A hands-on, practical guide, "Practice of Adaptive Leadership" contains stories, tools, diagrams, cases, and worksheets to help managers develop their skills as leaders who are able to take people outside their comfort zones and address the toughest challenges.

The volume examines how leadership and layers of leaders are developed and cultivated from the classroom to the boardroom. Some of the topics include leadership recruitment and selection processes, retention, coaching and mentoring, placement and continued professional development support for aspiring and practicing leaders.

Based on a case study of urban school superintendents in a leadership development program, this book offers a concrete demonstration of how adaptive leadership is applied and learned. Blending the theory of adaptive leadership with the practice of urban school superintendents, this book also utilizes the analytic lens of transformative learning as developed by Jack Mezirow.

Conflict is a persistent fact of organizational life. Much of it, however, rarely becomes public and instead is expressed `behind the scenes' in such forms as avoidance, toleration, gossip and vengence. This book takes examples from a number of organizational settings and makes the case that far from being an occasional occurrence, conflict is embedded in their very fabric. The authors go on to illustrate the frequency of conflict, show how conflicts are actually handled and suggest that these conflicts can be better managed for organizational effectiveness.

Water policy seems in perpetual crisis. Increasingly, conflicts extend beyond the statutory authority, competence, geographical jurisdictions, and political constituencies of highly specialized governing authorities. While other books address specific policy approaches or the application of adaptive management strategies to specific problems, this is the first book to focus more broadly on adaptive governance, or the evolution of new institutions that attempt to resolve conflicts among competing authorities. Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict investigates new types of water conflicts among users in the seemingly water-rich Eastern United States. Eight case studies of water quality, water quantity, and habitat preservation or restoration in Florida were chosen to span the range of conflicts crossing fragmented regulatory boundaries. Each begins with a history of the conflict and then focuses on the innovative institutional arrangements - some successful, some not - that evolved to grapple with the resulting challenges. In the chapters that follow, scholars and practitioners in urban planning, political science, engineering, law, policy, administration, and geology offer different theoretical and experience-based perspectives on the cases. Together, they discuss five challenges that new institutions must overcome to develop sustainable solutions for water users: Who is to be involved in the policy process? How are they to interact? How is science to be used? How are users and the public to be made aware? How can solutions be made efficient and equitable? In its diverse perspectives and unique combination of theory, application, and analysis, Adaptive Governance and Water Conflict will be a valuable book for water professionals, policy scientists, students, and scholars in natural resource planning and management.

With the entire world experiencing the global pandemic and its aftermath, VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) conditions have never been more extreme and the need for adaptive leadership never more urgent. But how is adaptive leadership applied outside Western cultures? How can it be taught through leadership development programs? Which tools enhance its practice and its teaching? How does adaptive leadership relate to other key theories and practices? This volume answers these questions and more as it illustrates how adaptive leadership practices address some of the world’s most pressing challenges-political and cultural division, remote work, crisis management-across a variety of sectors. Adaptive leadership has been explained as a key leadership approach for dealing with adaptive, as distinguished from technical or predictable, problems, especially prevalent in complex environments. However, adaptive leadership scholarship has suffered from a lack of conceptual clarity and casual application of its core concepts. It remains solidly Western in its prescriptions. This book will expand readers’ understanding of adaptive leadership and its potential to solve local and global adaptive challenges and will explore its relevance and application to cultures outside the United States. Aiming to increase conceptual clarity about adaptive leadership to enhance future scholarship and application and illustrate novel approaches and perspectives, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of leadership, strategy, and organizational studies.

To create deep change, you have to disturb people, or at least risk doing so. Shaking people out of their comfort zones not only generates the possibility of change but also elicits new information and brings out hidden resources that people need to navigate unfamiliar waters. Nevertheless, provoking without antagonizing or shutting people down and tolerating their pushback are complex challenges, requiring skill and will. This is the first comprehensive provocation roadmap: why provocation is necessary for effectively leading change, the different forms of provocation, action tools and frameworks, and case studies illustrating how change is achieved through the sustained and careful use of provocation and disturbance, with strategies and tactics for minimizing the risks involved. We illustrate, for example, how two Australian farmers challenged centuries-old farming practice to regenerate their properties and how a large American bank used the death of a revered CEO to reinvigorate the business. We show how a young indigenous school principal tackled entrenched attitudes to turn a failing school around and how a national statistical service acted like a technology start-up to innovate during the Covid-19 pandemic. The case studies address change at the local level, within organizations, as well as on a national scale. We finish with a synthesis of the lessons learned and a set of ideas about building people’s capacity to use provocation to live, learn, and thrive. Provocation as Leadership offers a blueprint for people who, using provocation, want to ignite change and help their organizations, group, or community break through to a better future. This book provides a vehicle to see provocation in its potential for necessary disturbance, to lay bare its anatomy, and give access to its possibilities, including how to enable provocateurs to live another day.