The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

CHAPTER 18

Articulate Your Purposes

Let yourself be silently drawn to the strongerpull of what you really love.

—RUMI

TAKING ON ADAPTIVE challenges is difficult and dangerous work. The only reason we can imagine you would want to do this kind of work is to serve purposes that matter to you deeply. Identifying your higher (orienting) purpose—figuring out what is so important to you that you would be willing to put yourself in peril—is a key element in the process of understanding yourself as a system. When you understand your orienting purpose, you can understand and make day-today decisions in that larger context, and you can make the tough decisions to subordinate other important purposes to that one. When things get tough, your orienting ...