The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Great sequel to Leadership on the Line, which may be one of the best books I have ever read concerning leadership. Pragmatic, complex yet so is leadership. The two together provide a framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging situations. Change requires you to challenge people's familiar reality, or in some sense be disruptive. That can be difficult, dangerous work. And, as you push though major changes, the political and organizational fallout can be deadly....Nonetheless, leaders need to find a way to make it work. The two texts are a necessary addition to any leadership library....and insightful for leaders in those situations.

Authors Ron Heifetz & Marty Linsky have used their 60+ years of combined teaching & leadership experience to compile a wonderful guide for anyone in a leadership capacity in any sized organization, to maximize their skills. It's consise, well-written & compelling; and quite possibly, could help some of the financially distressed organizations clean up their messes, without having to use taxpayers' money to help bail them out. "Adaptave Leadership" has a Darwinian edge to it; and in fact, it is those leaders who are the strongest in the jungle of 21st century business, who stand the best chance for long term survival. In a free market economy, that's the way it should be; either lead the organization to become competitive, or go away. If I hear Stimulis Package one more time, I'm going to lose it. Certainly, business needs to develop a more adaptive & flexible approach to running its operations; the leaders who are able to not only survive, but thrive in the real world will be deemed the fittest and reap the rewards.

With the danger of business collapse all around us, as a corporate HR director, I am continually searching for new and better books dealing with leadership. For me, leadership is the key (and only key) to long-term survival. With our leadership, we must continuously adapt to new realities if we are to live to fight another day. Important lessons within these pages are: 1. Leading with the courage and skill to challenge the status quo. 2. Deploy themselves with agility. 3. Mobilize others to step into the unknown. This book offers a realistic hands-on guide to making our leadership successful and more influential. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership will help me enhance my decision making process ensuring that I make not only make more correct decisions but that I make them in a timely manner. This book provides a thorough and systemic approach to assessing situations and provides guidance into the actions we should take. I particularly appreciated the diagrams, techniques, and activities that help assess the dangerous challenges that lie in our path. I recommend the Practice of Adaptive Leadership as it will help obtain the leadership skills needed in this complicated arena we call the business world. I would like to also recommend High Altitude Leadership: What the World's Most Forbidding Peaks Teach Us About Success (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) I believe that most readers will find that it is a very "adaptive" approach also. I hope you find this review helpful. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR

Let me start off by letting you know I'm biased. I have met both Heifetz and Linsky and hold the highest admiration and respect for them both personally and professionally. With their former book, Leadership on the Line, I learned about the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges and the distinction between leadership and authority. They also taught me that a major failure of leadership is treating an adaptive challenge with a technical solution. Once I learned this I have seen it play out over and over again everywhere I turn. It is a gem I have passed on to my graduate students in educational leadership. It has also resonated strongly with them. The sequel, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, has taken the concepts and strategies for leadership interventions to a new level of meaning. Learning more about the power of disequilibrium in promoting change and the encouragement to run small experiments have been further sharpened by this new book. Leaders, I've learned from the authors, are often too quick to jump on default action steps without first thinking through diagnostic options. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership addresses diagnosis of the system, diagnosis of self, how to mobilize the system, and how to most effectively deploy self. I highly recommend this book! With my next group of doctoral students, I plan to use three books that make up a complementary, powerful trilogy: Leadership on the Line, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, and Immunity to Change (Kegan and Lahey).

Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection among species also applies to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change initiatives that originate elsewhere? Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus the relationship of adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills, experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time, patience, and persistence. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, "There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way...As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, `There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.'" Only after twice re-reading Lawrence's comment did I fully appreciate how relevant his insight is to so many of the companies that seem dysfunctional but really aren't. Their inept leadership, flawed strategy, mediocre products, indifferent workforce, and poor customer service are all in alignment. That would not have happened had the companies' leaders been adaptive. That is, had they possessed the diagnostic skills needed to recognize or anticipate problems and opportunities and then take appropriate action. I commend Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky for their skillful use of several reader-friendly devices, notably the On the Balcony sections in most chapters that enable a reader to step back from a key point and examine from it a wider perspective (e.g. relevance to the reader's own circumstances) than its context in the chapter allows. They also include On the Practice Field sections in most chapters in which they suggest possible ways to apply key ideas or, in some instances, raise questions for the reader to consider. Here are two examples, both from Chapter 9: On the Balcony: "Each of the even steps [when designing effective interventions] can be understood as a skill set.