A Retrospective on KONU’s Inaugural Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents

Leadership is a balancing act between meeting expectations and disappointing them to mobilize collective learning and shared ownership. We know that subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) cultural expectations on women add complexity to how they practice leadership. That's why we decided to run our first-ever Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents last month. 

Our Lab invited participants on a journey to explore our guiding question: How do we lead with greater creativity and self-trust in a sea of competing voices, pressures, and projections? Participants knew we’d be delving into root causes of systemic challenges – both external and internal – and expanding our toolkits for responding. Our aim was to help them shift from feeling stuck, torn, and/or overwhelmed to a sense of agency, optionality, and creativity. 

Our inaugural cohort of 15 women-identifying change agents showed up ready for this work. They were tired of coping with their reflex responses to challenging contexts. They wanted lasting change.  

We spent the first morning of this Adaptive Leadership Lab in an experiential simulation modeled off the work of human systems pioneer Barry Oshry. Participants were assigned roles within a fictitious nonprofit organization: executives, middle managers, frontline workers, or funders. Over the course of five “work days” – each 10 minutes long – they sought to make progress on a particular initiative. Along the way, they encountered challenges extracting information around budget constraints, navigating internal politics and imposed regulations, and stumbled to manage a desire to be inclusive with the need to get the work done. 

In between various work days, we took some time to get off the dance floor of the action and onto the balcony for systemic diagnosis and learning. Participants noticed patterns of behavior based on role – what Oshry calls the “Dance of the Blind Reflex” – and their own reactive conditioned tendencies when faced with frustration, stress and pressure (e.g. retreat or speak up, people please or fight back, include or exclude, etc.) Together, we explored what other moves they might make instead. 

• Executives

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Continue to absorb even more responsibility

  • What else is possible?: Distribute responsibility throughout the system

• Frontline workers

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: In their place of confusion, blame higher-ups

  • What else is possible?: Take responsibility for their condition

• Middle managers

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Run around trying to make everyone happy (...everyone but themselves)

  • What else is possible?: Maintain independence of thought and action

• Funders

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Wonder why this organization can’t just give them what they need

  • What else is possible?: Get involved in making the outcome happen

After a lunch break, we dove into some fundamental Adaptive Leadership concepts to make sense of what happened in the simulation – and what happens in all systemic challenges we face. For instance: 

• Applying technical solutions to adaptive challenges will result in failure. We can’t open more vaccine clinics and expect that trust and willingness to get vaccinated will automatically increase. We need to tend to the hearts and minds of change. 

• In order to work through folks’ resistances, you have to manage their losses. It wasn’t easy for the frontline workers in our simulation to deal with the uncertainty of what they needed to produce. That uncertainty produced some heat and frustration! Instead of ignoring those realities, it’s important to engage with them – to say, “This is an uncertain situation. I know that’s uncomfortable – it is for me too. How can we cope together?” 

• Being in an authority role is not the same as practicing leadership. When people are in charge, we expect them to provide direction, protection, and order. (“The executives and funders should have had the answers!”) But in adaptive work, you can’t always meet those expectations. You need to mobilize the collective to face a difficult reality they would rather avoid. That’s real leadership. 

“[I now see] how leadership is not about role and can be exercised from any vantage point - [it’s] not just about solving problems, but also helping others relate to problems differently”

Drawing on Day 1’s systemic diagnosis of what makes leadership hard, what losses are at stake for people, and what leadership actions are often difficult, Day 2 focused on the internal work required to break out of reactive patterns, see new options, and take action on those options. We looked closely at gender messages we often receive throughout our lives and the voices in each of our own individual backgrounds that continue to shape our lenses and actions.  

From there we dove deeper into how those internalized voices shape our triggers and reactive tendencies. We identified key stakeholders from our leadership challenges that are triggering to engage with (yet, for the sake of progress, do require engagement) and unpacked the ways in which our internal voices can limit our leadership practice (e.g. causing us to miss out on possible partnerships, generate diagnostic inaccuracy, or limit our repertoire of action options).

“A more solid process for naming choices; more expanded language (eg for things like loyalties and losses) brings texture to some internal work I’d been doing in my personal practice.”

“A big part of this was moving through my own fear reactions to making decisions and learning my own discernment. In taking the time to feel the space, it gave me a better sense of how I react and what triggers me”

Drawing from extensive research on how our reactive tendencies become programmed into our bodies, participants worked in pairs to investigate somatically what happens when they’re triggered. By shedding light on their felt experience without jumping into an immediate response, participants began to build the muscle of pausing before reaction, and thereby creating more space to strategically choose a more effective response.  

“The power of discovery the conflict our body holds. The gift of releasing it.”

“I loved the physical, somatic exercises. They were very helpful in feeling space, decision moments. I am in control of how I react and how I show up in the world.”

“While I’m really good at identifying and brainstorming opportunities to exercise leadership, it reminded me of the power of a pause, reflect, and strategize in moving forward. Oftentimes I charge forward in action without taking the time to think, and I can get paralyzed in the fear of disappointing people, and just working through this internal challenge for me makes the options more possible to say yes to.”

This internal framework for understanding the systems inside ourselves enabled us to return to our leadership challenges with an even more accurate diagnosis and new ideas for how to better engage diverse stakeholders. Participants broadened their perception around what's at stake for others and the rationale behind the resistances they face.

“Strong reminders that behind every system and structure are people, and people are complex; and that, while I can’t choose my feelings, I can choose to listen better to what they are telling me and choose how to respond.”

“I can bring my “difficult” people on the balcony with me to align (or realign) on our understanding of the shared challenge. And I can do that without betraying my authentic self.”

We weren’t seeking solutions to “solve” participants’ challenges, but rather to build their capacity to hold complexity, manage ongoing adaptive change, and take new creative leadership actions. 

Day 3 focused on synthesizing next steps and increasing our stamina to stay in the game without burning out. We focused on the idea of leadership as a collective work, and thereby the vital role of having allies and confidants – and why not to confuse the two. Through an embodied exercise, participants sensed and felt what it’s like to have confidants on your side and having your back. 

“Processing a challenge takes time and engagement of allies and confidants. I’m eternally grateful for learning that through this training.”

In refining their leadership experiments – specific moves participants would make to make progress on our work challenges – we also anchored in the reminder that leadership is a choice. You can choose to make leadership interventions – and you can choose not to make them. Participants engaged in a somatic exercise to discover what “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” feel like in their bodies – and made their choices from a centered place about what moves they would and would not make. We spent a lot of time in our final hours together on somatic work, deepening our capacities to notice triggers in our bodies, re-center, and then – with agency and clarity – respond.

“I’m feeling compassion for my burnout. That it’s not a sign that I’m bad or not intelligent or even not exceptional. The flaw was in not exercising my choice to say no and use creativity to find solutions rather than just piling on.”

“In many ways I have only control over myself ... that was a powerful conclusion. Then the strategies offered in how I keep myself anchored were really powerful.”

It was beautiful how tightly this group bound together, offering their vulnerability and support in such a short space of time. 

Change is possible. In community, we have the courage to shed light on where we feel stuck, challenged, and ashamed. This Lab left participants with a framework for how to think about and approach their challenges, and a network of diverse and committed women-identifying change agents they can continue to tap into for support in their leadership endeavors – a space to reconnect to their inherent dignity, free choice, and creative impulses amidst the challenges of mobilizing real change. 

Given the impact of this pilot, we plan to offer another Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents in the coming year. Stay tuned! 

“Having done this work with people in my professional sector of all genders, it was meaningful to revisit it with female ID participants so that we had a safe space to dig in to power dynamics. I also felt people were open with and respectful of others’ intersectional identities in a way that added to our learning.”

“I think discussions/tensions of exercising leadership as a woman were more readily brought up and focused on. There also felt like shared understanding and connection from the beginning because of the group’s makeup.”

“I felt safe for the first time since I started in my role almost two years ago. I was embraced and validated for bringing forward my authentic self.”

*All quotes in this blog post are from Lab participants. They were pulled directly from the anonymous evaluation survey results.