Certificate Course in Leadership Agility

Duration 10 days 18 modules · 65 contact hours
Level Intermediate Certificate on completion
Who attends Senior Managers, Programme and Project Directors and others
Fee from USD 2,200 KSh 190,000 for Kenyan organisations
Where 52 cities + online See dates by city
Next start 9 Nov 2026 Course code SD-LD-121

Before you join: Participants should have at least three years of professional experience and current responsibility for a team, project, service, change initiative, or significant stakeholder relationship.

Dates & prices

Two start dates a month in every city, and live online on weekdays or weekends. Fees are per participant; classroom fees include tuition, materials, lunch and refreshments, and the certificate.

Suggest a date or city

Showing the next six months. Later dates, other cities and private deliveries for your team are available on request.

Course overview

Leadership agility is the capacity to lead effectively when the problem is unclear, stakeholders disagree, and familiar plans no longer produce reliable results. Managers and senior specialists are often expected to make decisions with incomplete information, maintain performance during change, address resistance without forcing compliance, and create conditions for teams to learn quickly. This requires more than personal adaptability: it requires disciplined sensemaking, sound judgment, stakeholder work, and deliberate leadership practice.

This certificate course develops the four connected practices commonly associated with leadership agility: setting direction in changing conditions, mobilising stakeholders, generating and testing new responses, and managing one's own reactions under pressure. Participants use Adaptive Leadership, Cynefin, systems mapping, stakeholder salience analysis, RAPID decision rights, safe-to-fail experiments, ADKAR, and structured coaching conversations. They learn to distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges, make trade-offs visible, handle conflict productively, and turn uncertainty into structured learning.

Teaching combines concise instructor briefings with sector-based cases, facilitated group analysis, simulations, peer challenge, and individual work on a live leadership issue. Participants begin building their own leadership case during the first week and improve it throughout the programme. They leave with a reviewed 90-day leadership agility plan containing a challenge diagnosis, systems map, stakeholder strategy, experiment portfolio, communication approach, measures, and governance actions.

The programme suits experienced professionals moving into broader leadership responsibilities, leaders directing change, and managers whose results depend on peers, partners, regulators, or cross-functional teams rather than direct authority alone.

What you will be able to do

  • Diagnose adaptive challenges using Adaptive Leadership and Cynefin frameworks
  • Map system dynamics through causal loop diagrams and intervention-point analysis
  • Design stakeholder engagement strategies using salience, influence, and network mapping
  • Structure decisions with RAPID roles, premortems, and decision logs
  • Create safe-to-fail experiments with hypotheses, measures, safeguards, and review triggers
  • Conduct difficult conversations using Crucial Conversations, SBI feedback, and interest-based negotiation
  • Build change plans using ADKAR, force-field analysis, and readiness assessment
  • Present a 90-day leadership agility plan for a live organisational challenge

Benefits of attending

For you

  • A defensible approach for leading ambiguous, politically sensitive work
  • Stronger judgment about when to decide, consult, experiment, or escalate
  • A practical method for influencing stakeholders without formal authority
  • Greater confidence conducting conflict, feedback, and resistance conversations
  • A 90-day development plan tied to a live leadership challenge

For your organisation

  • Faster identification of adaptive risks before they become delivery failures
  • Better cross-functional coordination through explicit decision rights and stakeholder plans
  • More disciplined experimentation before large-scale operational commitments
  • Higher-quality change implementation through readiness, resistance, and sponsor analysis
  • Managers who convert lessons from setbacks into tracked improvement actions

Course modules

18 modules over 10 days

Participants can frame a live leadership issue using the core practices and action logics of leadership agility.

  • Leadership agility defined through context-setting, stakeholder, creative, and self-leadership practices
  • Comparing expert, achiever, catalyst, and co-creator leadership action logics
  • Technical problems distinguished from adaptive challenges using Heifetz's diagnostic questions
  • Personal leadership case selected for two-week application work
  • Authority, responsibility, and accountability mapped before intervention design
  • Leadership assumptions surfaced through ladder-of-inference reflection prompts and evidence checks

Participants can assess uncertainty and form evidence-based working hypotheses for action.

  • Cynefin domains classify clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and confused situations
  • Signal detection separates weak signals from noise and familiar patterns
  • PESTLE scanning identifies political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental shifts
  • Scenario axes frame plausible futures around critical uncertainties
  • Assumption mapping tests certainty, impact, and evidence behind strategic beliefs
  • Sensemaking conversations convert divergent observations into shared working hypotheses

Participants can map system dynamics and identify credible intervention points around a leadership challenge.

  • System boundaries defined around the presenting issue and affected actors
  • Causal loop diagrams expose reinforcing and balancing feedback patterns
  • Stock-and-flow thinking distinguishes accumulations from rates of change
  • Intervention points identified using Meadows' twelve system-change locations
  • Second-order effects tested before selecting leadership responses under uncertainty
  • Systems map drafted for the participant's live leadership case

Participants can translate strategic intent into adaptive priorities, measures, and near-term choices.

  • Strategic intent translated into adaptive priorities, guardrails, and decision criteria
  • OKRs distinguish outcome measures from output and activity measures
  • Three-horizon planning balances current performance, emerging opportunities, and future options
  • Real-options thinking stages commitments when information remains incomplete
  • Portfolio reviews reallocate attention, funding, and talent against evidence
  • Strategic narrative links direction, trade-offs, and near-term action

Participants can diagnose stakeholder interests and build an engagement strategy for contested work.

  • Stakeholder salience assesses power, legitimacy, urgency, and relationship quality
  • Interest-influence matrices prioritise engagement effort and sponsor attention
  • Network maps reveal brokers, informal influencers, and isolated groups
  • Stakeholder interviews elicit interests, losses, fears, and non-negotiables
  • Coalition-building sequences commitments from sponsors, peers, critics, and implementers
  • Engagement plan specifies message, channel, owner, timing, and feedback

Participants can mobilise people around adaptive work while maintaining appropriate accountability.

  • Adaptive Leadership distinguishes technical fixes from value-conflict challenges
  • Balcony-and-dance-floor perspective separates observation from participation during pressure
  • Productive disequilibrium calibrated without overwhelming people or avoiding tension
  • Work avoidance patterns identified through blame, scapegoating, and procedural distraction
  • Giving work back builds ownership without abandoning formal accountability
  • Adaptive challenge statement drafted for the live leadership case

Participants can select decision methods that match risk, reversibility, and situational complexity.

  • Decision rights clarified with RAPID roles and escalation thresholds
  • Cynefin-informed responses match action style to situational complexity
  • Premortem analysis exposes failure modes before irreversible commitments
  • Red-team challenge tests evidence, assumptions, and dissenting interpretations
  • Reversible and irreversible decisions receive different speed and consultation
  • Decision log records rationale, confidence, dissent, and review triggers

Participants can design bounded experiments that reduce uncertainty while protecting delivery commitments.

  • Hypotheses express expected outcomes, mechanisms, measures, and timeframes
  • Minimum viable experiments test uncertain assumptions with limited exposure
  • Safe-to-fail probes establish boundaries, sensing measures, and exit criteria
  • After-action reviews compare intent, results, causes, and next adjustments
  • Learning backlog ranks questions by consequence and uncertainty
  • Experiment charter designed for the participant's leadership challenge

Participants can create communication approaches that build understanding, commitment, and useful feedback.

  • Audience analysis identifies information needs, concerns, language, and desired actions
  • Message maps organise core message, supporting points, evidence, and asks
  • Strategic stories connect change rationale, human stakes, and credible progress
  • Listening sessions surface meaning, resistance, and local intelligence
  • Framing choices distinguish loss avoidance, opportunity, duty, and identity
  • Communication cadence aligns announcements, dialogue, decisions, and feedback loops

Participants can prepare and lead direct conversations that address conflict without damaging working relationships.

  • Crucial Conversations prepares facts, stories, feelings, and mutual purpose
  • Interest-based negotiation separates positions from underlying needs and criteria
  • SBI feedback structures observations, behavioural impact, and future requests
  • Nonviolent Communication distinguishes observations, feelings, needs, and requests
  • Conflict styles assessed using Thomas-Kilmann mode choices under pressure
  • Repair conversations address breach, accountability, restitution, and recommitment

Participants can establish team conditions that support candour, coordinated action, and learning.

  • Team charter defines purpose, decision rules, roles, and operating norms
  • Psychological safety assessed through invitation, response, and boundary-setting behaviours
  • SCARF model anticipates status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness concerns
  • Meeting architecture separates information sharing, debate, decisions, and reflection
  • Team learning routines use check-ins, retrospectives, and peer challenge
  • Distributed teams establish handoffs, escalation paths, and asynchronous protocols

Participants can develop others through inquiry, feedback, delegation, and clear follow-through.

  • Coaching stance replaces premature advice with inquiry and accountability
  • GROW conversations clarify goals, reality, options, and committed actions
  • Developmental feedback distinguishes capability gaps from confidence or motivation barriers
  • Delegation levels match autonomy to risk, competence, and decision reversibility
  • Feedforward requests generate specific suggestions for future behaviour from colleagues
  • Coaching plan schedules observation, reflection, challenge, and follow-through

Participants can recognise personal patterns that limit adaptive leadership and establish better responses.

  • Immunity to Change maps competing commitments and hidden assumptions
  • Trigger mapping identifies cues, interpretations, emotions, impulses, and consequences
  • Circle of Control separates direct action from influence and concern
  • Recovery routines protect judgment through boundaries, sleep, pauses, and support
  • Leadership values translated into observable choices under competing pressures
  • Personal practice plan establishes habits, cues, metrics, and accountability

Participants can design leadership processes that account for power, voice, and uneven impacts.

  • Identity and power examined through positional authority and informal status
  • Inclusive meeting design distributes voice, preparation, and decision access
  • Bias interrupters slow attribution, confirmation, and similarity judgments
  • Perspective-taking protocols test whose knowledge is absent from decisions
  • Equity impact questions identify uneven burdens, benefits, and access
  • Speaking-up channels protect dissent, escalation, and retaliation reporting

Participants can build a change approach that addresses readiness, resistance, sponsorship, and implementation risk.

  • Change readiness assesses sponsorship, capacity, commitment, and implementation risk
  • ADKAR sequence identifies awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement gaps
  • Force-field analysis maps drivers, restraining forces, and feasible actions
  • Change network identifies sponsors, champions, managers, and affected groups
  • Resistance diagnosis distinguishes information gaps, losses, distrust, and overload
  • Implementation roadmap links milestones, owners, dependencies, and review points

Participants can lead decisively in high-pressure situations while maintaining ethical and communication discipline.

  • Incident leadership establishes roles, operating rhythm, and decision authority
  • OODA loop accelerates observation, orientation, decision, and action cycles
  • Crisis communication prioritises facts, uncertainty, empathy, and update timing
  • Escalation thresholds distinguish local resolution from executive intervention
  • Ethical decision screen tests harm, rights, fairness, and public scrutiny
  • Post-incident review captures lessons, commitments, owners, and due dates

Participants can consolidate their analyses into a feasible, measurable leadership intervention plan.

  • Leadership agility diagnostic scores current strengths and development priorities
  • Case evidence synthesised into a focused adaptive challenge statement
  • Stakeholder, systems, and change analyses reconciled into one intervention logic
  • 90-day plan sequences experiments, conversations, decisions, and review points
  • Success measures combine outcomes, leading indicators, and learning signals
  • Peer review tests feasibility, ethical risks, and overlooked dependencies

Participants can build, review, and present a complete leadership agility plan for a live organisational challenge.

  • Capstone brief states challenge, context, boundaries, and intended outcomes
  • Systems map explains feedback, constraints, and priority intervention points
  • Stakeholder strategy specifies coalition actions, communication, and dissent handling
  • Experiment portfolio sets hypotheses, safeguards, measures, and learning reviews
  • 90-day leadership plan assigns decisions, milestones, risks, and accountability
  • Panel-style presentation defends choices using evidence, trade-offs, and adaptive logic

Exercises and examples are adapted to each cohort's sectors and roles.

What you take back to work

  1. Leadership agility diagnostic
  2. Adaptive challenge statement template
  3. Causal loop diagram
  4. Stakeholder engagement strategy
  5. Safe-to-fail experiment charter
  6. 90-day leadership agility plan

Who should attend

  • Senior Managers — leading priorities that cut across functions, partners, or business units
  • Programme and Project Directors — managing uncertainty, dependencies, and stakeholder conflict
  • Department Heads — translating strategic change into decisions, team action, and measurable progress
  • Transformation Leaders — building commitment for difficult operational, digital, or policy changes
  • Public Sector Managers — balancing public value, political scrutiny, and implementation constraints
  • High-Potential Leaders — preparing for roles requiring broader influence and adaptive judgment

Skills and tools covered

Adaptive challenge diagnosisSystems thinkingStakeholder mobilisationDecision architectureChange leadershipLeadership self-management

Tools and standards

Adaptive Leadership, Cynefin Framework, RAPID Decision Rights, ADKAR Model

How the course runs

Training methodology

The course uses short instructor briefings to introduce each framework, followed by cases drawn from public services, banking, infrastructure, NGOs, and multinational operations. Participants analyse ambiguous situations, build maps and plans in small groups, practise decisions and conversations through simulations, and receive structured peer feedback. Individual application work runs through both weeks: each participant develops a live leadership case, tests assumptions, revises their approach, and prepares a 90-day action plan for workplace use.

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have at least three years of professional experience and current responsibility for a team, project, service, change initiative, or significant stakeholder relationship. They should be able to describe a real leadership challenge involving uncertainty, competing interests, or change. Familiarity with basic management concepts is useful, but prior study of leadership theory, systems thinking, change management, or coaching is not required. This is not an entry-level supervision course; participants need sufficient workplace experience to apply the methods to genuine decisions and relationships.

A typical training day

08:30 – 10:30First session
10:30 – 10:45Refreshment break
10:45 – 12:30Second session
12:30 – 13:30Lunch and networking
13:30 – 15:00Third session
15:00 – 15:15Refreshment break
15:15 – 16:30Workshop and daily review

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in East Africa Time, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

  • Instruction by a practitioner facilitator
  • Full course workbook and materials
  • Exercise files, templates and case studies
  • Refreshments and lunch on classroom deliveries
  • Certificate of completion
  • Post-course application plan

Frequently asked questions

You should have at least three years of professional experience and responsibility for a team, project, service, or stakeholder relationship. No previous formal training in leadership theory, coaching, systems thinking, or change management is required.

Bring a current leadership challenge that involves uncertainty, competing stakeholders, change, or a difficult decision. You may also bring non-confidential background material, such as a project brief, stakeholder list, performance measures, or change plan.

It is best suited to managers, senior specialists, project and programme leaders, and transformation professionals whose work depends on influence across boundaries. Participants gain most when they have a real issue to develop throughout the ten days.

General leadership courses often focus on delegation, motivation, performance management, and communication. This programme concentrates on leading when the answer is not known, authority is distributed, stakeholder interests conflict, and learning must occur during delivery.

You will leave with a 90-day plan built around your own work challenge, including stakeholders, decisions, experiments, measures, and review points. The templates can be reused for change initiatives, service improvements, strategic projects, and crisis response.

Each day runs from 08:30 to 16:30 and provides about 6.5 contact hours. The first week establishes the diagnostic, systems, stakeholder, decision, and experimentation methods; the second week deepens communication, team, change, self-management, crisis, and integration work before the capstone presentation.

Questions about this course?

Ask about dates, fees, group bookings or running it for your team. Our training team replies by email.

Ask on WhatsApp info@skillsetdevelopment.com

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