Have you ever heard the saying, “The people with the problem are the problem — and are the solution”?

There’s no doubt that leaders today are navigating more complex challenges than ever before. Fast-changing global dynamics, market volatility and the acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) are disrupting and impacting organizations in profound ways. And it’s no longer just the job of the C-suite to respond — we’re seeing executive teams calling on leaders at all levels to drive transformation programs while also managing the impacts of change on their teams.

This pushing down of complexity is both a challenge and an opportunity. There’s no playbook for what leaders are navigating today. Yet history shows great leadership is often forged in difficult times — when leaders are driven to operate on the edge of certainty and comfort and harness the collective capabilities and wisdom of their teams.

Training managers have a vital role to play in this. For leaders to thrive in these conditions, they need the right tools, mindsets and environment to support them.

Applying the Right Leadership Style to Challenges

We tend to think of success in solving challenges as a straight line, when it’s often far more messy, involving backwards and sideways steps in the process of moving forward.

As Harvard professor Ron Heifetz points out in his work on adaptive leadership, to lead through challenges effectively it’s important to first diagnose the type of challenge you’re dealing with:

• Technical challenges are clear cut. They have been dealt with before and require expertise or best practices to solve. If we can teach someone how to tackle a challenge, then it’s a technical one. A simple example is building a bridge.
• Adaptive challenges are far more complex, often involving many actors and parties with a stake, and sometimes “blurry” causes and effects. There are no known solutions. Understanding and moving through these challenges requires pausing to diagnose the challenge correctly and invite diverse perspectives, then moving quickly to action by creating space for collaboration and experimentation — all the while holding a willingness to surface uncomfortable truths. An example is the introduction of AI agents into workplaces, a challenge that humans are navigating for the very first time.

It’s all too common for leaders to treat adaptive challenges as technical ones, which explains the high failure rates of change programs in organizations. When the wrong type of leadership is applied, barriers are hit and nothing changes.

Equipping Leaders to Solve Adaptive Challenges

When designing leadership development programs, there are four key processes training managers should build in — and the best way to do this is to get leaders to work through real-life challenges they’re dealing with right now.

1. Get on the balcony: When navigating a new challenge, leaders should start by briefly stepping back to get a broad, strategic view of the situation. This includes seeking to understand the dynamics at play and root causes. With more clarity, they can figure out if the challenge they’re looking at is adaptive, technical, or more likely a combination of both, and apply the right approaches.
2. Enlist and collaborate: Once an adaptive challenge is identified, leaders can enlist their team and other stakeholders in working through it. With adaptive challenges, no one person has all the answers, so collaboration is key to getting to solutions.
3. Run experiments to learn through doing: Developing a large-scale, detailed plan upfront, and attempting to implement it in full, is a recipe for failure when tackling adaptive challenges. Instead, teams should experiment with lots of small interventions or prototypes, assess results, and course correct as they go. As well as helping move towards solutions, experiments often help those involved understand the situation better — similar to throwing stones into a pond and watching the shape of the waves to understand what’s below the surface.
4. Reflect to learn and innovate: Deliberate reflection allows individuals and teams to learn from the results of experiments, refine and iterate their approach, and gain important insights, leading to solutions.

Adeption’s Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better methodology is built to support these processes. It provides leaders with a simple and practical framework to navigate adaptive challenges and share with their teams.

Mindset Growth Enables Adaptive Leadership

We all have different ways of looking at situations that are filtered by the mindsets we hold from our life experiences.

Leading through adaptive challenges requires a flexible way of seeing the world. This helps us appreciate the many shades of grey and interdependencies that exist and see new options and possibilities.

Consider looking at leaders’ mindsets through the lens of vertical development, which categorizes how leaders think and perceive into a series of mindset stages. Mindset development helps leaders grow the range of mindsets they can access — giving them more mental models to draw on.

Take a simple example of a manager with a team member who’s performing poorly on a project. A leader could look at this in a range of ways:

• They may think “I didn’t train them right.” Or “They’re not smart enough” (an Expert mindset). The action they’d take as a result is skills based.
• They could assume “The importance of the task wasn’t clear enough.” Or “The goal wasn’t well enough defined” (Achiever mindset).
• They might focus on the system instead of the individual and think “This happened because we didn’t put the right onboarding steps in place two years ago” (Transforming mindset).

Integrating mindset development in adaptive leadership training is essential for two reasons:

1. It builds awareness that when we think about situations through different mindsets, we “see” different things. This alone can be a big unlock as it provides leaders with choice, rather than unconsciously defaulting to their go-to ways of thinking.
2. Growing leaders’ mindsets is important, as it’s hard to try on different mindsets you don’t yet have.

When leaders grow their mindset range, they’re able to take a more holistic view of challenges, have more empathy for different perspectives, and access more possibilities.

The adaptive leadership processes outlined above enable this. Mindset growth naturally happens when you seek out colliding perspectives, have experiences that challenge your habitual ways of thinking, and use reflection to learn and elevate how you make sense of what you’re seeing. Leadership development programs that enable these processes can foster measurable mindset growth in a matter of months.

Final Thoughts

Adaptive challenges aren’t new to leaders. If you look back in time, many of today’s technical challenges were yesterday’s adaptive challenges.

What’s new is the pace at which new adaptive challenges are arising. For training managers, equipping leaders with the tools, mindsets and environment to navigate adaptive challenges effectively is vital — not only for solving today’s complex problems but also for building resilience and readiness for whatever comes next.