Discussion Assignment Part 1

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References

BERNSTEIN, M., & LINSKY, M. (2016). Leading Change Through Adaptive Design. Stanford Social

Innovation Review, 14(1), 48-54.

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Section:

FEATURES

Leading Change Through Adaptive Design

Change is fun. Change is hard. Between those truths yawns a large gap that poses a

challenge for would-be change makers. Yet by integrating two widely influential

practices—design thinking and adaptive leadership—social innovators can manage

transformative projects in a way that's both creatively confident and relentlessly

realistic.

TIM MOREHOUSE, A SILVER MEDALIST in team fencing at the 2009 Summer Olympics in

Beijing, didn't always feel a drive to excel. As a kid, he lacked focus and ambition. But

fencing, he now says, gave him the resources and the inspiration to dream big. He regards

fencing—with its focus on discipline, practice, patience, and seeing the big picture—as a

metaphor for meeting the essential challenges of life.

Today Morehouse is a social activist and entrepreneur. His mission is to take fencing out of

its elite milieu and to make it widely accessible to children and adults everywhere.[ 1]

Children, he points out, encounter images of sword fighting in many forms of entertainment.

He wants to use that familiarity with the sport as a way to spark an interest in fencing among

kids—disadvantaged inner-city boys and girls, in particular. Fencing, he believes, can nurture

qualities that will help those kids grow into successful adults.

When Morehouse set out to realize this goal, he knew that he faced huge obstacles. The cost

of the equipment needed for a school to maintain a fencing program, for a gym to offer

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fencing, or for an individual to take up the sport, is often prohibitive. And few physical

education teachers have the training that fencing experts believe is necessary to teach

fencing or to coach a fencing team.

Morehouse engaged IDEO, a firm that specializes in design thinking, to help him create

fencing equipment that would meet several criteria: It had to preserve the essence of the

sport. It had to be inexpensive enough to keep cost from being a barrier to entry. And it had to

be simple enough to use that teachers who are relatively unfamiliar with the sport could easily

adopt it. The design thinking process at IDEO resulted in prototype equipment items that

largely met Morehouse's goals. Standard fencing equipment, for example, includes a cord

that runs from each fencer to a scoring machine—a feature that costs several thousand

dollars. IDEO designed a relatively inexpensive system that syncs each player's foil

electronically to a scoring mechanism.

But members of the fencing establishment didn't hail Morehouse as a savior of the sport. Nor

did they embrace the equipment innovations that he had developed. They argued that those

innovations would mark a departure from "real fencing" and suggested that only people with

years of training could teach the sport. They regarded his efforts as a threat, and they moved

to thwart his project. Morehouse was flabbergasted. He had the makings of a solution that

would bring their sport to disadvantaged young people. What was the problem?

At this point in his journey, Morehouse happened to sit next to Marty Linsky (one of the

coauthors of this article) on a flight from San Francisco to New York City. That serendipitous

encounter led to a series of conversations between Morehouse and Linsky about the practice

of adaptive leadership. When Morehouse looked at the problem from an adaptive

perspective, he realized that for many people who care deeply about fencing, his project

represents the potential loss of a cherished and comfortable environment. Although many of

these people give lip service to the goal of increasing participation in the sport, they are wary

of relinquishing the sense of exclusivity that fencing provides.

Morehouse used the tools of adaptive leadership to develop a new approach to engaging with

the people and organizations that embody the values of exclusivity in fencing. He now

understood that the fencing establishment could impede, or even derail, what he is trying to

accomplish. Morehouse began to appreciate the sense of threat that they were experiencing,

and he adjusted the pace of his work so that it wouldn't seem overwhelming to them. He

listened to them, tried to accommodate their concerns whenever he could, and modified his

behavior so that he would come across less as a crusader than as an embodiment of their

expressed desire to see fencing thrive.

Then he returned to IDEO and resumed work on developing innovative, cost-effective

equipment. Slowly but steadily, he began to collaborate with willing members of the fencing

establishment to pursue the changes that he believed would increase the reach of the sport

among young people. He attracted favorable publicity to his project, and he held a few well-

attended fencing exhibitions—steps that demonstrated his ability to generate immediate

benefits for the sport.

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Morehouse launched the project less than three years ago, and already it has come a long

way. His efforts have brought fencing to more than 15,000 schoolchildren, most of whom

attend schools in low-income areas. He and his team have trained 115 physical education

teachers to teach and coach the sport. More than 50 schools in nine US states now offer

fencing for the first time ever. This school year, more than 5,000 kids in New York City alone

will take part in fencing activities that include both new after-school programs and new varsity

teams.

TWO FACES OF CHANGE

Design thinking and adaptive leadership are two well-regarded forms of organizational

practice—two powerful approaches to leading systemic change. Each area of practice

reflects the environment from which it emerged and in which it flourishes. Design thinking, a

product of the West Coast, is optimistic and playful, sunny and casual, innovative and

entrepreneurial. Adaptive leadership, born on the East Coast, is pragmatic and severe,

somber and formal, highly established and highly "Establishment" in its orientation.

We can trace the origins of design thinking to the work of Herbert A. Simon, a social scientist

and Nobel laureate who referred to design as a "way of thinking."[ 2] But over the past 25

years, this practice has become closely associated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

at Stanford University (commonly known as the d.school). Practitioners in fields that range

from aviation to health care come to the d.school to learn about the practice. Adaptive

leadership, meanwhile, originated at Harvard University's Kennedy School. There, people

from a diverse array of fields and roles—current and future politicians, policy makers, and

executives—take lessons on how to lead adaptively. Each practice area has a prominent

institutional home: IDEO, a global design thinking firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and

Cambridge Leadership Associates, a consulting firm in New York City that bills itself as the

mother ship of adaptive leadership.

Design thinking embodies the spirit of "creative confidence," to cite the title of a book by

David Kelley and Tom Kelley.[ 3] It teaches those who lead change to access their innate

creativity, their sense of hope, and their potential to make the world a better place.[ 4] (David

Kelley is a founder of the d.school. He and his brother, Tom, are both principal figures at

IDEO.)

Adaptive leadership, as Ronald A. Heifetz explained in his book Leadership Without Easy

Answers, embodies relentless realism.[ 5] It teaches those who lead change to accept that

their work will be difficult, risky, politically contentious, and personally gut-wrenching.[ 6]

(Heifetz teaches at the Kennedy School and is a cofounder of Cambridge Leadership

Associates.)

One of us, Maya Bernstein, has experience in the practice of design thinking. The other,

Marty Linsky, has a background in the practice of adaptive leadership. (Linsky collaborated

with Heifetz on two books that expanded on the latter's first book about leadership.[ 7]) In our

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work, both separately and together, we have found that neither approach provides a complete

solution to many of the problems that we encounter in working with clients.

Design thinking work is exciting, fast-paced, and highly accessible. But in many cases, it fails

to produce deep changes in the norms, values, and behaviors that underlie a given design

challenge. Adaptive leadership work is gritty, honest, and complex, and it carries the potential

to make a lasting impact on the human dynamics that affect an organization. All too often,

however, people experience this practice as emotionally exhausting and excessively negative

in spirit. It can reveal the proverbial elephant in the room, but it offers few tools for taming the

beast.

At the same time, we have noticed that design thinking and adaptive leadership can

complement each other in useful—and, indeed, profound—ways. We aren't the first

observers to note the potential for synergy between design thinking and adaptive leadership.

Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon, in their recent book Moments of Impact, point to the

benefits of weaving together these two approaches. Designers today, they say, must

"navigate their way through a world of adaptive challenges."[ 8] In our work, we have taken

this insight further by exploring theoretically how each area of practice can best complement

the other. We have also started to test ways to synthesize the two practices.

Inspired by our work with change agents such as Tim Morehouse, we are developing an

approach that integrates design thinking and adaptive leadership into a single, seamless

method of managing complex change projects. We call this approach adaptive design. It

builds on the work of people who pioneered those two established practice areas, and it flows

out of our experience in helping people and organizations deal with a wide range of

seemingly intractable challenges. It also stems from our recognition that a deep synthesis of

the two disciplines can facilitate greater progress than either of them can achieve on its own.

DESIGN THINKING (AND ITS LIMITS)

In design thinking, practitioners use the principles of human-centered design to solve

problems in the business, social, and educational sectors. Human-centered design places

people at the center of the design process. This approach originated in the field of product

design, and it starts with a simple principle: If you design a chair, design it for the person who

will sit in it for eight hours a day. More recently, design thinking practitioners have begun to

apply this method to services (such as low-cost health care) and to organizational

improvements (such as better schools).

Design thinking is an iterative process that includes four steps: empathy, definition, ideation,

and prototyping.

The purpose of the first step, empathy, is to gather insights about the true needs of users or

beneficiaries. Consider a classic example of the design thinking process. In 2007, a group of

Stanford students were charged with redesigning an infant incubator for use in developing

countries.[ 9] They traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal, and visited the neonatal units of hospitals

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there. Instead of immediately trying to design a new incubator, the student team spent time

observing women in local communities, talking with them, and working to understand their

lives. This process resulted in a critical insight: Most premature Nepalese infants were born in

rural areas and never made it to a hospital.

The next phase of design thinking, definition, involves reframing a challenge on the basis of

insights that emerge from the empathy phase. During this phase, designers generate

language that serves two purposes: It helps concretize the challenge, and it recasts the

challenge as an opportunity. An integral part of this process is the use of "How Might We"

questions. In the incubator redesign project, the students changed their framing of the

challenge from "We need better hospital incubators for premature babies" to "How might we

save the maximum number of premature babies' lives?" Through this technique, design

thinkers simultaneously identify root problems and create an opening for creative solutions.

In the following two modes, designers mobilize untapped wells of creativity to generate ideas

that they can test quickly both for impact and for feasibility. In the ideation phase, designers

produce as many ideas as they can muster. Here, quantity trumps quality, and the hope is

that exploring silly, wild, or unlikely ideas will lead to ingenious ones that just might do the

trick. In prototyping, designers work quickly to create mockup versions of a product or

service. The goal at this point is to gauge how a given innovation affects users. Through

prototyping, the Stanford students arrived at an idea that resulted in the Embrace

Incubator—a light, small device that looks like a sleeping bag and can keep an infant warm

for up to four hours. Each Embrace device costs just $25, and users can "recharge" it simply

by submerging it in boiling water. By making it easier for mothers to transport their babies to a

hospital, this newly designed incubator has radically reduced the rate of infant mortality in

rural areas.

What design thinking is good for | Practitioners who use design thinking are better able to

understand the people they are serving. They develop the courage to fail and make mistakes,

and they learn that they can design their way out of many (if not all) problems. The steps of

the design thinking process feel intuitive and natural. In addition, design thinking helps to

instill a creative mindset within both individuals and institutions. When people work with a

"design mind," they become more optimistic, more collaborative, and more willing to take

risks.

Where design thinking falls short | In many cases, the strengths of design thinking are the

very qualities that pose the greatest threat to established institutions. And design thinking, on

its own, lacks the conceptual and practical tools needed to manage the consequences of that

perceived threat. Collaboration, creativity, rapid action, and comfort with failure can also be

significantly counter-cultural. In young institutions, people often celebrate this way of working.

In more established institutions, however, it can be threatening. When people in those

organizations begin to think and behave like designers, they inevitably disrupt the status quo.

Sometimes their efforts are so disruptive that they put their jobs at risk.

ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP (AND ITS LIMITS)

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Two core principles distinguish adaptive leadership from other leadership approaches. The

first principle is that leadership is available to anyone, regardless of position. The second

principle is that leadership is dangerous, unsettling, and even subversive work. Adaptive

leadership also emphasizes two core distinctions—the difference between exercising

authority and exercising leadership, and the difference between technical problems and

adaptive challenges.

People in positions of power exercise authority. Authority figures provide direction, protection,

and order. No family, organization, or country can survive and thrive unless the people in

positions of authority do their jobs competently. Exercising authority is important work, but it

has nothing to do with exercising leadership. In fact, leadership is not about meeting

expectations; it's about challenging them. It's about telling people what they need to

hear—especially when what they need to hear differs from what they want to hear.

Challenging people's expectations generates resistance and pushback. That is what makes

leadership dangerous. Ask Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr., or Anwar Sadat.

Adaptive leadership focuses on challenges that are not primarily technical. Technical

problems are susceptible to clear definition, and they have clearly identifiable solutions.

Adaptive challenges, by contrast, are hard to define precisely. Solving them involves

changing hearts and minds, and solutions of that kind often threaten people's self-identity.

Take the example of a broken leg. Fixing it might be a complex task, but it's amenable to the

competent application of medical expertise. Now compare dealing with that problem to

dealing with a disease like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, or cancer. With those conditions,

the work of change falls largely to a patient and his or her family members, who must adapt to

a new and unwelcome reality.

Adaptive leadership is uncomfortable because it involves helping people through loss. After

all, we don't resist changes that we think will be exciting or good for us—starting a new job,

moving to a new city, getting married, having children, winning a lottery. But we do fear and

resist the need to leave behind something that we cherish. Part of the work of adaptive

leadership, therefore, is identifying the losses that come with any change.

The adaptive leadership process involves three steps: observation, interpretation, and

intervention.

In the observation phase, people step back from their immediate work in order to see what is

happening around them. Adherents of adaptive leadership use the metaphor of "getting on

the balcony" to describe this activity: Practitioners, even as they are in the midst of action,

must stand apart from the fray so that they can notice larger systemic patterns.

A commitment to careful observation was evident in the work that Linsky did with Proskauer

Rose, a global law firm based in New York City. The firm had a two-headed governance

system that worked well to solve short-run, non-firm-wide problems. Yet that structure also

allowed some departments in the firm to become fiefdoms, and it created barriers to cross-

firm communication. For that reason, some partners in the firm were working to create a

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single culture for their organization, but they had been unable to make serious progress

toward that goal. Then, at off-site meetings that brought the two governance bodies together,

members of the firm began to view the problem through an adaptive lens. And they saw a

pattern: Each decision that they had made about structure or process was reasonable on its

own terms, but those decisions had cumulatively reinforced a culture that preserved fiefdoms

and fostered intense internal competition.

The next phase, interpretation, requires practitioners to make sense of their observations.

The work of interpretation can be difficult. People will gravitate toward interpretations that are

narrowly technical and that favor consensus. They will resist interpretations that are systemic

in scope or that focus on conflict and loss. Yet systemic disruption, conflict, and loss are

inevitable aspects of real change work. At Proskauer Rose, members of the firm began to

understand that they would have to choose between two futures: By staying on their current

path, they would protect the autonomy of individual departments and maximize the

opportunity for short-run financial gain. By choosing an alternative path—one that involved

nurturing a single set of values, practices, and norms—they could create a more inviting work

environment and a stronger firm over the long term.

In the last phase, intervention, practitioners undertake customized experiments that focus on

the human element of the change process. In that vein, partners at Proskauer Rose took a

few small, relatively low-risk steps to advance their one-firm vision. They altered how the firm

compensates members for collaboration, for example, and they restructured certain legacy

departments that no longer aligned with the financial expectations of the firm.

What adaptive leadership is good for | Adaptive leadership involves the paradoxical embrace

of relentless optimism about the prospect for changing the world and brutal realism about the

obstacles to doing so. People who want to lead change often focus on the former rather than

the latter. But by retaining a sense of both optimism and realism, practitioners can keep the

optimism from becoming naïve and the realism from becoming cynical. The biggest mistake

that people make in trying to lead change is that they treat adaptive challenges as if they

were technical problems. Adaptive leadership makes it easier to distinguish technical

elements from adaptive ones. It also offers tools that equip practitioners to manage

themselves as they conduct this risky and difficult work.

Where adaptive leadership falls short | Adaptive leadership provides few resources for

fleshing out the elements of an imagined future or for devising specific interventions. Many

people, moreover, find that adaptive leadership offers little in the way of excitement or

inspiration. Alongside managing the loss, pain, and fear that often come with change,

practitioners need to engage people by providing a sense of fun, a spirit of collaboration, and

visible signs of progress. At Proskauer Rose, adaptive leadership was essential to enable

members of the firm to identify and confront the choices that they faced. Yet adaptive

methods were not enough to help them generate innovations that would fundamentally recast

how they did business together.

THE PROCESS OF ADAPTIVE DESIGN

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Each of these areas of practice—design thinking and adaptive leadership—features strengths

that have the potential to compensate for the weaknesses of the other. In our work, we have

begun to combine these well-established practices into the emerging practice of adaptive

design. Broadly speaking, practitioners can pursue adaptive design by following one of two

approaches.

In the first approach, practitioners move rapidly through cycles of both design thinking and

adaptive leadership. Here, the two practices complement one another at various phases of an

iterative, overarching change process. Typically in this approach, practitioners begin with

design thinking. They employ principles such as empathy and definition to gather data about

an organization and its capacity to accommodate new ways of thinking and functioning. In

doing so, they can generate the excitement—and the political capital—needed to tackle

systemic problems. But the design process will also reveal issues that require the tools of

adaptive leadership: observation, interpretation, and intervention. After practitioners analyze a

situation from an adaptive perspective, they can shift back to the use of design thinking,

which offers tools for solving tough political and psychological problems.

In the second approach, practitioners integrate design thinking and adaptive leadership to

create a distinct process that blends and alternates the phases that make up those two

practices.

The first phase consists of "empathic observation." It draws on the empathy mode of design

thinking and then, in the spirit of adaptive leadership, applies that empathy work to an

analysis of the relevant institutional environment. Through a practice called "political

mapping," practitioners review the values, alliances, and perceived threats that pertain to

each stakeholder in a given organization or system.

The second phase draws primarily from the interpretation mode of adaptive leadership. Here,

practitioners distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, and they work to

discern the value conflicts and the apprehensions about loss that affect various stakeholders.

In doing so, however, practitioners also employ tools from the definition mode of design

thinking: They use concrete language, for example, to pinpoint adaptive challenges and to

frame each challenge as a creative opportunity.

The third phase draws primarily from the ideation mode of design thinking. Using tools that

help build "creative confidence," practitioners encourage people to come up with new and far-

reaching ideas. (In adaptive work, the interpretation phase often leads to a discouraging

awareness of the complex human dynamics that underlie a given challenge. The creative and

optimistic mindset of ideation can counteract this tendency.)

In the final phase, practitioners develop "prototype interventions"—experiments that not only

test potential new products and processes, but also reveal the ability of an organization or

system to accommodate change.

ADAPTIVE DESIGN GOES TO SCHOOL

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In 2014, at a private school in New York City, a group of teachers formed a design team.

Their initial mission was to create a classroom environment that would meet the diverse

learning needs of the school's student body. They focused, in particular, on the difficulties

faced by students with special needs. (Bernstein has worked with this team over the past

couple of years.)

In adherence to the design thinking process, members of the team started their work in an

empathy mode. They visited multiple classrooms, studied how students and teachers use

classroom space, and conducted interviews. Then, shifting into a definition mode, they

framed their challenge in this way: "How might we create spaces that support special needs

students in an integrated classroom setting?" Following an ideation phase, the team picked

one classroom to serve as a prototype and physically redesigned the space with input from

teachers and students. The new design included additional workstations that made it easier

for students to learn in small groups or in one-on-one sessions with a teacher. There was

also a "chill out" area in the back of the classroom. The entire redesign process took just a

few weeks, and people throughout the school were enthusiastic about the result.

Next the team returned to an empathy mode. Through that process, team members came to

see that the school could fully serve special needs students only if it equipped teachers with

tools and tactics for working with those students. So the team redefined its challenge as

follows: "How might we better prepare faculty to support students with special needs?" After

some ideation, team members concluded that the school should revise the way that it

handles teacher training. Traditionally, the school had brought in specialized personnel to

work with special needs students. Team members believed that the school should go further

by giving teachers a baseline set of skills to manage and support those students. At the

beginning of each school year, the school conducts a weeklong faculty orientation event, and

the team decided that this event would be an ideal occasion to provide additional training on

this topic. The team created a prototype version of an orientation schedule that prominently

featured material on supporting special needs students.

The team shared the prototype orientation schedule with the head of school. She had fully

supported the classroom redesign effort, but this time she shot down the team's idea.

Members of the team felt deflated and devalued. They also felt stuck. Design thinking had

generated the insight that in order to help special needs students, they should work with

teachers. But design thinking didn't provide the resources that they needed to overcome the

new obstacle.

Members of the team regrouped and began to pursue an adaptive design approach. They

again conducted empathy work, but they now employed tools from adaptive leadership as

well. Using the "political mapping" tool, the team identified all of the school's stakeholders: the

head of school, other administrators, the board of directors, the faculty, students with special

needs and their parents, mainstream students and their parents. The team then explored

questions about what motivated people in each stakeholder group: What do they value? To

whom are they loyal? What are they afraid of losing if the plan to redesign the teacher-

training program moves forward?

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The team also adopted an adaptive leadership tactic called "partnering with authority."

Through that tactic, people who lack authority ally strategically with those who do have

authority over a given system. In this instance, the team met extensively with the head of

school and gained a new understanding of the multiple pressures that she felt. Crucially,

team members learned that she saw faculty professional development as falling within her

purview. They learned that parents were divided about how deeply, and at what pace, the

school should integrate special needs students into mainstream classroom activity. Some

parents of mainstream students worried that efforts to support special needs students would

detract from their children's academic advancement. The head of school felt a tension

between meeting the school's ideal of inclusivity and serving its commitment to academic

rigor.

When the team began to interpret this information, they realized that faculty training was a

focal point of the tension. Teachers were also under pressure to achieve the conflicting

objectives (inclusivity and rigor), and partly because of that pressure, they felt undervalued

and burnt out. What had begun as a design project, in short, had led the team into difficult

adaptive territory. At this point, team members returned to the definition mode so that they

could reframe their challenge in adaptive terms: "How might we help teachers to support

special needs students in a way that keeps those teachers from burning out?"

The team was ready to enter the ideation phase again. But this time, as team members

began to review their ideas, they did so with an awareness of the interests that motivated

various factions within the school. They looked for ideas that would not be threatening either

to the head of school or to teachers. Ultimately, they focused their attention on ideas related

to teacher education and teacher appreciation.

Next they designed and implemented two prototype interventions. First, they created a brief,

visually engaging manual with tips on how to support special needs students. Significantly,

they shared the manual first with the head of school and then, after receiving her approval,

with the entire faculty. And second, they persuaded the head of school to create a "perks"

program for teachers. The perks were modest—Starbucks and Amazon gift cards, birthday

parties in the teachers lounge, notes of appreciation—but they had a noticeable effect. The

school, teachers now say, clearly values and supports their work with special needs students.

People throughout the school, meanwhile, have shown a willingness to tackle the broad

challenge of balancing inclusivity with academic rigor.

THE CHALLENGE (AND THE PROMISE) OF SYNTHESIS

Combining two established practices—and combining the practices of design thinking and

adaptive leadership, in particular—entails notable challenges for practitioners:

First, operating within the framework of adaptive design involves real work. It requires

practitioners to learn two complex areas of practice instead of just one, and it entails moving

between one approach and the other.

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Second, adaptive leadership and design thinking tend to appeal to different types of people.

Adaptive leadership resonates with those who like to think about the psychological and

political elements of change—those who prefer to focus on the human dynamics of a change

project rather than on its content. Design thinking resonates with those who like to think about

the work at hand and who want to get things done quickly. Adaptive design inevitably tests

the flexibility of people in both camps. It pushes them, at various times, to the edge of their

comfort zones.

Third, and perhaps most important, practitioners can use these practices together effectively

only when they concede that neither design thinking nor adaptive leadership alone is

sufficient to solve complex social and organizational problems.

Design thinking adherents tend to believe that the design process encompasses all of the

essential ingredients in adaptive leadership. They are apt to claim that real empathy work and

high-quality definition work can furnish the same insights that adaptive leadership contributes

through observation and interpretation. They also tend to assume that results are what

ultimately drive meaningful change—that people will come along for the ride once they see

what design thinking can achieve.

Adaptive leadership adherents tend to believe that their ability to diagnose a system—to

reveal the skeletons that lurk in the closet of an organization—is what ultimately enables

people to be more effective in their work. People in organizations, those adherents argue,

have the technical expertise to do their best work but lack the ability to notice the blind spots

and deeply held commitments that get in their way. The effective use of adaptive leadership

tools, in short, frees people up to do their jobs well.

For adaptive design to flourish, both the adaptive leadership practitioners and the design

thinkers will have to start by acknowledging that neither has all of the answers. Indeed, in

working to develop this synthesis, each of us had to give up something—some piece of our

original practice that had worked for us in the past. Without knowing it at the time, we were

practicing what we now try to preach!

Despite these challenges, we believe that adaptive design combines the best of both

practices and minimizes the weaknesses in each of them. Adaptive design provides a set of

principles and tools to help practitioners achieve the promise of innovation while also

navigating the cultural and political ramifications of change.

Disclosure: Marty Linsky worked with Tim Morehouse on a pro bono basis, and he worked

with Proskauer Rose through Cambridge Leadership Associates. Maya Bernstein worked

with the private school in New York City through the Day School Collaboration Network, an

initiative led by UpStart Bay Area in conjunction with the Jewish Education Project, a

nonprofit organization based in New York.

NOTES

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1 Mary Pilon, "Education With a Dose of Zorro: An Olympian Brings Fencing to Children in

Cities," The New York Times, December 23, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/sports/an-olympian-take-fencing-to-children-in-

cities.html?%5fr=0

2 Herbert A. Simon, Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969; Reuven

Cohen, "Design Thinking: A Unified Framework for Innovation," Forbes.com, March 31, 2014,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2014/03/31/design-thinking-a-unified-framework-

for-innovation

3 Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential

Within Us All, New York City: Crown Business, 2013.

4 Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt, "Design Thinking for Social Innovation," Stanford Social

Innovation Review, Winter 2010.

5 Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1994.

6 Ronald A. Heifetz, John V. Kania, & Mark R. Kramer, "Leading Boldly," Stanford Social

Innovation Review, Winter 2004.

7 Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the

Dangers of Leading, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002; Ronald Heifetz,

Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and

Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Boston: Harvard Business Press,

2009.

8 Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic

Conversations That Accelerate Change, New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2014.

9 "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability: Embrace," Hasso Plattner Institute of

Design at Stanford University website, 2010,

http://dschool.stanford.edu/extreme/impact/embrace%5f02.html

DIAGRAM: DESIGN THINKING

DIAGRAM: ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP

DIAGRAM: ADAPTIVE DESIGN

PHOTO (COLOR)

~~~~~~~~

MAYA BERNSTEIN is a consultant based in New York City. She is also a cofounder of

UpStart Bay Area, a nonprofit accelerator that supports innovation in the Jewish community.

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MARTY LINSKY is a cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and an adjunct lecturer

at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Copyright of Stanford Social Innovation Review is the property of Stanford Social Innovation

Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv

without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print,

download, or email articles for individual use.

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