Ronald Heifetz: Ours is a time of great opportunity and great transition. And transitions inevitably cause people to ask a fundamental question: what’s essential and what’s expendable? What’s precious and what isn’t as precious…

The aphorism that is commonly bandied about is "people resist change," or "change frightens people." I think that’s wrong. I think that when people win the lottery and win a million dollars, or ten million dollars, they know their life is going to be enormously changed and they welcome that change. They don’t give the money back. Change is hard when it represents the possibility of loss. It’s the possibility of loss, and the apprehension, fear, and anxiety associated with that possibility of loss that generates resistance…

All of a sudden, on this Sunday afternoon in 1965, his 15-year-old daughter Mary comes running into the living room from the bedroom. She agitatedly says to him: "Daddy, Daddy, we’ve got to change the television channels and see if the news is on television right now. I was just listening to the radio and I heard that there are innocent men and women and children being beat up by police on horseback, tear-gassed, because they’re demonstrating and they claim they’re not allowed to vote…

I think our transitional moment in human history is so extraordinarily exciting. We’re revisiting our failed effort a hundred years ago at global interdependence…

There’s an openness and a willingness to learn that I don’t think existed a hundred years ago.… We’re talking about a pluralism that’s far more than tolerant respect. A tolerant respect is: "I tolerate our differences and we’re not going to go to war over them anymore." But an appreciative pluralism is where we really have a lot to learn from one another, because we’ve been plowing similar terrain.

… leadership is about mobilizing people’s capacity to sift through and hold on to what’s essential from their past.

I like the term "creating better adaptations," because as in biology, an adaptation may be transformative in the sense that it dramatically widens, deepens, and broadens our capacity to thrive in new environments…

So I think we’re socially at an extraordinary moment historically. We’re creating a whole new set of social adaptations in our relationship with the earth, in our understanding of its limitations, of our role in stewarding the earth and our relationship to it, and in our relationship to one another. It’s an extraordinary moment… But the leadership that will be required, I believe, to take advantage of these opportunities will be a leadership that will have a reverence for the losses and the disloyalties that you’re asking people to sustain as they let go of pieces of the past that no longer serve them…

It isn’t true in my experience yet that one can achieve a transcendent consciousness without engagement with the world around us. I think the reason people seek a monastery or why an artist seeks the solitude of his or her garret is because they’ve already internalized so much of the environment around them. That environment is so pregnant and so alive as an inner chorus of voices speaking to them all the time that they need a quiet and protected haven. In solitude they can begin to hear themselves think and experience their consciousness. In solitude they can engage with and distinguish themselves from the environment that they’ve already internalized. But they don’t achieve that transcendence independent of that engagement, in my experience…

The activity of leadership has to be tailored to that person. The strategic and tactical ideas that I’ve discussed in my writing and teaching are general ideas that then have to be tailored to that person or context. In short, however, they have to do with moving her from what you’re calling a victim consciousness to an agency consciousness, or a creative consciousness. In a sense, in the particular case of an individual, it seems to me that that is what the art of therapy is supposed to be about. And then leadership might look, in a one-on-one situation, like therapy...

Ron Heifetz’s concept of adaptive change emphasizes what in most rhetoric and popular writings about leadership tends to be tuned out: that leadership means dealing with losses and addressing the fundamental question, "what’s essential and what’s expendable?" From this angle, resistance to change has to be reframed as resistance to the possibility of loss. Section VII of the interview contains an interesting exchange about the sources from where the new comes into being: does it come from holding on to what’s essential from the past and adapting to an environment that has changed (perspective 1), or does it come from accessing a deeper knowing that connects us to the future that wants to emerge through us (perspective 2)? While my experience, when I am doing my best work, tends to resonate with the second perspective, Heifetz did not agree with that. His experience resonated with the first perspective. While both perspectives are embedded in a joint cyclical view of dynamic interaction between self and environment, it is an interesting question whether, when going through a process of profound change, you focus on what is essential that you want to keep and take forward or whether you focus on surrendering to what wants to emerge (through you)–that is, surrendering to the unknown.