Day 17 · Act III — Lead Performance
Resilience and Adaptive Leadership
Adaptive challenges · Recovery · Learning
~30 minutes
Bend, learn, and return taller.
The Core Idea
Some problems are technical — experts can solve them. Others are adaptive — they require people to change values, habits or beliefs. Treating adaptive challenges as technical is a common leadership failure.
Resilience is not toughness alone; it is recovery. Leaders sustain performance by managing energy, not just time.
The Mental Model
Technical vs Adaptive Challenges
From Ronald Heifetz: technical problems have known solutions; adaptive ones require learning by the people with the problem.
At work: Installing a CRM is technical. Getting sales teams to share client relationships is adaptive.
The Case Study
Nokia's decline
DocumentedNokia led global mobile phone sales in the 2000s and sold its handset business to Microsoft in 2013/14.
Interpretation: research by Vuori and Huy suggests internal fear and status dynamics hampered adaptation — an adaptive, not technical, failure.
Cinema & Story
The Martian (2015)
Resilience is solving the next problem, then the next one after that.
The Reading Room
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership
Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky
Tools for leading people through difficult change.
Further reading: Option B — Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant
The Journal · Portfolio output: Resilience plan
The Field Experiment · within 24 hours
Schedule one genuine recovery block this week and protect it like a client meeting.
The Evening Review
The storm is the classroom.