These practices are behavioral and specific to the context. That means leading adaptively is not “one and done,” and it is not dependent on positional authority. It can be practiced from any position in an organization, government, or society. It is deployed through context-relevant interventions that help people make progress on complex challenges by building new capacity for thought and action.

Leadership is often confused with authority. Many people with authority do not lead, meaning they do not behave in ways that help others navigate complex problems. The distinction matters because we are only “leading” when we exercise agency and practice behaviors that mobilize progress on adaptive challenges. Authority, both formal and informal, can be valuable for focusing attention and marshaling resources, but authority by itself does not build capacity. Likewise, fear or excessive deference to authority can prevent people from exercising the agency required to practice leadership.

Technical challenges, like repairing a flat tire or performing a heart bypass, can be solved with expertise, authority, and effective execution. The knowledge to solve them exists, even if the work is intricate. Adaptive challenges are different. Often called “wicked” problems, they are more complex, require shifts in values, beliefs, or behaviors, and cannot be solved by any one person alone. They often require developing new capacities that did not previously exist. A common organizational trap is treating adaptive challenges like technical ones, which leads to repeated failure and escalating emotion. Many problems include both technical and adaptive elements, so discerning which is which is essential for effective intervention and progress.

Most people stay on the dance floor, focused on day-to-day execution. Adaptive Leadership requires moving to the balcony to observe the system. From the balcony, you can see human dynamics, stakeholder patterns, and the underlying values of factions that hold different perspectives. This is structural listening. It helps you shift from personal interpretations to systemic insight, so your interventions back on the dance floor are more informed, more targeted, and more likely to work.

Adaptive change rarely happens through a single big move. It happens through incremental updates to the behavioral operating system of an individual, team, or organization. The work is to decide what to keep, what to let go of, and what new behaviors need to replace those that inhibit progress. That requires experimentation because you cannot fully predict what will work in a complex human system. Aspiring change agents often push too much change too fast without understanding the values, traditions, and beliefs that make the system coherent. Small experiments create valuable data, reduce unnecessary risk, and generate learning that supports durable change.

Most people do not fear change if it is purely additive. Resistance rises when change implies loss, especially when people are asked to discard familiar values, beliefs, or ways of working. Losses include material resources, but also stability, identity, competence, control, status, and influence. Building new capacity often requires giving up forms of comfort and certainty. Working through loss is difficult, but it is a central requirement of real growth and adaptation.

Strong purpose helps people navigate loss with energy, focus, and resolve. It creates a reason to stay engaged when the work is uncomfortable. But if the losses feel too great, or if the competence to do the work does not yet exist in the system, people may avoid the real work of change. This “work avoidance” can show up as apathy, blame, scapegoating, excuses, endless debate, performative agreement, or other behaviors that drain energy and prevent progress. Purpose does not eliminate resistance, but it gives the work a center of gravity that keeps people oriented toward what matters.

Adaptive work requires a level of tension because tension forces learning. The question is whether that tension becomes productive or destructive. A holding environment is the set of conditions that allow people to stay in the work: trust, accountability, transparency, and a tolerance for learning that includes failure. Like a pressure cooker, the right conditions can accelerate learning and change. Acts of leadership require reading the temperature of the environment and adjusting the heat, raising it when the system is avoiding the work and lowering it when people are overloaded.

When people are asked to adopt new behaviors that are uncomfortable, or when they lack competence to solve a complex problem, they can feel threatened, helpless, or directionless. As the heat rises, stakeholders may resist because homeostasis is disrupted. When you advocate for change that requires losses, you may be viewed as a threat to the system and become a target for fear and frustration. That is why adaptive leadership requires the discipline to stay alive and stay in the game. You need to remain part of the system long enough to help it learn, adjust, and make progress.

Organizations often treat symptoms instead of underlying causes. The discipline is to regularly ask, “What is the essential work?” That question forces you to look across levels, from individual to team to organization and back again, in a dynamic and iterative way. It helps shift interventions from quick fixes to the work that actually changes outcomes. Diagnosis is not a one-time step. It is an ongoing practice of clarifying what is really happening, what is being avoided, and what must be faced to move forward.