Leading the Change You Want To See: THE PRACTICE OF ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky) Offers An Authoritative and Practical Field Guide for Change Leadership
This post was first published on April 30, 2018. It was revised, updated, and re-published on November 13, 2025.
Book Review
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky)
This post explores the core insights from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and shows how its frameworks apply to the real-world complexities of schools and districts. Through a blend of narrative reflection and practical tools, it illustrates how leaders can diagnose culture, frame adaptive challenges, and guide their communities through purposeful, sustained change. If you’re navigating shifting expectations, stalled initiatives, or persistent “unsolvable” problems, this guide offers a grounded, human-centered approach to progress.
Overview
The authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership clearly understand that adaptive leadership challenges — such as change the change leadership challenges that can stymie innvoation in K12 schools — don’t yield to quick fixes or new software tools alone.
The authors truly grasp both the layered dynamics of complex organizations like schools and the broad principles of change leadership and give readers a strong grasp of the key features of change dynamics and change-oriented governance.
But what really makes this book a winner is the authors’ ability to combine this authoritative and accessible expose with a very pragmatic approach, including practical “field manual” tools and resources — to help K-12 leaders diagnose professional culture, name the real problem, and run small, smart experiments that stick. Leaders learn ways to keep change in the “productive zone of disequilibrium,” grow leadership at every level, and turn setbacks into applied learning.
For K12 leaders ready to move beyond mandates and make progress on the work that actually matters, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership still has currency today and provides a uniquely intelligent user manual for both leaders and aspiring change agents across complex organizations, big and small who are interested in driving results and impact by focusing on transforming organizational culture.
“There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it currently gets.”
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is an insightful and practical how-to manual for aspiring "purpose-driven" leaders.
1. Why This Book Still Matters — Especially for K-12 Educators
When you work in a complex system — like a school or school district — effective and transformative leadership requires much more than just managing tasks. Adaptive leadership helps re-tool and re-energize organizational culture — building capacity, coherence, ongoing cycles of inquiry into best practices, and the agility and resilience needed to embrace innovation and respond to disruption.
Key steps include taking on the following: entrenched workplace silos, broken organizational alignment, and competing or mostly self-serving internal factions — both vertical and horizonal — in order to foster more trust-fueled collaborative work informed by evidence-based inquiry and shared decision making.
And once leaders succeed at cultivating a more cohesive and thriving professional culture, the energy this unleashes poses new challenges along with new promises and new rewards, as empowered change agents become catalysts for new changes.
Even at the local school site level, this work requires confronting organizational complexity:
navigating idenities, interest groups, and diverse constituencies
stewarding shared decision making
safeguarding coherent alignment and constructive productivity and engagement even as engagement and deliberation increase
That’s a tall order, but the alternative — taking short cuts and leapfrogging the deeper work, or simply tacking technical fixes on to a broken, self-perpetuating organizational culture — just isn’t enough.
That’s why this book still lands.
Whether it's changing the world, dealing with an abusive or counterproductive school culture — a school culture you lead or one you want to see improve — or you’re simply committed to fixing your local PTA... The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is both a theory of action and a field manual for change-oriented leaders who need to shift culture, not simply install the next tool.
Thorough, realistic, nuanced and immensely insightful, this work on leadership, published in 2009, remains highly useful and relevant today.
I first read this book a bit too late — after years of sprinting as a school administrator that entailed what’s more like going through motions and staying afloat than it is being part of meaningful inquiry and innovation in collaboration with my peers. However, I was also fortunate to be in a setting where all this would change, enabling me to see up close what tranforming a school culture involves and what it can look like and feel like in real time.
Through these lenses, I was surprised to see the just how accurate the authors’ insights were into the challenges of leading (and truly improving) complex organizations:
The book accurately named the tensions my co-administrators and I had lived: the policies that looked elegant on paper but stalled in practice; “fixes” that never really changed either the professional culture or the classroom environments; the culture work that just as often backfired as “succeeded,” depending on how we sequenced it, framed it, and supported it…
However, it also named and described very accurately the very change leadership strategies that really did work… This why, even though published in 2009, this book remains highly relevant for any leader or change agent who wants a reliable playbook for putting their idealism into deeper action and having an informed approach to taking on the work — messy work — of deeper organizational change.
2. Authoratative Insights Built on Research and Practice
Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write from deep, lived experience at the intersection of organizational theory, leadership education, and real-world consulting.
Ronald Heifetz is the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, where he pioneered the study of leadership as a practice rather than a position. His teaching and writing (including Leadership Without Easy Answers and Leadership on the Line) have influenced generations of executives, policymakers, and education leaders who must navigate change without clear precedents.
Alexander Grashow has led global leadership programs for corporations, governments, and nonprofits through Cambridge Leadership Associates (CLA), the consulting firm he co-founded with Heifetz and Linsky. His work focuses on helping organizations diagnose adaptive challenges, design interventions, and sustain cultural change over time.
Marty Linsky, also a long-time faculty member at Harvard Kennedy School, is known for coaching public officials and senior executives worldwide. His expertise centers on building political resilience and the “staying power” leaders need to survive the personal and organizational backlash that deep change invites.
Together, the three authors offer up a powerful combo of academic insight and consulting realism. Their frameworks come not from theory alone but from years spent helping real organizations — not just corporations but also complex public and nonprofit institutions like schools, school districts, and hospitals — address the messy human dynamics that block progress.
For K–12 leaders, their lens resonates because school organizations are archetypal adaptive systems: complex, mission-driven, and saturated with competing values and loyalties.
But for K-12 change advocates and change agents, the book’s enduring relevance also lies in how it reframes leadership and organizational excellence — not as technocratic or bureaucratic top-down expertise and authority or charisma, but as the disciplined, shared, and often uncomfortable work of mobilizing and inspiring people to recommit to shared ideals and purpose and learn their way through tough challenges together.
“Leadership, as we define it, is not authority, position, or title. It’s the activity of mobilizing people to make progress on their toughest, most important challenges.”
3. Professional Culture: Adaptive vs. Technical
Adaptive leadership is the kind that goes beyond the important but less complex forms of managerial authority. While conventional managerial authority is key to addressing technical challenges, a different, more nuanced set of leadership skills and practices are needed for responding to adaptive challenges.
Technical Challenges
have known solutions and require applying the needed expertise and solutions or “fixes”
If you can buy it, hire, or configure in the short-term = technical challenges
Adaptive Challenges
require organizational growth that demands learning, course setting; entail shifts in core organizational beliefs, understandings, assumptions, and attitudes that shape the organizational status quo — such as strategies and established workplace or governance practices, structures, and norms
If successful outcomes involve impacting professional culture — mindsets, norms, incentives, and identity = adaptive challenges
Examples in K-12 Settings
Technical: Speed up grade reporting with a new SIS.
Adaptive: Build transparent, shared grading norms families trust, are anchored in evidence-based practice, and teachers own.
Technical: Roll out 1:1 devices.
Adaptive: Re-design pedagogy to leverage wired classrooms to accelerate student mastery of core 21st-century learning objectives.
Technical: Implement software for to reduce staff time spent doing administrative paperwork related to reporting on behavior referrals.
Adaptive: Undertake staff inquiry into alternatives to exclusion for improving behavior interventions and school climate.
Technical: Make adjustments to the weekly bell schedule to increase staff collaboration time.
Adaptive: Adopt a school-wide collaborative approach to curriculum planning and data-driven instructional practices.
“Adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties, rather than technical complexity, and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis. For these reasons, organizations often avoid addressing the value-laden aspects and try to get through the issue with a technical fix...One way you know that there is an adaptive challenge facing your organization or community is that the problem persists even after a series of attempted technical fixes.”
4. Adaptive Change Implementation
While an implementation blueprint for solving a technical challenge involves clear steps — identify the problem, assign experts, purchase the tool, train the staff, and track compliance — implementing adaptive change follows a very different playbook.
Adaptive challenges have no single owner or linear rollout.
They unfold through discovery, tension, and learning.
The leader’s task is less about scheduling, commanding, and tracking and more about framing the work, distributing responsibility, and keeping the system engaged long enough to learn its way forward.
The process looks less like project management and more like disciplined experimentation — a cycle that leans on diagnosis, inquiry, design, and adjustment where leaders and co-leaders are looking to deepen shared capacity as the change unfolds.
A Four-Move Playbook (that loops)
1) Diagnose the system
Map the structures, culture, and defaults that produce today’s results (p.54).
Structures: incentives, policies, schedules
Culture: norms, meeting protocols, unwritten rules
Defaults: “how we solve problems here,” habitual patterns
Ask…
Where does informal power sit?
What gets praised, promoted, protected?
What messages actually move?
2) Name the adaptive challenge
Separate what’s hard-but-known from what’s value-laden and uncertain.
Ask…
Which losses will people feel (status, routine, identity)?
Which sacred cows are implicated?
What outcomes matter enough to warrant discomfort?
“One person’s innovation can cause another person to feel incompetent, betrayed, or irrelevant.”
3) Design and audition or “test” interventions
Treat proposals as hypotheses; test reactions early.
Anchor to shared values and student-centered outcomes.
Offer multiple options; don’t crown a winner prematurely.
Ask…
What will break? Who will need support?
“Adaptive leadership… [means] moving people through those losses to a new place.”
4) Run the learning process
Start small; define success/failure signals up front.
Hold no-blame reviews; iterate in public.
Expand the circle as capacity grows.
Was the Pain Worth the Gain?
(A short scene from the field)
Our school is in a very different place now, but getting here wasn’t easy. As for myself, as I had grown very comfortable to my own syllabus and teaching style, I wondered if the change was even worth it, and I certainly was skeptical at times of whether it would really fix or improve anything.
But as a staff we reconnected with our purpose, which isn’t about our comfort first and foremost but about creating a school where students are more engaged and motivated, where learning and how to learn involves some authentic dialogue between all of us and all of us and our students too.
The robust integration of computers in the classroom, a stronger focus on a smaller core of learning objectives, more honest and interactive professional learning, restorative practices — just five years ago, none of these practices really had traction here or weren’t even considered. When the change started there was one year with no small amount of acrimony, and there were some strong opinions and factions that even led some teachers to move to other schools. But as we began to agree on some areas for change and stumbled our way to making it work, that added to our momentum, especially because we actually started to all have important roles ourselves in shaping and designing the changes. Over the past few years, by focusing on the most important changes and approaching the work in safe and honest collaboration, professional learning and student learning have both soared.
5. Leadership Competencies
Whereas technical challenges require simple or complex managerial skills, adaptive challenges require relational aptitudes and skills and far more open-ended designs, such as leading toward an outcome that is really a moving target based on an evolving process of learning, deliberation and trial and error.
Core Leadership Traits
Candor: Say what needs to be said when there’s objective evidence of limiting or counter-productive organizational norms, attitudes, conventions, or practices
Humility: Be an answer-seeker, not an answer-dispenser; move away from prescriptive authority to listening, gathering input and information, creating structures and norms for constructive deliberation and shared leadership and goal setting
Objectivity & Insight: “Get to the balcony” and see the system as it is (in terms of organizational and relational dynamics, norms, beliefs influencing behaviors and routines)
Patience: Iterate publicly, confront iterative change efforts candidly and honestly, with a focus on learning from “mistakes,” “missteps,” and “failures” and increasing capacity for collective learning and productive, evidence-informed risk taking and agility
Courage: Adaptive leadership will “raise the temperature” as those rewarded by the current status quo grow hostile to the idea (or perceived “threat”) of doing things differently — especially when adaptive change entails focusing on professional practices and not a prescribed outcome.
Relational & Emotional Intelligence: Adaptive leaders must perform a nuanced relational balancing act — keeping the heat high enough (moving deliberately) for learning and for catalyzing each new step in the adaptive change process, but low enough (adjusting the pace of change) to avoid an organizational conflagration or implosion!
“By practicing adaptive leadership beyond authoritative management, you risk telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear, but you can also help your organization, community, or society make progress on its most difficult challenges.”
It’s an intimidating leadeship competency profile, but this book is designed to help aspiring leaders identify concrete strategies and practices for cultivating and applying these competencies in the context of adaptive leadership implementation processes and challenges.
“For some people, the hardest part...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.”
6. Traits of an Adaptive Organization
In a school context, the signs of an adaptive organization won’t be any specific learning design or approach used, the relative prevalence or absence of specific learning technologies, nor the structure of the school day as such. These organizational features will inherently change and evolve thanks to adaptive traits that inform the school culture.
Key traits of an adaptive school organization will in many ways align with the traits Michael Fullan attributes to a high-functioning “learning organization.”
Communication: Shared norms facilitate vibrant, candid, professional, evidence-informed dialogue, discussion, and deliberation
Coherence: Core high-impact goals for student learning and wellbeing drive focused work and coherent priorities and actions
Learning Is Iterative: Mistakes are gemane to learning and iterative improvement
Inclusion: Decision making includes those closes to the work
Active Collaborative Learning: Deliberation is protected — creating time for collaborative working sessions with effective, inclusive structures is crucial
Collective Effort: Networks are cultivated; silos discouraged
Thoughtful But Agile Experimentation and Innovation: Plans are drafts, informed but open to active, ongoing evaluation, potential course changes, and iterative improvements
7. Partnering With an Adaptive School Organization
If you partner with schools, the more adaptive the school the bigger the tent is likely to be and the less insular or siloed the leadership “center” and leadership perspective and practice. If your external organization already understands co-design and community-informed practice or brings a dynamic and adaptive business approach to adaptive challenges and complex and recursive implementation process, adaptive school cultures should be more ready to welcome and gain from your input, observations, and partnership if your organization is willing to forge a more sustained partnership.
Keeping in mind that “solutions” can succeed or fail in relative measure based on local dynamics and other system and culture alignments, an adaptive lens can help both school change agents and external partners as they:
Seek to Anticipate or Diagnose Potential Points of Friction (norms, incentives, power) before jumping into implementation
Measure capacity building steps for specific deliverables, alongside the “activation” goal as such
Define success in terms of behavior change and larger systems alignment and coherence, not just in terms of mere numerical adoption rates
Partner throught the process: providing evidence-based clarity for adoption, understanding front-line concerns and challenges (and addressing them meaningfully) before implementation, trouble-shooting through implementation and activation, learning from challenges and results, helping inform and contribute to iterative changes in collateral practices and systems for strong integration and genuine impacts on outcomes
8. Practical Tools & Resources in the Book
The authors of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership not only have insights informed by research and front-line consulting experiences, they also give readers extensive practical strategies, tips, and tools for HOW to engage in successful adaptive leadership.
These useful features include:
Clear theoretical definitions of adaptive leadership that teach readers to quickly distinguish adaptive challenges from technical challenges or other kinds of organizational problems
Diagnostic tools to assess how adaptive your organization is and growth along the way
Comprehensive insights into change theory and into the risks, challenges, and rewards of engaging in adaptive leadership, including descriptions of the predictable destabilizing effects unleashed by the process of adaptive change
Sequential outlines of the adaptive change process along with key actions steps and recommended interventions, surveys, and checklists for navigating each phase: for initiating, moving into, and sustaining the adaptive change process
Guidance for how to pilot the psychological dynamics that complicate adaptive change — what to anticipate and how to respond to the turbulence that’s part of the change process
Suggestions for designing norms, processes, and interventions that facilitate structure constructive inquiry and deliberation within and across organizational teams —as a foundation for building organizational capacity, improving morale, and fostering distributive leadership
Abundant insights and advice on crafting targeted interventions and on who to involve when, and how to implement interventions in phases in order to align change with capacity building, as you go…
Final Thoughts
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership reminds us that leading real change isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about creating the conditions for learning, courage, and shared responsibility. Adaptive work asks leaders to hold steady through uncertainty, to name loss without assigning blame, and to keep purpose at the center even when the path forward feels unclear. In schools and districts, this means moving beyond compliance cycles toward cultures that experiment, reflect, and grow.
The process is rarely tidy, but it’s deeply human — because progress depends not on authority, but on collective willingness to face reality and evolve. Ultimately, adaptive leadership is the only genuine way to confront organizational complexity and dysfunction and truly transform workplace culture — through responsive, relational, purposeful commitments to improvement and ongoing professional learning that drive a culture of agile innovation and problem solving.