The Practice of Adaptive Leadership:
Tools and Tactics for Changing Your
Organization and the World by
Alexander Grashow
Recommendation From A Professor Of Ed Leadership
We live in a time of danger and opportunity. Individuals, organizations,
communities and countries must continuously adapt to new realities to
simply survive. Wanting more, wanting to thrive even under constantly
shifting and often perilous conditions, people in all sectors are called upon
to lead with the courage and skill to challenge the status quo, deploy
themselves with agility, and mobilize others to step into the unknown.
Ron Heifetz first mapped a groundbreaking theory of leadership in the
seminal book, Leadership Without Easy Answers. Followed by the

bestselling Leadership on the Line, he and long-time Harvard colleague
Marty Linsky offered a compelling set of arguments and stories to show
how to lead and stay alive through the dangers of change.
Now Heifetz and Linsky, joined by Alexander Grashow, have distilled the
learning from their combined sixty-plus years of leadership consulting,
teaching and training around the globe into a practical hands-on guide to
making your leadership both more effective and more powerful.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership will help you think and execute amidst
profoundly changing complexity. With its comprehensive and systemic
approach to assessing candidly the situation and yourself, and then taking
action, its wisdom and advice are drawn also from the experiences of
people like you, committed to advancing what you care about most.
The book is anchored in the framework of Adaptive Leadership, but goes
beyond the theory to provide a practical set of stories, diagrams,
techniques, and activities that will help you both assess and address the
toughest challenges that lie ahead. Dozens of tools and tactics are
presented in an exciting, clear, and reader-friendly design.
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is your handbook to meeting the
challenges of leadership in a complex and rapidly changing world.
Personal Review: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools
and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World by
Alexander Grashow
Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection among species also applies
to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that
do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two
of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership
responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully
complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change
initiatives that originate elsewhere? Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow,
and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their
thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of
those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus the relationship of
adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the
past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through
continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills,
experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly

displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or
irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time,
patience, and persistence. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, "There
is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the
organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any
social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way
it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and
factions with the most leverage) want it that way...As our colleague Jeff
Lawrence poignantly says, `There is no such thing as a dysfunctional
organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve
the results it gets.'"
Only after twice re-reading Lawrence's comment did I fully appreciate how
relevant his insight is to so many of the companies that seem dysfunctional
but really aren't. Their inept leadership, flawed strategy, mediocre
products, indifferent workforce, and poor customer service are all in
alignment. That would not have happened had the companies' leaders
been adaptive. That is, had they possessed the diagnostic skills needed to
recognize or anticipate problems and opportunities and then take
appropriate action. I commend Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky for their
skillful use of several reader-friendly devices, notably the On the Balcony
sections in most chapters that enable a reader to step back from a key
point and examine from it a wider perspective (e.g. relevance to the
reader's own circumstances) than its context in the chapter allows. They
also include On the Practice Field sections in most chapters in which they
suggest possible ways to apply key ideas or, in some instances, raise
questions for the reader to consider.
Here are two examples, both from Chapter 9:
On the Balcony: "Each of the even steps [when designing effective
interventions] can be understood as a skill set. What are your strengths?
Where do you need to build your skills?"
On the Practice Field: "The next time you are in a meeting, notice what is
going on inside your head while others are speaking. Are you judging their
ideas or comments? Rehearsing what you are going to say when it is your
turn? In what ways are you staying on the dance floor and leaping into
action? Practice avoiding this mental leaping by listening to others and
trying to figure out on whose behalf are they speaking, whose perspectives
they are representing, and how you can give your perspectives context
within the current concerns and subject on the table."
Those who have read Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers and/or
Heifetz and Linsky's Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the
Dangers of Leading already know that they (and presumably Grashow) are
world-class pragmatists who have an insatiable curiosity to know what
works in the business world, what doesn't, and (especially) why. After
identifying the components (i.e. the "what") of adaptive leadership, they

devote most of their attention to explaining how to develop and apply it.
For that reason, they insert various checklists and Figures throughout their
lively narrative that anchor insights in real-world situations. For example:
The unique challenges of adaptive leadership (Pages 52-53)
How to identify a primarily adaptive challenge (Page 74)
Nonconfrontational ways to slow down organizational momentum (Page
111)
Seven steps to orchestrating conflict (Pages 152-153)
How to personalize the adaptive challenge (Page 193)
Common leadership traps and how to avoid them (Pages 244-246)
How to ease the constraint presented by loyalties (Pages 248-251)
In the first chapter, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky explain that The Practice
of Adaptive Leadership is a "field book" in that it draws upon the vast
scope and depth of their combined experiences "in the field" and that they
wrote it "for the field" so that it could be of greatest practical value to their
reader's own leadership efforts. On both counts, they succeed brilliantly.
Bravo!
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