A significant national conservation federation deals daily with the complex adaptive issues that face the conservation movement as a whole:

• The current generation of leadership will soon be retiring, leaving a pipeline of young, inexperienced potential successors.
• Serious value conflicts exist between conservationists who came to the conversation as sportsmen and those who came as environmental activists, yet both must be included in resolving the toughest issues.
• The organization must consider the varying perspectives of science, politics, economics, and limited resources, yet remain focused on its core purpose.

These are classic adaptive challenges. Different constituencies have long traditions and deeply held loyalties that conflict with one another. Finding viable solutions involves genuine soul searching to identify which values must be preserved and which must be sacrificed to achieve a way forward with which most everyone can live. To do so will require learning new behaviors and changing hearts and minds. This is difficult, at times painful, work.

Like many organizations, this client has been struggling with its issues for a long time, hitting roadblocks, unable to move forward. That’s why the federation turned to CLA, asking us to use the framework of Adaptive Leadership to help them provide their constituents with the tools and courage to work through the challenges they and the conservation movement face.

The work began, as CLA engagements frequently do, with two preliminary interventions. First, representatives of the client’s management group attended a CLA open enrollment program, where they were introduced to the core framework of Adaptive Leadership. Then CLA conducted a short workshop for the top team. Once these key people had been exposed to the concepts of Adaptive Leadership, CLA collaborated with them to design and conduct a deep, transformative, year-long experience to be offered to a carefully selected group of men and women from for-profit, non-profit and governmental backgrounds. These participants were identified as having the potential to lead the conservation movement in this country for the next twenty years. Through small group work, individual leadership challenges and coaching, our goal is to embed the skills, the will, and the insight they will need to open and sustain a new dialogue for meaningful change and progress, using Adaptive Leadership as their shared language and framework.