A Leadership Failure, or a Diagnosis Failure

Adaptive Leadership Part 1

There is a leadership problem beneath the leadership problem, and it shows up everywhere: in burnt-out executives, in teams that feel both over-managed and under-led, and in organisations that move fast but don’t shift.

Often senior leaders I work with aren’t overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. They’re overwhelmed by the nature of it - the daily requirement to hold tensions that don’t resolve cleanly. You’re expected to move quickly, yet you’re criticised for haste.

You’re asked to be visionary and pragmatic, empowering and accountable, steady and responsive. And increasingly, you’re tasked with solving problems that cannot be solved with the tools that made you successful.

This is where misdiagnosis quietly becomes expensive.

Many of the challenges facing organisations now are not technical problems in need of better expertise, clearer plans or more decisive execution. They are adaptive challenges: ambiguous, systemic, relational and value-laden. They can’t be “fixed” in the way a technical issue can, because progress requires learning, learning requires change, and change often involves loss. Sometimes the loss is obvious (a role, a structure, a way of operating). Often it’s less visible: loss of certainty, loss of status, loss of identity, loss of the comfort of being competent.

When adaptive challenges are treated as technical ones, predictable patterns follow. Leaders over-function; stepping in to create clarity, to restore order, to move things along. Teams swing between avoidance and overwhelm. Decision-making fragments into parallel conversations and private frustrations. Issues are relitigated. Activity increases, but traction doesn’t.

And then we call it a leadership capability gap, when what’s really happening is that we’re trying to solve complex adaptive challenges like technical problems.

1. The first discipline: identify the adaptive challenge

The central task of adaptive leadership starts with diagnostic clarity. What is the nature of this challenge? Is it technical, where expertise and authority can apply known solutions? Or is it adaptive, where the work will require shifts in beliefs, relationships, roles, priorities, and the way power and accountability are organised?

This question matters because technical responses feel safer. They reduce anxiety. They signal decisiveness. They create the appearance of control. In the short term, they are often rewarded — by stakeholders, boards, markets, even by our own nervous systems.

But where the challenge is adaptive, technical solutions usually create movement without progress.

-       You can reorganise the structure without addressing mistrust.

-       You can refine the strategy without confronting competing commitments.

-       You can set performance expectations without naming the losses required to meet them.

Eventually, the system returns to equilibrium — and the problem recycles, often with more fatigue and less goodwill than last time.

2. Get on the balcony: see the system that’s producing the problem

From the balcony, different questions come into view. Where is work avoidance happening — not laziness, but a systemic response to discomfort? What alliances or loyalties are shaping decisions? What is being kept off the agenda? Where does authority sit formally, and where does it sit informally? What is rewarded in practice, not just in rhetoric?

Without this vantage point, it’s easy to misread the system. Leaders end up responding to the loudest issue, the newest issue, or the most emotionally charged issue, rather than the underlying pattern generating them.

3. Regulate distress: create conditions where learning can occur

Adaptive work generates distress because it asks people to let go of something. That discomfort is not a sign that leadership is failing; it is often a sign that the work is real.

The leadership challenge is not to remove distress, but to regulate it — to keep the organisation in a productive zone of disequilibrium where learning can happen without the system shutting down. Too much distress and people become defensive, polarised or immobilised. Too little and the organisation stays comfortable and unchanged.

For executives, this can be counterintuitive. We often feel pressure to stabilise quickly, to bring the temperature down, to provide certainty. Yet the very certainty we offer can become a substitute for the learning the system needs.

4. Maintain disciplined attention: counter work avoidance

This is the discipline many organisations resist most strongly, because it runs directly against how systems protect themselves.

When discomfort rises, work avoidance appears. Sometimes it looks like initiative overload — a burst of activity that creates the feeling of progress without the pain of confronting the real issue. Sometimes it looks like personalisation — locating the problem in a person rather than in a pattern. Sometimes it looks like urgency — speeding up so we don’t have to sit with what’s emerging. Sometimes it looks like endless analysis — staying in explanation because action would involve loss.

Maintaining disciplined attention means noticing the drift and returning, again and again, to the adaptive work. It is the practice of holding the question steady long enough for something to genuinely shift.

It requires steadiness more than charisma, and emotional capacity more than cleverness.

5. Give the work back: stop over-functioning in the name of leadership

Over-functioning is not a capability issue. It is often underpinned by a confusion with identity and role.

Most capable leaders have built their careers on solving problems. They are rewarded for stepping in, creating clarity, restoring order. When the system becomes anxious, the reflex is immediate: absorb the responsibility, make the call, carry the burden.

It feels responsible. It feels protective. It feels like leadership.

But adaptive challenges cannot be solved on behalf of others.

If progress requires a team to rethink how it makes decisions, that team must wrestle with the loss of familiarity and control. If a function must redefine its role, that function must confront what it is letting go of. If a culture must shift, the people who sustain it must bear the discomfort of changing.

Someone has to absorb the loss.

When leaders take that work onto themselves, they do not remove the loss — they defer it. Often they displace it. And in doing so, they weaken the system’s capacity to learn.

Giving the work back is not withdrawal. It is discipline. It means tolerating the discomfort of watching others struggle with the very work you could complete more quickly. It means resisting the pull to rescue in order to relieve anxiety — yours and theirs.

Adaptive leadership asks a harder question than “How do I solve this?”

It asks: Who has to change — and am I allowing them to do that work?

6. Protect voices from below: widen the system’s field of view

Adaptive progress depends on perspective, and perspective often sits outside formal authority. The people who are closest to customers, operations, risk, culture, or the lived experience of decisions frequently see what senior teams cannot — not because executives are careless, but because power narrows attention.

Protecting voices from below is therefore not an inclusion gesture; it is a learning strategy. It’s how blind spots are illuminated before they become failures, and how the system stays in contact with reality rather than its own narratives.

What this means for CEOs. Boards and founders

The implications are practical: if you primarily reward certainty and speed, you may unintentionally encourage technical responses to adaptive problems. If you ask for clear answers in conditions that are inherently ambiguous, you may drive performative confidence rather than real diagnosis. If you treat distress as dysfunction, you may suppress the very tension required for learning.

A more useful governance stance isn’t less accountable — it’s more diagnostically precise. It sounds like: What kind of problem is this? What learning is required? What losses are we asking people to absorb? Where is avoidance showing up? Whose perspectives are absent? What would progress actually mean here, beyond activity?

Leadership beyond the technical

Adaptive progress rarely looks neat. It often looks like slowing down when the system wants to speed up, naming what’s been politely avoided, inviting responsibility rather than rescuing, and holding competing tension without collapsing into certainty.

This is leadership as practice and stewardship, not performance. And in a complex world, it’s less a model to adopt than a discipline to practise -  because the work isn’t just to decide and deliver, but it is to mobilise learning in the places where expertise and authority alone cannot.