For professionals navigating complex organizational challenges, this practice-based doctorate strengthens how you see, think, decide, and lead. Grounded in the Adaptive Leadership framework, the program builds the clarity, capacity, and discipline required to mobilize others and drive meaningful progress.
The program is designed to help students build the emotional and psychological capacity for the burden of leadership, advance and enhance leadership skills, better understand and diagnose organizational needs, and improve personal and organizational effectiveness.
Program Roadmap
Phase 1: Introduction to the Practice of Adaptive Leadership
The program begins with a week-long summer intensive where you meet your cohort and immerse yourself in the foundations of Adaptive Leadership. During this opening experience, you begin developing a shared language for understanding leadership, examining how organizations function as social systems and how leaders mobilize people to address complex challenges.
Following the intensive, the program shifts into its regular course cadence. Students take one eight-week course at a time, meeting in person once a month for a Friday evening and Saturday session while completing additional coursework online. These early courses introduce the core ideas and frameworks that begin reshaping how you interpret leadership challenges in your own organization.
- Foundations of Adaptive Leadership
- Understanding organizations as social systems
- Technical problems vs. adaptive challenges
- Authority, stakeholders, and group dynamics
- Developing new ways of diagnosing leadership challenges
Phase 2: Developing Research and Inquiry Skills
With the foundations of Adaptive Leadership established, the program shifts toward research and inquiry. In this phase, you begin developing the analytical tools needed to examine complex leadership challenges within your organization.
Through research-focused coursework, you will learn how to frame problems of practice, evaluate existing systems, and test ideas about leadership and organizational change. At the same time, you will begin identifying the real-world challenge that will become the focus of your dissertation in practice.
Students work closely with faculty during this stage to refine their topic, build an initial research plan, and assemble their dissertation committee.
- Applied leadership research methods
- Identifying and framing a problem of practice
- Organizational analysis and inquiry
- Designing research to evaluate leadership interventions
- Selecting a dissertation topic and forming a committee
Phase 3: Global Perspective and Preparing Your Proposal
By this stage, the ideas and tools you’ve developed throughout the program begin to come together. As you complete your final coursework, you continue refining your understanding of leadership within complex systems while sharpening the focus of your dissertation in practice.
Students also gain exposure to leadership on a global scale through a program-supported immersion experience, such as attending the International Leadership Association’s Global Conference. This experience connects your learning to broader conversations about leadership across industries and cultures.
During this phase, you finalize your research design and formally defend your dissertation proposal, positioning you to move into the final stage of the program.
- Integrating adaptive leadership and research insights
- Global leadership perspectives and professional immersion
- Finalizing dissertation research design
- Defending your dissertation proposal
- Preparing for the Dissertation in Practice phase
Phase 4: Implement and Defend Your Dissertation in Practice
In the final phase of the program, you complete your dissertation in practice, applying everything you have learned to address a complex leadership challenge within your organization or professional context.
Working closely with your dissertation committee, you will conduct your research, evaluate the effectiveness of your intervention, and produce insights that contribute both to your organization and to the broader understanding of leadership practice.
The program culminates in your dissertation defense, where you present your findings and demonstrate the impact of your work.
- Implementing your dissertation research
- Evaluating leadership interventions in real systems
- Analyzing outcomes using research and data
- Contributing practical insight to leadership practice
- Defending your dissertation
This roadmap reflects a typical progression through the program. Individual experiences may vary as coursework, research focus, and dissertation work are tailored to each student’s professional goals and organizational context.
Complex organizations