Harriette Thurber Rasmussen and Mohammed Raei on Adaptive Leadership in a Global Economy

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Their eSuite platform has everything teachers need to individualize and accelerate learning for every student, and for a fraction of the cost of other professional development platforms. There’s no more about bringing Engage to Learn to your campus or district. Contact them today at the link in the show notes. Harriet, what is adaptive leadership and why is it more important than ever?

Adaptive leadership. We think of adaptive leadership as it falls within a group of leadership practices that are loosely known as collaborative leadership. But adaptive leadership is really built on some very specific practices. That is how the founder, Ron Heifetz, who is at Kennedy School at Harvard, refers to

it as adaptive leadership requires that you think about your challenges or whatever you’re leading in two very specific ways. One, that there are technical challenges for which there are answers and experts to solve them. And secondly, that there are adaptive challenges for which we don’t necessarily have answers,

which leads us right into why it’s so important today, because we’re in a society where there’s a lot of novel things going on, a lot of complexity. And so a lot of most of the work, I would argue, for leaders right now today is adaptive. Adaptive leadership asks leaders to consider what they call the dance floor, which is where all the action is happening, but also have the ability to step on the balcony.

So you’re looking down at the action and seeing the whole system, all of the pieces that contribute to whatever it is that you’re trying to resolve. I think the biggest component of adaptive leadership for me, as someone who’s worked in the field of supporting leaders in education for, I hate to say it, almost 30 years, is that hyphens defines resistance to change as really resistance to loss.

And more than any other set of leadership practices, it really gets underneath why it is that stakeholders are resisting something. And the fact that any significant change to make progress on difficult issues requires some level of sacrifice and loss and giving something up, which means we have to prioritize what we are willing to let go of and then be really clear on what we’re not willing

to let go of no matter what. So in a nutshell, adaptive leadership is learning to know your stakeholders, learning to look at challenges as these are mostly situations that require learning all the time, learning of the leaders, learning of stakeholders, and that you need a safe place in which to learn.

And he calls that the holding environment, which comes from, it’s kind of interesting, it comes from the idea of a mother holding a child in a safe way. So we’ve taken that to the idea that we need safe environments in which people are really going to be able to grapple with challenging aspects. If you’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, I’m Tom Van Der Rik and today I’m joined

by Dr. Harriet Thurver Rasmussen and Dr. Mohamed Ray. They’re co-editors of a beautiful new book called Adaptive Leadership in a Global Economy, which is used for application and scholarship. Dr. Rasmussen is an organizational development coach and an assistant prophet at Drexel University. Harriet and I connected more than 20 years ago when we were working together to try to

reinvent America’s high schools. She was a school coach and Harriet, I think we both discovered Haifa’s work and appreciated then the need for adaptive leadership. And if we needed adaptive leadership 20 years ago, little did Ron know how crazy the world would get, right?

We’re also joined by Dr. Ray, who’s dialing in from Amman, Jordan. Mohamed, it’s so great to have you with us. We really appreciate your scholarship in the area of leadership, particularly adaptive leadership. And I love how you connected with Dr. Rasmussen in your dissertation and we’re able to take

up this beautiful, edited volume with so many smart people in the world. Thanks for joining us on a snowy evening in Jordan. Thank you. Mohamed, what would you add to that definition of adaptive leadership? What does it mean to you?

I would add that it’s about change. So there are leadership theories that are not concerned with change. How does the leader deal with the follower? But it’s not in the context of change. I think Haifetz argues and some other theorists argue that leadership is about change.

And why is that important? Because up to 90% of all change efforts fail. And they did a study 20 years ago. The numbers have not changed. 17 to 90% of all change efforts fail.

In fact, I did a keynote for the Puget Sound Project Management Institute. There were 65 people and I asked, has your organization done a change effort that was successful? And not a single hand went up. Then I asked, has there been a change effort that achieved 50% of its goals?

And there were people from Microsoft, from big companies in the Puget Sound, and not a single hand went up. So that’s why adaptive leadership is really important. Mohamed, because I know a little bit of Harriet’s backstory and how she came to appreciate this topic, why did you choose to make this a subject of your scholarship?

So I was introduced to it in my masters and I had led major change efforts in my family business, which was an industrial company. And I did a lot of things and at the end, my change efforts failed. So when I read Haifetz’s work, I could see why my change efforts did not come to fruition, which is I didn’t understand the losses for people.

And I also dealt with the change as purely technical change and not adaptive. There’s so many parts of your book I loved, but you make the case early on that some problems can be solved by known methods and that other problems, other challenges are not tame problems. People have called wicked problems and they’re new and different. And some tried and true methods may help, but it really so frequently requires leaders

to step back and understand the system. Harriet, I loved your focus on looking at the system. And I would add it’s not just understanding the system, but sort of the sweep of history and what forces are tugging on that system. Was Haifetz the first one that referred to that standing on the balcony?

Did he borrow any of that from Senge or were they both writing about that 20 years ago? Oh, good question. I don’t actually know whether a Senge used the term the balcony. Did he? He may have borrowed it from Haifetz.

Yeah. Well, and you know, when we were writing the theory chapter, one of the chapters in the book takes the basic principles of adaptive leadership and it looks at, okay, there’s theories underneath here. Even though Haifetz writes for practitioners, there’s scholarship underneath there and he

doesn’t always refer to the scholarship. So for academics, we wanted to get underneath that and there was a lot of connections where I know Mo and I would have conversations and he says, you don’t know that he discovered that before Bridges or you don’t know that Bridges talked about this or Haifetz. So it is very possible that at the time Senge was beginning to write the fifth discipline

and looking at we all need to know how to see systems in order to be effective leaders. Haifetz was coming to the same understanding. But the balcony metaphor is very specific and I think to adaptive leadership. And we use it a lot when we’re working in education because once people know the metaphor, we can stop and I’ve had, I’ve had watched superintendents and we’ve done this and said,

okay, we’re going to leap to the balcony right now and take a different look at this problem. So the metaphors are incredibly helpful, helping people just even think about where are you? Are you in the muck? Are you surrounded by the problem so you can’t see it? Or are you up on the balcony so you’re starting to see the relationships, the patterns

and how things have changed or not over time? Mohamed, maybe we can build a list of some change forces that are making more situations adaptive. So what kinds of changes are happening in and out of school that make more, that make adaptive leadership more necessary? Well, I mean, I’m not in public education in the US, but my, I was, I dated somebody who was a teacher for seven years.

So I’m quite familiar with the situation of public education in the US. And for the US, not just for education, the issue of diversity is increasing diversity. So it’s predicted that the US will be a wide minority country by 2040. So, you know, the demographics are changing at the society level, but also in the public school system. So that’s as we point out in the book, and there were a couple of chapters, I think, or three chapters.

Diversity is really as is an adaptive challenge. And you’ve seen it with the George Floyd riots and, you know, the the racial tension in the US even before COVID. So that has been an adaptive challenge and it does carry over to the schools, too. It’s really interesting. I haven’t, I haven’t consulted in two years.

So it’s been two years since I’ve been in a classroom with educators, but my students are primarily educators. So we talk a lot. And the general consensus is that we’ve been struggling in education. We’ve had strikes against us in education for for decades, and we’ve been trying to get past them. COVID took the cracks that were in the system that was never functional for all students.

And we’ve been working on that for decades. COVID blew it wide open. And the challenge, I think, when you talk about the forces that have made adaptive consideration more important than ever, is that everything that’s happening is novel and could not have predicted it. Just you want to even look at the economy and the things that we maybe didn’t predict as we were trying to work with that.

And education, it’s interesting. And my East Coast schools, the number one challenge that the principals and central office people talked to me about when we kind of go, OK, tell me what’s going on these days. It’s violence in the schools. It’s the kids have been so pent up and they have all this pressure and they haven’t had a socialization and they come in.

Everything erupts. And so it’s not it’s not outbreaks. It’s violence. We didn’t think about that. So everything that’s happening, the number of variables that are that are pushing on the system,

means that there are no right ways to go about it. There’s not even a right place to start. It’s just starting somewhere and making some progress. You can’t do that with a technical answer. And we we’d had exponential technology in the rise of machine learning and the way it’s changing the nature of work to the list.

Right. Mohammed, I see around the world that an increasing percentage of people are doing their work on diverse teams using smart tools, facing adaptive challenges, right? That feels like a larger and larger percentage of people are stepping into that world of unknown problems with new tools on diverse teams and and those diverse teams may be remote.

So new settings, new teams, new tools, addressing problems that we’ve never seen before. So novelty and complexity all the way around. Totally. And I think, you know, it’s very challenging for people working online because in before COVID, you could meet with the people, have coffee, walk, go out for a drink afterwards.

And now you’re like, this is your team member. Go forth and, you know, trust them and get to know them. And, you know, there are ways to get people to know them, but it, you know, sharing food and laughter and play. That kind of builds social capital.

Can I add that? I suspect while you’re working on this volume, it became eminently clear that climate change was a new change force, probably the most important change force in the lives of young people over the next 20 years. And you add that to the diversity and the technology that we were talking about, the health challenges and add climate to that. The unifying force seems to be that all of the factors that we’ve talked about have ratcheted inequity in society,

sort of compounding the level of challenge for everyone, but particularly people leading schools, right? Did any of your authors consider climate change? I don’t remember it being a big thread, but how do you think about how schools can and should be addressing that today as an adaptive challenge? I don’t think so. We, in our chapter on improvement science and adaptive leadership, we do talk about this constant turbulence.

And we do mention climate change in that, but that isn’t really what the chapter is about. So no, there were a lot of things that we saw over and over again. But Mo, do you remember? I think there was more focus on social justice and diversity in the book volume and global warming and climate change were mentioned in passing. I mean, a lot of the methodologies in the book can be used to deal with climate change, but it just so happened that the submissions we had did not deal with it explicitly.

Harriet, how do you see the job of school leadership as different today than 20 years ago when we were trying to spur new high schools? I think it’s just a job different. You know, Tom, I don’t think it is different. And I know that when I say that things have cracked open, the cracks were there. And I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember the very first thing when we were a bunch of coaches sitting around in a room in 2020 with you trying to decide what our work was when we went into districts.

That already you’re doing pretty good work. And you said to me, for the coaches, you said, if you create conversations that might otherwise never have happened, you’ve done your job. I’ve never forgotten that. And that has been this guy that I have taken with me. And you see that throughout the volume in everything that dialogue, the capacity to talk through at a micro level.

And we have a chapter on macro and micro activism and why macro big activism is not effective. But that dialogue, so this isn’t new. The needs of people when they’re put into tight spots, when one of our authors makes this great point in looking at resilience, that when we come in as leaders, as school leaders, and we set out our values, we want to be collaborative. If you look at a list for what people want in superintendents and principals, it’s always the same thing. Respect, listen to us, be grounded, put students first.

So I believe that everybody comes into the job wanting to do that. And leaders want to do that. When we get pressure, it forces us into these narrow either or loss of control. And the first thing we do as human beings is we want to establish order, which in adaptive work is exactly the wrong response. But it’s a natural response.

So the difference now, I think, Tom, is that the loss of control is exponential. Whereas before it was you could take it in bite size pieces, you actually would create the dissonance, create the conversations that you needed. Now the dissonance is everywhere. And I think maybe that would be the biggest change is that the conversation is there or the dialogue. And you add social media in on that as well.

Yeah, definitely. Mohammed, what would you add about this role of being a conversation host? I think it’s very important. I think the structure of public education doesn’t allow for it as much because there’s limited time for meetings. It’s usually an hour a week.

A lot of people say we hate meetings. I love meetings, but not unproductive meetings. I love meetings that are productive where people have the productive conversations. One of the key things in adaptive leadership is bringing out the elephant in the room. And every organization has that.

But when you don’t have enough time to facilitate these conversations, then you’re kind of shying away from the adaptive challenge. So I think there should be more meetings, just more productive meetings, well-facilitated meetings that are not people just talking at each other. Meetings with proper agendas and time to really dive into the juicy issues that each school faces. Harriet, you talked about not rushing too quickly to order, but your definition is, you said leadership, we believe, is a decision to act with or without authority, which is interesting, so it’s not positional, but it’s a decision to act, to listen and to engage.

So how do you square that decision to act without too quickly jumping to what might be the wrong answer? Well, we call that regulating the distress. And I do, years ago, somebody was asking me, what is leadership? And you’re in an interview and you think, it’s a decision. It’s a decision to do something. Now, creating a holding environment, which is that safe, and we try to stay away from the use of the word safe space,

because a real dialogue that really moves the work forward, that isn’t necessarily acting quickly, but the dialogue component isn’t safe necessarily. It’s not fun. It’s difficult. But the holding environment is a place where the authority, this is where authority comes in handy, is where you can create the structures of a holding environment and make sure that the people in there feel valued, feel respected, are allowed to speak, and don’t get bullied in conversation.

But the decision to act can mean I’m going to start slowly with some small technical changes and get people warmed up. I’m going to introduce some structures into conversation so that people feel like they can actually state their ideas. And it could mean I’m going to move to this level of dissonance where we’re going to push people and get them out of their comfort zone. But the act is not necessarily go make a decision. The act is the decision is what is it you are doing in order to move the work. And it doesn’t necessarily mean in our image of the leadership we’re going to do this right now.

No, it’s we are going to do something. Well, Ahmed, I want to ask you a question about mutuality. It strikes me that in the last few years, we as a species for the first time have entered this new space where we’re experiencing things on a planetary scale, health crises, media, exponential technology, climate change. And it just strikes me that that calls for a new sense of mutuality or a renewed sense of mutuality.

In other words, we are all in this together, whether we like it or not. Is there an intersection between adaptive leadership and the spirit of mutuality? I think adaptive leadership, if we want to solve the problems of the planet, then we have to understand that mutuality that the US can’t act alone, Russia can’t act alone. We’re in the same boat. We can’t say, hey, I met my Paris Accords Agreement.

I can go and rest because it affects everybody. So mutuality is the basis for international global work on solving the planet’s problems. And I think adaptive leadership can add to it by bringing people together and build the trust in a holding environment. So that relationship goes two ways between adaptive leadership and that mutuality. But what does that mean for a school leader?

Harriet, what obligation does a school leader to see mutuality? Should they just focus on their school community or do they really need to see a broader community if they’re really to be an adaptive leader? It would be really easy if we were in an agrarian society where nobody left their community and the values that people wanted were fine because nobody left and nobody knew what was happening elsewhere.

But our students don’t stay in their communities. Our students not only are they exposed to values all over the world, but the mutuality is part of technology. Whether you see that as progress or not such a great thing, it is what it is. It’s there. So I don’t believe that a school leader can… You are working within the stakeholders that are closest to the students

and making sure that they are aware of where students are going and that bigger picture. Remember the days when we used to have white change conversations. How has the world changed and what does that mean for what our students need to know and be able to do? Those conversations are still essential. I don’t see them happening at the same level in the last 10 years as when we were working in the 2000s

when we were trying to get people motivated to even think differently about outcomes for education. But they’re still essential. They still have community people rolling into schools every time their kiddos start kindergarten or preschool. They become part of the community and they may not have had any exposure to why school is different today. So the mutuality I think is global.

But the action is local. Mohamed, a number of the chapters dealt with deep change. What is that and how do adaptive leaders support deep sustained change? So part of the definition of adaptive leadership or adaptive change specifically is that it’s a change in values and assumptions. So if you just change your behavior without changing your values and assumptions, that’s not really deep change.

So adaptive leadership really talks about values. What values do we say we have and then what values do we act so that disconnect between we’re committing for example to diversity but then our board doesn’t have any diversity. So you know, showing the disconnect and trying to close the gap between the values that we espouse and the values we enact. And I would add to that that most of us have conflicting values that we live with all the time, but we don’t surface them.

So deep change can’t come about unless people really are able to step back and realizing that I believe this. Oh, I believe this too. And then there’s some prioritization that goes on. I spoke earlier about I can’t give up this for anything, but this maybe I can let go a little bit in order to make progress. I would love to have both of you comment on how we can better equip education leaders with adaptive leadership skills. Mo, I’ll ask you to go first. What should preparation look like?

Well, you know, the basic adaptive leadership skills, diagnosing the system, so seeing what the adaptive challenge is, you know, creating the holding environment. How do you facilitate conversations? How do you build trust both at all levels of the organization? So another thing is comfort with conflict and that’s not an easy one. So to get somebody to be comfortable with conflict can take a year or two or three.

Understanding their own values. So self development, self leadership is essential for adaptive leadership. And from my own doctoral research, I asked what were the actions that were really helpful for adaptive change? And basically listening and inviting ideas were in the top 10. In fact, providing the answer was slightly less than listening and inviting ideas. So in adaptive leadership, you know, getting the information from other people and engaging other people is slightly even more important than providing the answers.

You know, I promised myself I wouldn’t say that’s a great question. That’s a great question. Wow, because I don’t know. There are so many. I mean, yes, you can enroll into a program. You can take a class. You can read our book. I mean, there are lots of ways to prepare yourself and there are some very technical understandings such as the way dialogue can be entrenching, versus moving us forward and be more generative and the kinds of things looking out for work avoidance.

So there’s some technical parts of adaptive leadership that can be very helpful perspectives, even just like using the metaphors. The biggest preparation, though, for leading adaptively is to be able to understand the way that we’re going to be. And I think it’s letting go and Otto Sharma and Thierry, you talks about letting go and letting come. And you can’t lead adaptively if you have all the answers. You can’t lead in schools today if you are so certain that you know the only way to get the answers.

I think a lot of us would have loved to have had this great model of schooling and all we do is put it in every school and everything is great. That was my biggest disappointment. Was that that’s not going to work. And when we scale up, we lose context. So I think that’s a great thing to do.

I think that’s a great thing to do. I think that’s a great thing to do. And when we scale up, we lose context. So I think the biggest way adaptive leaders can prepare themselves is to get in touch with who they are and gain enough confidence and what eggers would call resilience to be able to stand on something as they let go and allow, allow the mess to happen because it is messy. And you have to kind of know, we just had a conversation with Thomas Hatch who’s done some great writing.

But he talks, his big argument was. New books on education for the future that we need. The education the future needs. Anyway, we had him on the podcast. Four months ago. It’s beautiful. He’s the godfather of coherence. We’ve appreciated his work for 20 years.

I had not heard his work before. His lecture was wonderful. He talks about do we need incremental or radical change the same conversations we were having in the early 2000s and probably before that. But his, his answer it’s an and both. And I would absolutely concur with that is that adaptive work and leaders need to be thinking of adaptive change as baby steps. Incremental change because in a complex environment where you’ve got so many things going on that are shifting the sand is shifting beneath your feet.

You can’t possibly know exactly how to get to the end. But there’s a lot of little try this, try this, try this and watch and category catalog what’s happening and then learning. So that is letting go of the certainty on the best way forward is you have to be watching and listening. So I don’t that’s a disposition that’s a comfort level. So I think we can support educators in that way, but you can’t mandate that.

I would add there was one of the chapters in the book about liminal space and being comfortable in that kind of gray area where things are, you know, not going one way or another. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and definitely that’s a skill that’s needed for anybody leading change, not just in public education. It is but Mohammed one thing I was going to acknowledge is that breadth of experience matters. And I think it’s interesting that that you have had an you’ve had an interesting life. You live in a Monde Jordan.

You your family has a business background. You’ve experienced different complex settings that I think give you this the the ability to go to the balcony more easily to see systems and change forces and somehow my sense is that we need to give more education leaders more breadth of experience, at least periodic externships into immersively experience the complexity in other sectors so that they begin to develop some pattern recognition for how systems change and what’s happening to them and the system that they steward. So breadth of experience, it’s hard to do right, but it seems important. So I know for a fact, and I’ve worked with a few people from Boeing and Microsoft who were serving on boards for nonprofits or doing volunteer consulting with nonprofits so they would get the experience that’s outside their own organization.

So I’m not sure how that can be done. Maybe not before they become principles, but as part of their principle certificate, they’re supposed to go get exposure to things that are outside public education. Mo one of my favorite school principals stop visiting other schools and started visiting local businesses because he really wanted to understand the mentorship of local businesses who are facing these rapidly changing environments so just looking even for quick immersive opportunities to think about change in other settings. I just feels like it’s important here.

I want to close with just a couple minutes and thinking about how we can prepare young people to develop their adaptive leadership skills area. What kinds of experiences particularly in high school should young people have that build adaptive leadership skills in them. I’ve real experiences. I think anytime young people are given the opportunity to get into the world in ways that are authentic internships projects. I my boys had senior projects where they had to go grapple with the world and lead things and

Real world learning. I love that. Mohammed, how do we help kids develop adaptive leadership? Well, you know, real world learning projects basically but with guidance so it’s not just you know, we throw people at the deep end of the pool and expect them to swim which is what happened to me with life through me at the at the deep end of the pool. But I think, you know, just providing structure and guidance throughout the projects and focusing on action learning.

I think that’s that’s most helpful. Isn’t it interesting that both for kids and for adults that we need to help people become more comfortable saying I don’t know how might we. That feels like a critical skill of adaptive leaders. I felt like raising my hand saying I have the answer. But I do I do have an answer.

And I see this with my students who are experts at what they do and how hard it is for them to get into this discomfort of not knowing. We could do that with students. We can create and use curricula that allow them to explore big ideas where there’s not a single answer where they’re held accountable for the evidence and for their arguments. We can do that. We can do that in kindergarten all the way through.

We can prepare because that’s the essence of being adaptive is your learning and you’re exploring and you’re grappling with what you don’t yet know and realizing that it’s not just you who has an answer but there’s a lot of different directions you could take. So that’s how I would support kids. So for both of you I guess as we think as we wrap up I’m thinking about implications for school and system leaders. Some of the things that we’ve talked about today. You’ve invited them to see systems to become a conversation host a community conversation host.

Harriet at the beginning you talked about we learned this from high fits to recognize loss and understand that with change comes loss and that people have experienced a lot of loss in the last few years. We talked about inviting innovation even micro innovations this is barring from Dr. Hatch as we did. Mohammed what are the lessons for leaders would you headline for us. I we didn’t mention this well we mentioned it implicitly but I think a focus on learning and questioning assumptions. I think that’s very important so you’re going and those embedded in the system right yes and that comes from not knowing the answers so if you if you think you know the answers you’re not going to question but if you come off from a place of not knowing

then you can be like okay what are my assumptions. And Harriet anything else you want to add. Yeah. Go slow to go fast. It’s not a new it’s not a new phrase but I don’t think it could ever it’s ever been more important is that yes put out the fires.

And you know what the big work is and the relationships the holding environment in order to be able to do that work. I think school leaders absolutely set the culture and the tone for what’s it’s OK to talk about and how that happens and I. My I go back to a leader that I watched a staff member coming out of a very difficult conversation where she was talking about her failures in a lesson. And and it was a very nice conversation. And he said to me he said I’m going to get an hour with her tomorrow she did a lot of things right and I want to make sure she knows that.

That is a culture where it was safe for her to fail. And so that would be that would be a huge piece. I so appreciate that you finished with that because we haven’t talked enough about creating conversation spaces and workplaces full of safety and belonging right because you can’t have the conversations that we talked about. Unless you create safe spaces for people so I. I appreciate that.

We’ve just had a beautiful conversation with Dr. Harriet Thurber Rasmussen and Dr. Mohammed Ray their co editors of a great new book. It’s called Adaptive Leadership in a Global Economy Perspectives for Application and Scholarship. Go get the book make it your next school or district book study book. Mohammed and Harriet thank you for joining us today. I want to thank our producer Mason Pasha and the whole Getting Smart team for making this possible and keep learning and keep innovating for equity.

We’ll see you next week. If you have a topic or a guest in mind send your recommendations to me Mason at gettingsmart.com and if you like what you’re hearing don’t forget to leave a review in Apple podcasts or subscribe wherever you listen. Feel free to share the podcast on social media using the hashtag GS podcasts. Thanks so much.