Adaptive leadership
Ronald Heifetz
b. 1951
Technical problems authority can solve; adaptive challenges it cannot. Regulating distress — enough disturbance to provoke work, not enough to trigger flight — is shaping described as pacing.
Read alongside: Shape
- Start with
- Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994)
- Where they resist the book
- The adaptive/technical line is cleaner in the book than in a real week, and can excuse leaving a solvable problem unsolved.
Works worth the time
Leadership Without Easy Answers · 1994
The distinction between technical and adaptive work, before it was reduced to a slide.
Read further
- Harvard Kennedy School: Ronald Heifetz ↗
Harvard Kennedy School
- Wikipedia: Ronald Heifetz ↗
Wikipedia
Where Heifetz appears
Authority and orientation are different currencies.
Heifetz distinguishes technical problems, which authority can solve, from adaptive challenges, which it cannot. Uhl-Bien's complexity leadership separates the formal system from the adaptive space where new order actually forms. Both describe the gap the book calls Orientation Points.
Strategy is a pattern in a stream of behaviour.
Mintzberg's emergent strategy is nearly a definition of the Current: what an organisation does repeatedly becomes what it is doing strategically, whatever the deck says. Heifetz's regulation of distress describes shaping as pacing — enough disturbance to provoke work, not enough to trigger flight.