In this module, we're going to move away from some of the more mainstream theories and look at some alternative, highly complex series of leadership that are sitting slightly to the side but still highly respected. These theories action inquiry leadership from Bill Tolbert and adaptive leadership from Ronald Heifetz have received lots of support from Harvard, multi-disciplinary and built on very strong evidential research. We're including them here because they provide a great doorway into the complex and ambiguous world that the modern organizational leader must inhabit and it gives him ways of navigating through that complexity and coping with it in a meaningful manner. The first lessons, we'll examine action inquiry and leadership transformation. The core idea of this is that leaders will transform as they mature. It's very similar idea to the maturity and development levels and situational leadership. The action inquiry section examines how leaders learn and practice and how they reflect on things like effectiveness, legitimacy, and strategic processes as they mature [inaudible] leadership roles. Here, the leadership transformation section investigates characteristics of leadership at different stages of maturity, sophistication or development. Adaptive leadership frames leadership as a activity that anybody, whether in a position of authority or not, can undertake anytime in the organization if the adaptive challenge comes up. Instead of framing leadership in a way that transformational leadership does, in which a leader has to create a vision as the future and inspire people to follow them, it opens up an ambiguous space where the leader and other members of the organization investigate possible solutions to the challenge together. We'll discuss how adaptive leadership differs from authority in that it is focused on the risks and challenges of a situation, rather than just directing, protecting and ordering the people to do things. We'll also look at how it can be a very risky activity that requires resilience and elegance to pull off successfully. Finally, we will look at the way the leadership terrain is shifting with today's leaders having to understand a number of different models and help them to make decisions. We'll look at how they might be operating in volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous environments and how their decision-making might be in obvious, complicated, complex, or chaotic domains. There we'll also be able to understand the difference between the risky and challenging activity of adaptive leadership versus formal authority. Finally, they will understand the more complex and ambiguous leadership terrains that the contemporary leader has to operate in.