Adaptive Leadership Coaching For Teams Or Daring Educators “Stirring The Pot”?

It’s called Case-in-Point and is an innovative, experiential framework that uses the dynamics unfolding in the room as fodder for leadership development and learning.

By seeing a room of individuals as a system and surfacing the complex forces at play in that system, participants are able to identify the leadership concepts coming to life in the moment. An approach that seeks to engage participants both intellectually and emotionally, case-in-point shifts the focus from didactic, front-of the room dispensing of knowledge to system-wide engagement.

Such an approach tends to disappoint participants’ expectations and in turn to generate a level of disequilibrium. The work of the facilitator is to hold participants through that disequilibrium to begin to generate insights about the rules of engagement and about their individual default reactions to ambiguity, chaos, and conflict.

An experimental framework, case-in-point asks that the facilitator model the very behaviors core to developing leadership capacity: holding steady in the midst of uncertainty, developing multiple interpretations of what’s going on in the moment, navigating the participants’ call for protection, order, and direction from authority. For the educator this work is daunting, unclear, and messy by design — in effect mirroring the work of leadership in every other realm. We’ve found that when what’s happening in the room is different, ambiguous, unfamiliar, people often tend to replicate what they’ve seen.

We invite you to learn more about adaptive leadership coaching for teams with this approach as our hope here is not for you to replicate our approach but rather to find yourself and your own practice. We are passionate about this work and would love to help you join a growing number of daring leadership educators willing to use this approach for the sake of deep, meaningful leadership development. The power in this practice is that both participants and facilitators have the opportunity to grow their leadership edge.

An assumption that grounds all case-in-point teaching: we are effective in teaching leadership ONLY WHEN we as facilitators both model and exercise leadership in the classroom space. As leadership development practitioners, our call to leadership expresses itself through our ability to build leadership capacity in others. Rather than “talking about” leadership, case-in-point gives educators access to engage in acts of leadership themselves.

Are you curious about this work? Check our latest online resource below.