Agility, for most L&D teams, is less about sprints and more about decisions close to work, safe experimentation and leading through uncertainty. Matt Smith reviews Giles Lindsay’s book The Adaptive Leader, exploring adaptive traits and cross-cultural ambition, alongside a key tension between “being agile” and the book’s recurring Agile terminology.
Book: The Adaptive Leader
Author: Giles Lindsay
There is a version of agility that most L&D professionals recognise, even if they have never attended a sprint planning session or facilitated a retrospective. It is the capacity to move quickly, distribute decisions to the people closest to the work, build cultures where experimentation is safer than silence, and lead through uncertainty without pretending to have all the answers. That version of agility matters enormously and is the territory Giles Lindsay sets out to map in this book.
When a book reaches beyond the narrow Western corporate lens to explore how these ideas play out across different cultures and contexts, I noticed
What immediately distinguishes The Adaptive Leader is its ambition. Giles attempts to cover organisational culture, leadership practice, team dynamics, conflict management, operational agility across business functions, and the application of agile thinking across different global cultures and generations. I work in an organisation that actively aspires to lowercase-a agile approaches of test and learn, prototyping, outcome-based leadership, and psychological safety as a foundation. So, when a book reaches beyond the narrow Western corporate lens to explore how these ideas play out across different cultures and contexts, I noticed. That stood out to me as genuinely ambitious, and worth acknowledging.
CLEAR leadership
The framework Giles builds on is well-structured. His five-step CLEAR model (culture, leadership, execution, adaptability, responsiveness) is a useful through-line, and the broader instinct to ground everything in culture and leadership reflects how high-performing adaptive organisations actually operate. The five traits of adaptive organisations he identifies (psychological safety, growth mindset, decentralised decision-making, transparency, and a bias for action) are sound and will resonate with anyone working on organisational effectiveness.
For me, the book hit its stride in Part Three, focused on empowering teams and culture for sustainable agility. There are genuinely useful nuggets here, including a clear articulation of how adaptive leadership operates at different levels of an organisation, distinguishing the roles of senior leaders, middle management and team leads in ways that practitioners could put to immediate use.
Range, structure and tension
As an L&D practitioner whose work sits inside the territory of adaptive, people-centred leadership but outside formal Agile methodology, I found there to be a central tension running through the book. Giles explicitly argues for a shift from doing Agile to being agile. The distinction appears early and recurs throughout. It is the right argument. But the book’s own language keeps pulling in the opposite direction. Capital-A Agile is used throughout, with consistent references to scrums, kanban, sprints and retrospectives, enough that a reader without Agile methodology experience may find themselves quietly excluded from a book that ostensibly wants to welcome them in. If your organisation already operates in an Agile environment, that vocabulary is unremarkable. If you are approaching adaptive leadership from the outside, as I was, it creates distance where the book intends connection.
This tension is sharpened by the book’s structure. Because Giles covers an enormous range, many crucial topics like emotional intelligence, psychological safety, purpose-led leadership, and trust receive a paragraph or a well-organised table before the book moves on. For example, his observation that “AI doesn’t inspire, mentor or build trust – people do” is sharp, but it arrives as a single line in a chapter on future skills, without the sustained treatment it deserves. The ideas Giles cares most about are the right ideas, but I felt they needed a longer treatment than the book gives them.
Making the most of the book
The Adaptive Leader works best as a practitioner reference, a consolidation of agile thinking for someone already operating in that world, dipping into specific chapters as needed rather than reading cover to cover.
If you are an L&D professional approaching adaptive leadership from outside the Agile tradition, you may find the entry point harder to locate. If you are an Agile coach, transformation lead, or senior leader embedding agility at scale, there is real value in having this breadth collected in one place.
Matt Smith is Head of L&D at Nesta and has his own consultancy, Matthew Smith Learning
