CHAPTER 3

Before You Begin

PRACTICING ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP is difficult on the one hand and

profoundly meaningful on the other; it is not something you should enter into
casually. Here are four tips to consider before you step out there.
 Don’t Do It Alone
Sounds easy and obvious, but we have seen over and over again how people
who are trying to do the right thing end up out on a limb all alone. It is not
only lonely out there; it is dangerous. Those who see your good works as a
threat will find you a much easier target if you are out there by yourself.
If the peril is so obvious, why do so many people end up going it alone?
Three reasons: first, their opponents will do whatever it takes to make them
vulnerable. For example, they might say something like, “You know I
disagree with you, but I admire your courage in fighting for what you believe
in.” Who would not like the sound of that? So you are happy to oblige, by
isolating yourself even more.
A much more subtle danger comes from friends. It usually works
something like this. Your allies sense that you are fully committed and that
you enjoy the plaudits that come from being out there on the front lines. They
say to themselves, “Well, as long as he’s willing to go out there and test the
ice, good for him. If the ice is strong enough, we’ll follow.” They clap harder
as you inch your way across the frozen lake, so you think they are right
behind you. But when you look back, you see them still onshore, waiting to
see what happens so they can make sure it really is safe for them to follow
you. To keep you motivated, they might say something like, “You know, until
you came to this company, no one understood our issues, no one spoke for us.
We owe you so much. You are indispensable.” That sounds good, too. Makes
you feel warm all over. Want to hear it again? Just inch farther out onto the
ice. But there is a way to avoid making this mistake: when someone tells you
how wonderful you are, listen for a little voice inside yourself saying, “I
know I’m terrific, but I’m not that terrific.” That little voice is sending you a
signal that something else is going on.
The third reason that you may end up too far out there by yourself is a
function of your passion and commitment. Your belief in what you are doing
is indispensable to your willingness to take the risks of leading adaptive
change. But that same belief can also make you vulnerable. It is so easy to get
so caught up in the cause that you do not notice danger signals. So your
intervention fails.
 We recently had a conversation with one of the people central to
advancing the United States’ ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2012
Olympics in New York City. He recounted how he was so fired up by the
cause, believed in it so deeply, was so committed to the connection between
the Olympics and the post-9/11 resurgence of the city he loved, that he could
not read the smoke signals and never saw that the decision makers did not
see things as “clearly” as he did. Thus he was unable to step back and make
the midcourse corrections that might have made the story turn out differently.
Whether you are taking on a small initiative (such as planning to raise a
difficult issue at a team meeting) or a large one (like our friend and the New
York Olympics bid), do not go it alone. Find partners who will share the
dangers and the exposure. Together, you’ll stand a far better chance of
avoiding attacks from opponents and keeping your initiative alive.
 Live Life as a Leadership Laboratory
Opportunities to exercise adaptive leadership come before you every day.
They come at home with your family; at your workplace; and in your civic,
religious, and community life. Look for them, and try to take advantage of
them.
For most people, including us, it is all too easy to let those opportunities
slip through the fingers. There are lots of rationales, lots of stories, lots of
excuses. “I’m too busy.” “I’ve got to put three kids through college.” “In this
job market, I’ve got to hold on to what I have.” “We four siblings only get
together a couple of times a year. I can’t ruin things by bringing up the issue
of moving Mom and Dad into an assisted-care facility.” “I’m on this
nonprofit board to give something back to the community. I don’t want to
create trouble by pointing out that we’re not practicing our stated values.”
“This is my church. I am a member of the vestry to further my spiritual life,
not to force parishioners to face the uncomfortable reality that we’re
spending money faster than we’re taking it in and at some point, probably
long after I am gone, reality will catch up with them. I’ll just increase my
annual donation, do my part, and let it go at that.”
The purpose of this book is to help you see and take advantage of adaptive
leadership opportunities more often than you have before, and on behalf of
what you care most deeply about. It’s not meant to move you from exercising
leadership 25 percent of the time to doing it 75 percent of the time. Going
from 25 percent to just 30 percent would make a major difference in your
professional and personal life, as well as to your purposes in your family,
your job, and your community.
To move the adaptive leadership needle, you have to be willing and able
to see opportunities where you might have missed them before. Start by
recognizing that those opportunities are present everywhere and every day in
your life.
After his first near fatal bout with cancer, Marty’s friend and longtime
Boston talk show host, the late David Brudnoy, wrote a book called Life Is
Not a Rehearsal. 1 It was his own way of saying that his experience with the
disease taught him to live life in the present. But whether you think it is all a
rehearsal for something else, or whether you think it is all in the moment,
either way, opportunities for exercising leadership are also learning
opportunities. Leadership is an experimental art. We are all at the frontier.
And one way of reconciling the rehearsal versus living in the present
conundrum is to think of your life as a leadership laboratory. In that
laboratory, you are continuously facing opportunities for learning how to be
more effective in living a meaningful existence, and for making more
progress on life’s deepest purposes and leading meaningful change. Seeing
life as a leadership lab enables you to try things out, make mistakes,
strengthen your skills, and take pleasure in the journey as well as the fruits of
your labor.

The difference between a beginner and the master—is that the master
practices a whole lot more.

—YEHUDI MENUHIN
 Resist the Leap to Action
Adaptive leadership may come intuitively and spontaneously to some, but for
most people, it requires a lot more reflection. Many iconic practitioners of
leadership in recent history, such as Nelson Mandela, Mohandas K. Gandhi,
Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa, were notably reflective, as well
as people of action.
Yet in organizational life, particularly in times of stress or crisis, pressure
mounts to take quick action. That pressure plays into many people’s strengths.
You may have been there before. You know how to rise to the occasion. Even
if you do not have the foggiest idea of what to do, you have a strong incentive
to give in to others’ demands that you: “Do something!”
Of course, emergency management is a needed skill. Saving people’s lives
when they are trapped in a burning building is as important as any other
human endeavor. But adaptive leadership is difficult and dangerous in
different ways than rescuing people from a fire. Adaptive challenges are hard
to define and typically require people to reinterpret and question their own
priorities, as well as their habits of thinking and behavior. When leading
adaptive change, you will be courting resistance by stirring the pot, upsetting
the status quo, and creating disequilibrium.
Sorting through an adaptive challenge takes time and reflection. Resist the
pressure to do something, and spend more time diagnosing the problem, even
if taking that much time feels excruciatingly uncomfortable. Give yourself
license to assess your own skills and to determine whether you are the right
person to intervene or someone else would have a better chance of success.
Take time to inventory the risks, to yourself and your organization, and to ask
yourself whether the potential rewards are worth the risks.
 Discover the Joy of Making Hard Choices
Leadership is a difficult practice personally because it almost always
requires you to make a challenging adaptation yourself. What makes
adaptation complicated is that it involves deciding what is so essential that it
must be preserved going forward and what of all that you value can be left
behind. Those are hard choices because they involve both protecting what is
most important to you and bidding adieu to something you previously held
dear: a relationship, a value, an idea, an image of yourself. Marty often uses
the metaphor of getting divorced with children, something he and Ron have
both experienced. If you have gone through that, you might relate directly, as
well as metaphorically. You tell yourself that you believe in self-fulfillment,
but also you believe just as strongly that you would never do anything your
kids would experience as deeply harmful to them. Those are both important
values, equally compelling in the abstract. But then you decide to get
divorced, and all of a sudden instead of two number one values, you have a
number one and a number two. You are, in your own eyes and in the eyes of
your family and your community, a different person, and not necessarily more
admired. It is a painful process, but a revealing and liberating one as well.
Acknowledging that you have opted not to exercise leadership because
there’s something more important to you is a step toward self-knowledge,
Socrates’ definition of virtue (as reported by his student, Plato). When you
take responsibility for the choices you make, you understand a little more
about who you are. Choices between multiple deeply held values are not
matters of right and wrong, but moments of clarification, painful as those
choices may be to make.
You know best who you really are by watching what you do rather than
listening to what you say. The only way you can really know what you
believe in comes from the times when one belief comes into conflict with
something else you say you believe in. It does not mean much to say you
believe in something if it is so far down on your list of cherished values that
you never have to act on it. There are many more people who “believe in
ending world hunger” or “believe in saving the environment” than those who
actually do anything on behalf of their belief beyond voting for politicians
who share their view or making a few behavioral changes (such as sending a
check to a charity or turning off a few lights in the house).
Here’s an everyday example of the way loyalties shape everyday beliefs.
We have a friend who for twenty years thought of himself as someone who
liked Chinese food, even though he never partook. Then one day he was with
a group of friends who suggested they go out for Chinese dinner. He was
taken aback when he heard himself say, “Let’s go somewhere else. I really
don’t like Chinese food.” So, why had he been holding on to the idea that he
did? After thinking about it for a while, he began to see that his commitment
to Chinese food was actually a commitment to his family. When he was
growing up, he and his parents and his siblings went out for Chinese dinner
most Sunday nights. It was a family ritual. If he acknowledged disdaining
Chinese food now, he would have experienced it (and very likely his parents
would have similarly experienced it) as a criticism of his family’s practices.
Holding on to beliefs or practices often is a commitment to the source of
those beliefs or practices rather than to the belief or practices themselves.
If you want to exercise adaptive leadership more than you have in the past,
you will have to make some different choices from those you have made
before. You will have to risk whatever commitment or concern held you back
on behalf of something else that you have been saying is more important to
you. Some wise person once told us that the sign of being an adult is saying a
hard no once a day. Saying a hard no is a clarifying act, a step toward self-
knowledge, a commitment to stand up for something even when it is hard to
do so. Finding the joy in making such a personal, purposeful declaration is
the flip side of grieving for what you will have to give up to lead adaptive
change.
 PART TWO

DIAGNOSE THE SYSTEM

IN MEDICINE, DIAGNOSIS COMES BEFORE treatment. As in the television show

House, teams of doctors, nurses, technicians, scientists, and other health-care
professionals devote extraordinary talent, skill, and energy to identifying the
problem. Occasionally, the illness is identified backward by trying a
particular treatment and seeing whether it works, but more often, tests, time,
thought, and discussion are devoted to assessing the problem first. Treatment
comes second.
In organizational and political life, people often jump to treatment without
stepping back to clarify the nature of the problem itself, making enormous
investments in solutions, rolling out large-scale new strategies and programs,
without knowing as much as they should about the situation. As the United
States learned in the war in Iraq, countries even go to war sometimes without
adequately assessing the situation: Were there really weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq? Did the United States have the manpower to fight in Iraq,
secure the peace in Iraq, and at the same time finish the job of securing and
stabilizing Afghanistan? Did the government have the public commitment and
the funds to stay the course, if protracted, and what were the odds that it
would be protracted? What impact might a protracted war have on many
other national and global economic, social, and political priorities? When
the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General Eric Shinseki, told Congress
before the war that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to win
the war and secure the peace, the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
categorically disagreed. After Baghdad fell, Shinseki reiterated the need for
more troops and was fired for saying so.
In medicine, when two highly skilled experts strongly disagree on the
diagnosis and therefore the treatment, they remain in the diagnostic mode,
probing to find out whose interpretation of the facts is closer to the truth,
gathering more data, and, at most, taking action in small steps in an
experimental way to generate more data. Only in nearly hopeless and
desperate situations, would they take the risk of a major treatment
intervention under great uncertainty about the nature of the problem itself.
Many treatments are too dangerous and costly to try them without having
some level of confidence that your diagnosis is accurate.
Too often, people trying to address tough issues are too smart for their
own good, throwing guesses at tough problems, seeing the shapes they
recognize because they fit what they know already, without even knowing that
they are doing so. Impatient with the diagnostic process, and sensitive to the
urgency with which the people around them look to them to be quick and
decisive, they move with resolve. Indeed, people get rewarded for
decisiveness and resolve and take pride in it, too. Sometimes decision and
resolve are great virtues, but sometimes they push organizations into the wild
blue yonder.