International consultants Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow call this type of work adaptive leadership. The core of adaptive leadership is regulating the pace of loss that people experience—to keep people from bumping up against their liminal tolerance limit. A leader doesn’t create or eliminate loss. Rather, he or she tries to control the pace at which people experience the loss. He or she protects people from experiencing too much of the loss at one time. In this way the organization continues its adaptive work and eventually moves toward reorientation.
