Why the challenges feel harder right now — and how to create more room for real progress
People exercising leadership right now are holding a lot.
Nonprofit executives are navigating a huge gap between growing needs and a volatile funding landscape, while trying to hold their teams through uncertainty and burnout.
Public servants and city leaders are absorbing pressure from all sides, often without the authority to match the weight they're carrying.
Healthcare leaders are managing teams somewhere between exhausted and checked out, and being asked to drive performance anyway.
Corporate and tech managers are being pushed to lead AI transformation across their organizations, and discovering that the harder problem isn't the technology — it's getting the organization to actually change.
Across sectors, the pressure to do more with less has become so constant that it barely registers as pressure anymore. It's just the water.
What makes this moment particularly hard isn't just the volume of challenges. It's that the instincts that have served us well — solve the problem, communicate clearly, push harder — often aren't producing the results they used to.
That's not a failure of effort. It's a signal about the kind of challenges we're actually dealing with.
In this 90-minute interactive workshop, we'll explore a framework that helps make sense of why that is — and what to do about it. Drawing on the Adaptive Leadership framework developed at Harvard Kennedy School, we'll work through:
the distinction between technical and adaptive challenges, and why misreading that distinction is one of the most costly mistakes in any organization
why people are either firefighting or disengaged right now, with very little room in between, and what that means for anyone trying to lead change in that environment
what it takes to make more room, and the moves available to anyone trying to create better conditions for hard work
This session is intended for executives, managers, and change agents working in environments where the challenges keep outpacing the solutions — nonprofit executives, city and public sector professionals, healthcare administrators, and corporate leaders navigating organizational transformation.
This workshop is taking place in person at the Bread and Roses Community Fund training space (100 S Broad Street, Suite 1600, Philadelphia, PA 19102) from 3:30-5:00 p.m. EDT. Light refreshments will be provided.
The workshop fee is $119. If finances are a barrier, reach out to KONU Associate Partner Emily Wyner for a discount code to waive the workshop fee.