Programs

THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS: Fostering real learning in a risk averse world.​

“How do we create real learning and progress in a disturbed world, where people crave more certainty, care and safety?”

• What is the need for continued challenge, even provocation, in our leadership development work?
• What are the risks now and are they the same as before? Or are the costs higher now?
• How can you tell how concerned/vulnerable participants are? What are the signals?
• What type of conditions are required to optimise learning? Are our current holding environments adequate?
• What are the ethical issues we need to consider when challenging people?
• Can you ‘teach’ adaptive leadership if you can’t challenge people?

It is clear we are coming to terms with a different world than expected.

We need to adapt and help our clients do the same.

Our world, in Australia and beyond, has been buffeted by extraordinary events since the last AALI Master Class in early 2022.

The local and global impact of the war in Ukraine, the long tail of Covid-19 and the ever-apparent global consequences of climate change.

Patterns of our work are changing. Attitudes to race, gender and social issues require all of us to reconsider where to place ourselves, let alone what to do.

All of these circumstances lead us to ask, “What is it time for now in our work?”

This question is central to the 2023 AALI Masterclass and we will examine the relevance of the question for us individually and collectively.

• What do you feel called to pay attention to and what is required in your professional role to help others do the same?
• What needs to be done collectively that can’t be done individually? And given the need for greater collective effort, how do we create shared learning in a time of increasing fragmentation?
• What is required of us?

These questions have direct implications for our work:

• How do we partner in a competitive environment?
• How do we remain a learner while others look to us for our expertise?
• In a time of turmoil and transition what different and new roles do we need to explore?
• How do we deal with the opposition and resistance of others?

The question on the minds of so many as we approach 2022 is: “when will life get back to some semblance of normal?”. Or what will the ‘new normal’ be? Answering this for ourselves and our clients, is complex, in part because we cannot know the answer. But we can look for the most useful questions and these will become the focus for the 2022 Masterclass:

• How do you get ready for something that is as yet undefined?
• Where is your well of renewal?
• Where will you start? With problems and challenges, or with people and their hopes and aspirations? Or both?

Past Masterclasses have emphasised the external challenges we all face and the facilitation skills needed to undertake leadership and adaptive work. This time we will identify our internal challenges as part of being ready to respond fully to our professional and personal life challenges. We will take an inside-out perspective and invite you into an exploration of:

• Who am I becoming, as a person and as an adaptive practitioner?
• What am I holding onto and what can I reshape?
• Your best way to build your capacity to maintain presence and dexterity in the face of so many unknowns
• What will I celebrate about my impact, influence and my own adaptive skills? What am I willing to be pleasantly surprised about?

This will be a different Masterclass. It will be more of a collaborative, just-in-time, co-learning experience as the faculty see themselves in the same boat. We will share some of our ideas and draw on yours. We will provide some structure and will also let go. We will use reflection activities and invite you all to exchange feedback. And we will connect all of this to the practice of leadership education.

Explore, reflect, renew and reinvigorate.

In 2020 AALI continued building an active nucleus of adaptive leadership practitioners.

In an increasingly fractured world, individual and group identities play a powerful role in social change and politics, within nations and communities. We see groups of people prioritising the concerns most relevant to their own racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual, social or national identity to the exclusion of the concerns of others in order to defend their group’s interests. Problem solving and adaptation across identity divides becomes ever-more challenging and important.

This Masterclass presented an opportunity for both new and experienced Adaptive Leadership practitioners to experiment with and extend their current repertoire, to practice and share with colleagues and to be a part of a uniquely Australasian leadership development profession.

AALI’s 3 day workshop provided an introduction to Adaptive Leadership, building on ideas developed at Harvard’s Kennedy School over the past thirty-five years, and explored the application of several core principles and skill-sets required for leading adaptation and change in a range of organizational and community settings. Adaptive Leadership is a powerful framework, and set of tools and practices, for navigating the complex social, economic and political problems of our times. The approach combines understandings of adaptation and change, systems theory, group dynamics and adult learning.

Adaptation and leadership are to all organisatons if they are to survive and thrive in our current demanding and changing times. Business as usual will not be sufficient and everyone will need to adapt: to examine practices, values and ways of doing business ensuring we are “fit for purpose”.

This workshop will provided the participants with insights into several key adaptive capacities that effective organizations need to develop including:

• The diagnostic skills needed to determine when a challenge is predominately adaptive, not technical;
• Overcoming the tendency to conflate Leadership and Authority;
• The relationship skills needed to mobilize others to action and;
• The experimental skills required to test new ideas that lead to innovation.

In addition to exploring key ideas relevant to adaptation and change, the workshop also provided an opportunity to apply a new skill set to real challenges that participants, their organisations, clients and partners face, and to test prevailing attitudes and beliefs about leadership, including barriers to progress.

Overall, Adaptive Leadership opens up new ways to think about and make progress on complex problems and to contribute to the deep desire leaders have to make Australia and the world at large, a better place.

Case in Point (CiP) teaching is a powerful methodology helping leaders learn about adaptation and leadership by experiencing it directly in a workshop setting, team or coaching session. The method enables you to identify moments where participants experience a leadership dilemma directly and then to learn from the shared experience. CiP builds the critical leadership capacities necessary  for holding people to challenging work while learning together and in so doing, building new leadership “muscles”.

Masterclass Outcomes

This comprehensive program will give you:

• Improved skills in facilitating, teaching and consulting and an enhanced diagnostic and intervention capacity
• Greater insights into the way human interaction and group dynamics shape behaviour during learning An expanded range of tools and interventions used in keeping groups in a learning zone
• A peer group and network of committed practitioners from a wide variety of professional settings Certification from Australia’s only professional body of adaptive leadership practitioners.

The 2019 Masterclass continued AALI’s focus on encouraging participation and growth of our community of practice, and forming an ‘active nucleus’ of adaptive leadership practitioners within Australia.

AALI’s 3 day workshop provided an introduction to Adaptive Leadership, building on ideas developed at Harvard’s Kennedy School over the past thirty-five years, and explored the application of several core principles and skill-sets required for leading adaptation and change in a range of organizational and community settings. Adaptive Leadership is a powerful framework, and set of tools and practices, for navigating the complex social, economic and political problems of our times. The approach combines understandings of adaptation and change, systems theory, group dynamics and adult learning.

Adaptation and leadership are to all organisatons if they are to survive and thrive in our current demanding and changing times. Business as usual will not be sufficient and everyone will need to adapt: to examine practices, values and ways of doing business ensuring we are “fit for purpose”.

This workshop will provided the participants with insights into several key adaptive capacities that effective organizations need to develop including:

• The diagnostic skills needed to determine when a challenge is predominately adaptive, not technical;
• Overcoming the tendency to conflate Leadership and Authority;
• The relationship skills needed to mobilize others to action and;
• The experimental skills required to test new ideas that lead to innovation.

In addition to exploring key ideas relevant to adaptation and change, the workshop also provided an opportunity to apply a new skill set to real challenges that participants, their organisations, clients and partners face, and to test prevailing attitudes and beliefs about leadership, including barriers to progress.

Overall, Adaptive Leadership opens up new ways to think about and make progress on complex problems and to contribute to the deep desire leaders have to make Australia and the world at large, a better place.

AALI’s 3 day workshop provided an introduction to Adaptive Leadership, building on ideas developed at Harvard’s Kennedy School over the past thirty-five years, and explored the application of several core principles and skill-sets required for leading adaptation and change in a range of organizational and community settings. Adaptive Leadership is a powerful framework, and set of tools and practices, for navigating the complex social, economic and political problems of our times. The approach combines understandings of adaptation and change, systems theory, group dynamics and adult learning.

Adaptation and leadership are to all organisatons if they are to survive and thrive in our current demanding and changing times. Business as usual will not be sufficient and everyone will need to adapt: to examine practices, values and ways of doing business ensuring we are “fit for purpose”.

This workshop will provided the participants with insights into several key adaptive capacities that effective organizations need to develop including:

• The diagnostic skills needed to determine when a challenge is predominately adaptive, not technical;
• Overcoming the tendency to conflate Leadership and Authority;
• The relationship skills needed to mobilize others to action and;
• The experimental skills required to test new ideas that lead to innovation.

In addition to exploring key ideas relevant to adaptation and change, the workshop also provided an opportunity to apply a new skill set to real challenges that participants, their organisations, clients and partners face, and to test prevailing attitudes and beliefs about leadership, including barriers to progress.

Overall, Adaptive Leadership opens up new ways to think about and make progress on complex problems and to contribute to the deep desire leaders have to make Australia and the world at large, a better place.