Now More Than Ever

We wrote this book with three goals in mind: (1) to show that productive change must be adaptive to be sustainable; (2) to offer tools and frameworks that lower risk so people can see how to lead and stay alive through the dangers of change; and (3) to encourage people to seize opportunities to exercise leadership that are within reach every day.

While the need for adaptability has always been critical, never has its significance been as front and center as it is today. People everywhere are having to figure out how to adapt to the multiple daunting challenges facing the world: stateless and state-sponsored terrorism, wars, and refugees; the effects of climate change in the violence of storms, flooding of coastal cities, and drought; the dangers of new viral pandemics; population growth that exceeds the carrying capacity of families and economies. The internet and its social media offspring have changed how human beings communicate with each other, how war is fought, and how politics are played. The Great Recession that began in 2008 not only threw the worldwide equity markets into free fall, but led to a recovery that fell unevenly, widening further the income gap.

Politically, the United States elected its first African American president, yet polarizing movements emerged in the world, on both the left and the right, often entering and upending mainstream electoral processes. Elections in democratic settings in Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, and the United States have been won, or nearly won, by politicians with authoritarian inclinations and an appeal promising easy answers and a restoration of order, predictability, and calm. The key word in President Trump’s 2016 campaign mantra, “Make America Great Again,” was “Again.” The desire for restoration, to take one’s country back, whether you share that yearning or not, is a pushback against the difficulties and hardship of adapting to new, unfamiliar, often threatening realities.

The constancy, complexity, and depth of the change challenge all of us. On one hand, we face extraordinary new opportunities to thrive individually and collectively. On the other hand, with deep change comes loss, people left behind, long-held values questioned, beloved norms and practices undone, and the security of jobs, familiarity, and predictability gone, simply and suddenly gone.

All of this volatility has surfaced festering challenges in the world order and in the differential experiences of those people who were riding the waves versus those who felt they were drowning in them.

Take population growth. A worldwide consensus on the importance of population policy has unraveled, for reasons that we believe are only partly justifiable, with major impact on poverty, terrorism, sex trafficking, pandemics, mass migrations, and of course, climate change. In many countries around the world, families, school systems, and local economies are overwhelmed by the number of children, rendering young men vulnerable to terrorist and criminal recruiters, and young women to sex predators and traffickers. Climate change seems intractable not only because, as consumers, many people are wedded to old jobs and old patterns of fuel and meat consumption, but also because, as aspirants, particularly in the digital age, huge populations of young poor people worldwide will seek to consume more. No longer will people find happiness in subsistence and isolation. Pandemics, too, are fed by the high density of people living close together. These factors have combined to strain the holding environments of all of our communities and societies, including those in the West, creating the trigger points of drought and floods from home, and migrations, epidemics, and terrorism from abroad. In Syria, for example, a high rural growth rate combined with a long drought prior to 2011 led to a massive movement of farming communities to the cities, and created a ripe context for civil war, brutal repression, the growth of regressive Islamic movements, terrorism, and mass migration.

In leadership terms, these conditions too often generate yearning for authoritative direction, protection, and the return of order. Just as dictatorships in history usually emerge in crisis, the conditions of our times create a political marketplace for certainty and answers. Distressed citizens reward pandering, and politicians oblige. Politicians overpromise to win election and earn distrust because they cannot deliver. Inevitably, amid the adaptive challenges of these decades, people feel that those in authority are letting them down, not meeting their expectations, not hearing their pain, talking at them rather than listening to them. Feeling betrayed and increasingly insecure, many people angrily retreat into narrower identity groups. The strain on solidarity in diversity is palpable around the world.

We need to break this vicious cycle. Citizens need to face the complexity and consequences of their demands, but politicians need to engage citizens more honestly and artfully to lead that process. It’s not enough for officeholders to work hard to comprehend the issues if they then shield their constituents from tough choices. Profound change is more honest than grandiose, more incremental than the experience of it, and builds from the enduring values of individual human beings and the orienting values of human communities. We believe it’s possible to lead and stay alive, to both win reelection and engage people to own their part of change in an iterative, adaptive process of renewal.

Leadership Traps: The Transformation Dilemma

When we and our colleagues began thirty-five years ago to develop these perspectives on the practice of leadership, initially in Ron’s collaboration with Riley Sinder and the seminal book Leadership Without Easy Answers and subsequently here in Leadership on the Line, the term commonly used to capture the aspirational in leadership thinking was “transformational.”

Transformation by itself is problematic as a frame for leadership. First, it encourages self-referential grandiosity—“I have a transformational vision and now I am going to sell it to you.” Leadership seen in this light too readily becomes about “me and my vision” rather than the collective work to be done. The transformational mindset does not begin with a diagnostic focus and search process: the crucial step of listening to comprehend the gap between values, capacities, and conditions, before formulating a path forward. Rarely does it encourage the quest for shared purposes; far too often, the self-styled “transformational leader” begins with a solution and then views leadership as a sales problem of inspiration and persuasion.

Second, by itself, the transformational mindset tends to be ahistorical. It tends to start with the change idea, perhaps a “best practice,” with little respect for the soil in which it must take root. Even if it is on paper a great idea, the importation of the idea risks uprooting more than it should, disorienting and devaluing people more than is needed, and in the end often generates a cultural immune reaction that rejects or distorts the original idea, regardless of one’s good intention. The allergic reaction may happen quickly (Egypt, Yemen, and the Arab Spring), or it may take forty years (the Chinese Revolution) or sixty years (the Russian Revolution).

Third, emphasizing transformational change alone encourages passionate and courageous people to seek big, systemic change, but also risks encouraging them to rush to scale and discount the incremental and transactional day-to-day work of leadership. The world today needs adaptations at every level, from the way families raise children to the way neighbors, consumers, and citizens interact, to the ways we operate across national boundaries and among nation-states. The challenges of the twenty-first century need not a single savior, but everyday leadership from people mobilizing collective creativity on tough problems within their reach from wherever they live.¹

Sustainable Change Is Adaptive

We believe our times call for deep and widespread change that transforms people’s capacity to meet today’s challenges and thrive in new ways. We also believe that sustainable, transformative change is more evolutionary than revolutionary, conserving far more cultural DNA than it tosses out. For example, Google’s search engine depended on and conserved an already evolved economic and technological infrastructure—the US economic system and the growing market for web-based products, a rich network of tech industries, the ecosystem of Silicon Valley, and many previous engineering solutions, including lessons from the search engines that preceded it. Google’s technology transformed our human capacities in a sustainable way because these deep changes took root in established technological, economic, and cultural competencies, institutions, and values, and built from there. And though Google’s business model, based on advertising revenues and new data-gathering techniques, transformed the online marketplace, much of it drew on essential lessons and conserved essential capacities that had already evolved over the course of generations in advertising and marketing. To take a historical example, the American Revolution conserved most of the cultural DNA of Great Britain, its language, arts, science, political theory, and the nascent free-market system. A nation built upon values rather than ethnicity, enabling an architecture for diversity, was not only transformative, it was also adaptive. The founders conserved more than they changed.

For transformative change to be sustainable, it not only has to take root in its own culture, but also has to successfully engage its changing environment. It must be adaptive to both internal and external realities. Therefore, leadership needs to start with listening and learning, finding out where people are, valuing what is best in what they already know, value, and do, and build from there. It’s dangerous to lead with only a change idea in mind. You need both a healthy respect for the values, competence, and history of people, as well as the changing environment, to build the capacity to respond to new challenges and take advantage of new openings.

Systemic Adaptation: The Colombian Example

Even big change led from the top of a government is the accumulation of countless daily increments and transactions. Over the past decades, Ron has had the privilege of educating and advising several presidents and prime ministers around the world, all of whom had high aspirations for accomplishing significant changes in their societies, and all of whom both succeeded and failed (depending on the issue) based in part upon their ability to think in evolutionary, adaptive terms about the demands of leading deep social change and preparing their peoples accordingly.

President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia began taking big but incremental steps toward a peace accord with the FARC even before his inauguration in August 2010. He knew the war intimately, having just served as defense minister. He began by building an ecosystem, a holding environment, for peace negotiations. He appointed as foreign minister the previous ambassador to Venezuela so he could establish a working relationship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who had provided sanctuary to the Colombian guerrillas. Santos needed to persuade Chávez to change course and put pressure on the guerrillas to end the violence and move instead to the negotiating table. Santos also successfully reached out to Cuba, historic supporters of the guerrillas. Raúl Castro too changed course, not only by pressuring the FARC to negotiate, but also by offering to host the negotiations. And Santos brought in the Norwegians, who had hosted the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and the Oslo Accords, to serve as a neutral host along with the Cubans. These were big moves, but they were also incremental steps.

The negotiation process itself lasted more than five years. President Santos had a first-rate negotiating team, but he also established multiple lines of communication with the FARC to increase his options and maintain control over the process. Daily, he paid attention to the work of his negotiating team, the challenges and opposition of his political colleagues, and the difficult adjustments for various publics, as they each were being challenged to face the host of tough issues placed on the negotiating table and before the country at large. There were endless, big, tough questions, as narrow as the mechanisms for the confiscation of weapons and as broad as policies to tackle the inequity that gave rise to the guerrilla wars in the first place fifty years earlier. Each required detailed, specific analysis and creativity, and significant changes in the heart and minds of everyone, from the negotiators to the average citizen.

That President Santos survived reelection in 2014 and concluded the peace agreement in 2016 is a testament to the detailed, daily, transactional, and dangerous work of nurturing deep societal change.

Of course, the jury is still out. Santos lost the referendum on the peace agreement in October 2016, but adapted quickly, revised the agreement, and rapidly won congressional approval. To secure those gains in his last year in office, President Santos turned the focus of his attention toward the public’s reparative work. For most of his time in office, he focused on the negotiation with less time for engaging and building trust with relevant communities across the countryside. Everyone inside the negotiation process went through a deeply emotional change experience over years of intense effort. They were held well by Santos at every step. But the president was less available to hold those who would have to bear the brunt of reconciliation—the families of kidnapped and murdered victims—and those who would have to risk their political, economic, or cultural standing in the new political order. A sustainable peace is not achieved in an agreement; it’s only achieved in the adaptive changes in people’s lives as they lay their traumatic past to rest, gain new social and economic policy, and build new working political relationships. Peace will remain a work in progress for a generation, with starts and stops requiring highly adaptive leadership not only from Santos and his successors, but also from people leading with and without authority throughout the society. President Santos won the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize because, with courage, stamina, and political artistry, and with an evolutionary mindset and adaptive approach, he did something extraordinary: he gave peace a chance and strengthened the odds of its sustainability.

Adaptation at the Personal Level: The Stages of Life

Adaptive work at the systemic level is equally tough as an individual.

We are certain that somewhere along the way you have had to cope with unanticipated and unwelcome new realities in your personal and/or professional life. The sudden death of a loved one. An unexpected divorce. An election defeat. The loss of a job. A health crisis. A business failure. A romance for which you had high hopes suddenly fell apart. A trusted friend betrayed you.

Add your own examples to this list.

The challenges of adaptation in any of these situations parallel those facing President Santos and the people of Colombia. What do you preserve going forward? What do you lay to rest and leave behind? How do you sustain yourself through the loss? What new behaviors, values, and beliefs do you take up and try on?

For Marty, this has had a special resonance since this book was first published. More particularly, in the past few years, Marty has faced the challenge of adapting to the inexorable process of aging. Advances in health care, dietary guidelines, and the practice of wellness lifestyles has meant that everyone has the possibility of living longer and healthier than did the previous generation. There are two easy, lazy options: (1) Retire like the previous generation did, move to a warmer climate, play golf and bridge, read, travel, hang around with kids and grandkids, and volunteer, give back. Or, (2) keep on doing what you have been doing. There’s a lot of systemic pressure to do that. Why not just stay the course, do what you’ve been doing, what you are valued for, what you do well? The world appreciates it (and pays you for it), and it makes you feel competent and useful. Not bad. Many friends are doing just that.

The adaptive challenge, however, is the opportunity to see this period as a new, next chapter, not just same old, same old, or just fading gloriously off into the equally glorious sunset, but as a whole new period of the journey, needing to be invented, what Mary Catherine Bateson called “active wisdom” in her recent book, Composing a Further Life: the challenge of figuring out how to take what you think you have learned and make it available to a wider and different audience, or in a different way, than you have expressed it in the past.

Nevertheless, Marty says that nothing he has ever learned, observed, been told, or experienced has prepared him for this phase of life. As his body deteriorates (and, alas, memory starts to fade), he is constantly facing difficult choices: give in to it, fight it, go with it, or try to fix it. Fixing it was always the preferred option; now not necessarily so. Try to avoid a back operation by giving up running (a central element of his self-identity), going to physical therapy, and doing forty minutes of exercises every day? Hearing aids? Cataract operations? No more long, back-to-back plane flights? No more successive nights of less than seven hours of sleep? Naps? Yikes!

What to give up? What to hold onto? And, of course, how to make best use of whatever time there is left. Emotionally painful prioritization processes. Unlike for humanity as a whole, for Marty the end is known. How, when, and what to do between now and then are not completely within his control, to be sure, but retaining his sense of agency by framing a series of choices, one-by-one, every day, and making them through the lens of what is essential and what is expendable has become his new, nearly full-time job.

Our Own Evolution

As teachers and consultants, we saw that the responses to the frameworks and tools we laid out in this book pivoted dramatically after the Great Recession.

Before that, the challenges of adaptation seemed to many people to be a “nice to have,” not a “need to have.” From 2009 onward, people’s perspectives shifted. The capacity to adapt came to be seen as an immediate necessity and, for many individuals and organizations, a difficult and traumatic challenge. This realization led to the decision by the editors at Harvard Business Review Press to republish this book, and to this new preface. HBRP strongly encouraged us not to make substantive changes in this edition. “The book holds up well as it is,” we were told. However, they also wanted us to reflect on what we have learned and to suggest in this preface some reconceptualizations you might want to take into account as you explore these pages.

Our ideas about thinking and acting politically (chapter 4) have morphed as readers, students, and clients have pushed us to be more expansive about how to use the ideas at the ground level. Some of this gap we began to address in our subsequent book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Acting politically involves much more than having partners, the main thrust of the chapter. Acting politically means customizing interventions, tailoring what you say and what you do to engage each particular target population for your initiative. It means knowing that all people in their professional and personal roles profoundly identify with other people, and therefore are best understood to represent others. People represent people. Respecting those professional and personal loyalties becomes key to finding cooperative options. Acting politically, then, requires deep empathy, understanding the story people are telling themselves and you, even if you think that story is foolish, so that you can meet them where they are, instead of where you are. Operating in this way requires you to know what’s at stake for the people they represent, for their “constituents,” and to be open to alliances with people and factions whose motivation, interests, values, and agendas might be very, very different and even in some ways contrary to yours.

And we have learned from our work over these years that orchestrating conflict (chapter 5) is really a subset of the broader umbrella idea of creating a holding environment. Orchestrating conflict requires a vessel—bonds that can hold people together against the divisive forces that pull them apart. These bonds are both vertical and horizontal—bonds of trust in authority and lateral bonds of trust called social capital. Wonderful work has been done by our colleagues in politics and sociology, negotiation and diplomacy, on the careful, detailed analysis of the structures and processes that build these holding environments. Leadership requires not only pacing and sequencing the issues themselves to contain division, but also tending to the holding environment itself to strengthen the bonds of trust and shared interest that make the losses of compromise and innovation worth sustaining. You can’t cook without a pot to cook in, and leadership is as much about strengthening the pot and controlling the temperature as it is about which ingredients to add when. Many people tell us that they find it difficult and personally well outside their comfort zones to raise and lower the heat (especially to raise the heat), although they may realize that doing so may be essential to getting people to address difficult issues. There are many tools here, some more challenging than others, for raising the heat; but strengthening the holding environment provides crucial leverage.

Similarly, skillful interventions (chapter 6) involve giving the work back, not only tactically, but also strategically. Intervening to make progress on adaptive work requires experimentation, making an ask, and customization. This is a retail business, not a wholesale operation. But you also have to think strategically about capacity and context: both about setting and framing priorities, and about timing, pacing, and sequencing interventions in an arc of change over time.

Finally, we say in these pages (chapters 7, 8, and 9) that “self-knowledge and self-discipline form the foundation for staying alive.” Not surprisingly given the risks involved, we have found that people trying to exercise leadership are keenly interested in advice about survival. But we also find that people often undermine themselves by taking pushback, criticism, and attack personally. Self-awareness and discipline are relevant to the task of generating for yourself the freedom to respond with a nondefensive defense when the attack is personal, and with an expanded set of options when it is not. To effectively distinguish role and self, manage your hungers, and anchor yourself, you will want to know how to identify the default settings within you that are shaped by the loyalties you’ve internalized from your professional and personal life, and sometimes your ancestry; and you will then want to learn how to renegotiate the relevant loyalties that inhibit the freedom to see and respond more creatively to what’s really in front of you.

Rereading this book closely, writing this new preface, and making tiny word changes here and there has been a labor of love for us, an opportunity to reflect on our own experience and the dramatic changes in the world since it was first published fifteen years ago. We are humbled by the testimony of so many people that Leadership on the Line has continued to be a useful beacon for them in doing the meaningful yet difficult work of leading adaptive change.

For us, this experience has also been an opportunity to reconnect and reinvigorate our professional collaboration and personal friendship, both of which have seen some bumps in the road over the years. Adaptive challenges are with us every day. Reading, writing, lecturing, teaching, and consulting on adaptive change with so many people have not necessarily made us experts at doing it ourselves. Like the changes in the world, the need for learning never stops.

Ron Heifetz

Marty Linsky

December 1, 2016