Learning Adaptive Leadership: Experiencing Concepts

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

The framework of adaptive leadership is designed to help individuals, organizations, and communities confront complex challenges and thrive in rapidly changing contexts. Drawing from their experiences learning from and working with Heifetz, Williams, and O’Doherty, the facilitators will introduce key concepts of adaptive leadership and case-in-point teaching to apply and illustrate these concepts in reference to an immediate group process. Participants will experientially learn adaptive leadership concepts through a video clip, case analysis, and their group dynamics. By the end of the session, participants will develop or strengthen their understanding of adaptive leadership and enhance their ability to apply the framework in diverse contexts.

Detailed Abstract

In our increasingly complex world of increased connection and uncertainty, our conference theme suggests that we need a new mindset of leading in unstable and unpredictable times. With advances in technology and new forms of communication and information sharing, we are in a perpetual state of change and growing interdependence among individuals, groups, organizations, and societies. In this dynamic and ever complexifying context, the question of how to “effectively lead and adapt across boundaries we have never crossed and that are also shifting” has been posed. To engage with this question, the co-facilitators of this workshop would like to offer a space for participants to encounter a way of learning leadership through direct experience of the concepts presented. In so doing, we intend to advance a leadership practice skill set that helps change agents navigate rough waters and bring about progress in the midst of turbulence.

Adaptive leadership entails the exercise of mobilizing people to confront complex challenges and thrive in rapidly changing contexts (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009; Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). The analytical framework and teaching of adaptive leadership originated over 30 years ago at the Harvard Kennedy School and has been taught by several faculty members, including Dr. Ronald Heifetz who co-founded the framework, Dr. Dean Williams who developed the framework to include insights on cross-cultural leadership and collaboration across boundaries, and Dr. Hugh O’Doherty who has also applied the framework to address issues of peace and conflict (Daloz Parks, 2005; Williams, 2015). The framework has been traditionally applied to help organizations more effectively realize their purpose by discerning practices that should be preserved from those that must be abandoned, and to make the adjustments necessary to achieve progress (i.e. adapt). The framework is also designed to enhance our awareness of diverse perspectives and to recognize that we operate in the context of a larger system of people who each bring a unique viewpoint based on their experiences, values, family, culture, and beliefs (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009; Heifetz, 1994; Williams 2005, 2015). Adaptive leadership offers a set of tools to better understand that system and how we can catalyze change within it, without getting sidelined or marginalized in the process (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009; Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002; Williams, 2015).

The primary pedagogy used to deliver adaptive leadership education at the Harvard Kennedy School has been case-in-point teaching, which is used to help people identify key patterns in social systems that “include the role and functions of authority and the challenges to authority; factions within the social group; regulating the heat required to do the work; work avoidance activity; loss and grief; and challenges to the self” (Daloz Parks, 2005, p. 61). Case-in-point teaching requires people to actively observe, listen, reflect, and participate in an interactive process of critically examining patterns of behavior and assumptions in their social system and discover new insights, perspectives, and options for action that could generate adaptive work.

We, as the facilitators of the workshop and authors of this proposal, both learned the adaptive leadership framework as students at Harvard Kennedy School and subsequently served as Teaching Assistants to Dr. Heifetz and Dr. Williams. Inspired by the framework’s potential to bring about transformative learning and action, we have applied adaptive leadership to our professional work and started teaching courses as adjunct faculty members in academic institutions. Recognizing the challenges of teaching the framework in new contexts where the authorizing and cultural environment was not the same as what we had experienced during a semester-long course at Harvard Kennedy School, we have set out to experiment with new tools and formats that can bring adaptive leadership education to new places, including other academic and educational settings. In this sense, our challenge has been how best to adapt the adaptive framework from the way we had previously experienced it, attempting to reach new learners in new contexts and experimenting with different formats in different authorizing environments.

Drawing from these experiences of teaching, we will introduce key concepts from the adaptive leadership framework, followed by experiential application exercises and video clips illustrating an adaptive challenge. Participants will be asked to conduct a case analysis to diagnose an adaptive challenge in a system and generate possible actions for intervention and change. The presenters will also illustrate “case-in-point” teaching where the principles of adaptive leadership are used to analyze the dynamics of an immediate group process. By the end of the session, participants will gain an introduction or strengthen their understanding of adaptive leadership while enhancing their ability to apply the framework in diverse leadership education contexts.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Education

Presenters

• April H. Bang, Columbia University

• Marc Manashil, New York University