TY  - JOUR
TI  - Leading in perpetual whitewater: Roles leaders can play.
AU  - Harvey, V.
AU  - Adler, S.
AB  - In today’s era of perpetual whitewater leaders face turbulence, complexity, and ambiguity that demand new capabilities for leading change and supporting their organizations’ overall change capability. This article synthesizes existing literature on building sustainable change capability through leadership. It is organized around five roles leaders can play: As navigators, leaders scan environments, interpret signals, and provide real-time navigation through situational awareness and sensemaking. As learning guides, they model and nurture curiosity, developmental readiness, and learning agility while orchestrating cultures where experimentation and reflection drive collective growth. As pilots, leaders compassionately guide people through the human side of change, reducing friction, by helping them process uncertainty, align diverse perspectives, and co-create shared meaning. As engineers, leaders design systems, structures, and distributed leadership practices that balance stability with agility, embedding adaptability into the fabric of the organization. Finally, as stabilizers, leaders steady their teams by demonstrating versatility, emotional agility, self-care, and boundary setting, providing microstability that complements organizational agility. Together, these roles highlight the paradoxical demands of modern leadership—balancing stability and flexibility, force and enablement, and learning and performance. Consultants and coaches can support leaders in understanding and cultivating these capacities and as a result help leaders both guide organizations through disruption but also embed resilience, adaptability, and trust as enduring capabilities for thriving in a world of constant change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)
IS  - 4
JO  - Consulting Psychology Journal
PY  - 2025
SP  - 374
EP  - 401
UR  - psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-24454-004
VL  - 77
LA  - English
ER  -