—Keith Grint

lexicon, was in pole position to become the master of
the revolution too” (Figes & Kolonitskii 1999, 1–2).
Of course, what particular future is embodied in the
flag is still up for debate, so it is not that the flag
leads because of what it symbolizes but rather that its
followers attribute to the flag a future that they find
attractive—even if that attribution is not consciously
agreed on by the followers.

Yet, one could still argue that nonhuman leader-
ship fails because the nonhuman element of the net-
work does not instigate the changes and does not act
as a mobilizer of networks: Human leaders are not
naked, but naked technologies cannot lead because
they do not instigate the vision or mobilization.
Thus, it is the pivotal creative role played by
humans in these collaborative hybrids that distin-
guishes them primus inter pares (first among
equals). However, this is a little like saying the
driver is the most important part of a car; in some
sense that might be true, but without a car a person
cannot drive. Precisely what is the creative force of
the network is debatable: God, alcohol, human
emotion, destiny, culture, and genes are all potential
culprits here. Moreover, because invented futures
have to be inscribed and communicated, and
because humans are never without technological
supports, one might still argue that human-nonhu-
man networks are critical for leadership. One might
suggest that the search for an essence is irrelevant
because the important element is the hybrid, and
neither the elements that comprise the hybrid nor
any alleged network is the essence.

If this is right, then people should reconsider how
people strengthen the links in the hybrid networks
because, of course, this also means that people can-
not consider the nonhuman as a leader in isolation
either, not because nonhumans do not embody voli-
tion but rather because nonhuman leadership is as
mythically pure as human leadership. There lies the
rub—according to ANT it isn’t the consciousness of
leaders that makes them leaders; it’s their hybridity.

—Keith Grint

Further Reading
Branigan, T., & Vidal, J. (2002, July 22). Hands up or we strip!

Guardian, p. 7.

Callon, M. (1986). The sociology of an actor network. In M.
Callon, J. , & A. Rip (Eds.), Mapping the dynamics of
science and technology, pp. 19–34. London: Macmillan.

Edwards, R. (1979). Contested terrain: The transformation of
the workplace in the twentieth century. London: Heinemann.

Figes, O., & Kolonitskii, B. (1999). Interpreting the Russian
Revolution: The language and symbols of 1917. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press.

Grint, K., & Woolgar, S. (1997). The machine at work. Cam-
bridge, MA: Polity Press.

Latour, B. (1988). The prince for machines as well as machina-
tions. In B. Elliot (Ed.), Technology and social process, pp.
20–43. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

, J., & Hassard, J. (Eds.). (1999). Actor-network theory and
after. Boston: Blackwell.

Warry, J. (1980). Warfare in the classical world. London: Sala-
mander Books.

! ADAPTIVE WORK

Our language fails us in many aspects of our lives,
entrapping us in a set of cultural assumptions like
cattle herded by fences into a corral. Gender pro-
nouns, for example, corral us into teaching children
that God is a “he,” distancing girls and women from
the experience of the divine in themselves.

Our language fails us, too, when we discuss, ana-
lyze, and practice leadership. We commonly talk
about “leaders” in organizations or politics when we
actually mean “people in positions of managerial or
political authority.” Although we have confounded
leadership with authority in nearly every journalistic
and scholarly article written on “leadership” during
the last one hundred years, we know intuitively that
these two phenomena are distinct when we complain
all too frequently in politics and business that “the
leadership isn’t exercising any leadership,” by which
we actually mean that “people in authority aren’t
exercising any leadership.” Whether people with for-
mal, charismatic, or otherwise informal authority
actually practice leadership on any given issue at any
moment in time ought to remain a separate question
answered with wholly different criteria than those
used to define a relationship of formal or informal
authority. As we know, all too many people are

8———Adaptive Work

skilled at gaining authority, and thus a following, but
do not then lead.

Moreover, we assume a logical connection
between the words leader and follower, as if this
dyad (pair) were an absolute and inherently logical
structure. It is not. The most interesting leadership
operates without anyone experiencing anything
remotely similar to the experience of “following.”
Indeed, most leadership mobilizes those people who
are opposed or who sit on the fence, in addition to
allies and friends. Allies and friends come relatively
cheap; the people in opposition have the most to lose
in any significant process of change. When mobi-
lized, allies and friends become, not followers, but
rather activated participants—employees or citizens
who themselves often lead in turn by taking respon-
sibility for tackling tough challenges, often beyond
expectations and often beyond their authority. They
become partners. When mobilized, opposition and
fence-sitters become engaged with the issues, pro-
voked to work through the problems of loss, loyalty,
and competence embedded in the change they are
challenged to make. Indeed, they may continue to
fight, providing an ongoing source of diverse views
necessary for the adaptive success of the business or
community. Far from becoming “aligned” and far
from having any experience of “following,” they are
mobilized by leadership to wrestle with new com-
plexities that demand tough trade-offs in their ways
of working or living. Of course, in time they may
begin to trust, admire, and appreciate the person or
group who is leading, and thereby confer informal
authority on the person or group, but they would not
generally experience the emergence of that appreci-
ation or trust by the phrase “I’ve become a fol-
lower.”

If leadership is different from the capacity to gain
formal or informal authority, and therefore different
from the ability to gain a “following”—attracting
influence and accruing power—then what can
anchor our understanding of it?

Leadership takes place in the context of problems
and challenges. Indeed, it makes little sense to
describe leadership when everything and everyone in
an organization are humming along just fine, even
when processes of influence and authority will be

virtually ubiquitous in coordinating routine activity.
Leadership becomes necessary to businesses and
communities when people have to change their ways
rather than continue to operate according to current
structures, procedures, and processes. Beyond tech-
nical problems, for which authoritative and manage-
rial expertise will suffice, adaptive challenges
demand leadership that can engage people in facing
challenging realities and then changing at least some
of their priorities, attitudes, and behavior in order to
thrive in a changing world.

Mobilizing people to meet adaptive challenges,
then, is at the heart of leadership practice. In the short
term, leadership is an activity that mobilizes people
to meet an immediate challenge. In the medium and
long terms, leadership generates new cultural norms
that enable people to meet an ongoing stream of
adaptive challenges in a world that will likely pose
an ongoing set of adaptive realities and pressures.
Thus, with a longer view, leadership develops an
organization’s or community’s adaptive capacity.

Adaptive work may be described in seven ways.
First, adaptive work is necessary in response to

problem situations for which solutions lie outside the
current way of operating. We can distinguish techni-
cal challenges, which are amenable to current expert-
ise, from adaptive challenges, which are not.
Although every problem can be understood as a gap
between aspirations and reality, technical challenges
present a gap between aspirations and reality that can
be closed through applying existing know-how. For
example, a patient comes to his doctor with an infec-
tion, and the doctor uses her knowledge to diagnose
the illness and prescribe a cure.

In contrast, an adaptive challenge is created by a
gap between a desired state and reality that cannot be
closed using existing approaches alone. Progress in
the situation requires more than the application of cur-
rent expertise, authoritative decision making, standard
operating procedures, or culturally informed behav-
iors. For example, a patient with heart disease may
need to change his or her way of life: diet, exercise,
smoking, and the imbalances that cause unhealthy
stress. To make those changes, the patient will have to
take responsibility for his or her health and learn a new
set of priorities and habits. (See Table 1.)

Adaptive Work———9

Second, adaptive work demands learning. An
adaptive challenge exists when the people them-
selves are the problem and when progress requires a
retooling, in a sense, of their own ways of thinking
and operating. The gap between aspirations and real-
ity closes when they learn new ways. Thus, a con-
sulting firm may offer a brilliant diagnostic analysis
and set of recommendations, but nothing will be
solved until that analysis and those recommenda-
tions are lived in the new way that people operate.
Until then, the consulting firm has no solutions, only
proposals.

RESPONSIBILITY SHIFT

Third, adaptive work requires a shift in responsibil-
ity from the shoulders of the authority figures and
the authority structure to the stakeholders (people
with an interest in an outcome) themselves. In con-
trast to expert problem solving, adaptive work
requires a different form of deliberation and a differ-
ent kind of responsibility taking. In doing adaptive
work, responsibility needs to be felt in a far more
widespread fashion. At best, an organization would
have its members know that there are many technical
problems for which looking to authority for answers
is appropriate and efficient but that for the adaptive
set of challenges, looking primarily to authority for
answers becomes self-defeating. When people make
the classic error of treating adaptive challenges as if
they were technical, they wait for the person in
authority to know what to do. He or she then makes
a best guess—probably just a guess—while the
many sit back and wait to see whether the guess pans
out. Frequently enough, when it does not pan out,
people get rid of that person in authority and go find

another one, all the while operating under the illu-
sion that “if only we had the right ‘leader,’ our prob-
lems would be solved.” Progress is impeded by inap-
propriate dependency, and thus a major task of
leadership is the development of responsibility tak-
ing by stakeholders themselves.

Fourth, adaptive work requires people to distin-
guish what is precious and essential from what is
expendable within their culture. In cultural adapta-
tion the job is to take the best from history, leave
behind that which is no longer serviceable, and
through innovation learn ways to thrive in the new
environment.

Therefore, adaptive work is inherently conserva-
tive as well as progressive. The point of innovation is
to conserve what is best from history as the commu-
nity moves into the future. As in biology, a success-
ful adaptation takes the best from its past set of com-
petencies and loses the DNA that is no longer useful.
Thus, unlike many current conceptions of culturally
“transforming” processes, many of which are ahis-
torical—as if one begins all anew—adaptive work,
profound is it may be in terms of change, must honor
ancestry and history at the same time that it chal-
lenges them.

Adaptive work generates resistance in us because
adaptation requires us to let go of certain elements of
our past ways of working or living, which means to
experience loss—loss of competence, loss of report-
ing relationships, loss of jobs, loss of traditions, or
loss of loyalty to the people who taught us the les-
sons of our heritage. Thus, an adaptive challenge
generates a situation that forces us to make tough
tradeoffs. The source of the resistance that people
have to change isn’t resistance to change per se; it is
resistance to loss. People love change when they

10——— Adaptive Work

Table 1: Technical and Adaptive Work
Solutions and Primary Locus of

Kind of Work Problem Definition Implementation Responsibility for the Work
Technical Clear Clear Authority
Technical and Adaptive Clear Requires Learning Authority and Stakeholders
Adaptive Requires Learning Requires Learning Stakeholder > Authority

Source: R. A. Heifetz (1994, 76).

know it is beneficial. Nobody gives
the lottery ticket back when he or
she wins. Leadership must con-
tend, then, with the various forms
of feared and real losses that
accompany adaptive work.

Anchored to the tasks of mobi-
lizing people to thrive in new and
challenging contexts, leadership is
not simply about change; more
profoundly leadership is about
identifying that which is worth
conserving. It is the conserving of
the precious dimensions of our past
that makes the pains of change
worth sustaining.

IMPROVISATION

Fifth, adaptive work demands experimentation. In
biology, the adaptability of a species depends on the
multiplicity of experiments that are being run con-
stantly within its gene pool, increasing the odds that
in that distributed intelligence some diverse member
of the species will have the means to succeed in a new
context. Similarly, in cultural adaptation, an organi-
zation or community needs to be running multiple
experiments and learning fast from these experiments
in order to see “which horses to ride into the future.”

Technical problem solving appropriately and effi-
ciently depends on authoritative experts for knowl-
edge and decisive action.

In contrast, dealing with adaptive challenges
requires a comfort with not knowing where to go or
how to move next. In mobilizing adaptive work
from an authority position, leadership takes the form
of protecting elements of deviance and creativity in
the organization in spite of the inefficiencies associ-
ated with those elements. If creative or outspoken
people generate conflict, then so be it. Conflict
becomes an engine of innovation rather than solely
a source of dangerous inefficiency. Managing the
dynamic tension between creativity and efficiency
becomes an ongoing part of leadership practice for
which there exists no equilibrium point at which this
tension disappears. Leadership becomes an improv-

isation, however frustrating it may be to not know
the answers.

Sixth, the time frame of adaptive work is markedly
different from that of technical work. People need
time to learn new ways—to sift through what is pre-
cious from what is expendable and to innovate in
ways that enable people to carry forward into the
future that which they continue to hold precious from
the past. Moses took forty years to bring the children
of Israel to the Promised Land, not because it was
such a long walk from Egypt, but rather because it
took that much time for the people to leave behind the
dependent mentality of slavery and generate the
capacity for self-government guided by faith in some-
thing ineffable. (See Figure 1.)

Because people have so much difficulty sustain-
ing prolonged periods of disturbance and uncer-
tainty, people naturally engage in a variety of efforts
to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible, even if
it means avoiding adaptive work and begging the
tough issues. Most forms of adaptive failure are a
product of our difficulty in containing prolonged
periods of experimentation and the difficult conver-
sations that accompany them.

Work avoidance is simply the natural effort to
restore a more familiar order, to restore equilibrium.
Although many forms of work avoidance operate

Adaptive Work ———11

Source: Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie

Figure 1. Technical Problem or Adaptive Challenge?

across cultures and peoples, two common pathways
appear to exist: the displacement of responsibility
and the diversion of attention. Both pathways work
all too well in the short term, even if they leave peo-
ple more exposed and vulnerable in the medium and
long terms. Some common forms of displacement of
responsibility include scapegoating, blaming the per-
sistence of problems on authority, externalizing the
enemy, and killing the messenger. Diverting atten-
tion can take the form of fake remedies, such as the
Golden Calf of the Bible’s Book of Exodus; an effort
to define problems to fit one’s competence; repeated
structural adjustments; the faulty use of consultants,
committees, and task forces; sterile conflicts and
proxy fights (“let’s watch the gladiator fight!”); and
outright denial.

Seventh, adaptive work is a normative concept.
The concept of adaptation arises from scientific
efforts to understand biological evolution. Applied to
the change of cultures and societies, the concept
becomes a useful, if inexact, metaphor. For example,
species evolve, whereas cultures learn. Evolution is
generally understood by scientists as a matter of
chance, whereas societies will often consciously
deliberate, plan, and intentionally experiment. Close
to our normative concern, biological evolution con-
forms to laws of survival. Societies, on the other
hand, generate purposes beyond survival. The con-
cept of adaptation applied to culture raises the ques-
tion, “Adapt to what, for what purpose?”

In biology the “objective function” of adaptive
work is straightforward: to thrive in new environ-
ments. Survival of the self and one’s gene-carrying
kin defines the direction in which animals adapt. A
situation becomes an adaptive challenge because it
threatens the capacity of a species to pass on its
genetic heritage. Thus, when a species multiplies its
own kind and succeeds in passing on its genes, it is
said to be “thriving” in its environment.

Thriving is more than coping. Nothing is trivial in
biology about adaptation. Some adaptive leaps trans-
form the capacity of a species by sparking an ongo-
ing and profound process of adaptive change that
leads to a vastly expanded range of living.

In human societies “thriving” takes on a host of
values not restricted to survival of one’s own kind. At

times human beings will even trade off their own
survival for values such as liberty, justice, and faith.
Thus, adaptive work in cultures involves both the
clarification of values and the assessment of realities
that challenge the realization of those values.

Because most organizations and communities
honor a mix of values, the competition within this
mix largely explains why adaptive work so often
involves conflict. People with competing values
engage one another as they confront a shared situa-
tion from their own points of view. At its extreme,
and in the absence of better methods of social change,
the conflict over values can be violent. The U.S. Civil
War changed the meaning of union and individual
freedom. In 1857 fulfilling the preamble to the Con-
stitutional goal “to insure domestic tranquility”
meant the return of escaped slaves to their owners; in
1957 it meant the use of federal troops to integrate
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Some realities threaten not only a set of values
beyond survival, but also the very existence of a
society if these realities are not discovered and met
early on by the value-clarifying and reality-testing
functions of that society. In the view of many envi-
ronmentalists, for example, our focus on the produc-
tion of wealth rather than co-existence with nature
has led us to neglect fragile factors in our ecosystem.
These factors may become relevant to us when
finally they begin to challenge our central values of
health and survival, but by then, we may have paid a
high price in damage already done, and the costs of
and odds against adaptive adjustment may have
increased enormously.

Adaptive work, then, requires us to deliberate on
the values by which we seek to thrive and demands
diagnostic inquiry into the realities that threaten the
realization of those values. Beyond legitimizing a
convenient set of assumptions about reality, beyond
denying or avoiding the internal contradictions in
some of the values we hold precious, and beyond
coping, adaptive work involves proactively seeking
to clarify aspirations or develop new ones, and then
involves the hard work of innovation, experimenta-
tion, and cultural change to realize a closer approxi-
mation of those aspirations by which we would
define “thriving.”

12——— Adaptive Work

The normative tests of adaptive work, then,
involve an appraisal of both the processes by which
orienting values are clarified in an organization or
community and the quality of reality testing by
which a more accurate rather than convenient diag-
nosis is achieved. For example, by these tests serving
up fake remedies for our collective troubles by
scapegoating and externalizing the enemy, as was
done in extreme form in Nazi Germany, might gen-
erate throngs of misled supporters who readily grant
to charlatans extraordinary authority in the short run,
but they would not constitute adaptive work. Nor
would political efforts to gain influence and author-
ity by pandering to people’s longing for easy answers
constitute leadership. Indeed, misleading people is
likely over time to produce adaptive failure.

—Ronald A. Heifetz

Further Reading
Foster, R. (2001). Creative destruction: Why companies that

are built to last underperform the market—and how to suc-
cessfully transform them. New York: Doubleday.

Freud, S. (1959). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego.
New York: Norton.

Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers (p. 76).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Heifetz, R. A., & Laurie, D. L. (1988). Mobilizing adaptive
work: Beyond visionary leadership. In Conger, Spreitzer, &
ler (Eds.), The Leader’s Change Handbook: An Essen-
tial Guide to Setting Direction and Taking Action. New
York: John Wiley and Sons.

Kuhn, T. A. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

May, R. (1975). The courage to create. New York: Bantam.
Pascale, R. T., Milleman, M., & Gioja, L. (2000). Surfing the

edge of chaos: The laws of nature and the new laws of busi-
ness. New York: Crown.

Selznick, P. (1957). Leadership in administration. New York:
Harper & Row.

Tucker, R. C. (1981). Politics as leadership. Columbia: Univer-
sity of Missouri Press.

Wildavsky, A. (1984). The nursing father: Moses as a political
leader. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press.

! AFRICA
See Apartheid in South Africa, Demise of;
Haile Selassie; Harris, William Wade;
Kenyatta, Jomo; Lumumba, Patrice;

Mandela, Nelson; Mau Mau Rebellion;
Nasser, Gamal Abdel; Nkrumah, Kwame;
Nyerere, Julius; Shaka Zulu; Suez Crisis of
1956; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions;
Tutu, Desmond

! AFRICAN-AMERICAN
LEADERSHIP
See Civil Rights Act of 1964; Civil Rights
Movement; Du Bois, W. E. B.; King, Martin
Luther, Jr.; Malcolm X; Robinson, Jackie;
Russell, Bill; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

! AKBAR (1542–1605)
Mughal emperor

Akbar was the grandson of Babur (1483–1530), who
founded the Mughal rule (1526–1857) in India.
Babur was succeeded by his son Humayun
(1508–1556), during the first portion of whose reign
(1530–1540) the territories conquered earlier by
Mughals was lost to the Afghans. After an interreg-
num of rule by the Afghan dynasty of Sur, the
Mughals were again able to set foothold over Delhi
in 1555; yet until his death in 1556, Humayun was
fighting on many fronts to recapture the empire.
After Humayun’s death the Afghans under their
Hindu Prime Minister Hemu reoccupied Delhi. It
was left to Akbar, Humayun’s son, to build up the
empire from scratch and raise it to glorious heights.
Akbar was only fourteen years old when he was
coronated, and under his command, Mughals
defeated Hemu in the second Battle of Panipat
(November 5, 1556) that is considered landmark in
reestablishment of Mughal rule in India.

Akbar’s leadership skills were not limited to war
or to the expansion and consolidation of the Mughal
empire; indeed, his most important contribution was
the way that he molded the Mughal empire and cre-
ated legitimacy for his rule that was based not on
brute force, but on the consent of the governed.
Despite Mughals being Sunni, Akbar refused to

Akbar———13