How leaders use operational evidence, bounded experiments, and accountable decisions to guide concurrent change
A leadership team can approve several sensible initiatives and still create an unworkable situation.
A customer-service platform needs experienced supervisors for testing. A pricing change needs those same supervisors to explain new terms. An artificial-intelligence pilot needs them to review unfamiliar outputs. Meanwhile, customers continue calling and normal operations must continue.
The difficulty is not contained in any one project plan. It sits in the relationship between the plans and the organization expected to carry them.
Adaptive leadership during organizational change becomes essential when leaders must learn what the combined change actually requires and adjust decisions as that understanding develops.
For organizations living with continuous change, adaptability includes the willingness to revise priorities, redistribute responsibility, test assumptions about available capacity, and reconsider how several initiatives interact. Asking employees to become more flexible addresses only part of the problem. Leaders must also be willing to adapt the conditions and commitments they create.
Why Adaptive Leadership Matters During Organizational Change
Change plans are based on assumptions.
Leaders make assumptions about available capacity, employee capability, customer effects, system performance, implementation timing, dependencies, and the willingness of different groups to support the change.
Some assumptions can be tested before implementation. Others become visible only when the change enters ordinary operations.
Adaptive leadership helps leaders respond when experience challenges the original plan. It does not mean abandoning direction whenever a difficulty appears. It means determining what kind of problem the organization is facing, what must be learned, who should participate, and which commitments may need to change.
This is especially important when organizations are managing several concurrent change initiatives. A problem that appears inside one project may be caused by an interaction with another initiative, a capacity constraint, an existing process, or an unresolved enterprise decision.
Separate Technical Problems From Adaptive Challenges
Ronald Heifetz’s adaptive leadership framework distinguishes technical challenges from adaptive challenges.
Technical challenges can generally be addressed through existing knowledge, expertise, procedures, or authority. Adaptive challenges require people to learn, reconsider assumptions, negotiate competing values, or change established ways of working.
Harvard Kennedy School’s overview of The Practice of Adaptive Leadership describes the approach as practical leadership work for addressing difficult challenges that require people and organizations to move beyond familiar patterns.
Technical and adaptive work can occur inside the same initiative.
Configuring access to a new platform may be a technical task. Deciding how sales and customer service should share responsibility for a customer relationship may require negotiation, experimentation, and changes in established authority.
Correcting a software defect may require technical expertise. Determining how much human review an artificial-intelligence tool requires may involve customer expectations, professional judgment, risk tolerance, employee capability, and organizational responsibility.
An executive who treats an adaptive challenge as a technical problem may commission more technical work while the underlying disagreement continues. An executive who labels every difficulty adaptive may overlook a defect that someone already knows how to correct.
The practical leadership task is to determine what kind of work each problem requires.
The related GRIFFOX article on project management and change management across the enterprise examines how delivery and organizational adoption contribute different but connected forms of work.
Do Not Place the Entire Burden of Adaptation on Employees
Organizations frequently describe adaptability as an employee capability. Employees are expected to remain flexible, learn new systems, accept changing priorities, and maintain performance during implementation.
Those expectations may be reasonable, but they do not remove leadership responsibility.
Leaders influence:
- How many initiatives enter the organization
- Which priorities receive attention
- Whether implementation periods overlap
- How responsibilities and decision rights are distributed
- Whether operational concerns affect plans
- Which work will stop when new work is introduced
- How quickly unresolved problems reach someone with authority
- Whether evidence can change an earlier commitment
Employees cannot resolve a portfolio conflict simply by becoming more resilient. A team cannot create additional capacity through positive communication. A manager cannot correct contradictory enterprise priorities without the authority to change them.
When the combined demand approaches or exceeds what people and operations can absorb, leaders must address the relationship between change demand, change capacity, and change saturation.
Adaptive leadership therefore applies to leadership decisions as well as employee behavior.
Create Conditions in Which Adaptive Work Can Continue
Adaptive challenges create pressure because they may require people to reconsider established practices, relationships, authority, competence, or professional identity. Some discomfort is unavoidable when genuine learning and change are required.
Leaders must therefore pay attention to the level of pressure surrounding the work. If there is too little urgency, the organization may avoid the difficult issue. If pressure becomes excessive, people may become defensive, overwhelmed, or unable to learn.
Adaptive leadership involves creating a sufficiently stable environment in which people can remain engaged with difficult questions. This is sometimes described as a holding environment. It may include:
- Clear purpose and boundaries
- Honest information about what is known and uncertain
- Sufficient time and capacity for learning
- Permission to test ideas and acknowledge mistakes
- Constructive ways to address disagreement
- Protection for people who raise inconvenient evidence
- Accountability for participating in the work
Empathy matters within this environment, but empathy alone is insufficient. Leaders must understand what people may lose while still maintaining attention on the change that must be addressed.
Leaders also need to move between participation and perspective. Heifetz describes this as getting on the balcony: stepping back from immediate activity to observe patterns, relationships, avoidance, and competing commitments across the wider system.
After gaining that perspective, leaders must return responsibility to the people who hold relevant knowledge and experience. Giving work back does not mean abandoning employees to solve enterprise problems without authority. It means allowing them to participate in diagnosis, experimentation, and local problem-solving while leadership retains responsibility for decisions involving priorities, resources, policy, and organizational direction.
Voices from operational levels require particular attention. Employees closest to customers, systems, and daily work may see problems that formal leaders cannot yet see. Protecting those voices does not require accepting every interpretation. It requires ensuring that credible concerns can be examined without being dismissed or punished merely because they challenge the approved plan.
Reflection Cycles and Operational Integration can support this work by making employee experience, emerging conflicts, and operational evidence visible. When the issue exceeds local authority, the Change Office can connect related signals and prepare options for Enterprise Governance.
Make Room for a Bounded Experiment
Adaptive challenges often require learning through experience. A bounded experiment allows the organization to test important assumptions without treating every pilot as an automatic first step toward full deployment.
Consider an illustrative company introducing artificial-intelligence assistance for customer service while also changing its pricing model.
Leaders expect the technology to shorten preparation time, but they do not yet know whether it will help with complicated pricing questions. They also do not know how much review will be required or whether the tool will recognize important customer exceptions.
A useful pilot should identify:
- The management questions being tested
- The customer situations included in the trial
- The operating conditions under which it will run
- The people responsible for reviewing results
- The boundaries of local decision authority
- The evidence required for the next decision
- The conditions that would require adjustment or escalation
The assessment must include the time employees spend checking suggestions, correcting errors, documenting exceptions, and explaining results to customers. That effort is part of the implementation demand.
The team should have authority to adjust local working practices within agreed boundaries. Questions about broader customer commitments, resources, policy, or the timing of another initiative need a route to the leaders who can decide them.
Experimentation becomes difficult when everyone can suggest changes but no one knows who can authorize them.
The purpose of the pilot is to learn enough to make a better next decision. Expansion is one possible outcome. Redesign, postponement, narrower use, or stopping may also be responsible outcomes.
This learning orientation also supports agile change management across concurrent initiatives when short learning cycles remain connected to enterprise priorities and operational reality.
Read Operational Experience Alongside Project Progress
A project can make progress while the affected operation becomes less stable.
The technology team may report that the pilot is ready. Service supervisors may report that pricing questions are taking longer and that the same employees are supporting two launches. Both observations can be accurate.
A useful leadership review must examine:
- What the project has completed
- What employees are experiencing
- Whether customers are receiving the intended result
- Which workarounds have appeared
- Whether service, quality, or rework is changing
- Which dependencies remain unresolved
- What other initiatives are affecting the same operation
- Whether managers have the capacity and authority to support the change
The GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model™ connects the individual initiative with the operational units where change must be interpreted, implemented, and sustained.
Operational Integration makes dependencies and interactions among initiatives, operational conditions, and employee experiences visible and manageable.
In the example, leaders need to ask:
- Which routines must change?
- Who will maintain them?
- What work must continue during the transition?
- Where does one initiative alter the conditions assumed by another?
- Which local adjustments are authorized?
- Which problems require a decision beyond the initiative?
The answers should influence the plan. Recording operational concerns without changing anything can leave the organization dependent on overtime, informal favors, unsupported workarounds, or work that quietly stops getting done.
Treat Operational Observations as Evidence That Requires Interpretation
Adaptive leadership depends on learning, but leaders still need to interpret what they observe carefully.
A complaint, performance result, employee comment, project event, or customer-service problem begins as information. It becomes a useful signal when it is interpreted against a management question, relevant context, a baseline, an objective, or a risk.
For example, employees continuing to use an old process may indicate reluctance. It may also reveal a system defect, a missing exception process, inadequate training, or conflicting requirements from another initiative.
The GRIFFOX article on employee resistance to change examines why leaders should diagnose the behavior and its conditions before selecting a response.
Related signals can form a broader signal picture. That picture may show that:
- One team has a local capability gap.
- Several units are encountering the same system problem.
- A customer effect is increasing as implementation expands.
- Project progress and operational performance are moving in different directions.
- A capacity constraint involves several initiatives.
- The original business assumption no longer fits current conditions.
Adaptive leadership does not mean responding to every isolated observation. It requires leaders to recognize which evidence is relevant, which patterns are emerging, and which decisions the evidence should influence.
Keep Enterprise Choices With Accountable Leaders
When competing initiatives draw on the same capacity, someone must make a choice across them. A project manager cannot reasonably settle that choice when it exceeds the authority of the project.
Within the GLCM Enterprise Change Architecture, a Change Office function can integrate signals, identify patterns and dependencies, examine capacity constraints, and prepare realistic options. That function may sit within an existing project management office, strategy team, transformation function, or another coordinating structure.
Enterprise Governance retains responsibility for decisions within its mandate.
For the illustrative company, the options could include:
- Narrowing the artificial-intelligence pilot
- Moving the pricing launch
- Temporarily adding operational support
- Reducing another commitment
- Changing the sequence of implementation
- Establishing an approved exception process
Each option changes costs, timing, operational exposure, and potential customer effects.
Leaders need to evaluate the tradeoffs, make the decision, and communicate it back to the people doing the work. Repeatedly asking teams to “work it out together” is insufficient when the unresolved question is which enterprise commitment takes precedence.
The GRIFFOX article on Enterprise Change Governance examines how decision rights, operational evidence, capacity, priorities, and management action can be connected across multiple initiatives.
Revisit the Assumptions Behind the Decision
An adaptive review should return to the assumptions that justified the plan.
Useful questions include:
- What did we expect to happen?
- What are we observing instead?
- Which assumptions have been supported?
- Which assumptions should be reconsidered?
- Which effects come from this initiative?
- Which effects may involve other changes or existing operations?
- What can the team adjust within its authority?
- Which decision requires operational or enterprise leadership?
- What additional evidence would improve the next decision?
- What would make us reconsider the next stage of work?
The review rhythm should fit the pace, uncertainty, and consequences of the change. A rapidly evolving pilot may need closer attention than an established process improvement. There is no useful universal meeting frequency.
Reflection Cycles create recurring opportunities to compare intended results with operational experience. They can occur throughout the work and at every GLCM layer.
Recalibration provides a deliberate point for evaluating emerging evidence and deciding whether the implementation, timing, scope, direction, or underlying assumptions should change.
The decision may be to maintain the current course. It may also be to adjust, wait, return to an earlier question, or stop a particular course of action.
Once a Goal is achieved, the resulting capability, constraints, and experience become part of the organization’s next Foundation and Experience. The organization has changed, so the next decision should begin from that new reality.
Connect Adaptive Leadership With Organizational Readiness
Adaptive leadership and organizational change readiness answer related questions.
A readiness assessment asks what the organization is prepared to do next, under which conditions, and with which risks. Adaptive leadership determines how leaders respond when implementation produces new evidence or challenges an earlier assumption.
An organization may be ready to begin a pilot while remaining unready for enterprise deployment. It may be ready to implement a technical component while an adaptive question about roles, customer commitments, or decision authority remains unresolved.
The article on organizational change readiness provides eight executive questions for examining strategy, scope, dependencies, capacity, ownership, stakeholder experience, evidence, and risk.
Adaptive leaders use that understanding to determine which conditions must be strengthened and which commitments should change.
What Adaptive Leadership During Organizational Change Looks Like
Adaptive leadership becomes visible through management behavior.
Leaders demonstrate it when they:
- Distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges
- Define what must be learned
- Create bounded opportunities for experimentation
- Give teams meaningful authority within clear limits
- Examine project progress alongside operational experience
- Connect related evidence across initiatives
- Reconsider assumptions when evidence changes
- Escalate issues to the level with authority to resolve them
- Adjust priorities and commitments when necessary
- Explain decisions and tradeoffs to affected people
- Review the consequences of their actions
This does not weaken accountability. It strengthens accountability by requiring leaders to take responsibility for the conditions under which change is expected to succeed.
Adaptive leadership during organizational change is therefore more than flexibility or openness to new ideas. It is the disciplined practice of learning from operational reality and allowing that learning to influence responsible decisions.
Where several changes meet the same organization, this capability helps leaders protect strategic direction while adjusting the route used to reach it.
Explore the GLCM Enterprise Change Architecture to see how individual initiatives, Operational Integration, Change Office support, Enterprise Governance, and continuous feedback can work as a connected system.
If competing initiatives are making your next decision difficult, begin a conversation with GRIFFOX about the operational realities, leadership choices, and organizational conditions involved.
By Harald Lavric | Founder, GRIFFOX Consulting | Creator, GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model™
About Harald Lavric
Harald Lavric is the founder of GRIFFOX Consulting and creator of the GRIFFOX Layered Cake Model™. His work focuses on the connections among leadership, strategy, organizational change, operational responsibility, and enterprise decision-making. Drawing on more than three decades of experience in the German health-insurance system and work across public- and private-sector environments, he helps leaders make overlapping change more coherent and workable.