Adaptive Leadership™
Train-the-Trainer

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Profound adaptive change awaits those seek mastery of Adaptive Leadership.

Internalize the "X" factor of Adaptive Leadership as a trainer, coach or leadership advisor.

 

The need for effective leadership facilitation increases 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?

Format

The Train-the-Trainer workshop takes place over 5 days spread out over 3 months

The program consists of a field and forum design. Participants receive a grounding in the principles and practices of Adaptive Facilitation on November 9-10. They then undertake 3 months of largely self-guided practice, culminating in a 3-day 'teach-in' in early 2024.

During the 'teach-in', participants develop skills to design and expertly facilitate one or more of the following: 

  • Standard Adaptive Leadership session (2-day)

  • Shorter form trainings or adaptive interventions (1-hr to 1-day)

  • Longitudinal action-learning programs (6-18 months)

  • Peer-based self-guided activities

  • Other formats tailored to the needs of your organization or clients

Certification

Upon successful completion of the program, facilitators receive ACA certification in Adaptive Leadership (TM) along with access to proprietary materials and trainer assets.

As the premier mission-based Adaptive Leadership organization worldwide, ACA is the only provider of Adaptive Leadership certification. ACA’s experts have run similar programs to build in-house capacity at Google, Microsoft, Acumen, and elsewhere. ACA continually evolves Adaptive Leadership content to stay apace with today’s adaptive challenges, while preserving its core elements and Case-in-Point pedagogy.​

Fees

$12,000 Corporate

$7,500 Nonprofit and Government

Limited scholarships available

About the Workshop

The Train-the-Trainer workshop builds on and extends the leadership development framework and methodology of Adaptive Leadership™ developed at Harvard over the past thirty-five years. It provides certification in a framework, shared language and set of tools and techniques for leading individuals and teams through times of transition, uncertainty and possibility.

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 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 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

Facilitator Guide

A facilitator guide and other resource materials are provided upon completion of the workshop.

Lead Faculty

Eric R. Martin is a renowned Adaptive Leadership advisor, speaker and trainer and author of the book Your Leadership Moment.

He has served in various capacities at places such as: The White House Executive Office of Presidential Personnel, Google, Rockefeller Foundation, Microsoft, National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, The Sustainability Consortium, Sustainability Leadership Initiative, Clean Energy Leadership Institute, Verizon, US Business Council for Sustainable Development, United Nations Innovation Network, World Bank, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, USAID, Democracy Fund, Aspen Institute, Cornell University, and Acumen.  Eric's work to "democratize leadership" has put the powerful framework, tools and techniques of Adaptive Leadership into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

 

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