Public health professionals are trained to solve problems. But the most persistent challenges facing public health organizations today — burnout, equity gaps, community trust, cross-sector coordination — resist the kind of solving we are trained for. They are adaptive challenges, not technical ones. And adaptive challenges cannot be resolved by authority alone. They require leadership from everyone in the system, regardless of role or title.
This session begins with a single, clarifying distinction: authority and leadership are not the same thing. Authority is the act of providing direction and order in exchange for cooperation. Leadership is mobilizing yourself and others to make progress on daunting challenges. Authority is a role. Leadership is an activity — and anyone can exercise it. Participants will explore what this distinction means in practice and where in their own organizations the two are most commonly confused.
From there, participants will apply the technical versus adaptive challenge framework to a real challenge from their own work. This is not a theoretical exercise. Participants will examine an actual problem they are facing, diagnose its nature, and begin to surface what kind of response it actually requires — and who needs to be involved in making progress.
The session closes with a structured peer consultation practice using Troika Consulting from Liberating Structures. In rotating groups of three, participants bring a real challenge, receive powerful questions from peers, and listen without defending. The experience builds the habit of asking before advising — a foundational leadership behavior that transforms how teams diagnose and respond to adaptive challenges together.
Participants will leave with one reframed challenge, a set of questions worth sitting with, and a leadership practice they can use the following week.
Instructional Methodologies: Brief didactic framing of authority versus leadership and technical versus adaptive work; individual challenge identification and small-group diagnosis; Troika Consulting (Liberating Structures) as structured peer practice; large-group debrief focused on insight and next action.
Measuring Skill Development: A brief post-session reflection will ask each participant to name the challenge they brought, the most useful question they received, and one leadership action they will take within the next two weeks.
