By Ralph Ranalli
The adaptive leadership course she took with Adjunct Lecturer Dean Williams at Harvard Kennedy School changed her life, Laura Berlind says: “He really cracked my head open and helped me see the work of leadership in a new light.”
Adaptive leadership emphasizes shifting from traditional, top-down authority to experimental, team-driven solutions that address the root causes of problems rather than symptoms. She says the course’s emphasis on nuance, iterative change, and deep listening—especially in difficult environments—became an operating philosophy that has guided her career over numerous leadership posts, including as executive director of the Adaptive Leadership Network.
She recently joined Yascha Mounk AM 2010, PhD 2015 as director of operations at Persuasion, an independent digital magazine and community that defends free speech and open inquiry. But her path to guiding organizations focused on collaborative solution-building almost didn’t happen. Once an aspiring lawyer, she remembers sitting on the floor of her Boston College dorm room with her law school applications strewn around her in the late 1990s, leafing through a catalogue. “There wasn’t a single course that I was truly excited about taking,” she says. “And I thought: ‘Why am I doing this?’”
So, instead, she used her year abroad and French and political science degrees to land a job with the French Embassy and the French American Chamber of Commerce, helping French companies establish footholds in the Boston region. She was fascinated by the intersection of public policy and private industry, and soon she was poring over an HKS catalogue of courses she couldn’t wait to take.
A course in macroeconomics taught by Professor Susan Dynarski deeply influenced her thinking, leading to a conviction that economic literacy is essential for civic life. “I think if every citizen of this country understood a bit more about basic economics, we would have a more engaged citizenry and a stronger democracy,” she says.
After graduation, she joined a municipal bond insurance company in New York, where she analyzed the political and financial health of public entities seeking to issue debt. It fed her interests in economic analysis and in leadership and civic accountability. “The role married my wonky, analytical nature with a more qualitative dimension—assessing the strength of public leadership, whether officials would make the tough fiscal decisions needed to service their debt, and whether governance risks like corruption were lurking beneath the surface.”
“If we can agree that these disparities are not good for any of us, then we can start a conversation.”
An unexpected career detour came in 2008—not due to the financial crisis, but a job change for her husband, an astrophysicist—which took the couple to Nashville. Her first job in Tennessee was running Renewal House, a residential and outpatient addiction treatment center for low-income women who are pregnant or parenting small children.
It was her first nonprofit CEO role, and the distance from her previous life couldn’t have been greater. A fast-talking, spreadsheet-driven finance executive fresh from New York City, Berlind was now leading an organization of social workers doing the deeply human work of recovery with women and their children. The challenges were unlike any she had encountered in conference rooms or on trading floors. In the beginning, she was terrified. “But it turned out to be one of the most mind-expanding and heart-expanding experiences of my career.”
A few years later, a foundation that supported Renewal House announced that it was committing $2 million to start a nonpartisan public policy think tank, kicking it off with a three-day workshop. “I raised my hand to participate in that process, and I think that turned into a job interview that I didn’t know was happening at the time,” Berlind says.
The Sycamore Institute started “as a check and me and a small but determined group of community and statewide leaders who shared a commitment to improving public policymaking in Tennessee,” Berlind says. The lessons she learned at HKS were “huge” in helping guide the building process, from public finance to empathy to adaptive leadership, which helped build the trust to bring disparate groups together in common purpose.
Berlind says that the institute, now celebrating 10 years, was built on finding common ground in the recognition that Tennessee ranks near the bottom of the country on education, health, and other quality-of-life indicators. She says those are outcomes no reasonable person, regardless of party, could celebrate: “If we can agree that these disparities are not good for any of us, then we can start a conversation.”
