Adaptive Leadership for Transforming Business

Corporate Social Entrepreneurship (CSE) is born out of the need to change current business mind-sets and practice.  Businesses are faced with multiple challenges and demands from governments, regulating agencies, consumers, employees, competitors, changing technologies, depleting resources, etc. This module offers theories and tools to support organizations address complex challenges. Adaptive leadership is about responding adequately to dynamic contexts, which will be practiced in a consultancy case.

Personal and professional skills

• Embracing ambiguity, uncertainty and risk
• Capable of creating a vision and strategy for long term resilience
• Proactively seeking to revisit, recombine and transform knowledge and practice to develop transdisciplinary solutions for complex problems
• Understanding the need for continuous learning
• Ability to uphold mutual trust, transparency and integrity

 CSE core skills

• Shaping the corporate identity and the need for change
• Being sensitive: enacting a good ‘radar’ system of timely alerts on deviations, current and future developments and threats to internal and external matters
• Being responsive: enacting innovative solutions for a changing environment and developing core capabilities to adapt to new circumstances
• Being connective: proactively seeking new connections and facilitating collaborations (networks, themes, societal challenges, stakeholders)
• Facilitating collective sense-making, shared awareness and perspectives
• Leveraging systems dynamics: designing and experimenting with micro/macro interconnections, escalating processes and feedback loops, etc.
• Enabling favourable conditions to bridge the plannable and the unpredictable matters of business
• Mobilizing allies for change