private corporations, public community groups, or nonprofit organizations—face increasingly complex problems. The authors distinguish between two types of challenges an organization can face: technical challenges and adaptive challenges.

• Technical challenges are problems that have familiar characteristics and can be resolved with existing resources, knowledge, and procedures.
• Adaptive challenges are complex problems with no easy solutions. They live in the space between your existing reality and your ambitions, and they require new expertise, relationships, priorities, habits, and beliefs.

Both types of challenges can be complex: Technical challenges can present difficulties requiring great expertise and knowledge; for example, diagnosing mechanical failures at a factory. But adaptive challenges are more complex and more difficult to resolve. This is because of a few characteristics:

• Adaptive challenges involve a human element. They require deep, systemic, and structural change not only to tangible resources like technology, but also to people’s beliefs, values, and behaviors.
• Adaptive challenges always involve an element of loss; when making deep, structural changes, people will have to give up things they’ve become accustomed to: habits, policies, priorities, and even sometimes, certain products or services that no longer serve a company.
• Because they involve beliefs and values, adaptive challenges tend to spark emotional responses.

Loss as the Beginning of the Process

In Managing Transitions, organizational change consultants William and Susan Bridges also discuss the impact of loss in the process of change, arguing that the external changes we experience aren’t nearly as challenging as the internal, emotional process we go through as we come to terms with those changes.

They write that the process of coming to terms with change emotionally has three stages: The first is the “ending/losing” phase, when people experience sadness about what they’re losing in the change. The second is the “neutral zone,” where an organization is between systems and everything feels uncertain. The third is a “new beginning” phase, where changes have been implemented and there’s widespread buy-in across the group.

Like Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, the Bridges say that a leader's main role is to support their team through this internal transition process. They caution you to watch for signs of grief in response to anticipated loss, noting that even seemingly small bureaucratic or staffing changes have the potential to threaten people’s sense of comfort, core values, or stability.

Because they bring loss and spark emotions, adaptive challenges often are met with resistance—people don’t like losing things they’ve grown comfortable with, and they don’t like being made to change their behaviors and views. But because we operate in an increasingly changing and complex world, the need for adaptive leadership has grown.

The authors write that adaptive leadership may be needed in two situations:

1. If your organization has been frustrated by a long-running, recurring problem
2. When you see change coming on the horizon that you don’t feel your organization currently has the ability to effectively manage

In either case, the only effective solution may involve deep, fundamental change in how your organization and the people within it operate.

In the rest of this guide, we’ll look at the authors’ advice on how to effectively implement adaptive leadership by breaking the process into two stages: diagnosis and action.

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...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Part 1: What Is Adaptive Leadership? | Chapter 1: Backgrounder

When your organization is facing changing conditions or never-before-seen challenges, the only way to survive is to adapt. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, three leadership experts—Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky—explain how to lead your organization through the difficult, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous process of adaptation.

In Part 1 of this summary, you’ll learn what adaptive leadership is and the kinds of challenges it can help address. Next, in Part 2, you’ll assess your organization’s current capacity for adaptation and learn to diagnose challenges. Then, in Part 3, you’ll learn some tips and tricks for addressing these challenges. Finally, in Part 4, you’ll learn how to build an adaptive company culture.

(Shortform note: We’ve rearranged the book’s content for concision and clarity.)

What Are Adaptive Leadership and Adaptive Challenges?

“Adaptive leadership” is marshaling people to tackle problems with unknown solutions and thrive while doing so. (Both the people and the organization should thrive, and for an organization, thriving generally includes having good customer service, high morale, high profit, and...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Part 2: Diagnosis | Chapter 2: Assess the Organization

In Part 1, we learned about adaptive leadership and adaptive challenges. There are two steps to solving such challenges, and in this chapter, we’ll look at the first step: diagnosis. Diagnosis involves:

• Assessing the adaptive capacity of your organization and the people within it
• Assessing your own adaptive leadership abilities
• Assessing the specific adaptive challenges you and your organization are facing

These assessments will help you understand both the scope of the problem and the resources you have available (or can acquire) to address it when it’s time for treatment.

Assess Your Organization’s Adaptive Capacity

There are five characteristics to consider when it comes to assessing an organization’s adaptive capacity (how capable it currently is of addressing adaptive challenges):

Characteristic #1: Sector Membership

Your organization’s adaptability is informed by the distinctive characteristics of the sector it belongs to. Be aware of the limitations that come with each sector, all of which can impact an organization’s ability to change:

• Not-for-profit organizations are usually driven by their mission and usually believe in...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 3: Assess Yourself

In the last chapter, we assessed the adaptive capacity of your organization and the people within it. Now, it’s time to assess one particularly important person—you—and your adaptive capacity.

Before we get started, it’s important to note that you’re partly responsible for any adaptive problem you find yourself facing and, like everyone in your organization, you will need to change yourself to successfully solve it.

Assess Your Ability to Lead Adaptively

There are six characteristics to consider when it comes to assessing yourself and your adaptive leadership abilities:

Characteristic #1: Multiple Selves

You are a system of multiple selves, not just a single entity. In different roles and contexts, you’ll highlight different parts of your personality and skills. To effectively manage adaptive change, you need to acknowledge, accept, and be mindful of these multiple selves.

• For example, Helen, who runs a medical practice, is both a medical and business professional. If she focuses only on her medical work and ignores expenses, her business is in danger of going bankrupt. She needs to be both selves to succeed.

Acknowledging your multiple...

Shortform Exercise: Accept Your Part

Whenever your organization faces an adaptive challenge, you’re part of the problem.

Describe an adaptive challenge your organization is currently facing.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 4: Assess the Challenge

In the previous two chapters, we assessed the adaptive capability of your organization and the people who make it up, including you. This gave you a sense of your current capabilities and resources. In the last chapter of this part, we’ll learn to assess the adaptive challenge itself so that when you move into treatment in Part 3, you’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with.

There’s a three-step process for assessing adaptive challenges:

Step #1: Become Aware of the Major Pitfalls of Misdiagnosing Adaptive Problems

As we learned in Part 1, there are two types of problems: technical, which have known solutions, and adaptive, which don’t yet have solutions. The most common reason change initiatives fail is because they attempt to apply a technical solution to an adaptive problem.

There are two main reasons people misdiagnose adaptive challenges as technical problems:

Reason #1: Most problems have both technical and adaptive elements, and it’s not always to tell which are which.

• (Shortform example: Company X’s adaptive challenge is a lack of women in its workforce. Some parts of this problem, such as how to attract applicants from unexplored talent pools,...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Part 3: Treatment | Chapter 5: Interpretations

In Part 2, you learned how to diagnose your organization and yourself, and how to identify an adaptive challenge. Now that you know what you’re dealing with, we’ll look at some tips for putting together change initiatives and interventions to tackle your challenge. Since people changing is a key ingredient of adaptive change, the treatment tips are all people-related.

First, in this chapter, we’ll look at how to manage others by shaping their interpretations of the adaptive challenge.

Help Others With Their Interpretations of the Problem

People (including you) have to change to carry out adaptive change. However, organizations, teams, and individuals often default to interpretations of problems that don’t require change or for them to take responsibility. Default interpretations aren’t always wrong, but they usually don’t capture the full picture—which is necessary for adaptive change.

• For example, when companies are losing market share, many middle managers interpret this as senior management failing to innovate. If the fault is senior management’s (it could be partially), then middle managers don’t have to make any changes to their own work. In...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 6: Harness Political Power

In the last chapter, we looked at how to get others to acknowledge the existence of adaptive problems. In this chapter, we’ll continue looking at how to manage the people who will be responsible for making adaptive change by studying techniques to improve political clout. The more political clout you have, the more power, support and influence you have, and the less people will resist you.

Here are six techniques to increase your political power:

Technique #1: Increase Your Informal Authority

The more informal authority you have, the less you have to break expectations when exerting authority, and the more likely you are to be part of many factions with overlapping interests. All of this will make adaptive leadership easier.

To increase your informal authority:

• Use your formal authority to get access to people with more authority than you. For example, if part of your job description is to organize meetings and invite attendees, schedule a meeting with supportive attendees who have authority that they can lend you.
• Bolster your relationships with people, especially people who are invested in the adaptive challenge (whether they support your...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 7: Surface Conflict

In the previous two chapters, we looked at ways to make people see things your way and support you and your change initiatives. Now, we’ll look at a different side of managing people—how to bring up conflict.

Surfacing conflict is a way to reveal unarticulated and unacknowledged differences in values and points of view. It won’t be possible to solve an adaptive challenge until this information comes to light and people understand the challenge’s underlying issues.

Conflict is uncomfortable, and as a result, many people and organizations respond to it using the following ineffective methods:

• Inaction. The organization encourages people to maintain the status quo. As a result, the organization doesn’t change or adapt.
• Fight or flight. To avoid tolerating the conflict and finding a resolution, some factions leave, and others bluster or blame.
• Rely on leaders. Often, people and organizations expect leaders to fix the conflict.

Eight Steps for Getting Through Conflict

There are eight steps to successfully bringing up and powering through conflict:

1. Do your research. Before bringing up the conflict, talk to all the parties involved, find...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 8: Develop Effective Interventions and Change Initiatives

In the previous chapters, you learned how to manage people and surface conflict to put yourself in a strong position from which to launch interventions and change initiatives. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to develop these interventions and initiatives.

Develop Interventions

For the best chances at success, interventions should be:

1. Clearly related to your interpretation of the adaptive challenge. People must see how what you’re proposing is relevant.

2. Purpose-serving. People need to see that your intervention will further the group interest. If they see it as a threat to their interest, they won’t support it.

3. Unpredictable. Develop interventions that are outside your current skill set. If you always respond in the same way, people will be able to predict you and head off your efforts. (Shortform example: If, in every situation, you most value environmental protection, people can attack your change initiatives by bringing up the environmental consequences of them, knowing that this will make you doubt your initiative.)

4. Experimental. Remember that addressing adaptive challenges requires openness to new ideas. You should commit to...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 9: Maintain Purpose

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to design and launch interventions to address adaptive problems. Some of these interventions will inevitably fail, since addressing adaptive challenges is a long, experimental process. At points, you might be tempted to give up. In the next few chapters of this part, we’ll look at how to maintain the momentum of adaptive change, starting with maintaining your sense of purpose (remember that purpose is a useful motivator for adaptive change).

There are five techniques to stay true to your and your organization's orienting purpose as you navigate adaptive change:

Technique #1: Regularly Remind Yourself of Your Purpose

It’s common for everyday life to get in the way of your purpose, but when you put your purpose on the back burner, your life starts to lose meaning. Here are some ways to keep your purpose at the forefront of your mind:

1. Use a physical object to symbolize your purpose. Choose something you see every day, and for extra accountability, something that’s public, so people will check in with you about your progress.

• (Shortform example: If your purpose is to keep your family safe and healthy, you might put...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 10: Maintain Emotional Commitment

In the last chapter, we looked at how to maintain purpose to keep tackling adaptive problems. Now, we’ll look at how to use inspiration to maintain emotional commitment to change. Because adaptive challenges involve emotions, not just intellectual leaps, you need to be able to inspire people.

You especially need to be inspiring when people have lost purpose, hope is in short supply, or there are high levels of conflict. Inspiration will help people see that even though things are rough right now, a better future is possible via adaptive change, and not everything needs to be lost to achieve that change.

Two Techniques to Inspire Others

Everyone inherently has the ability to inspire, though everyone will do it differently depending on their purposes, communication style, and the adaptive challenge at hand.

To inspire, use the following two techniques:

Technique #1: Visibly and Audibly Express Your Emotions

You feel strongly enough about your purpose to risk the dangers of adaptive leadership, so show people how much you care about changing things for the better. This will help people see why their suffering and loss are worth pushing through....

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 11: Engage in Self-Care

In the last two chapters, you learned how to maintain purpose and emotional commitment in yourself and others while addressing adaptive challenges. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to personally thrive—keep yourself happy and healthy—while addressing challenges.

It’s very important to take care of yourself as a leader of adaptive change—if you burn out, you’ll no longer be able to lead, and this could derail all progress towards your purpose.

Thriving Techniques

Here are some techniques for thriving. All of them involve building a support network of relationships with people unrelated to your adaptive challenge.

Technique #1: Recruit Confidants

The first technique is to recruit family members, friends, community members, advisors, or therapists as confidants to support you. (You should have several confidants so that none of them is excessively burdened.) They provide the following support:

• Reminding you why you’re tackling adaptive challenges
• Helping you remain separate from your role and not take things personally
• Sharing your emotional burden
• Congratulating you when you’re doing well and warning you when you’re self-sabotaging
• ...

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Chapter 12: Overcome Five Fears

In the previous chapters, you learned tips and techniques for addressing adaptive challenges. In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the toughest fears that come with adaptive challenges.

Fear #1: Disappointing People

As you learned in the politics and authority sections, while leading adaptive change, there’s a good chance the different groups you represent will come into conflict with each other or with a particular change initiative. You’ll have to disappoint at least one party to make progress.

To handle this fear:

1. Talk to the people with progress-stopping loyalties (loyalties that leave them opposed to your change). You’ll know who these people are from your diagnostic exercises. Tell them that they need to change their loyalties. This might be uncomfortable—people might feel betrayed and turn away from you. Or, conversely, you might discover that they don’t hold the loyalties you thought they did.

• Example #1: The CEO of a company needed to reform the compensation system. Some of the firm’s longest-standing employees, including the CEO’s mentor, were opposed to the reform. The CEO spoke with his mentor and his mentor was offended, which made...

Shortform Exercise: Face Your Fears

Fear is one of the reasons people don’t pursue adaptive change.

Describe a recent opportunity for adaptive change that you didn’t pursue.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership Summary Part 4: Adaptive Organizations | Chapter 13: Build an Adaptable Culture

Every time your organization successfully addresses an adaptive challenge (as you learned how to do in the previous parts), it increases its adaptive capacity and is more prepared and equipped to handle the next adaptive challenge. You can additionally increase your organization’s adaptive capacity by building an adaptable culture. In this final chapter, we’ll discuss how to do this.

Here are five qualities of an adaptive organization:

Quality #1: People Acknowledge Problems

In adaptive organizations, everyone is allowed and even encouraged to bring up problems and ask uncomfortable questions, even of senior leaders:

• Senior leaders support whoever brought up the problem and help facilitate conversation about it.
• Rituals encourage conversation and the sharing of different perspectives. When bringing things up is the norm, it doesn’t require bravery.
  • For example, an adaptive organization might end every meeting by asking people if they see any potential problems on the horizon. This makes bringing up problems an accepted regular occurrence.

As a result, these organizations catch problems early, before they can spiral into disasters.

• ...