Facilitated Learning
Adaptive Leadership: Practical Strategies for Change (Facilitated Experience)
Course Length
6 weeks
7–8 hours per week
Featuring faculty from:
Harvard Kennedy School
Enroll as Individual
Harvard Online Certificate:
$3,200
Enroll by Oct 28, 2026
Enroll NowEnroll as Individual
Harvard Online Certificate:
$3,200
Enroll by Oct 28, 2026
Enroll NowA Guided, Facilitated Adaptive Leadership Experience
Seats are limited for this new facilitated experience. Enroll early to secure your seat.
Complex challenges rarely have straightforward solutions. This facilitated learning experience is designed to help you move beyond understanding adaptive leadership concepts to building a leadership practice you can apply to challenges that matter to you.
Throughout the course, you will work with an adaptive leadership expert and a cohort of peers as you apply the framework to a current, real-world challenge. You’ll participate in targeted activities, peer interaction and feedback, and live facilitated sessions that serve as a leadership training gym, all designed to give you opportunities to reflect, experiment, and refine your approach as you put course concepts into action.
You will learn to diagnose complex situations, engage stakeholders, navigate competing perspectives, and develop interventions that can move difficult work forward. Along the way, you will receive structured support to strengthen your leadership practice, learn from the experiences of others, and build connections with professionals working through similarly complex challenges.
Designed for leaders who want to take their learning further, this facilitated experience combines the flexibility of online learning with the rigor and community of the live classroom.
Live Online Sessions
Fixed start and end dates • Scheduled live class meetings
Harvard Online
Certificates:
- Individual Certificate
Industries:
- Government
- Health Care
- Consumer Products
Navigate Complexity and Drive Progress
Strengthen Your Leadership Approach Through Guided Practice
Apply the Concepts to a Challenge That Matters to You
- Learn from real case studies
- Join live facilitated sessions
- Get a certificate, add it to your resume
- Be part of a dedicated cohort of peers
Course Syllabus
Adaptive Leadership: Practical Strategies for Change (Facilitated Experience) provides an in-depth overview of one of Harvard’s well tested approaches to making a difference in any group, community, or organization. Following and analyzing the success stories of five practitioners, all former students of the course, you will gain effective tools and strategies for diagnosing challenges and generating lasting progress in the systems you’re a part of, no matter what level of rank or authority you may hold.
Faculty
Industry Experts
Your Instructor
Ronald Heifetz
Founder, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School
Ronald Heifetz is the Founder, Center for Public Leadership and the King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and advises heads of governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations across the globe. In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia highlighted Heifetz’s advice in his Nobel Peace Prize Lecture.
Your Instructor
Mo Sook Park
Facilitator
Mo Sook Park serves on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education as an Adjunct Lecturer, where she teaches “Practicing Leadership Inside and Out” to doctoral candidates. This highly experiential course integrates frameworks from Adaptive Leadership, Adult Development and Group Dynamics. Mo recently concluded a 5-year faculty appointment at the Federal Executive Institute in the Office of Personnel Management for the U.S. Federal Government where she taught the framework of Adaptive Leadership and Systems Change to over 1400 executives from across the federal government.
Mo runs i-D Leadership Consulting, an organization and leadership development practice to help people and organizations increase their adaptive capacity. Mo works with a vetted network of values and mission-aligned consultants to offer leadership coaching, project-based consulting, facilitation, and customized leadership development experiences tailored and responsive to each client’s specific needs. Recent clients include a large urban school district, a Chicago based boutique design firm, and a leading affordable housing provider.
Industry Expert
Uriel Kejsefman
Senior Product Manager at Duolingo
Uriel Kejsefman is a Senior Product Manager at Duolingo, where he has overseen the growth of Duolingo subscriptions, redesigned the learning experience with AI, and expanded access to English learning worldwide. Uriel’s has worked to expand access to education across industries—advising universities at the Education Advisory Board, designing large-scale education reforms at the World Bank, and building learning products at Duolingo. He holds a B.A. in Economics and Humanities from Yale University and a Master’s in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University.
Industry Expert
Mitzi Johnson
Former Vermont Speaker of the House
Mitzi Johnson is a leadership consultant, trainer, and coach. In her former role as Speaker of the House, she reshaped Vermont’s legislature and policy focus to navigate the challenging and deeply uncertain first year of the COVID pandemic. Representing the Grand Isle-Chittenden district in the Vermont House from 2003-2021, she helped shape the legislative agenda for nearly 2 decades. For 10 of those years she wrote the state’s budget on the Appropriations Committee, including as Chair and during the Great Recession. She is widely recognized not only for her policy work in community development, water quality, and landmark tri-partisan gun safety legislation, but also for improving collaboration across party lines and strengthening transparency and inclusion. Mitzi holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Vermont.
Industry Expert
Dr. Hasan Sheikh
Emergency Physician and Clinical Lead for Substance Use Disorders, Mental Health and Addictions Centre of Excellence, Ontario Health
Dr. Hasan Sheikh is an emergency and addiction medicine physician at the University Health Network in Toronto, where he serves as the Medical Lead for Substance Use Services. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Department of Family and Community Medicine, and holds a Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He also serves as the Provincial Clinical Lead for Substance Use Disorders at the Centre of Excellence for Mental Health and Addictions at Ontario Health.
Industry Expert
Rebecca Trupin
Consultant and Facilitator
Rebecca Trupin is a facilitator and consultant, who specializes in working with governments and communities to strengthen core public services. She has 14+ years of experience in strategic planning, organizational development, and movement building across small-holder agriculture, conservation, education and public health. She co-founded Better Purpose Collective in India to advance previous work with the state government of Meghalaya to reduce maternal and infant mortality, further early childhood development, and strengthen government-citizen partnerships. Rebecca is currently a Senior Policy Manager at the What Works Hub for Global Education, at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She holds a Master's in Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Industry Expert
Kornvuthi (Korn) Lapprathana
Co-Founder and CEO, TechUp
Kornvuthi (Korn) Lapprathana is co-founder and CEO of TechUp, a tech academy based in Thailand that runs bootcamps and courses in software development, data analytics, and generative AI. Prior to starting TechUp, he worked in management consulting in Asia and Africa. Korn holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University, an MPA in International Development from Harvard University, and an MBA from Stanford University.
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Past Participant Discounts
Learners who have enrolled in at least one qualifying Harvard Online program can receive a 30% discount, automatically applied to the Program Fee upon time of payment.
Learners who have earned a verified certificate for a HarvardX course hosted on the edX platform are eligible to receive a 30% discount using a discount code. Please check your email for a code or contact us.
Nonprofit, Government, Military, and Education Discounts
Eligibility is determined by a prospective learner’s email address, ending in .org, .gov, .mil, or .edu. Interested learners can apply below for the discount and, if eligible, will receive a promo code to enter when completing payment information to enroll in a Harvard Online program.
FAQs
We offer 30% discounts to past participants of select Harvard Online courses. We also offer discounts on select courses to learners who work in nonprofits, government, military, or education, or are U.S. veterans. You can find more information about current discounts and eligibility on our course policies and discounts page.
We’re unable to upgrade an existing or past course enrollment to the facilitated experience. If you’d like to participate in the facilitated version, you’ll need to enroll separately at the full price, less your 30% past participant discount. You’ll also need to complete the asynchronous course again and meet the attendance requirements for the live sessions.
There is no application required for this course, or prior knowledge of the adaptive leadership framework to enroll and participate. You can enroll directly through Harvard Online if you are at least 18 years old, proficient in English, and committed to learning and engaging with fellow participants throughout the program.
To successfully complete the course and receive a Certificate of Completion for the facilitated experience, you must:
- Complete all required online coursework by the stated deadlines.
- Attend at least 4 of the 6 live facilitated sessions.
Learners who do not meet both requirements will not be eligible to receive a Certificate of Completion for the facilitated experience. If extenuating circumstances affect your ability to meet these requirements, please contact our support team. Accommodations may be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Use of AI assistants during live sessions: AI chatbots, meeting assistants, note-taking bots, avatars, or other AI agents may not attend or participate in live facilitated sessions on a learner’s behalf. The facilitated experience is designed around active, personal participation and engagement with instructors, facilitators, and fellow learners. In addition, Harvard’s current guidance limits the use of AI meeting assistants to approved tools and specific circumstances, such as authorized pilot programs or accessibility accommodations. For more information, please review Harvard’s AI Assistant Guidelines.
Upon successful completion of this program, you will receive a digital and printed Certificate of Completion from Harvard Online. Our team reviews all participant coursework after the final deadline in your course, and, once eligibility is confirmed, participants will receive a hard copy of a Certificate of Specialization from Harvard Online, as well as a Certified Electronic Credential. Certificates are delivered by mail to your home address six to eight weeks after you have been notified of your certificate eligibility.
You will have access to the materials in every prior module as you progress through the program. Access to course materials and the course platform ends 60 days after the final deadline in the program.
At the end of the course, you will be able to download a PDF summary highlighting key concepts that were introduced throughout the course. We hope the summary document will serve as a helpful resource after you finish the course.
When you enroll in Adaptive Leadership: Practical Strategies for Change (Facilitated Experience), you will receive:
- Access to the online course content.
- Six live facilitated sessions with a cohort of peers.
- Access to facilitator office hours for additional guidance and support.
- A digital Certificate of Completion, along with a printed certificate delivered to your home address.
Both options include access to the asynchronous Adaptive Leadership: Practical Strategies for Change online course. The key difference is the level of live engagement and support.
The Facilitated Experience includes six additional live sessions led by an expert facilitator in the Adaptive Leadership framework, as well as office hours and supplemental resources. These elements are designed to help learners engage more deeply with the framework, apply it to a current challenge, and benefit from peer perspectives, discussion, and feedback.
The asynchronous course offers a more flexible, lower-commitment experience. Learners still have opportunities to apply the Adaptive Leadership framework to their own work and challenges and engage with an online cohort, but without live facilitated sessions.
The Facilitated Experience is best suited for learners who want more structure, interaction, and support as they work through a real-world challenge. The asynchronous course is a strong option for learners seeking greater flexibility and a lighter time and resource commitment.
Please refer to the cohort calendar linked at the top of this page for specific dates and details about the course schedule, including online coursework deadlines and live facilitated sessions.
Professor Heifetz teaches the asynchronous components of the course through recorded videos and other course content. He will not facilitate or participate in the live sessions.