As we work to make a change in this often beautiful but sometimes cruel and confusing world, we will have moments of great joy. We will also have periods of sadness, even despair when the injustices we work to overcome seem immovable. To be able to move fast when we have momentum and to hold steady when we feel blocked we need ways of understanding the resistance in the systems we seek to change and what blocks us humans from changing our behaviour.
Marshall Ganz developed the leadership thinking we teach at ICL.
Over the last 40 years, one of Marshall's colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School, Professor Ron Heifitz, has developed and been teaching an ever-evolving, but highly complementary framework for thinking about the work of mobilizing people to create change called "Adaptive Leadership."
As we know so much is needed in our current environment, Adaptive Leadership helps change makers "hold steady" and stay strong throughout the often lengthy and gradual process of change, whether that change is in an individual, a team, an organization, a community or government.
We think adaptive leadership could be both an eye-opening and affirming set of concepts and tools to add to your toolbox, so we are offering a six-part online course teaching the concepts.
Workshop: Introduction to Adaptive Leadership
As our world grows more complex and interdependent, leadership is an increasingly complicated and challenging activity to undertake. Providing leadership to prevent, soften, or resolve a crisis requires both head and heart, compassion and creativity, skill and perseverance. It requires both a stomach for despair and a heart for hope.
The Adaptive Leadership framework has been developed by Professor Ronald Heifetz and his team of colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government over the last 40 years.
It is designed to help leadership practitioners and others thrive in difficult environments. It offers ways to differentiate between "technical" and "adaptive" challenges, to diagnose the system, and see where practitioners and others can apply leverage to innovate solutions that might not otherwise be possible. It is evolutionary and experimental. Adaptive Leadership's approach helps to develop genuine and hopeful leaders that reject the trap of short-term fixes. Our online program invites participants to explore and engage in the work of mobilizing themselves and others to confront the realities that impede progress and to grow in resilience and empathy.
We are offering six 50-minute videos of Ron Heifetz teaching the basics of Adaptive Leadership:
Session 1: Leadership and Authority
Session 2: Leadership as a Practice
Session 3: Technical and Adaptive - Starting Where People Are
Session 4: Adaptability, Change, and Work Avoidance
Session 5: Case Diagnosis and Renegotiation Loyalties
Session 6: Staying Alive
Coming soon.
