The Problem with Leadership
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Exercising Leadership in a Complex World
The leadership problem beneath the leadership problem
Many leaders today are overwhelmed not by the volume of work, but by the nature of it. They are rewarded for speed yet criticised for haste; expected to be visionary and pragmatic, empowering and accountable, steady and responsive. And they are asked—relentlessly—to solve challenges that cannot be addressed with the tools that once made them successful.
Most organisations still behave as though expertise and technical excellence are enough. But today’s challenges are rarely technical. They are adaptive: ambiguous, systemic, relational and value‑laden.
When adaptive challenges are treated as technical ones, predictable patterns follow. Leaders over‑function. Teams oscillate between avoidance and overwhelm. Decision‑making fragments. Culture becomes performative rather than courageous.
Progress stalls - not because people lack capability, but because the wrong problem is being solved.
Beneath every stuck pattern sits the same truth: we are navigating complexity with a mindset designed for certainty.
Why this work matters now
Leadership today is defined by tension. Move quickly without losing people. Drive results while sustaining wellbeing. Protect your team and challenge them. Honour difference while maintaining alignment. Provide stability while enabling transformation.
These are no longer edge cases. They are the daily work of leadership.
In ‘Leading from Within’, I argued that leadership is shaped less by competencies and more by the internal architecture of the leader—the beliefs, values and meaning‑making systems that determine how pressure is interpreted and responded to.
In ‘Change Your Mind, Not Your Behaviour’, I extended this argument: sustainable change is not behavioural. It is cognitive and identity‑based. We shift outcomes by shifting the frames beneath them.
Adaptive Leadership sits at the intersection of these ideas. It is not a model to adopt, but a discipline to practise—mobilising people to do the difficult work of learning and evolving together.
Adaptive Leadership: A practice, not a position
The central premise of Adaptive Leadership is simple yet profound:
“Leadership is the practice of mobilising people to tackle tough challenges and thrive — particularly when progress requires learning, loss, and change[1]”.
Exercising leadership is therefore not tied to authority, hierarchy, or expertise.It is tied to behaviour—the behaviour of diagnosing reality; separating the adaptive from the technical work, and helping people navigate the discomfort that accompanies real transformation
Technical challenges have clear problems and known solutions. Authority can address them; expertise can solve them
Adaptive challenges are different. The problem is unclear. The solution uncertain. Progress requires shifts in beliefs, roles and relationships. Progress requires learning.
Heifitz goes on to suggest that most leadership failures occur when adaptive challenges are treated as technical ones (ibid). This is not incompetence, it’s human. Technical solutions feel safer, faster, more certain. They avoid loss, conflict, and discomfort. But they do not create progress. Adaptive progress requires learning; it’s uncomfortable and not allows apparent.
Core Practices of Exercising Adaptive Leadership
1. Identify the adaptive challenge
Leadership begins with diagnosis. The first discipline is distinguishing what is technical from what is adaptive. Until the nature of the challenge is named accurately, intervention is guesswork.
2. Get on the balcony
Leadership requires the capacity to step onto the metaphorical balcony to observe dynamics, patterns, alliances, avoidance strategies and competing commitments. From this vantage point, the system becomes visible - not just the symptoms, but the dynamics producing them. Who’s in step, who’s dancing a different move, where the faction or subgroups are, and who is on the periphery.
3. Regulate distress — Create conditions for learning
Adaptive work generates discomfort because it involves loss. Loss of certainty, identity, role, structure or control. Too much distress and the system shuts down. Too little and nothing changes. Leadership means holding people in productive disequilibrium; feeling the heat and letting it burn enough for long enough for learning to occur - so progress can be made.
4. Maintain disciplined attention
We are skilled at work avoidance. Not laziness but avoiding the hard work. We shift the topic, makes things ‘bite-sized’, use humour to deflect or default to technical fixes. Maintaining disciplined attention means returning the group – repeatedly, to the adaptive work that is being sidestepped.
5. Give the work back
Over-functioning is a familiar trap. When leaders carry work that belongs to others, they create dependence and stall learning. Exercising leadership means locating responsibility where it belongs and allowing those who must change to do that work – that includes the discomfort of them bearing the associated loss.
6. Protect voices from below
Adaptive progress depends on perspective and constructive dissent. Insight often resides outside formal authority, so leadership requires ensuring that uncomfortable, minority or views from the periphery are heard and considered. The quiet or marginalised voices often illuminate the blind spots.
The cost of leading without an adaptive lens
Without an adaptive lens, leaders exhaust themselves, frustrate their teams and stagnate. Problems recycle. Culture becomes brittle. Talent disengages.
By contrast, leaders who build adaptive capacity demonstrate steadiness under pressure, clearer judgement and alignment between purpose and practice.
Reflection: A place to begin - What is the adaptive challenge we are actually facing? - What loss am I / is the system willing to tolerate? - What discomfort is required for progress - and how will I regulate it? - What work must I give back to others? |
When leadership moves beyond the technical
Adaptive progress rarely looks neat. It looks like slowing down when the system has sped up; naming uncomfortable truths; inviting responsibility and holding competing perspectives and tensions without collapsing into certainty or authority.
This is leadership as practice and stewardship. In a complex world, it is the discipline we need most.
[1] Heifetz, R. A., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership. Harvard Business Press
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