paper post — 600 words, APA format, at least 3 references
ReadThe Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Book I will attach).
Consider and research adaptive challenges that are relevant to your organization, work, and/or field.
Identify one leadership practice fromThe Practice of Adaptive Leadershipthat you can implement in your professional life. Attempt to apply the identified practice.
Write two sections in paper:
Explain an adaptive challenge that currently confronts an organization for which you work or with which you are familiar. Your post should identify the organization and clearly state the factors that result in an adaptive, rather than technical, challenge. This section of the post can be strengthened by incorporating sources.
Describe the leadership practice fromThe Practice of Adaptive Leadershipthat you attempted to implement. What was the result? Will you continue this practice?
Copyright
Copyright 2009 Cambridge Leadership Associates
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission
of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
[emailprotected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business
School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
First eBook Edition: June 2009
ISBN 978-1-4221-0576-4
2
mailto:[emailprotected]
To our parents, Betsy and Milton Heifetz, Sheri Saltzberg
and Mark Grashow, and Ruth and the late Harold Linsky,
whose fingerprints, teachings, and values permeate this book
and everything we do.
3
Contents
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Introduction: Purpose and Possibility
1. How to Use This Book
Overview
Adaptive Challenges and Adaptive Capacity
2. The Theory Behind the Practice
The Illusion of the Broken System
Distinguishing Technical Problems from Adaptive Challenges
Distinguishing Leadership from Authority
Living in the Disequilibrium
Observe, Interpret, Intervene
Experiment and Take Smart Risks Smartly
Engage Above and Below the Neck
Connect to Purpose
3. Before You Begin
Dont Do It Alone
Live Life as a Leadership Laboratory
Resist the Leap to Action
Discover the Joy of Making Hard Choices
Part Two: Diagnose the System
4. Diagnose the System
The Elegance and Tenacity of the Status Quo
Discover Structural Implications
Surface Cultural Norms and Forces
Recognize Default Interpretations and Behavior
4
5. Diagnose the Adaptive Challenge
Determine the Technical and Adaptive Elements
Listen to the Song Beneath the Words
Four Adaptive Challenge Archetypes
6. Diagnose the Political Landscape
Uncover Values Driving Behavior
Acknowledge Loyalties
Name the Losses at Risk
Realize Hidden Alliances
7. Qualities of an Adaptive Organization
Name the Elephants in the Room
Share Responsibility for the Organizations Future
Value Independent Judgment
Build Leadership Capacity
Institutionalize Reflection and Continuous Learning
Part Three: Mobilize the System
8. Make Interpretations
Notice When People Are Moving Toward the Left Side of the Chart
Reframe the Groups Default Interpretations
Generate Multiple Interpretations
Audition Your Ideas
Generate a Diversity of Interpretations
9. Design Effective Interventions
Step 1: Get on the Balcony
Step 2: Determine the Ripeness of the Issue in the System
Step 3: Ask, Who Am I in This Picture?
Step 4: Think Hard About Your Framing
Step 5: Hold Steady
Step 6: Analyze the Factions That Begin to Emerge
Step 7: Keep the Work at the Center of Peoples Attention
10. Act Politically
Expand Your Informal Authority
Find Allies
Stay Connected to the Opposition
Manage Authority Figures
Take Responsibility for Casualties
5
Protect and Engage the Voices of Dissent
11. Orchestrate Conflict
Create a Holding Environment
Select Participants
Regulate the Heat
Give the Work Back
12. Build an Adaptive Culture
Make Naming Elephants the Norm
Nurture Shared Responsibility for the Organization
Encourage Independent Judgment
Develop Leadership Capacity
Institutionalize Reflection and Continuous Learning
Part Four: See Yourself as a System
13. See Yourself as a System
Your Many Identities
14. Identify Your Loyalties
Prioritize Your Loyalties
Name Your Unspeakable Loyalties
15. Know Your Tuning
Know Your Triggers
Hungers and Carrying Water
16. Broaden Your Bandwidth
Discover Your Tolerances
17. Understand Your Roles
What Roles Do You Play?
Identify Your Scope of Authority
18. Articulate Your Purposes
Prioritize Your Purposes
The Story You Tell Yourself
Part Five: Deploy Yourself
6
19. Stay Connected to Your Purposes
Negotiate the Ethics of Leadership and Purpose
Keep Purposes Alive
Negotiate Your Purposes
Integrate Your Ambitions and Aspirations
Avoid Common Traps
20. Engage Courageously
Get Past the Past
Lean Into Your Incompetence
Fall in Love with Tough Decisions
Get Permission to Fail
Build the Stomach for the Journey
21. Inspire People
Be with Your Audience
Speak from the Heart
22. Run Experiments
Take More Risks
Exceed Your Authority
Turn Up the Heat
Name Your Piece of the Mess
Display Your Own Incompetence
23. Thrive
Grow Your Personal Support Network
Create a Personal Holding Environment
Renew Yourself
Notes
Glossary
About the Authors
7
PREFACE
On a beautiful spring evening in 2006, the three of us (two Boston Red Sox fans and
a New York Mets fan) were watching a Red Sox baseball game on television at
Rons house. The Red Sox were well ahead. The conversation began to drift to
reflecting on the insights we had gleaned from the clients and students with whom
we had worked over the past quarter century as they tried to apply the frameworks
we have offered to their own challenges of leadership on important and tough
issues. This book grew out of our conversation that evening.
Our previously published work had been focused on developing the conceptual
framework and practical basis for adaptive leadership, but as we talked together
that night, we realized that we knew a lot more about the operational nitty-gritty,
how to actually do adaptive leadership, than we had written before. The efforts of
people with whom we had worked across all three sectors and all over the globe
had created a real-time virtual learning laboratory for translating leadership into
practical tools and techniques for leading adaptive change. By the end of that
evening, we understood that together we had enough of a track record of real
experience that we had the opportunity, perhaps even the responsibility, to share
these insights and emerging best practices with a wider audience. The tools and
tactics for leading adaptive change should be treated, we believe, in the same spirit
as open source technology, made broadly available, so that people who lead
adaptive change can learn from each other and improve their skills, and all of us
improve our insights into practice.
During that evening, we talked about several people with whom we had recently
worked. Gail went well beyond her job description to help people in her firm deal
with persistently troubling external and internal pressures. Drew deliberately gave
up a role he enjoyed enormously and performed with unique competence, defining
his professional identity, and stepped into discomfort and incompetence by taking
on new responsibilities to enable his firm to reach higher aspirations. Ed walked
away from a secure career he loved with its promising personal trajectory to build
an institution committed to helping the people of his state tackle the big questions,
knowing he was going to have to raise the heat carefully in the system to have an
impact. Clive and Brian took significant risks within each of their governments to
develop the leadership capacity of senior officials to operate more creatively,
courageously, and wisely in mobilizing collaboration and innovation across sectors
in their countries. And Debbie believed so deeply in the need for leadership in her
religious community that she put her own job on the line to change the way her
8
organization thought about the qualities needed in its senior people.
Each of them faced what we call an adaptive challenge for themselves and for
the communities in which they took action. In order to exercise leadership on that
challenge, they had to go beyond what people expected of them, risk testing some
relationships, and move themselves and their organizations into unfamiliar territory.
They had to be coolly realistic and skilled at diagnosing their own resources and
constraints, and make some necessary adaptations in their own preferred behaviors.
And they needed to do the same coolheaded diagnosis for the situation: understand
the underlying value conflicts embedded in the strategy of the organization or
community, what and whose interests benefited from the status quo, and the
political dynamics that both kept their organizations in their current equilibrium and
offered some potential for catalyzing change. They each learned in the midst of
action, made some mistakes and midcourse corrections, and stayed the course.
Their journeys are close-to-home sagas of leading adaptive change, with all the
dangers, ambiguity, setbacks, and improvisations that leadership journeys involve.
As of this writing, none of their journeys are over. The work of leadership
continues.
In this book, we have tried to capture their experiences and those of many others
(usually appropriately disguised) with whom we have worked in the classroom or
the field, at the tactical level, teasing out lessons and then creating straightforward,
practical, accessible resources and tools in the hope that doing so will be useful to
you as you take on the issues you consider most important. Everything in this book
comes from the field and has been tested there by our clients and students. They
have been out on the edge, trying techniques and honing their skills, and we are no
more than the vehicles for transmitting their insights to you.
In a very real sense, this field book is a tribute them, our clients and students,
who have taught us more than they can imagine.
9
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the generosity of our clients,
program participants, students, and friends in sharing their challenges, stories, and
learning with us over the past quarter century, particularly during the years after the
publication of Leadership Without Easy Answers and Leadership on the Line and
the formation of Cambridge Leadership Associates (CLA). This book is theirs as
much as it is ours.
As we have noted in the text, this book has many intellectual and practitioner
progenitors. These ideas and tools have lineage that goes back centuries, as well as
a distinctly twentieth-century context. Starting more than thirty years ago, Riley
Sinder, collaborating with Ron Heifetz, created much of the intellectual bedrock on
which adaptive leadership rests. Sousan Abadian deepened this work and enriched
its articulation in countless ways for over two decades as colleague, practitioner,
and Rons former wife.
We thank many of our current colleagues at CLA, including Jeff Lawrence,
Karen Lehman, Eric Martin, JoAnn Martin, Hugh ODo-herty, Lee Teitel, and
Kristin von Donop, for their wisdom and input, for their significant additions to the
ideas and tools in this book, for their willingness to road test so much of this
material, and for their forbearance while we took much more time away from CLA
core activities than we had planned in order to see this field book through to
publication. And we recognize the contributions of Liz Nill, our founding managing
director, who believed in this project from the outset and without whom CLA
would likely not exist.
Ron and Marty appreciate the colleagueship of our friends at the Harvard
Kennedy School, the succession of deans under whom we have worked, and
particularly our faculty colleagues in the management, leadership, and politics
areas of the school, and the team at Executive Education under Pete Zimmerman
and now Chris Letts, all of whom have supported our work in their own ways.
Alexander is grateful to the friends, family, and colleagues from across the globe
who have shaped his experience of the world and shared many long, animated
meals. Gil Skillman, Peggy Dulany, the Blue Unit, Imraan Jamal, and Rachel
Grashow, in particular, expanded Alexanders ideas and experience and
encouraged his dreams.
Our families and loved ones put up with last-minute trips out of town and
innumerable phone-call interruptions of our time with them so that we could work
together and make this book a real collaboration instead of parallel play. David
Abadian Heifetz improved the quality of this book by offering the wonderful
strength of his encouragement and editorial suggestions. Ariana Shirin Abadian-
10
Heifetz helped test these ideas in the field by giving articulate feedback and
ongoing perspective as only she can. Kathryn Ann Herring sustained, embraced,
and provided a wonderful ear for words. Yasuko Tamaki, Alexanders wife, was
extraordinarily generous during this process: bringing her strength and grace to
taking care of one baby and having another during the writing of this book. Martys
wife, Lynn Staley, who has somehow adapted to his stubbornness, irrationality, and
self-absorption for the past thirty years, was once again a tower of tolerance and a
superb informal design consultant, as this projects deadline kept slipping. Thank
you.
We thank Britt Ayler, who helped us on the glossary, and Lauren Keller
Johnson, who provided much needed clarity as an outside editor. Jeff Kehoe, our
editor at Harvard Business Press, provided his usual skilled performance, artfully
employing both the carrot and the stick to bring this project from a one-line idea to
a finished project.
Finally, we acknowledge each other, for hanging together trying to write a book
with three authors and one voice, testing our relationship and our commitment to
coming through this journey more closely bonded, knowing that such collaborations
have sometimes ended professional and personal relationships rather than
strengthened them.
11
PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
Purpose and Possibility
IF YOU WANT TO HELP your organization, your community, and your society
thrive in a changing world, this book is for you. If you want to mobilize greater
progress on the issues most important to you, this book is for you.
If you want to strengthen your practice of leadership no matter where you sit in
your society or organization, this book is for you.
If you want to help others strengthen their capacity for change, as a trainer,
coach, consultant, facilitator, or friend, this book is for you.
This book is about possibility. Not daydreaming, wishful-thinking possibility,
but rather a roll-up-your-sleeves, optimistic, realistic, couragegenerating, and
make-significant-progress kind of possibility. Leadership for change demands
inspiration and perspiration. We present tools and tactics to lead and stay alive, to
build up a sweat by inspiring others, to mobilize people to tackle tough problems
while reaching high. This book comes out of our experience in working with people
in organizations around the world, across sectors, cultures, and countries in
positions high and low, helping them tackle their most pressing challenges. We
have had the blessing and have taken no greater delight than helping people get
more traction on moving their organizations, communities, and societies forward.
These are extraordinary times. The turn of the millennium brought the pressing
realization that every human being, as a member of a globalizing set of nations,
cultures, and economies, must find better ways to compete and collaborate. To
build a sustainable world in an era of profound economic and environmental
interdependence, each person, each country, each organization is challenged to sift
through the wisdom and know-how of their heritage, to take the best from their
histories, leave behind lessons that no longer serve them, and innovate, not for
changes sake, but for the sake of conserving and preserving the values and
competence they find most essential and precious.
This is a tall order, requiring people to look backward and forward at the same
12
time. Looking backward, the challenge is to discover new ways to more quickly put
to rest the traumas of the past in order to build a post-empire, post-Crusades, and
post-colonial world. Looking forward, human beings have the ability to realize
ancient dreams of civility, curiosity, and care as we tackle the pressing issues that
surround us. These times call for new ways of doing the business of our daily lives
as we take on these purposes with new, more adaptive solutions.
Between the time we wrote the bulk of our last book, Leadership on the Line,
and its publication date, we experienced 9/11. Between the time we wrote the bulk
of this book and its publication date, we saw Barack Obama elected President of
the United States and the world economy go into crisis. The challenges posed by
9/11 and the international economic meltdown are in part the unresolved dilemmas
of old ways and in part they are new. They are not amenable to authoritative
expertise, although people might hope that if the right subject matter expert could
only be found, these problems would be solved. These are what we call adaptive
challenges, gaps generated by bold aspirations amid challenging realities. For these
the world needs to build new ways of being and responding beyond the current
repertoires of available know-how. What is needed from a leadership perspective
are new forms of improvisational expertise, a kind of process expertise that knows
prudently how to experiment with never-been-tried-before relationships, means of
communication, and ways of interacting that will help people develop solutions that
build upon and surpass the wisdom of todays experts. That is the aim of this book:
to provide an understanding of the processes and practices of leadership so that you
can address the adaptive pressures that challenge anyones current individual and
collective competence.
The answers cannot come only from on high. The world needs distributed
leadership because the solutions to our collective challenges must come from many
places, with people developing micro-adaptations to all the different micro-
environments of families, neighborhoods and organizations around the globe.
Adaptive leadership is an approach to making progress on the most important
challenges you face in your piece and part of the world, presumably in your
professional life but perhaps in your personal life as well. Our concepts, tools, and
tactics aim to help you mobilize people toward some collective purpose, a purpose
that exists beyond your own individual ambition.
For some people, the hardest part of this work might be finding the courage to
identify and claim what is most important to you, those goals and challenges for
which it is worth taking on the pains and risks of leadership. Our work begins with
the assumption that there is no reason to exercise leadership, to have a courageous
conversation with a boss or a spouse, for example, or to take a risk on a new idea,
unless you care about something deeply. What outcome would make the effort and
the risk worthwhile? What purpose would sustain you to stay in the game when it
gets rough? For other people, figuring out their purposes is not as daunting as
grasping the practices required for making progress, stepping out into the unknown
skillfully. We try to address both parts in this field book: purpose and skill.
13
Our goal is to provide practical steps you can take to act further on behalf of
your deepest values, to maximize the chances of success and minimize the chances
of your being taken out of action. We hope to enrich your personal and professional
capacity to accomplish what you care most deeply about.
14
CHAPTER 1
How to Use This Book
THE PRACTICE OF Adaptive Leadership is a field book for two reasons: first,
we have written it from the field, drawing on our experiences with thousands of
people who are trying to create something better from the current reality.
Second, we have designed it for the field, to be of day-to-day utility in your
own leadership efforts. As we wrote this book, we imagined you coming home
after a particularly frustrating day at work trying to move an important initiative
forward. We envisioned you using one of the balcony reflections to understand
better why events did not go as well as you had hoped, or using one of the
leadership exercises to develop your next plan of action.
Perhaps you have picked up this book to figure out how to organize a six-month
program to reverse a problem of high turnover among your companys most talented
employees. Or maybe you are using it to prepare for a particularly important
meeting with key constituencies that resist wrestling with the perspective you offer.
Perhaps you will copy a resonant section of the book or a particularly useful
graphic for your team to create a shared understanding of a challenge you face
together. You might even find it helpful for making progress on a tough problem at
home.
We have designed this book with that flexibility in mind: you can read it from
start to finish, or browse to find the concepts and tools most useful for
understanding and dealing with a particular adaptive challenge you are facing. The
book has a beginning, middle, and end, with a story line and an organizing frame.
But we have also constructed it with self-contained elements and a detailed index
so you can go directly to the ideas and activities that speak to the specific
challenges before you.
To these ends, the book is organized into five parts: an introductory part and
four content parts, displayed in the matrix in figure 1-1, which captures the four
essential practices of adaptive leadership. While the four practice parts of the book
come after one another in linear sequence, the matrix is meant to highlight that you
need not read or use the book that way. How did we get to this matrix? We find its
often best to start with whats salient to you.
The practice of leadership, like the practice of medicine, involves two core
15
processes: diagnosis first and then action. And those two processes unfold in two
dimensions: toward the organizational or social system you are operating in and
toward yourself. That is, you diagnose what is happening in your organization or
community and take action to address the problems you have identified. But to lead
effectively, you also have to examine and take action toward yourself in the context
of the challenge. In the midst of action, you have to be able to reflect on your own
attitudes and behavior to better calibrate your interventions into the complex
dynamics of organizations and communities. You need perspective on yourself as
well as on the systemic context in which you operate.
The process of diagnosis and action begins with data collection and problem
identification (the what), moves through an interpretive stage (the why) and on to
potential approaches to action as a series of interventions into the organization,
community, or society (the what next) . Typically, the problem-solving process is
iterative, moving back and forth among data collection, interpretation, and action.
FIGURE 1-1
Two-by-two diagnosis matrix
There is a logic to the sequencing of the four parts, even though we have written
them so that you can dive into any of the four, depending on where you locate
yourself in your leadership challenge. We ordered the four sections in figure 1-1 to
counteract two tendencies that often stymie progress.
First, in most organizations, people feel pressure to solve problems quickly, to
move to action. So they minimize the time spent in diagnosis, collecting data,
exploring multiple possible interpretations of the situation and alternative potential
interventions. To counteract this drive toward a quick-fix response based on a too
swift assessment of the situation, we spend a lot of time in this book on diagnosis
(What is really going on here?) for both the system-level and the self-level
sections of the adaptive leadership process.
The single most important skill and most undervalued capacity for exercising
adaptive leadership is diagnosis. In most companies and societies, those who have
moved up the hierarchy into senior positions of authority are naturally socialized
and trained to be good at taking action and decisively solving problems. There is
no incentive to wade knee-deep into the murky waters of diagnosis, especially if
some of the deeper diagnostic possibilities will be unsettling to people who look to
you for clarity and certainty. Moreover, when you are caught up in the action, it is
16
hard to do the diagnostic work of seeing the larger patterns in the organization or
community. People who look to you for solutions have a stake in keeping you
focused on what is right in front of your eyes: the phone calls and e-mails to be
answered, the deadlines to be met, the tasks to be completed.
To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the
ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the
metaphor of getting on the balcony above the dance floor to depict what it
means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening. If
you stay moving on the dance floor, all you will see will be the people dancing
with you and around you. Swept up in the music, it may be a great party! But when
you get on the balcony, you may see a very different picture. From that vantage
point, you might notice that the band is playing so loudly that everyone is dancing
on the far side of the room, that when the music changes from fast to slow (or back
again), different groups of people decide to dance, and that many people hang back
near the exit doors and do not dance, whatever the music. Not such a great party
after all. If someone asked you later to describe the dance, you would paint a very
different picture if you had seen it from the balcony rather than only from the dance
floor.
When you move back and forth between balcony and dance floor, you can
continually assess what is happening in your organization and take corrective
midcourse action. If you perfect this skill, you might even be able to do both
simultaneously: keeping one eye on the events happening immediately around you
and the other eye on the larger patterns and dynamics.
Second, too often in organizational life, people begin analyzing problems by
personalizing them (If only Joe was a leader ) or attributing the situation to
interpersonal conflict (Sally and Bill dont collaborate very well because their
work styles are so at odds). This tendency often obscures a deeper, more systemic
(and perhaps more threatening) understanding of the situation. For example, Sally
and Bill represent conflicting perspectives on the tough strategic trade-offs that
need to be made in our harsh economic climate, and each is protecting the functions
and jobs of their own people. The conflict is structural, not personal, even if its
taken on a personal tone. To counteract the personalization of problems, start with
diagnosing and acting on the system (moving outside in) and then do the same for
the self (moving inside out).
Nevertheless, in our view, systemic and personal realities always play out
simultaneously. Thus adaptive leadership is an iterative activity, an ongoing
engagement between you and groups of people. But to strengthen your ability to
practice this kind of leadership, you have to start somewhere. The good news is
that you can do so at any point in the process: diagnosis of the system or yourself,
or action on the system or yourself.
17
Overview
In this book, you will find ideas, resources, practices, and examples meant to help
you lead adaptive work in whatever context you work. In each chapter, you will
find framing ideas and illustrative stories followed by reflections, which we have
called On the Balcony, and exercises, which we have called On the Practice
Field. The On the Balcony reflections are designed to provide you with a focused
and structured way to think about the ideas and stories you have just read in light of
your own experience. And the On the Practice Field exercises are designed as low-
risk experiments you might run as a way to try out some of those ideas in your
leadership practice. You can do the reflections alone. The exercises involve
engaging with others.
The ideas build directly on two previous books in which we developed the
adaptive leadership framework: Leadership Without Easy Answers and
Leadership on the Line. 1 You do not need to have read them to get value from The
Practice of Adaptive Leadership. But it would help you to have some familiarity
with the overall framework. To give you a quick review if you are familiar with
these ideas, or to provide a concise introduction if you are not, we have provided a
chapter called The Theory Behind the Practice that distills some basic concepts
we think you will find most useful in your work. In the rest of this book, the theory
fades into the background in favor of practical application.
The resources in this bookall the tools, lists, diagrams, reflections, exercises,
and chartswere developed primarily for our engagements with client
organizations, big and small, on every continent (except Antarctica), across public,
private, and nonprofit sectors. We designed these resources to help you make
significant progress on real challenges and opportunities. Each has been widely
road tested. We hope they constitute a useful smorgasbord from which to choose as
you tackle the issues that move you or keep you awake at night.
The books resources are also designed to be used across teams and
organizations. Shared language is important in leading adaptive change. When
people begin to use the same words with the same meaning, they communicate more
effectively, minimize misunderstandings, and gain the sense of being on the same
page, even while grappling with significant differences on the issues. The language
we have developed for adaptive leadership seems to fuel productive change much
more powerfully than the languages that commonly swirl throughout organizations.
That does not mean that our language is perfect; just that after more than twenty-five
years of using it, we know it generates new and successful options for both
diagnosis and action. To help you utilize this language, we have included a
glossary.
The practices provided in this book are concrete steps you can take to move a
change initiative forward. However, they are best understood as vehicles for
18
disciplined experiments. We think of adaptive leadership as an art, not a science,
an art that requires an experimental mindset. Each practice presented in this book
has been successful alone or in combination with others, but none is foolproof.
Each depends to some degree on the situation in which you use it. We include them
all here because so much of adaptive leadership work is iterative: you try
something, see how it goes, learn from what happened, and then try something else.
You tailor your interventions to the individuals involved and to the unique (and
shifting) characteristics of the situation facing you.
T he examples we offer are drawn from the stories of people like you,
individuals in organizations, communities, and societies who face difficult
challenges and strive to create positive, enduring change. These stories come from
three sources: our consulting and teaching experience; our own personal and
professional challenges; and material in other books, case studies, and popular
culture where our usage is derivative but seems to us nevertheless to illuminate a
particular aspect of leadership practice.
19
Adaptive Challenges and Adaptive Capacity
In our work, people often come to us for assistance with a specific adaptive
challenge. For example, a young but rapidly growing design and advertising
business geared to the entertainment industry was stuck because the founder/CEO
and the senior management team were colluding to keep the founder tied down in
day-to-day operations so that he was unable to spend his time focusing on the
strategic issues involved in explod
