Somewhere in the last 18 months, most organisations solved the wrong problem...
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on what Adaptive Leadership needs to become for the age of AI.
Somewhere in the last eighteen months, most organisations solved the wrong problem. They rolled out the tools. New platforms, licences, prompts to master, dashboards to watch. They ran the training sessions, celebrated the early productivity wins, and reported the numbers up the chain. By almost every measure leadership tracks, the AI rollout looked like a success.
And yet, underneath it, something isn't landing.
Recent research bears this out (Zaki, 2026). While 81% of CEOs report having a clear AI policy, only 28% of their own employees agree the company has a clear strategy for using it. Leaders are also badly misreading morale: 76% of executives believe their people are enthusiastic about AI adoption, when the real figure is closer to 31% (Zaki, 2026). Meanwhile, Gallup (2026) finds AI adoption is reshaping roles and workflows faster than the systems meant to support people through that change. Something is out of step.
This is the gap between a technical challenge and an adaptive one, a distinction Ronald Heifetz named decades ago and that has never felt more relevant (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). A technical challenge has a known solution. You can buy it, install it, train someone on it. An adaptive challenge has no such shortcut. It asks people to change how they think, what they value, and sometimes who they believe themselves to be at work.
Most AI rollouts are being managed as if they were entirely technical. Choose the platform. Write the policy. Schedule the workshop. Move on. But what's actually being asked of people is adaptive: let go of expertise you built over twenty years, sit with not knowing, trust a colleague who now works differently than you do, find out whether your value was ever really about the task at all.
You cannot train your way out of an adaptive challenge. You can only lead your way through it.
Heifetz's image for this is the balcony and the dance floor (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). Down on the dance floor, everything is close and loud. You're reacting to the next email, the next objection, the next person who wants reassurance you can't yet give. The balcony is different. From up there, you can see the whole pattern: who's protecting territory, who's quietly grieving a version of their job that's disappearing, where the resistance is actually a legitimate question wearing a disguise.
Good leadership in this moment means learning to move between the two. Enough time on the dance floor to stay credible and connected. Enough time on the balcony to see what the system is really telling you.
There's a particular kind of leadership pressure that shows up here, and it's worth naming honestly: the pressure to look certain when you are not. To have the answer when your team looks to you expecting one. This is precisely where technical thinking seduces us back in, because certainty feels safer than staying with the question. But an adaptive challenge doesn't resolve because a leader performs confidence. It resolves because a leader can hold steady in the discomfort long enough for the system underneath them to find its own new equilibrium.
That 'holding' is a skill. It can be learned, but not from a slide deck.
If you're watching your own organisation move through this right now, technically ready but adaptively unsettled, that gap is worth paying attention to, before it costs you your best people. I work with leaders and teams navigating exactly this territory, the space between having the tools and actually being changed by them.
This distinction between technical and adaptive work is just the entry point. In Part 2, I'll look at why hybrid human-AI teams break several of Adaptive Leadership's founding assumptions altogether, and in Part 3, at how the framework itself needs to extend to keep up.
If that's live for you at the moment, I'd welcome a conversation. You can book a 30-minute session with me directly: https://calendly.com/tara-minchin-aintreeleadership/30-minute-session
References
Gallup. (2026). Rising AI adoption spurs workforce changes. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/704225/rising-adoption-spurs-workforce-changes.aspx
Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of leading. Harvard Business School Press.
Zaki, J. (2026, April 30). Empathetic leadership can make or break AI adoption. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/04/empathetic-leadership-can-make-or-break-ai-adoption