Adaptive Leadership
A leadership approach for distinguishing technical problems from adaptive challenges that require learning, experimentation and shifts in values or behaviour.
Ronald Heifetz / Harvard Kennedy School field
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- supporting young leaders in complex situations
- helping organisations avoid quick fixes
- planning experiments where no one has the full answer
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Is this a technical problem or an adaptive challenge?
- Who needs to learn or change?
- What small experiment could produce learning?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Adaptive Leadership as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- adaptive work can be uncomfortable and political
- leaders need holding environments and support
- do not call every hard task adaptive