Over the past five weeks I completed a Harvard Kennedy School online course, Leadership and Character in Uncertain Times. I particularly enjoyed the contributions from Ron Heifetz on adaptive leadership.

Leadership is about accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty. It is mobilising people to make progress on adaptive problems. Adaptive problems are ones we need to figure out how to solve. Leadership is mobilising people to meet a collective challenge. 

A framework of mutuality or shared vision is a leap forward from the traditional conception of leadership. One of central tasks of leadership is to build containing vessels, structures, and processes for orchestrating different voices – holding environments in which those pressures can be harnessed. Properly orchestrated, passionately held differences generate not only conflict but also creativity and the evolution of public attitudes. 

Leadership involves the art of orchestrating legitimate conflicts as people renegotiate their loyalties and fashion new integrative perspectives that build upon, but depart from previous points of view. A successful adaptation enables a living system to take the best from its history into the future. People do not resist change; people resist loss. Leadership requires ongoing reality testing and a public honesty that mobilises people to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity and the need to take responsibility for tough trade-offs in their lives. Sharp discontinuities do not succeed. Significant and sustainable change builds on the past. 

Leadership for change is mainly not about change. It is about mobilising people to identify what is essential and precious to protect from the past and sift through, identify, and emotionally accept cultural DNA that must be discarded to meet today’s challenges, and then run the experiments that will enable the discovery of new ways that can be married to the old so that people can bring the best of their heritage into the future. Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can tolerate. 

Find where people are beginning to disagree. Then back up and find out what they agree on.  This is the holding ground, where you proceed through trial and error. Focus on the problem, not the factions. Make them constituents in the work. Mobilise people to do the work rather than fall into the seductive space of being the one with all of the answers. Help people with the problem to own the problem. The people with the problem are the problem, but they are also part of the solution. 

Leadership is pointing people at the problem. It requires constant attention. We have to work with people who we really don’t agree with.