You’re Not Failing—You’re Just Facing an Adaptive Challenge

I’ve been having some conversations recently that radiate a familiar tension:

Someone is trying to solve an adaptive challenge with a technical solution. 

They’re operating in the land of:

• ✅ We have a plan.

• ✅ The strategy is solid.

• ✅ The team is smart and capable.

• ✅ The funding came through.

But still…nothing’s shifting.

Here’s what I see all the time in systems change work (and honestly, plenty of other spaces too):

Leaders are trying to solve adaptive challenges with technical tools.

Why? Because they’re human. 

And when we’re under pressure, we reach for the tools that feel tangible. Familiar. Actionable.

But, it’s like the classic square peg, round hole situation. 

You can’t fix a values-based, trust-driven, emotionally charged challenge with a new spreadsheet or a clean RACI chart.

So today, I want to talk about the difference between the two—and why it matters more than ever.

If you’ve been working in systems change for a long time, you might be familiar with this concept.

But in practice? It’s still hard. (Like, really hard.)

And if this idea is new to you—or if you don’t see yourself as working in “systems change”—I invite you to read on anyway.

Because whether you’re running a tech team, managing a classroom, checking out groceries, or navigating a project that feels like pushing a boulder uphill—this distinction might just unlock something you didn’t realize you needed.

Wait, what’s the difference?

Let’s break it down:

🛠️ Technical challenges can be complex—but the solutions are known.

They can often be solved by an expert, a process, or a checklist.
Examples:

• ✅ Updating your org chart

• ✅ Launching a dashboard

• ✅ Filing a 990

🌪️ Adaptive challenges are messy, emotional, and relational.

They involve competing values, shifting power, identity, trust, and behavior change.

Examples:

• ⚡ Rebuilding trust after a breach

• ⚡ Shifting your collaborative network from transactional to true partnership

• ⚡ Figuring out why “engagement” isn’t working—even though you’re doing all the things

Here’s a personal example of when I totally missed the difference:

When I was in college, I started feeling a pull away from the religion I was raised in (Catholic, y’all 🙃- though shoutout to the new liberal-ish Pope).

Naturally, 22-year-old Lynn made a technical plan to solve this existential unraveling:

📝 “Find a new religion”—added straight to my winter break to-do list.

To me, it seemed simple enough:

1. Go to the library

2. Check out books on world religions

3. Browse, reflect, feel the vibe

4. Make a decision within 3 weeks

5. Enact new religion (whatever that meant 😬)

How hard could this be? 

But spoiler alert: that plan didn’t go anywhere.

And now, with an adaptive lens, I can see why:

• I was running from something, not toward something—which means my “motivation” was actually just fear and discomfort

• I didn’t account for the time, energy, and emotional processing required

• I treated it like a logistical swap—not a deep identity shift

• I hadn’t asked the harder questions: What do I believe? What am I longing for? What’s my relationship to spirituality, power, structure, meaning?

• And truthfully? I mostly just wanted something to say when my family asked, “What are you now?”

I boiled it down to:

👉🏼 Don’t like old religion → Need new religion → Choose one → Done.

But it was so much more layered than that.

And that’s the trap we fall into when we apply technical solutions to adaptive problems.

🌀 Adaptive challenges are fundamentally human.

💬 They’re about identity, emotion, values, and uncertainty.

🧩 Even when the surface looks tactical, the roots are usually relational.

Why this matters

Systems change work is deeply adaptive.

It’s about people. Trust. Power. Relationships. Identity.

Not just deliverables.

But the pressure you’re under?

It often demands technical clarity in response to adaptive uncertainty.

You’re asked to:

• Provide metrics when the work is about mindsets

• Translate nuance into soundbites for people who haven’t done the work

• Present neat PowerPoints about messy community dynamics

• Create roadmaps and five year plans while the terrain is shifting under your feet

And when the strategy doesn’t stick? You start to doubt yourself.

Maybe we just didn’t implement it right. Maybe I didn’t lead well enough. Maybe we need more data.

But here’s the truth:

You’re not doing it wrong. You’re solving the wrong kind of problem.

⚠️ Why this is especially important right now

We’re in a resource-constrained environment laced with scarcity mindset.

Leaders—especially in collective impact, public systems, and community-rooted work—are being asked to:

• Do more with less

• Prove outcomes faster

• Package complexity into something funders can digest

It’s tempting to default to technical fixes—because they’re cleaner. Easier to explain. Easier to fund.

But here’s the cost:

When you apply technical solutions just to make the work more “fundable,” you delay the real work that needs to happen.

You delay the opportunity to build trust.

You delay the chance to get honest about power.

You delay sustainable, community-driven change.

And the longer we avoid the adaptive work?

The more likely we are to burn out, lose momentum, or lose the thread entirely along the way. 

🧠 What’s happening in our brains during adaptive challenges

Here’s the part no one talks about enough in leadership circles:

Your body often knows it’s adaptive before your brain can catch up.

The sweaty palms.

The pit in your stomach.

The sense of dread, uncertainty, or sudden urge to avoid the meeting altogether.

That’s not overreacting. That’s your nervous system doing its job.

🔄 Why? Because your brain is wired for survival—not systems change.

Our brains evolved to detect threats—fast.

Not to process slow-moving complexity like power dynamics, competing values, or community trust.

When your brain perceives a threat to:

• Belonging (“Will I be rejected?”)

• Identity (“What if I’m not good enough for this?”)

• Safety (“Will this blow up the coalition?”)

…it doesn’t distinguish that from a threat like being chased by a bear.

Your amygdala (the brain’s fear center) lights up.

Your prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for long-term planning, decision-making, and empathy) starts to go offline.

And that’s when your body shifts into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Even if the issue on the table is “just” a new structure, a partner conflict, or a strategic reframe—your body might respond like your very survival is at stake.

🧠 Translation?

Even if the problem is strategic, your reaction might be physiological.

And here’s the part we often forget: This isn’t just happening to you—it’s happening to your team. Your board. Your funders. Your partners.

So that “surprising reaction” in a meeting?

That tension you didn’t expect when rolling out a new plan?

That moment when someone seems “resistant” or “checked out”?

It might not be about the idea.

It might just be your nervous system trying to protect itself. 

To which I say, “Thanks, nervous system–thanks for protecting me. I’ve got it from here though.”

💡 So what do we do with that?

We name it.

We normalize it.

We create space for processing—not just performance.

Because no amount of planning, dashboards, or logic models can override a body that feels unsafe.

And adaptive leadership?

Starts by understanding the humans in the room—including yourself.

🔄 Real Examples I See All the Time

By the time leaders reach out to me, they’re often sitting with challenges that seem like “strategy problems” on the surface—but when we dig deeper, they’re something else entirely.

Here are a few examples of what that can look like:

💬 “We need a new partner engagement strategy.”

📎 Technical response: Hire a comms firm. Redesign the invitation. Host another convening.

🧠 Adaptive truth: Partners don’t feel safe, seen, or invested. You can’t rebrand your way into trust.

💬 “Our dashboard isn’t driving action.”

📎 Technical response: Rebuild the data system. Add more filters. Color-code the heatmap.

🧠 Adaptive truth: People don’t agree on what success looks like—or they’re not ready to face the story the data tells.

💬 “This new hire didn’t work out—again.”

📎 Technical response: Change the job description. Revamp the interview process. Try a different recruiter.

🧠 Adaptive truth: The role itself may be misaligned with the current culture or structure. Or the org isn’t set up to support success in that seat.

💬 “We’ve got the 5-year plan, but nothing’s moving.”

📎 Technical response: Revisit the Gantt chart. Adjust the KPIs.

🧠 Adaptive truth: The team’s not aligned. Power is unclear. Or people are waiting for someone else to go first.

​​💬 “This model isn’t working—we need to shop around for a new one.”

📎 Technical response: Scan other frameworks. Pull best practices. Try to plug in a “proven” model that feels cleaner or simpler.

🧠 Adaptive truth: The issue isn’t the model—it’s the misalignment underneath.

Each of these situations shows up looking like a project management problem—but what’s underneath is usually identity, trust, power, or fear.

The longer we misdiagnose an adaptive challenge as a technical one, the more frustrated and burned out we become.

And that’s not a reflection of your capacity or leadership.

It’s not a failure of leadership.

It’s a system responding exactly how it was built—

and a nervous system doing what it was designed to do: keep you safe.

What adaptive leadership looks like

So what does help when you’re facing an adaptive challenge?

It’s less about jumping to fix—and more about learning to listen, adjust, and make space for complexity.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

🧘‍♀️ 1. Slowing down to sense what’s really going on

(Not what you wish were true. Not what you’re being asked to report.)

But what’s actually happening—beneath the surface.

Tools to support this:

• A short daily mindfulness or meditation practice (even 5 minutes can help, trust me)
  👉 Try: Insight Timer or how I learned meditation: the Headspace app (here’s a free 30-day guest pass)

• Embodiment practices like yoga, movement, or somatic check-ins (e.g., “Where am I holding tension right now?”)

• Intentional play or creative practices that activate right-brain thinking
  👉 Try: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for unblocking creativity and access
  
  

💬 2. Asking questions instead of delivering answers

Resist the urge to sound smart. Get curious instead.

Tools to support this:

• Practice open-ended, reflective questions in everyday settings (e.g., What feels possible here? vs. What should we do?)

• In meetings, invite inquiry rounds: What are you noticing? What do you wonder? What feels unclear?

• Use processes like Critical Response to make room for more voices without over-processing
  
  

🌀 3. Creating space for people to process, name, and work through uncertainty

People need time to metabolize change—especially in adaptive work.

Tools to support this:

• Add reflection prompts to the start or end of meetings: What’s one tension you’re holding? One insight you’re sitting with?

• Use breakout groups or pairs for “real talk” processing (safer than large-group performative responses)

• Host or join an adaptive leadership mastermind or peer support circle.
  👉 If this is something you’d be interested in joining, hit reply and let me know!
  
  

🧭 4. Reframing “resistance” as a signal—not a failure

Resistance is communication. It’s data. It’s a nervous system saying, “Something’s not sitting right.”

Tools to support this:

• Try “yes, and” reframing practices from improv or coaching

• Design small “safe-to-fail” experiments that normalize discomfort and learning
  👉 Learn more: Adaptive Leadership by Heifetz et al.

• Purposely try something new–practice the uncomfortable
  
  

Adaptive work is about learning, adjusting, and holding space for what’s unfolding. It’s not about perfect solutions.

And honestly? Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do… is pause.

🌱 You’re Not Failing—You’re Facing the Real Work

If your smartest plans aren’t shifting the system—

If your team feels stuck, even though the roadmap is clear—

If you’re carrying pressure that doesn’t feel fixable…

You’re not broken.

You might just be trying to solve an adaptive challenge with a technical tool.

And that’s not a reflection of your ability.

It’s a reflection of how complex, relational, and deeply human this work really is.

It’s just not clear-cut…no matter how much we wish it were.

There’s nothing wrong with you. 

You’re just a human—wired to outrun tigers, not navigate long-term complexity with 15 stakeholders and a Google Sheet.

Adaptive leadership asks more of us—not because we’re failing, but because the work is alive.

And if it feels heavy sometimes? That’s because you care.

✍🏼 A reflection for the road:

What’s one challenge you’re facing right now that might actually be adaptive?

And what would shift if you treated it that way?

💬 Want help navigating the complexity?

This is exactly what I support leaders with through my work as a Fractional Chief Strategy Officer and through my Customized Facilitation, Convening, & Strategy Support.

If you’re carrying the weight of an adaptive challenge—staff transitions, trust gaps, strategy fatigue, or momentum loss—I can help you hold it without holding it alone.

👉🏽 Let’s talk.

Book a free 30-minute call or reach out directly. I’d love to hear what you’re holding right now.

You deserve leadership support that actually matches the complexity of your work.

Because we don’t need more duct-tape fixes.