Adaptive Leadership Framework
A leadership model designed to mobilize groups to tackle 'wicked' or complex challenges that require shifts in values, beliefs, and behaviors. It distinguishes between technical problems solvable by expertise and adaptive challenges that require systemic change and the building of new organizational capacities.
When a few voices dominate or quieter people don't contribute
Your group discussions aren't balanced, you need better ways to include everyone, or conversations go in circles.
Ideal for organizational transformation, navigating high-stakes change, addressing recurring systemic failures, and developing leadership capacity across all levels of an organization regardless of formal authority.
Sustain
Sense-Make
Navigate
Activate
Ensures every voice is heard and the group's collective intelligence is unlocked.
Facilitators can integrate this by helping groups distinguish between technical tasks and adaptive shifts, creating a 'holding environment' for difficult dialogue, and teaching participants to move between 'the dance floor' (action) and 'the balcony' (systemic observation).
- 1Use structured turn-taking to balance voices
- 2Start with individual reflection before group discussion
- 3Create safe spaces for minority opinions
- 4Summarize and synthesize regularly
- Change Management
- Strategic Leadership Development
- Complex Problem Solving
- Organizational Culture Shifts
- Distinction between Technical and Adaptive challenges
- Leadership as a practice, not a position of authority
- The Balcony vs. The Dance Floor perspective
- Managing Productive Disequilibrium (regulating the 'heat')
- Acknowledging and navigating loss
- Iterative experimentation and micro-testing
- Requires high emotional intelligence to manage stakeholder resistance and 'work avoidance' behaviors
- Can be risky for the facilitator/leader as they may become a target for the system's frustration
- Requires a strong 'holding environment' or psychological safety to be effective