What Happens to the Learning When the Work Gets Faster?

Ahead of LPX 04, Mike Hutchins looks at where leadership development is heading, and what might be lost along the way.

In our first LPX session, Angus Scott and I asked people on the call to imagine an organization choosing a new enterprise system. Complex, cross-functional, and consequential. The kind of decision that touches customers, vendors, and a lot of people inside the business.

Then we asked a simple question. If AI did most of the work in making that selection, what would be gained, and what would be lost?

The gains are easy to list. Weeks of analysis, cross-functional discussion, and decision-making can now be compressed into something much shorter. The outcome might even be better.

The losses are harder to see, and I keep coming back to them.

A decision like that used to take weeks, and a lot happened in those weeks that was never on the project plan. People disagreed and had to work it out. Someone made a call that turned out to be wrong. Colleagues from different functions built relationships they would lean on later. Judgment formed slowly, through doing the work. Nobody put any of that on a development plan, but for many leaders it is where a good part of their development actually happened.

Executive education is already changing shape

I have been reading a recent chapter by Edward Barrows, Randall White, and Sandra Shullman, “The Direction and Future of Executive Education: Building the Plane while Flying,” published in The Changing Leadership Landscape (Oxford University Press, 2026). The authors interviewed about a dozen executive education experts from academia, industry, and consulting, and the picture they draw is of a field in serious motion.

Programs are getting shorter and more focused on real problems that participants bring from their own organizations. Companies want learning designed around their context rather than general curricula, and team development is increasingly handled in-house. Interviewees describe development as less tied to events and more organic: delivered just in time, through immersion, simulation, and work on live business challenges. The authors go as far as suggesting that the traditional classroom, with an expert lecturing at the front, will not last much longer in its current form.

One executive they quote sums up the pressure behind all of this: “If it takes longer than a few days, my business has already changed!”

A lot of this is good news. I would much rather see leaders learning on real challenges than on tidy case studies. But reading the chapter alongside that LPX 01 exercise left me with a question I have not been able to settle. 

If development is moving closer to the work, what happens when the work itself no longer contains the experiences that used to develop people?

Three tensions worth exploring

When Ed and I started planning this session, I suggested three tensions we might pull on. I don’t think any of them has a clean answer.

Efficiency and experience

Faster is often better. But if AI and compressed programs remove the slow parts of work and learning, we may also be removing some of the friction that builds judgment. If there is a cost, it probably won’t show up straight away.

Knowledge and development

Much of what leadership programs offer is capability: frameworks, skills, and information. That matters. But leading in complexity also depends on awareness and judgment, the ability to notice what is happening (in the situation and in yourself) and choose well in the moment. I am not convinced those develop the same way skills do, or on the same timeline.

Programs and developmental organizations

The chapter documents a clear move toward bringing development in-house, from a revival of corporate universities to team development run inside the organization. That points to a bigger possibility. Could the organization itself become the place where people continuously develop, rather than somewhere they step away from in order to be developed?

Join us for LPX 04

LPX 04: The Future of Leadership Development

Thursday, November 19, 2026  |  12pm ET  |  Online

Ed Barrows and I will explore the growing role of AI, the shift toward experiential and continuous learning, and whether the future lies in better leadership programs or in organizations where people develop through the work itself. We won’t be offering a single answer. We’ll be looking at the tensions and possibilities shaping the next generation of leaders, and we’d like to hear from people who are working through them.

Register for LPX 04