Overview

This train-the-trainer program builds on and extends the leadership development framework and methodology of Adaptive Leadership (TM), which was developed by Ron Heifetz and his Harvard Kennedy School colleagues over the past thirty-five years. It provides a framework, shared language and set of tools and techniques for leading individuals and teams through challenging and uncertain environments.

Relevance

The need for effective leadership facilitation is increasing as our global community and organizational challenges get more complex, less certain and simply harder to manage. “Facilitation” in these contexts often extends beyond simple training facilitation to holding—and even leading—competing stakeholders through a process of creative disequilibrium to undergo a deep experiential learning process.

For the facilitator, as for a leadership practitioner, a guiding question is therefore how do I prepare people to tolerate the pressures, heat and ambiguity that develops as we work toward resolving tough and seemingly intractable (adaptive) challenges? Facilitators take part in a well-tested and refined onsite and offsite development process that includes a range of experiential, didactic and results-oriented activities based on established adult-learning principles. Specific consideration will be given to differing levels of experience and perspectives.

What is Adaptive Leadership Facilitation?

Adaptive Leadership facilitation builds facilitator capacity by shifting the training “classroom” to become a space to practice leadership rather than to simply study it. The cornerstone of Adaptive Leadership facilitation is a belief that, to facilitate well, the facilitator needs to internalize the very capacities that they seek to create in the individuals and teams they’re facilitating. This includes managing self and role, understanding their relationship to authority, surfacing factions, managing frustration and discomfort in the face of intractable challenges, navigating disappointment and orchestrating productive conflict. To do that, facilitators must develop a keen eye for seeing the system as it reveals itself, generating multiple interpretations of “data” in the room, and then crafting activities and interventions to help people engage purposefully.

Specific, practical skills the facilitator can expect to learn include:

Reading dynamic situations and designing interventions in the moment
Making hidden issues, assumptions and interpretations transparent and testable
Depersonalizing conflict
Directing attention to systemic, rather than personal, interpretations
Resisting the urge to provide premature closure to conversations
Holding steady when participants express discomfort or hostility
Making conscious choices about which lines of inquiry to pursue and which to let pass
Refashioning participants' expectations that they can rely on the facilitator for answers

Overall Structure

This Adaptive Leadership Train-the-Trainer program will take place over four days. The program consists of a field and forum design. Facilitators choose from amongst a standard 2-day Adaptive Leadership format, shorter form trainings, longitudinal immersive trainings, peer-supported action learning activities, and other formats that fit the needs of their organizations or clients.

Certification

Upon successful completion of the program, facilitators receive ACA certification and access to trademarked materials and other trainer assets.