The Best Classroom Is a Real Problem
- May 21
- 3 min read
Stop teaching leadership. Start handing over real problems.
"There can be no learning without action and no action without learning." ~ Reg Revans, founder of action learning
What You'll Learn
Why workshop-based leadership development rarely transfers to real work
How action learning makes real organizational challenges the curriculum
The inner shift senior leaders must make for action learning to actually work
One way to design an action learning opportunity this week
Emerging leaders don't develop in workshops. They develop when handed real problems with real stakes. Here's how to design that.
Every organization says it wants to develop emerging leaders. Few design the conditions where development actually happens.
We send promising people to workshops, assign them mentors, slot them into programs that promise transformation in three days. Then we send them back to work — where, more often than not, nothing looks different.
The frameworks they learned aren't wrong. They just don't develop people in a classroom. They develop people when stress-tested against a real challenge.
That's the principle behind action learning — the deceptively simple idea that you develop leaders by handing them real problems, not theoretical ones.
The shape of it is straightforward. Take a real, unsolved organizational challenge — one that matters, one that's on someone's plate right now. Assemble three or four emerging leaders. Hand them the challenge. Pair them with a coach who helps them reflect on how they're working, not just what they're doing. Give them a real timeline and real authority. Let them deliver.
What looks like a project is actually a development engine. The work itself becomes the curriculum.
But here's where most attempts at this fall apart. Real action learning requires senior leaders to genuinely let go. To empower. That sounds easy. It isn't.
Most leaders quietly believe they could solve the problem faster and better than their emerging leaders will. And they're often right — in the short term. The trade-off is that every problem a senior leader solves themselves is a leader they didn't develop. The fear that drives the takeover isn't usually about the problem. It's about what an imperfect outcome might say about the leader who handed it off.
Until that fear is named, action learning quietly collapses back into oversight in disguise. The framework only works when the senior leader is genuinely willing to let the emerging leader own it — including the risk of doing it differently than the senior leader would have.
This week, design one action learning opportunity. Pick a real challenge sitting on your plate right now — one that matters, one with a real deadline, one you don't already have a perfect answer to. Identify three or four emerging leaders. Hand them the challenge with a clear scope, a coaching cadence, and explicit authority to come up with the answer. Then step back.
That's the whole framework. The hard part isn't the design. It's the stepping back.
Emerging leaders don't need more workshops. They need real problems and the trust to wrestle with them.
Hand one over.
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