What Is Adaptive Leadership? Six Practices for When AI Changes the Work.

Most leaders meet adaptive leadership when a change stalls. The plan is sound, the tools are bought, the training is booked, and six months later the work looks the same as before. Nobody is refusing. Something just will not move.

Adaptive leadership is the discipline for that kind of problem: the kind that experts cannot fix for you, because fixing it means the people involved, often including the people in charge, have to change how they work.

AI has made it the everyday kind. Installing an AI assistant is easy. Getting a team to change what it does, what it decides and what it is proud of is not.

Where adaptive leadership comes from.

The idea belongs to Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and his longtime colleague Marty Linsky. With Donald Laurie, Heifetz turned it into six practices for business leaders.

With Alexander Grashow and Linsky he later wrote a field guide for putting it to work. A May 2026 Harvard Kennedy School discussion paper calls it among the most influential approaches to leadership today.

Two ideas sit underneath everything else. The first is that leadership is an activity, not a position: anyone can exercise it, with or without a title. The second is that authority and leadership are different things.

Authority is the power to provide answers, protection and order, which is exactly what a technical problem needs. On an adaptive problem it backfires, because people look to the person in charge to fix something only they can fix.

In practice, Heifetz and his colleagues describe adaptive leadership as a loop rather than a plan.

What is adaptive leadership in practice: observe, interpret, intervene

01

Observe

Step back and watch what people actually do, not what the plan says

02

Interpret

Hold more than one explanation, and ask whose habits are part of the problem

03

Intervene

Make a small move that tests the explanation and hands the work back

Watch what the move changed, then observe again. The loop does not end; it gets faster.

Technical vs adaptive challenges.

A technical challenge is one where the problem is clear and the answer already exists somewhere: an expert, a procedure or a tool can fix it. An adaptive challenge is one where the people who have the problem must learn and change for it to be solved, and no expert can do that for them.

Most real problems have both parts, and Heifetz's warning is that the most common failure of leadership is treating the adaptive part as if it were technical.

Here are some adaptive challenge examples from the change most companies are living through now:

The steps of a process are technical work that a well-written standard operating procedure can settle. Whether people trust and use it is adaptive.

To sort your own problem, ask three questions:

• Could an expert solve it without the people involved changing how they work?
• If that expert left tomorrow, would the problem come back?
• Does solving it mean someone gives up something they value, such as status, control or a way of working they are good at?

A no, a yes and a yes point to an adaptive challenge. And with AI, the adaptive part is most of the job.

Where the effort in an AI program goes

Technology 10%

Algorithms and data 20%

People, processes and organizational change 70%

The six practices of adaptive leadership.

When people ask for the principles of adaptive leadership, these are the six practices Heifetz and Laurie set out for business leaders, and they have aged well. For each, here is what it means, what it looks like when the change is AI, and the question I would ask.

01Get on the balcony

Heifetz's image is a dance floor. From the middle of it you see your partner; from the balcony you see the pattern of the whole room. Leaders need both, and most spend all day on the floor.

When AI arrives, the floor is the pilot: license counts, usage dashboards, a few enthusiasts. The balcony shows whether anyone's actual work has changed. In the book I describe this as the shift from chief problem solver to chief system architect.

The question: What keeps happening, no matter who is in the room?

02Identify the adaptive challenge

Ask whose habits, priorities or beliefs have to change for the problem to go away, and put your own name on the list first. In Rewired Leadership I call the backlog unlearning debt: assumptions that were once a strength and now quietly slow everything down.

One of the four kinds of leader the book says AI will expose is the Solver, who spends their time finding answers AI now finds faster. The Solver's instinct is to treat every challenge as technical, because technical problems are the ones they are good at.

The question: What would I have to stop doing for this to work?

03Regulate distress

Adaptive work is uncomfortable, and it should be, because people change when they feel the gap between how things are and how they need to be. The leader's job is to keep the pressure in a productive range: high enough that people engage, low enough that they do not shut down.

Few leaders turn the heat down on purpose. In Kearney's August 2026 study of 102 senior transformation executives, more than half named resistance to change as the biggest barrier, yet only 12% said they intentionally slow a transformation to protect employee capacity and readiness.

You lower the heat with clarity about what will not change, a believable timeline, and safety for people who admit they are struggling. You raise it by naming the real issue out loud. That is why the trust that lets people admit what they don't know yet comes before speed, not after it.

The question: Is the pressure on the people, or on the problem?

04Maintain disciplined attention

People avoid adaptive work in predictable ways: they blame someone, ask for another analysis, reorganize, or reach for a technical fix. Heifetz calls this work avoidance. The leader's job is to keep the hard question on the table until it is worked through.

In the book I call this role the Chief Question Officer, and one of its questions is worth borrowing as it is: What process are we clinging to that exists only to manage a risk that no longer exists?

The question: What are we discussing instead of the real issue?

05Give the work back to the people

Adaptive problems are solved by the people who have them. Every time a leader supplies the answer, the team learns to wait for the next one. In the book I describe the habit of jumping in as stealing the learning moment.

The alternative is commander's intent: state the purpose and the boundaries, then let the team work out how. With AI in the work, that includes letting the team help settle which calls stay with a person and which an agent can take.

Gartner's latest advice points the same way. At its October 2026 HR Symposium, analyst Rebecca Lane said traditional change readiness is producing diminishing returns as AI changes the nature of change, and advised giving employees frameworks for safe, structured experimentation.

The question: Am I about to answer a question the team should answer?

06Protect voices of leadership from below

The person raising the awkward point is often the first to see the problem, and the easiest to silence. With AI, it is usually someone on the front line who notices that the agent is confidently wrong, or that a workaround has quietly replaced the official process.

In the book I put it as a rule, and it is a rule for what the performance system rewards: reward the people who surface data that contradicts the leadership narrative.

The question: Who told me something I did not want to hear this month, and what happened to them?

What adaptive leadership looks like when AI changes the work.

Change now arrives stacked, one initiative on top of the last, and most of it is not landing. Kearney's 2026 study found that only 29% of transformations consistently achieve the value they set out to deliver, despite unprecedented investment in AI and organizational change.

Adaptive leadership and AI meet at exactly this point. A new model is a technical change. What it does to roles, judgment and status is adaptive, and it keeps arriving, because the tools keep changing.

BCG's July 2026 study of more than 600 large US companies reaches the same place: it puts 70% of the effort in people, processes and organizational change, and classes only 6% of those companies as AI leaders.

In Rewired Leadership I call the organizational version of this skill adaptive intelligence: the capacity to learn, unlearn and respond to signals faster than the market.

Its measure is learning velocity, the time it takes to go from recognizing a needed change to running a better model based on what you learned. Leaders set that pace, mostly by how fast they change themselves.

In the age of AI, leadership isn't about knowing more. It's about unlearning faster.

An example of adaptive leadership.

Here is a case I tell in Rewired Leadership. Several years ago I worked with the CHRO of a Global 100 technology company, whom the book calls Sarah, on a multi-year leadership transformation across 80,000 employees. Six months in, the regional initiatives had stalled.

The technical reading was a slow approval process. The data told a different story. The executive committee was taking 45 days on average to approve regional budgets the CFO had already approved, because every member, the CEO included, felt they had to add value: a tweak here, a new metric there.

In Sarah's words, her leaders were "drowning in the effort of being indispensable." The same transformation, seen from the CHRO's chair as agents take over the execution, is where HR's own job changes most.

The fix was not a new process. Sarah challenged the CEO to publicly unlearn one habit, and the CEO stopped reviewing how budgets were spent and kept only the intent and the guardrails. That one change freed more than 500 hours of executive time and signaled a real shift in how far the top trusted the people below it.

All three moves are in it: getting on the balcony to see the pattern, naming the adaptive challenge even though the leaders were part of it, and giving the work back to the regions.

Adaptive leadership vs other leadership styles.

Adaptive leadership is a way of working on a kind of problem, not a personality type, so it sits alongside the familiar styles rather than replacing them. A leader can be transformational and adaptive at once.

The difference between adaptive leadership vs transformational leadership is where the answer lives. A transformational leader supplies the vision and inspires people toward it. An adaptive leader often cannot, because the answer has to be discovered by the people doing the work.

Common mistakes.

1. Treating an adaptive challenge as technical. Buying a course or a tool when what has to change is a habit, then blaming the tool.
2. Giving the answer. It feels helpful, it is often faster, and it takes the learning away from the people who needed it.
3. Getting the heat wrong. Too little pressure and nothing moves; too much and people freeze or leave.
4. Mistaking it for being flexible. Changing your own mind often is not adaptive leadership. Helping other people change theirs is.
5. Leaving yourself out of the diagnosis. The habit that slows the team down is often the leader's, which is why the book starts with the leader.

How to develop adaptive leadership skills.

Adaptive leadership skills grow through practice in real work, not through a reading list. Five habits from the book, each small enough to start this week:

• Name one habit you are unlearning, out loud. Leaders who say it first give everyone else permission.
• Run a short after action review after anything significant: what was supposed to happen, what happened, why the two differ, and what you will do differently next time.
• Swap one answer a day for a question. When someone brings you a problem, ask what they would do before you say what you would.
• Fund small experiments. The book suggests setting aside 5% of a budget for small, time-bound experiments designed to test an assumption, and expected to fail within 60 days if the assumption is wrong.
• Ask for negative feedback, and thank the person who gives it.

These are the habits at the center of leadership programs built around unlearning, and they are easier to keep with a coach who helps you get on the balcony when the dance floor is loud. That is a coach's job rather than a mentor's, because it works from your situation and not from theirs.

Frequently asked questions.

The short version.

Adaptive leadership is the work of helping people change when no expert can do it for them. Tell the technical part of a problem from the adaptive part, get on the balcony, keep the pressure on the problem rather than the people, and give the work back.

With AI, most of the work is the adaptive part, and it usually starts with the leader changing first.