Strategic Leadership
Adaptive Strategic Leadership
Diagnose a leadership challenge before choosing an intervention. Learn to distinguish technical fixes from changes that require people to adapt, vary your leadership response, and help a team make sense of uncertainty. Apply the methods to cases and build a practical adaptive-leadership plan.
Build practical capability
Stay grounded while the environment keeps changing.
Participants explore how leaders read context, make thoughtful adjustments, and help people move through uncertainty without losing purpose.
Develop the awareness and flexibility to lead effectively as priorities, conditions, and stakeholder needs change. Participants practice adjusting their leadership approach while maintaining direction, trust, and momentum.
What you will learn
Course learning objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Diagnose the challenge
Distinguish technical and adaptive work, complicated and complex situations, and the pressures shaping the problem.
Evaluate stakeholder perspectives
Identify competing values, expectations, and system pressures before choosing an intervention.
Vary your leadership response
Choose when to direct, coach, facilitate, convene, experiment, or step back for the situation at hand.
Support team sensemaking
Create shared priorities and productive discussion when information is incomplete or conditions change.
Design a small experiment
Define a bounded action, feedback loop, and signals that would prompt you to adjust the response.
Communicate and plan adaptively
Explain what is known, unknown, changing, and expected now; create a personal leadership plan with next actions.
What you will do
Apply the methods to practical work
Examine a leadership case, map stakeholders and competing values, and choose an intervention that fits the challenge. Anticipate wider effects, design a small experiment, practice communicating what is known and unknown, and refine your plan through peer coaching.
Techniques you will practice
Technical versus adaptive diagnosis: Separate problems with established solutions from challenges that require learning and changes in behavior.
Stakeholder and competing-value mapping: Make differences in expectations, interests, and system pressures visible.
Leadership-response selection: Compare direction, coaching, facilitation, convening, experimentation, and stepping back.
Sensemaking and feedback loops: Use questions, shared observations, and small experiments to learn without pretending certainty.
Communication in ambiguity: State what is known, what remains uncertain, and what people should do next.
How the course is structured
Demonstration, guided practice, testing, and improvement
Instructor demonstrations and guided activities lead into participant application, critique, and a practical next-use plan.
- Frame the leadership challenge
Use an opening case and challenge inventory to examine complicated and complex work.
- Diagnose before acting
Explore technical and adaptive elements, stakeholders, values, and pressures.
- Choose and test a response
Compare leadership approaches, apply one to a case, and anticipate wider effects.
- Lead a team through uncertainty
Practice sensemaking, priority setting, psychological safety, and productive tension.
- Experiment and communicate
Design a small feedback loop and practice a message about knowns, unknowns, and next actions.
- Build your leadership plan
Use peer coaching to refine an intervention, communication approach, and next-use commitment.
Choose an approach that fits your experience
Begin with a supplied case or apply the methods to an anonymized work challenge. More experienced participants can test competing values, uncertain evidence, and second-order effects. A management title and coding are not required for the exercises.
Use a supplied case or an anonymized work situation. Keep confidential information out of shared exercises and tools, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and retain human judgment over consequential decisions.
2027 schedule
Plan the experience into your learning year.
Choose a scheduled offering below. Course registration opens December 10, 2026. You can reserve your interest now and request an opening reminder; no payment is collected by the reservation form. A completed paid registration is required to secure a seat.
Live virtual · 8-hour course
9:30 AM–5:30 PM ET
Eastern Time (America/New_York)
Course investment: $625
Diagnose adaptive challenges, vary your leadership response, support team sensemaking, and design small experiments.
You will leave with: A challenge diagnosis, experiment design, and practical adaptive-leadership plan.
Reserve this offeringLive virtual · 8-hour course
9:30 AM–5:30 PM ET
Eastern Time (America/New_York)
Course investment: $625
Diagnose adaptive challenges, vary your leadership response, support team sensemaking, and design small experiments.
You will leave with: A challenge diagnosis, experiment design, and practical adaptive-leadership plan.
Reserve this offeringLive virtual · 8-hour course
9:30 AM–5:30 PM ET
Eastern Time (America/New_York)
Course investment: $625
Diagnose adaptive challenges, vary your leadership response, support team sensemaking, and design small experiments.
You will leave with: A challenge diagnosis, experiment design, and practical adaptive-leadership plan.
Reserve this offeringThe listed dates, times, and prices match the governed 2027 calendar. This reservation expresses interest; it is not a paid enrollment or a guarantee that an offering will run.
Find your pathway
Choose the next step that fits your goals.
Explore the full 2027 calendar and see how Adaptive Strategic Leadership connects to your Strategic Leadership pathway.
Explore the 2027 calendar