Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive Challenges

Adaptive Leadership addresses stubborn systemic Adaptive Challenges where we are collectively stuck around our shared purpose. There’s an underlying conflict of values and no known win-win option or playbook. There’s no authority or expert to close the gap. The values currently prioritized don’t work for the collective to achieve our shared purpose.

Adaptive Leaders

Adaptive Leaders put people and relationships first. We work towards collective impact through shared purpose. While we put people first, our goal is to change entire systems, often by changing the hearts of a few pivotal people. We keep a values focus as we work together differently to achieve the shared purpose we decided on with EVERYONE who is impacted. The change and the process we use to create the change enable thrival.

I learned Adaptive Community Leadership through Leadership Eastside (LE) in the Seattle area, and it changed my life. I’m now on the LE board, I coach LE campaign teams, and I co-facilitate leader days with the cohorts.

Thrival

We develop habits, patterns, and routines in how we talk about ourselves, our systems, and each other. Our dialogue often centers the status quo and assumes the norms of current and past power structures are the best or even only way to be. In that system we fight for survival in scarcity. With adaptive leadership we prioritize thriving instead. Everyone deserves to thrive. That means we focus on human-centered success, anchor in communities, look for ways to open new perspectives and choices, and find a balance of realism and optimism.

Question the Narrative

Befriending Dragon’s “Question the Narrative” framework combined with “Gracious Space” is a way to implement Adaptive Leadership and other related tools.

Coaching

Cindy uses the Question the Narrative framework in her coaching, consulting, and speaking work. It’s a powerful tool that gives insight into the narratives that fuel all the stories around us. When we listen differently to ourselves and to others, we open new possibilities that transform our life journeys through innovative actions.

Black banner: I'm speaking at Summit 2022, a hybrid conference in Seattle and online. Picture of a white woman with short red hair under "Adaptive Leadership" - Cindy Gross, she/her, Workplace Thrival Coach, Befriending Dragons. "Adaptive Leadership recognizes all systems work exactly as designed to uphold one set of values over all the others. Tech cultures work as designed, so we implicitly resolve those conflicts as “not a bug, it’s by design.”"
“Adaptive Leadership recognizes all systems work exactly as designed to uphold one set of values over all the others. Tech cultures work as designed, so we implicitly resolve those conflicts as “not a bug, it’s by design.”” — Cindy Gross

Resources

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