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Introduction 1-10
p.4 Problems often present themselves ambiguously... Prescription requires analyzing the problem in the larger system.
p.5 As a psychiatrist, I believe that many adaptive and communicative processes are unconscious, and I learn about them by inference. People do not always say what they "really think" or understand why they do what they do... Their behavior is their effort to adapt.
Part I Setting the Frame
1: Values in Leadership 13-27
p.15 leaders mobilize people to face problems
p.22 Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. Adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior.
p.22 The exposure and orchestration of conflict - internal contradictions - within individuals and constituencies provide the leverage for mobilizing people to learn new ways. In this view, getting people to clarify what matters most, in what balance, with what trade-offs, becomes a central task.
p.23 Different values shed light on the different opportunities and facets of a situation. The implication is important: the inclusion of competing value perspectives may be essential to adaptive success... The point here is to provide a guide to goal formation and strategy. In selecting adaptive work as a guide, one considers not only the values that the goal represents, but also the goal's ability to mobilize people to face, rather than avoid, tough realities and conflicts. The hardest and most valuable task of leadership may be advancing goals and designing strategy that promote adaptive work.
p.23 People discover and respond to the future as much as they plan it. Those who lead have to learn from events and take advantage of the unplanned opportunities that events uncover. They have to improvise. In the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt called for "bold, persistent experimentation." As he put it, "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all try something."
2: To Lead or Mislead? 28-48
p.29 Natural selection improvises, and improvises again, without any vision of what problems it might face ahead. [JLJ - perhaps a machine playing a strategic game which improvises, then improvises again, in constructing a diagnostic test of adaptive capacity, can play this game at a high level. How ironic - it might then win a game and have no vision beyond that of generating richly perceptive "maybe" moves, and "knowing" how to manage its attention by competing these lines against each other - effectively giving up exploring the unfavorable lines of play]
p.31 In human societies, adaptive work consists of efforts to close the gap between reality and a host of values not restricted to survival. We perceive problems whenever circumstances do not conform to the way we think things ought to be.
p.36 Perhaps Japan's competitive edge consists of consciously insisting that it must learn.
p.37 People fail to adapt for several reasons. In some cases they may misperceive the nature of the threat... In addition to threats within common knowledge, however, some threats remain to be discovered. People can respond only to those threats that they see. [JLJ - yes, but we can "sense" that we have not thoroughly explored all the reasonable options in a complex position. We can "see" that we are not done exploring.]
3: The Roots of Authority 49-66
p.66 Creativity is stimulated by engaging with one's environment
Part II Leading With Authority
4: Mobilizing Adaptive Work 69-100
p.75 [Adaptive work] The problem definition is not clear-cut, and technical fixes are not available... Learning is required both to define problems and implement solutions.
p.87 In situations that call for adaptive work, however, social systems must learn their way forward.
5: Applying Power 101-124
p.104-105 A holding environment consists of any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of another party and facilitate adaptive work. I apply it to any relationship which has a developmental task or opportunity - including the relationships between... coaches and their teams
p.105 The holding environment can generate adaptive work because it contains and regulates the stresses that work generates... holding environments formed initially by purely coercive means can provide a potent way to transform stresses into adaptive change.
p.106 eliminating the stress altogether eliminates the impetus for adaptive work. The strategic task is to maintain a level of tension that mobilizes people.
p.113 Attention is the currency of leadership. Getting people to pay attention to tough issues rather than diversions is at the heart of strategy.
p.113-114 the authority's strategic task is to redirect attention from her person and role to the issues that are generating distress.
p.116 Urgency, well framed, promotes adaptive work... one has to weigh the competing issues to determine which should be tackled in what sequence... a person in authority would begin with those issues that have already festered in people's minds. There is no science to this. In real-time, one makes an educated guess, tests how the issue is received, and then reassesses its appropriateness.
p.121 One produces progress on adaptive problems by working the conflicts within and between the parties. [JLJ - later Heifetz would have us "orchestrate conflict"]
6: On a Razor's Edge 125-149
p.128 five strategic principles of leadership: 1. Identify the adaptive challenge... 2. Keep the level of distress within a tolerable range for doing adaptive work... 3. Focus attention on ripening issues and not on stress-reducing distractions... 4. Give the work back to people, but at a rate they can stand... 5. Protect voices of leadership without authority.
[p.129-138 case study: Johnson and Civil Rights]
7: Falling Off the Edge 150-180
[Johnson and Vietnam, Nixon and Vietnam and Watergate, Carter and his "malaise" wrestle with difficult issues case study]
Part III Leading Without Authority
8: Creative Deviance on the Frontline 183-206
p.187 Leadership, as used here, means engaging people to make progress on the adaptive problems they face. Because making progress on adaptive problems requires learning, the task of leadership consists of choreographing and directing learning processes in an organization or community.
9: Modulating the Provocation 207-232
[Selma, 1965]
p.225 A major challenge of leadership, therefore, is to draw attention and then deflect it to the questions and issues that need to be faced. To do so, one has to provide a context for action.
Part IV Staying Alive
10: Assassination 235-249
p.235-236 Why is leading dangerous? Leaders are always failing somebody... Leaders and authority figures get attacked, dismissed, silenced, and sometimes assassinated because they come to represent loss, real or perceived, to those members of the community who feel that they have gotten, or might get, the bad end of the bargain.
p.242 Leadership... requires an experimental mindset - the willingness to work by trial and error - where the community's reactions at each stage provide the basis for planning future actions.
p.249 Martin Luther King Jr. sensed his death and referred to it in a speech the night before his assassination in 1968.
11: The Personal Challenge 250-278
p.252 Leadership is both active and reflective. One has to alternate between participating and observing.
p.253 To discern the larger patterns on the dance floor... we have to stop moving and get to the balcony... the right questions can help one get far enough above the fray to see the key patterns.
p.254 the strategic principles of leadership we have explored: identifying the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, directing disciplined attention to the issues, and giving the work back to the people.
p.254 an adaptive challenge consists of a gap between the shared values people hold and the reality of their lives, or of a conflict among people in a community over values or strategy. In both cases, these internal contradictions are likely to generate distress... The problem causing the distress frequently will not be on the surface.
p.272 In adaptive situations, where improvisation is the norm, listening and intervening go hand in hand. Each action ought to be viewed as an experiment. Improvisation demands ongoing assessment. In practice, a person who leads must intervene and then hold steady, listening for the effects of the intervention. She must move from balcony to dance floor, back and forth. She has to allow for silence. Holding steady gives the system time to react to her intervention. It also gives her time to listen. By listening, she refines her interpretation of events and takes corrective action. Based on what she hears, she intervenes again. By this approach, interventions are not simply proposed solutions; interventions are ways to test the waters and gather information to refine the strategy.
p.276 Leadership... requires a learning strategy.
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