Most leaders are not held back by a lack of competence. They are held back by an inner system that was built for a different kind of world.
According to Bob Anderson and Bill Adams at Leadership Circle, their research suggests that 70-80% of leaders lead reactively. That does not mean they are bad leaders. It means that much of their leadership energy is organized around staying safe, looking competent, being accepted, staying in control, or avoiding vulnerability.
That is human. It is also, in many situations, completely understandable. Reactive tendencies are not defects. They are strategies we developed, often early in life, to feel safe, belong, be valued, and handle situations that felt uncertain or threatening.
The problem is not that we have them. We all do. The problem is when those protective strategies keep running the show long after they have stopped being useful.
That becomes especially costly when the work becomes complex.
Complexity Asks for Something Different
Most leaders know that the work has become more complex. Fewer problems have obvious answers. More challenges require experimentation, collaboration across boundaries, and the ability to stay with uncertainty long enough for something useful to emerge.
Still, many leaders run on an internal operating system built for a more predictable world.
In a predictable environment, reactive leadership can work reasonably well. If the task is clear, the solution is known, and the main challenge is execution, then control, compliance, and analytical distance can all be useful.
But complexity asks for something else.
It asks leaders to hold direction without pretending to have certainty. To think in systems, not just in tasks. To invite contribution before the answer exists. To create the conditions where others can think, learn, challenge, adapt, and act together.
That is hard to do when your nervous system is busy protecting you.
AI Makes This More Visible
AI is now making this leadership challenge more visible.
As AI systems take on more analysis, drafting, coordination, and execution, leaders do not become less important. But the nature of leadership changes.
AI doesn’t just increase the amount of work that can be done. It also increases the speed of doing and developing. Ideas can become drafts faster. Drafts can become prototypes faster. Prototypes can become decisions, experiments, and changes faster.
That means people can easily become the bottleneck somewhere else: not in producing more output, but in making sense, choosing, deciding, coordinating, and taking responsibility.
If AI can help produce more options, summarize more information, draft more plans, and coordinate more activity, then the leader’s contribution shifts toward the work that cannot simply be delegated to the tool: setting direction, holding purpose, exercising judgment, making trade-offs, creating meaning, deciding what matters, and taking responsibility for consequences.
AI may reduce some of the cost of execution, but it does not remove the need for human leadership. It moves more of the pressure toward the system around the work: organizational structure, decision rights, ways of working, feedback loops, and the quality of leadership itself.
This is also where reactive leadership becomes costly. A leader who is trying to look competent may use AI to produce more confident answers. A leader who is trying to stay in control may use AI to increase speed without increasing learning. A leader who is trying to avoid exposure may hide behind analysis instead of entering the difficult conversation.
The deeper question is not just what AI can do.
It is whether leaders can provide the overview, direction, purpose, judgment, and accountability that make AI useful in a human system. And whether they are willing to redesign the system around the work when the old structure becomes the constraint.
The Three Reactive Patterns
Anderson and Adams describe three broad reactive patterns.
The complying pattern looks for acceptance and approval. It keeps the peace, avoids conflict, and often gives away too much power in order to belong.
The controlling pattern pushes hard for results. It relies on personal drive, certainty, force of will, and the need to be right.
The protecting pattern keeps distance. It values intellectual superiority, detachment, and self-sufficiency, often avoiding vulnerability and emotional exposure.
All three patterns have strengths. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is when they become the default response.
In complexity, each pattern tends to distort leadership.
The complying leader optimizes for what others want to hear. The controlling leader optimizes for local performance and personal certainty. The protecting leader avoids the conversations where real coordination and learning need to happen.
The result is often the same: the system suboptimizes.
Why This Is So Hard
David Rock’s SCARF model gives one useful explanation. Our brains are constantly scanning for threats to status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.
Complexity threatens all of them.
Certainty drops. Autonomy becomes more constrained by dependencies. Status becomes less clear when old expertise is no longer enough. Relatedness is tested when teams need to challenge each other across boundaries. Fairness becomes harder to interpret when priorities keep shifting.
When those threats are activated, reactive patterns make sense.
The controlling leader reaches for predictability. The complying leader protects belonging. The protecting leader withdraws to preserve autonomy and self-worth.
These are not irrational responses. They are survival strategies. But they are often the wrong strategies for the work.
The Hidden Cost
Many leaders know the feeling of driving with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake. They push hard for results, while also managing how they are perceived. They want to speak clearly, but soften the message. They want to experiment, but hesitate. They want to invite challenge, but feel threatened when it arrives.
That inner friction is expensive.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe a similar pattern in An Everyone Culture. In most organizations, they argue, people are doing a second job no one is paying them for: covering their weaknesses, trying to look good, and managing other people’s impressions of them.
The first job is the real work. The second job is self-protection.
This is close to what Kegan and Lahey call an immunity to change. Often, we are not failing to act because we lack insight. We already know what would be useful. We know we should speak more clearly, delegate more, invite challenge earlier, or stop controlling every detail.
The problem is that another commitment is running in the background. A commitment to not look incompetent. To not lose control. To not disappoint important people. To not risk belonging. That hidden commitment keeps one foot on the brake, even while the visible commitment presses the accelerator.
This is one reason the knowing-doing gap is so persistent. It is not only a knowledge problem. It is a competing-commitment problem.
For leaders, that second job can become enormous. A leader may be in the meeting to solve a product, team, or organizational problem. But part of their attention is also busy managing how they are seen: Do I look decisive? Do I look competent? Am I losing status? Will this expose something I do not want others to see?
Some of the leader’s energy goes into the actual work. Another part goes into staying safe, avoiding embarrassment, preserving control, or looking competent.
No wonder so many leaders feel exhausted even when things are going well. The complexity is not the only thing wearing them down. They are also fighting themselves.
From Reactive to Creative
The shift from reactive to creative leadership is not about becoming more expressive or coming up with more ideas.
Creative leadership means acting from purpose, wholeness, and conscious choice rather than from threat reactions.
It means noticing the fear without letting it run the show.
It means being able to say: “Something in me wants to protect myself right now. But what does the situation need?”
That is a different kind of leadership capacity.
Anderson and Adams describe this as a shift from an outside-in identity to an inside-out identity. In the reactive stage, identity is shaped by approval, expectations, old beliefs, and external validation. In the creative stage, the leader is more able to stand in purpose, take authentic action, and create outcomes that matter.
That does not remove fear. It changes the leader’s relationship to it.
This is what I mean by Catalyst Leadership.
Not leadership as control. Not personal heroics. Not being the expert with the answer.
In the Leadership Circle / Mastering Leadership tradition, this developmental move is often described as the shift from Reactive to Creative leadership. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs use another helpful lens in Leadership Agility: leaders develop through levels of agility, from Expert to Achiever to Catalyst and beyond.
Catalyst Leadership is the practical bridge between these two bodies of work. It names what becomes possible as reactive leadership starts to loosen its grip and the leader becomes less consumed by self-protection. The leader becomes more available to create the conditions for others to do their best thinking and work.
A catalyst leader does not need to be the source of all movement. They create the conditions where movement becomes possible: clearer purpose, better conversations, stronger teams, faster learning, and more intelligent action across the system.
That is why the word catalyst matters. A catalyst changes what is possible in the system without needing to be the whole reaction.
How the Development Starts
So how do you develop toward Catalyst Leadership?
Not by trying to become fearless. Not by pretending that reactive patterns are gone. They are usually too old, too embodied, and too well-practiced for that.
A more useful starting point is the practice my friend Jonathan Reams works with: move from trigger awareness, to naming the fear, to replacing fear with curiosity.
First, notice the trigger.
Sometimes the threat is external. Someone questions your decision. A senior stakeholder pushes back. A team misses a commitment. A colleague challenges your expertise in public.
Sometimes the threat is internal. The situation touches an old worldview, preference, identity, or insecurity. A complying pattern may feel the threat of disapproval. A controlling pattern may feel the threat of losing authority or certainty. A protecting pattern may feel the threat of being exposed, diminished, or pulled into vulnerability.
Second, notice the response.
Reactive leadership is not only a thought pattern. It shows up in the body. Faster breathing. Tension. Heat. Constriction. An urge to speak too quickly, withdraw, explain, attack, please, or regain control.
It also shows up emotionally and cognitively. Anger, anxiety, shame, frustration, inadequacy, guilt, or overwhelm. Racing thoughts, distorted perceptions, catastrophizing, rumination, or a sudden inability to think clearly.
This is the moment where the second job starts to take over.
Third, name the fear.
Fear of being wrong. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of being judged. Fear of rejection. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of accountability. Fear of losing control. Fear of being too powerful.
The exact fear matters less than the act of naming it. Once it is named, it becomes something you can relate to, not something you have to obey.
Then comes the developmental move: replace fear with curiosity.
Why is this situation triggering me? What am I afraid will happen next? What am I afraid I will lose? What is the work asking for that is different from what my self-protection wants?
This is a small move, but not a soft one. It creates the space where a leader can choose a more creative response.
Beyond the Course
A course can open the door. It can give language, models, practices, and shared experience.
But real development usually needs more than understanding the idea.
This is where the broader leadership work around the course matters. For leaders or leadership teams who want to go deeper, the Leadership Circle Profile can be a strong support. It gives leaders a structured mirror of both their creative competencies and their reactive tendencies. Not as a label. Not as a personality test. As a way to see the pattern more clearly.
That kind of feedback can be uncomfortable. It can also be clarifying.
A few of us at Crisp are certified in the Leadership Circle Profile. For people who want to continue beyond the course, it can be part of a more personal development path that includes profile, debrief, coaching, practice, and follow-up.
The point is not to become a perfect leader. The point is to make the reactive system visible enough that it no longer runs the show unconsciously.
Why This Matters for Agility
This is where many agile transformations miss something important.
Agility is not mainly about methods, ceremonies, or frameworks. At its core, it is about shaping the whole system for learning, flow, and useful outcomes.
But a reactive leader will almost always suboptimize.
The controlling leader may maximize their own team’s efficiency at the expense of organizational flow. The complying leader may optimize for what senior stakeholders want to hear, even when it creates downstream bottlenecks. The protecting leader may avoid the cross-functional conversations that the system depends on.
You cannot optimize the whole system if your inner system optimizes for personal safety.
That is why the shift from reactive to creative is not just personal development. It is part of what makes organizational agility possible.
It is also becoming part of the AI leadership challenge. When AI accelerates the work, weak direction, unclear accountability, and reactive decision-making scale faster too. The bottleneck may move from doing the work to deciding what work should be done, how decisions are made, where responsibility sits, and how the organization learns from what happens.
That is why leaders cannot only ask, “How do we use AI?” They also need to look at the system: structure, roles, decision forums, handovers, feedback loops, and ways of working. Catalyst Leadership is one way to describe the capacity leaders need when the system can move faster than its ability to make sense of what it is doing.
A More Useful Question
The question is not whether you have reactive tendencies.
You do. We all do.
The better question is whether you can notice them in the moment, hold them without letting them steer you, and choose a more creative response.
That is where leadership starts to become interesting.
Not as a role. Not as a title. Not as a set of tools.
As the capacity to stay present, purposeful, and useful when the situation is uncertain and your own inner system wants to protect you.
Invitation
If you want to explore the shift from reactive to creative leadership more deeply, our leadership development work at Crisp is a good place to start. Certified Agile Leadership at Crisp is one good place to start.
In the course, we connect inner leadership development with complexity, systems thinking, high-performing teams, and agility in practice.
If you want to explore the shift from reactive to creative leadership more deeply, this is a good place to start.
And if you want to go further after that, our broader leadership work at Crisp can help turn the idea into a more personal development journey. The Leadership Circle Profile can be a useful part of that.
References
- Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, “Reactive Leadership”, Leadership Circle, 2019. https://leadershipcircle.com/blog/reactive-leadership/
- Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams, Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, Wiley, 2015.
- Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, “Reactive to Creative Leadership”, Leadership Circle PDF. https://leadershipcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Reactive-to-Creative-Leadership-ML-2023-06.pdf
- William B. Joiner and Stephen A. Josephs, Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change, Jossey-Bass, 2007.
- Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, Harvard Business Press, 2009.
- Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, Matthew L. Miller, Andy Fleming, and Deborah Helsing, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, Harvard Business Review Press, 2016.
- Jonathan Reams / Adeptify, Reactive to Creative, How Development Starts practice material, 2023. Adapted with permission.
- David Rock, SCARF model.
Terminology note: Anderson and Adams provide the Reactive to Creative leadership frame. Joiner and Josephs provide the Expert, Achiever, Catalyst, Co-Creator, and Synergist levels of leadership agility. In this article, Catalyst Leadership is used as the practical bridge between these two frames: creative leadership as the reactive system starts to loosen its grip, expressed as the capacity to create the conditions for others and the system to perform.
