These are adaptive challenges. An adaptive challenge is not like technical work, in which you can prescribe a solution that doesn't require people to change. To take a medical example, when you give someone penicillin for an infection, she is cured. She doesn't have to change how she lives. But when you unclog the plumbing in someone's heart, that plumbing will stay open only if he changes his life -- changes how he eats; stops smoking; gets more exercise; learns to manage stress.

To meet adaptive challenges, people have to go through a period of painful adjustment. Leading people to make these changes is risky, because you are asking them to absorb various forms of loss -- asking them to out and out give up something in the interests of something to be maintained, to be conserved, or to be gained. They may have to go through a period of refashioning loyalty to the people to whom they feel beholden or of feeling disloyalty to their own roots. Or you may be asking them to go through a period of experiencing some incompetence as they fashion new competencies and sources of confidence.

Adaptive change is painful; leading it can be dangerous. Just ask Martin Luther King Jr., Rudolph Giuliani, or Carly Fiorina.

Dangers of Collusion

When you meet up with a significant challenge for which you don't have the answers and for which the people around you are even more desperate to hear some certainty, the temptation is to provide reassurance. This temptation is reinforced by the fact that it is also politically dangerous to express uncertainty. Most situations generate a mixture of technical and adaptive challenges. And because they are a mixture, the easiest way to avoid the adaptive challenges is to simply focus on the technical ones. We see this a lot in business. We certainly see it a lot in public life. People in authority will tackle that aspect of the challenge about which they feel confident, rather than tolerating the awful experience of feeling somewhat incompetent.

And what that often generates is a collusion, of the "blind leading the blind," in which the leader first deceives himself or herself by pretending to know more than he or she does know. (It's easier to sell something when you believe in it yourself.) And then others, wanting to believe, wanting to put the responsibility on people in authority and take it off themselves, convince themselves that the leaders really do have the answers.

The Enron debacle is a prime example of the dangers of collusion. Investors wanted to believe. Analysts wanted to believe. People in the company wanted to believe. The people at the top of the company wanted to believe. There may have been a few people who, in a more sinister way, knew what they were doing, but our guess is that they were rare players. Much more common is a systemic dynamic, in which lots of people are deceiving themselves because nobody wants to face reality. They don't want to face reality, in part because there are so many people around them looking to them to represent a happy certainty with a happy face.

As a leader facing difficult and dangerous challenges, how do you sustain yourself? How do you keep from sabotaging yourself by mismanaging your own hungers, by failing to discipline your own needs for control and for certainty, for importance, for recognition, or for intimacy? How do you anchor yourself? How do you remember who you are and what you want to protect and conserve at the same time that you are engaged in a process that's buffeting you and tossing you around?

The Open Heart

After years of raising questions and accumulating scars, most of us develop a set of defenses to protect ourselves. We buy into the common myth that you cannot survive a demanding leadership role without developing a thick skin. But that diminishes us, because it squeezes the juice out of our soul. We lose our capacity for innocence, curiosity, and compassion. In a sense, our hearts close -- our innocence turns into cynicism, our curiosity turns into arrogance, and our compassion turns into callousness. We dress these up, of course, because we don't want to see ourselves -- and certainly don't want others to see us -- as cynical, arrogant and callous. We dress cynicism up as realism. So now we are not cynical; we're realistic. We are not arrogant, but we do have authoritative knowledge. And we dress up and cloak our callousness by calling it the thick skin of wisdom. But to stay alive in our spirit, in our heart, requires the courage to keep our heart open; it requires what Roman Catholics call a sacred heart or what in the Jewish tradition is called an open heart. We can talk about the practical reasons why it's important to keep an open heart -- and there are practical reasons -- but chiefly it is important for your own spirit and identity.

Innocence

Innocence and naivete enable you to see things, to be alert to new, emerging realities that other people won't see because they think they already know the answers. We live in an age of expertise, where people pride themselves on knowing rather than on being naive. This can be a real trap for managers in today's organizations. People in authority have risen to their positions because they have been rewarded throughout their careers for taking responsibilities off other people's shoulders, solving problems through their experience and expertise, and delivering solutions. Managers take a great deal of pride in their capacity to solve problems and provide answers and be decisive. By the time you get to be a senior authority figure, that behavior has been reinforced through countless rewards. The seductive temptation for anybody in authority is to step in with the decision and resolve the problem. That's what people are going to reward you for doing. Even the people who aren't going to like your decision are at least looking to you to make a decision. If you don't step in, you'll be criticized as "weak."

But the toughest challenges that groups, organizations, and communities face are hard precisely because they do not have answers, quick fixes waiting to be applied. Moreover, a group, community, or organization will not authorize anyone to push it to address those problems and do the hard work needed. To the contrary, organizational rules, cultures, and standard operating procedures regularly discourage people from facing the hardest questions and making the most difficult choices. It takes real courage for a leader to admit he doesn't know the answer or she doesn't have a solution.

Innocence, however, will enable you to maintain hope when a situation seems hopeless, at least to some people. And your capacity to maintain faith will be self-fulfilling in the sense that it will give other people courage to hope that life can be better. This is the capacity to maintain what Buddhists call a beginner's mind, or a naive perspective. The word naive has the same root as the words genius, ingenuity, and Renaissance. And so we think of naivete as a juvenile quality, but it is also a critical quality for a genius. It is a critical quality for being open to new possibilities and staying hopeful about new possibilities.

Curiosity

Compassion

It is a sacred task to receive people's anger, and not to do so in an arrogant or defensive way, but to say, "This is helping me understand what I'm asking people to do." That capacity to receive people's anger with an open heart is a great gift to people in an organization in which painful adjustments need to be made.