Adaptive Leadership Lab: Leading beyond your authority in a climate crisis
Climate challenges routinely exceed the authority of any one person, organization, or institution. Yet our roles come with boundaries: a remit, a mandate, a set of decisions we are formally authorized to make. What happens when the change you are trying to create requires you to go beyond them?
This participatory leadership lab explores the gap between what our roles authorize us to do and what the climate challenge actually requires us to do. Where do we stay safely within our remit? Where might we exercise more leadership than our role formally gives us permission to exercise? And what makes crossing that edge difficult, risky, and sometimes worth doing?
At the heart of the session is a leadership practice developed at Harvard University over the past 40 years: “dancing on the edge of your scope of authority.” Rather than treating leadership as something that comes with seniority or title, the session will examine it as a practice of mobilizing change when formal authority alone is not enough.
Participants will bring the climate expertise and the real challenges. Adaptive Change Advisors will bring a framework for examining how each person is showing up within those challenges. Whether you are a CEO, community organizer, funder, program director, or technical expert, the authority you possess may differ. The experience of reaching its limits does not.
The goal is not to arrive at a universal answer about when to cross the boundaries of a role. It is to help each participant see their own leadership edge more clearly, understand what might be holding them back, and identify a move they can actually try.
What to expect
A live, highly participatory leadership lab. After a brief introduction to the distinction between authority and leadership, participants will map their own “scope of authority” around a real climate challenge: what sits comfortably inside it, what the challenge demands beyond it, and where their personal edge currently lies.
Two invited climate leaders will then work through their own dilemmas in a fishbowl exercise, making the tensions in their leadership visible rather than presenting themselves as experts with answers. The rest of the room will work simultaneously on their own challenges, comparing what they notice with what unfolds in the fishbowl. The session will close with each participant identifying one small experiment beyond their current edge that they could potentially try during Climate Week itself.
Who this is for
This session is for people already trying to make difficult climate-related change happen, particularly those pursuing outcomes they do not have sufficient authority to produce. It is relevant across roles and levels of seniority, from funders and technical experts to community organizers, program directors, and CEOs.
What you will get out of it
A practical way to distinguish between exercising authority and exercising leadership
A clearer picture of where your formal authority ends and your current leadership edge begins
Insight from seeing other climate leaders work openly on their own leadership dilemmas
Space to examine the risks and possibilities of moving beyond your formal remit
One concrete leadership experiment you can put into practice immediately
Hosted by
Adaptive Change Advisors