2022
I. overview
"Adaptive leadership" sounds like fluffy academic-corporate speak because it is best taught experientially and immersively, and therefore difficult to put into words, but I'll give it a shot. The practice draws from a zillion different disciplines—biology, philosophy, history, political science, social psychology, management, music—to define a new theory of change that feels revolutionary and urgently important in all areas of life. It reframes leadership as a practice that anyone can undertake, not just any person with a title; it offers a new vocabulary to recognize and articulate emotions, conflicts, biases, and identity/role/group formation that can elucidate and transform everyday interactions; it gives deep purpose and permission to bring "soft" concepts like curiosity and empathy into the "hard" practical work of transforming organizations, hearts, and minds.
At its core, adaptive leadership—developed and coined by Ron Heifetz, who still teaches it at the Harvard Kennedy School—is founded on the belief that most leadership failures happen at step zero: diagnosis. By applying its frameworks and practices, this theory boldly contends that we can more accurately and preemptively identify leadership failures; more productively and humanely lead groups through periods of uncertainty, distress, and change; and generate personal freedom for ourselves and lasting systemic progress for our societies. This school of thought happens to live at HKS (and not in the broader mainstream, more private-sector-focused study of leadership) by some combination of chance, inertia, and its origins in and ties to public leadership.
If we divide the study of leadership into three dimensions—the personal, the relational, and the systemic—then adaptive leadership is the experimental practice and thoughtful integration of all three. Part 1 below focuses primarily on the systemic and somewhat on the relational; its pair (often sequel) focuses almost entirely on the personal, but is grounded in ties to the relational and systemic. (As a point of comparison, many business school courses like Stanford's touchy feely focus entirely on the relational—a different, almost inverted approach to this one, which suggests that relational/interpersonal dynamics are just vehicles and signals at the surface of deeply personal and systemic patterns. Other courses, like MIT Sloan's profound innovation, touch on all three.)
note: this work can also be emotionally intense and destabilizing, as The Crimson wrote about two years after my experience, and mental health resources and community support are an essential part of ensuring that students leave the course with growth-oriented learnings vs. prolonged distress about the past.
II. the power of experiential learning
On the first day of this course, my professor introduced himself to our class—a classroom of ~120 grad students, from mid-20s to mid-40s and countries all over the world—and confirmed that we were all here for the right class, called Exercising Leadership. "Let's begin," he said definitively.
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After probably five or six (what felt like fifteen) minutes of piercing eye contact and uncomfortable silence, a student raised his hand and asked, "so what are you going to tell us about leadership?"
No response. More shifting in seats and raising of eyebrows between students. Our professor continued to stand at the front of the room, hands behind his back, looking expectantly at us.
There were a few more failed attempts to get at what we thought our professor was looking for, including a student who boldly walked up to the blackboard, asked for the professor's mic, and directed the class into breakout discussion groups. Our professor stepped aside to let him take the front of the room for a few minutes, then eventually told him to sit down, and we were back to painful silence.
Gradually, the barrier to participate seemed to subside, and more students started to speak up. Some shared thoughts and feelings—the discomfort they were experiencing, a prediction about what this exercise was all about—and others began to create rules and norms for our group, asking the class to vote on ways to make this chaotic free-for-all into an organized discussion where everyone had an equal opportunity to speak and be heard.
Our professor interjected only to call attention to dynamics in the room or challenge certain students: "do you realize you just spoke over your classmate?" or "are you sure you want to go there?" or "why do you think you felt that way?" but never to reclaim control of the classroom. I think we were all waiting for relief from this uncomfortable confusion—just a simple "good work, this exercise is done, now we can actually start the class"—but it never came.
The silence had now given way to a frenzied brawl of voices trying to create rules, share opinions, virtue signal (e.g. defend classmates who didn't ask to be spoken for), or otherwise direct conversation. Students started to attack each other for different solutions to our collective problem (an absent professor), many got defensive and invoked gender or race in response, and the palpable tension in the room continued to grow. Many students didn't speak at all, either observing the chaos and cautiously eyeing the professor, or completely checked out.
Over an hour into our 75-minute class session, our professor stepped in to share some observations. The discomfort we were experiencing, he told us, was the result of our natural craving for authority in a classroom setting: we expected direction, protection, order, control, and structure from our professor—who we had authorized with our trust, time, and tuition—and felt uncomfortable in the absence of those services, or the betrayal of that trust. Authority, though, was a misleading source of power: it was only a position (whether formally designated, like a professor, or informally acquired, like a student who makes shrewd interventions that garner respect and attention). Leadership, on the other hand, was a practice—he defined it as "mobilizing people to confront and make progress on a difficult reality they would rather avoid," which translates to a constant cycle of observing, interpreting, and intervening regardless of one's role or status.
Discomfort (at a personal level) and disequilibrium (at a systemic level) could actually be positive, he continued, if we learned to harness them. We were already developing the capacity to observe and modulate tension in group settings, which we would continue to experiment with throughout the course (both weekly in small groups of 8 and semi-weekly during our 120-person plenary). These "holding environments"—cohesive psychological spaces that sustain (dis)equilibrium within a system by promoting productive learning and fostering a "brave space" instead of a "safe space"—had certain knowable boundaries that we could learn and utilize: a minimum threshold below which people could get away with avoiding difficult work, and a maximum tolerance limit above which people become too stressed out to function. The best way to keep tension at a productive level was for group members to perceive it keenly at all times and make effective interventions to escalate it (calling someone out for avoidance behavior, alerting the group to a reality that allows it to notice a destructive pattern, naming an emerging dynamic within a subgroup) and to temper it (reaffirming the group's shared values and goals, relieving someone of public pressure, recognizing someone's positive behavior, even comedic relief).
Our professor's observations were valuable and clarifying, but he never really took back control of the room in a way that we still expected and craved (per his point exactly). These uncomfortable day 1 dynamics—public tensions between certain students, our group tendency to use gender and racial identity as scapegoats for conflict, a buzz of debriefs and emotions filling the hallway outside after the session, our professor taking on deliberate roles (instigator, contrarian, observer, but never that of an authority figure), to showcase certain concepts—would continue to shape the classroom environment for the rest of the semester.
I realize now that the combination of unease and intensity we left the room with after most class sessions, and the way the course concepts and group dynamics started to dominate our dreams and dinner conversations, was experiential learning at its finest. The course continued for three more months in much the same uncomfortable vein, the professor never fully reclaiming the role we expected of him but modulating his involvement and making piercing interventions to demonstrate adaptive leadership in action. While the class was ultimately grounded in real leadership failures that each student brought from previous professional work and presented as a case study to a weekly small group to interpret and learn from it, there were so many layers of learning built on top of that content: in both lecture and small group, we were encouraged to name publicly our fears, preoccupations, reactions, and expectations about others in the room, sometimes giving direct feedback to each other; we reflected constantly, aloud and in writing, on our experiences of interpersonal conflict and observations of adaptive leadership, applying new frameworks each week about system and interpersonal dynamics; we even had a few required "music nights" where we engaged creatively, improvisationally, and intuitively with each other to bring new dimension and strength to our class holding environment. We went everywhere from 12 Angry Men to Tiananmen Square to governments all over the world where classmates brought to light leadership complexities that together we diagnosed and learned from, all the while observing ourselves and our system at work.
III. part one: understanding systems ("outside-in" leadership)
Many of the dynamics and lessons of this class are described above—and moreover the ethos of adaptive leadership theory is that ambiguity and uncertainty and discomfort are important teachers themselves—but here are some of my personal takeaways (for actual course materials, concepts, definitions, and readings, see here):
- I happened to take a seminar on Buddhism concurrently with this course, and as the semester went on I was struck by the number of parallels: What would it take to sit with discomfort, to observe it in action in ourselves and in others, instead of trying to push it away by grasping for what's comfortable? How could we have productive conflict and honest interactions with a (bearable) level of tension as a backdrop? How to resist intellectualizing emotions as an escape, and instead closely examine our experiences and others' reactions with persistent curiosity and empathy?
- It was powerful to get academic validation that traditionally "soft" qualities like empathy and curiosity could actually be central tools toward positive progress in our teams, organizations and societies. This has become a pillar of sorts for me: a reminder to check in when I find myself judging other people who I don't agree with, or who espouse different values; motivation to bring compassion and curiosity into all my interactions, professional or personal or otherwise; permission to invoke these qualities as legitimate forces of change.
- Leadership is not a field of study but a skill—of shrewd observation, tirelessly empathetic diagnosis, and timely effective intervention—that anyone can practice regardless of their designated role. It can be as simple as training oneself to become aware of the composition of conversation (in both 1:1 and group settings): how much time am I spending sharing my own opinions vs. soliciting others' thoughts vs. silently listening vs. silently disengaged? What is the purpose of this conversation (to make a streamlined group decision; to voice reactions to a difficult issue that doesn't need immediate resolution; to show up for a friend who needs to vent; to restore power to a marginalized faction of the room) and what is the right mix of speaking vs. soliciting vs. silence required of me to enable that goal? How can I listen better to discern the right role for me, right now? How might that role differ from my own comfort zone, whatever that is (to speak whenever there is space; to scroll my phone under the table; to be silent until others speak up for me)?
- Authority, on the other hand, is a position that we have a tendency to overvalue—expecting services (structure, direction, protection) from figures that we authorize with trust and attention, and often feeling uncomfortable, even anxious and belligerent, when these needs are not met. There are always ways to notice what a situation needs and exercise the leadership described above, regardless of one's role or formal designation in the group, instead of the lazy way out (defaulting to expectations that come with authority, or staying in the safe space of one's own instincts).
- Identifying and articulating the actual problem that needs to be solved is often the hardest part. We have a tendency to confuse task with purpose— using experts as crutches, getting lost in surface-level fixes, and looking only to skills and tools that are already known—instead of embracing nonlinear, unknown paths that require public learning and certain failure.
- The simple practice of noticing and naming emotions and reactions as they arise in the mind and body (a preoccupation that a particular person is dominating the conversation, or a tightening of the chest when a certain topic is brought up, or a wave of sadness when not feeling heard by the group) can be incredibly powerful. The catch is that it requires a lot of self-awareness to even notice these feelings as they arise, then a lot of courage and humility to be able to name them to the group, not to mention trust that the group will honor and respond respectfully... but once shared, these small moments can provide a lot of clarity to everyone involved, prevent lots of time wasted dancing around the tough dynamics at play, and direct attention toward the biases, expectations, roles, and problems that are actually roadblocks to progress. Moreover, when even one person begins to model this type of honest, shrewd, timely intervention, it begins to normalize the same for the rest of the group and can spiral upward.
- However hard we try, it is nearly impossible not to get lost in our own internal framing of interpersonal and system dynamics, and therefore always helpful to have input from trained eyes and ears who are not emotionally invested in the situation. Even when I sat down to summarize, three years after the fact, a leadership case* that I later presented to my team, they were able to point out so many moments where I had inserted my own biases and beliefs into the narrative (conflating my team's purpose with my own role, allowing my personal relationship with a particular person to color my judgment of a group negotiation) all of which continued to hold me back from fully understanding the systemic failure at the heart of my case (an institution that is built to resist change and overvalue its own past) and the adaptive leadership paths I could have taken. The skill of fighting to pause and observe oneself as an actor within an environment (to take the long-arc perspective, or "get on the balcony") is an important one, even and especially when there are lots of heated emotions and chaotic happenings in the moment ("on the dance floor") that make the central problem seem unknowable, inaccessible, or immutable.
*this is not the case itself but a related story from the same institution/system - We tend to reward vulnerability categorically (sometimes creating environments where people feel they need to be vulnerable just to be heard), when maybe we should instead champion courage, honesty, curiosity, and self-awareness—that is, vulnerability in small, effective, intentional increments.
- How could a class on systems end up being so intensely personal? I realize now that much of the learning we aspire to here involves first unlearning our own instincts—to compulsively fill a difficult silence; to seek and value authority figures instead of leadership practices; to jump to solutions before we've fully observed and diagnosed a problem; to defer to experts for easy, "technical" fixes instead of seeking the long, hard way out (that requires failure, recovery, and risk but often produces lasting change)—in order to one day override them.
IV. part two: understanding the self ("inside-out" leadership)
This sequel is structured in much the same way as its counterpart course—large plenary sessions as the primary platform for experiential learning and modeling adaptive leadership, plus a smaller group that meets regularly to workshop real-world leadership cases and interpret (read: group therapize) each person's growth journey alongside course concepts—but this time with a deep focus on the internal world.
This is the intense, transformative personal stuff: the course is predicated on the belief that the self can be both a critical resource but also a dangerous constraint in the practices of learning effective leadership, creating positive systemic change, and seeking personal freedom—and a deep understanding of that self can help us transcend those limitations. It was difficult and destabilizing, but also incredibly freeing and empowering, to dig up old traumas, to revisit the people at the roots of our current biases and thought patterns, to confront how tightly we may still carry the unresolved expectations and wounds of loved ones (or our own past), and to actively choose what to honor and what to discard. We went everywhere from reading Taoist poetry to drafting letter exchanges with ancestors to rewriting Brett Kavanaugh's harrowing supreme court testimony, all the while observing the reactions, instincts, and patterns of our inner worlds.
A few things I am taking away / chewing on:
- The assertion that "to lead is to live dangerously" at first sounded overdramatic, but I kind of get it now: this theory of change is asking us to acknowledge and align (and in doing so, lay bare) the private self (our deep-seated fears and ambitions, our fragile self-conception) with the public self (our reputation and relationships, our ability to lead others through uncertainty, change, and loss). It is asking us to learn to live harmoniously in a world with real dependencies to other people and groups (family, colleagues, fellow Americans) who we fundamentally disagree with. It is asking us to dig deep to confront our own, others', and our organizations' core beliefs and loyalties, and then throw our systems into disequilibrium by taking people not where they want to go, but down the riskier, slower, less linear path that they (we) need to take to make progress (e.g. face and fight an institutional bias that overvalues its own legacy and puts blinders up to signs of decay; identify the right "ripe" moment to introduce productive tension into a system that does not know how to have healthy conflict) instead of falling for the easy dopamine hit of technical competence (e.g. fire the CEO). It is asking us to work tirelessly to understand the stakes for other people, and to put those, and them, at the center of our own work as leaders.
To lay bare, confront, and bridge the private and public selves; to take heat and receieve others' anger without letting it erode our own personal purpose; to learn how to let people down at a rate they can handle; to stay alive, responsive, resilient all the while—this is about as (emotionally) dangerous as it gets. - Humans have many natural "hungers" that drive our desires and movement through the world; a deep excavation of one's inner world and early life can help uncover which hungers might be exaggerated to an unhealthy level, limiting one's own freedom and causing harm to the self and others. We covered three core categories (there is a bit of overlap, in my opinion): significance, validation and belonging; power, influence, and control; intimacy, gratification, and delight.
The unlock here, I think, is that leading requires opening oneself up to the emotions of the collective, and holding the intensity and complexity of others' inner worlds—and one's own—without becoming either damaged or numb. This is not only delicate and destabilizing, but also creates a lot of tempting invitations to feed our hungers: to gain power, to enjoy intimacy, to have one's ego stroked. These temptations may call to us constantly (especially in the vulnerable state that emotional leadership requires), but our early influences, traumas, absences, and relationships can make some hungers stronger than others (e.g. not having emotionally available caregivers might distort one's hunger for validation and affirmation, causing one to give in more easily when those temptations arise) at risk to self, others, system, and progress. - It's easy to confuse our sense of identity with whatever present role we are playing (student, sibling, friend, roommate, American, young adult, all of which are social constructs), but a simple reframe can make all the difference: the self not as any one thing but rather a vessel that holds our various different identities, which get activated in different contexts. This pulls us away from a fixed interpretation of the self ("I am xyz") to a more fluid one ("I have the identity of xyz in this moment"), also called the subject-object shift, which can help us see identity as a rotating collection of detached pieces—deeply emotional, often contradictory, but ultimately separate from the self—that we can then deploy with intention.
Trauma (of both aggressors and victims) often unbalances these identities and cements a particular one in a dominant position, rendering it nearly non-negotiable. The shift to view identities as fluid and malleable also begins to create valuable space between an identity getting activated in a given moment (perhaps hearing about a classmate's Title IX investigation triggers the identities of "female," "friend," or "victim") and its resulting action (getting angry or defensive, acting rashly, resurfacing one's own trauma). Building this gap between one's self-conception and resulting actions can be really powerful, not unlike the space between stimulus and response (hello Victor Frankl), judgment and reaction (hello Stoics), sensation and perception (hello Buddhists) - The psychology of adult development is a fascinating field that is way more dense and deep than I expected (give these guys a whirl: Kegan, Thagard). We all develop our own social, cognitive, and ethical competence over time, but most adults remain at a level of self-conception known as the socialized mind (where the self is shaped by external structures, like cultural and social norms), while about a third will advance to the self-authoring stage (where the self is defined independent of external relationships and environments) and less than a percent will progress to the self-transforming mind (a constantly evolving, ever-changing self that embraces fluid and contradictory identities).
Here and here are pretty accessible primers on Kegan's five stages (although I recommend the original excerpt linked above); I also enjoyed this deep-dive on the fifth stage. - Another important part of generating the self-awareness and freedom required to lead is to confront, renegotiate, release, and reclaim our loyalties: the unresolved expectations of groups we identify with (past generations, early influences, peers, society) that we often continue to carry without knowing. Am I driving my own car, or actually just a taxi filled with my parents' hopes for my career based on opportunities they never had, or cultural definitions of marriage, or social/professional pressures to live a certain kind of life, or other manifestations of fear, desire, and bias that are not my own? It's fine, even normal, for there to be some overlap between what past generations taught me and what I might choose to strive for in my life, but to confront and actively reclaim these values is something altogether different from allowing the past to exert unwelcome, unconscious power beneath the surface.
- There are ALWAYS personal, relational, and system dynamics to be observed in a group setting, even (especially!) when there appears to be no content or conflict at the center. The biases, fears, assumptions, and patterns that are brought to light when multiple people in a room are in radical self-observation and peer-feedback mode create a kind of socialization-on-steroids environment, with so much to learn and unlearn about how our different identities show up in different spaces. Engaging in a lot of this raw and difficult kind of interaction, with both familiar and brand-new groups of people, is teaching me to pause, listen, and observe myself and what arises in me before I judge, assume, and speak. I'm training myself to notice arrogance at play when I find myself getting bored (e.g. assuming that others don't have valuable things to say or that I already know everything relevant); to notice judgment as an unhealthy form of self-protection (e.g. from the terrifying sensation of not feeling needed or wanted, or from feeling at all); to treat anger, defensiveness, disengagement, anything that arises as valuable information to learn about my personal triggers and mental patterns. Part of this process also includes acknowledging unresolved tensions and learning to honor the emotional reality of endings, which allows us to carry past conflicts forward as a resource instead of as unresolved baggage.
- One case study in particular really helped bring to life and tie together this whole adaptive leadership theory of change for me. We spent an entire module (out of ten) diving into Brett Kavanaugh's deeply unsettling supreme court confirmation saga from 2018 that happened to highlight so many course concepts: a human hunger exaggerated to the point of insatiability and serious harm, a public conflict shamefully mishandled, and perhaps most importantly, a missed opportunity to do the (dangerous!) leadership work of fighting for one's own personal truth, modeling humility and empathy while repairing trust on private and national stages alike, and actually living the values that one claims to stand for.
In this case, the human hunger that went unchecked was that of sexual gratification and intimacy. We started by reflecting individually on how we were taught to think, behave, and relate to others for sex; we discussed how the cultures we grew up in and the identities we hold teach, reinforce, and entitle us to certain beliefs about intimacy; we explored ways in which we all might be complicit in a rampant permissive context for sexual violence that tacitly reinforces the masculine identity, entitlement, and lack of accountability. (For instance, is it part of the permissive context to suggest that sexual advances are avoidable for women who take precautions? This puts the onus on men with the classically dismissive "boys will be boys" quip, but crucially still leaves women accountable for transgressions of this kind.)
Next, we learned a four-step process that Heifetz has coined the "non-defensive defense." I still often look back on my notes from this section and find this approach revolutionary and urgently important: it is a humble, graceful way of handling most types of interpersonal conflict in a way that repairs trust while still pursuing personal freedom. I'll summarize it here:- reckoning: let the criticism land, receive anger with grace. Listen and learn more. Give yourself private time and space to process; seek council from a confidant who is not emotionally invested in the situation; recover your capacity for empathy and imagine yourself fully into the other party's world
- accountability: acknowledge the damage richly and fully; acknowledge your part in the breach of trust (parse out what is yours to own—the part of the criticism that is true or plausibly true); listen to the response of those harmed for as long as they want to talk; understand their perspective on actions needed for repair
- redress: apologize for your part in the breach of trust; make amends for current or past violations of trust as fully as possible; accept responsibility for changes moving forward that will prevent further breaches of trust
- progress: get behind yourself; refine your message, position, or policies based on what you have learned; defend your claim to the message, or to the role you seek/want to play going forward; continue to listen
And finally, after spending a tough few hours replaying and reflecting on Dr. Blasey Ford's historic testimony and the dismissive, incensed response she received (not only does he not acknowledge the personal risk and bravery it took to come out with a national accusation of that kind, but he doesn't even address his response to her at all), we collectively rewrote Kavanaugh's testimony around adaptive leadership principles and the above four steps. Here is an excerpt of what we composed as a class:
"Regarding my behavior, I have several things to say. First, I regret the extent of my drinking as a young man in high school and college, and I more deeply regret my behavior while drunk, only some of which I remember. Although I have no recollection of doing what Dr. Blasey Ford has said I did, I realize that it is far more likely that her memory is accurate: far more likely that my memory failed me during that era of my youth than her vivid memory fails her. I want to repair the injury I caused her as a young man, and to hear more and know more from her. This is the beginning of saying to her, and to anyone else I may have harmed back then, I am so sorry. I want to do whatever I can to repair the damage I may have caused.
Nothing is more important to me than justice, and nothing is more essential to justice than the integrity and trustworthiness of those who serve in our judicial system. Dr. Blasey Ford has done us all an extraordinary service, and at great personal risk. Dr. Blasey Ford has given us an opportunity to comprehend in new ways the violations that people experience across our nation. It's not good enough to say "boys will be boys" and leave accountability with others. It never was good enough. Dr. Blasey Ford has helped us to take to heart grievances that lie hidden everywhere and call out for repair. I, and many other men, will be better men because of her. I will be ever more trustworthy in the service of justice. We owe her a debt of gratitude."
Is it possible, we debated afterward, that Kavanaugh still might have been confirmed to the supreme court with raw and honest testimony like this? Could he have, in the process, also lived bravely his own truth (honoring his imperfect memory and the likely tendencies of his youth) while setting a positive example not only for his own daughters and female clerks but also for a country that looks to its highest legal office to uphold truth and justice, not to mention personal and systemic integrity?
V. bringing these principles to everyday life
still working on this!