The Case For Case-in-point: Leadership Experiential Learning Really Works!

When people ask me why use Case-in-Point, I often answer: because it works (and because I don’t believe it’s possible to become a leader only by seeing a slide show!)

The bottom line is that we use this leadership experiential learning methodology created by Heifetz and Linsky at the Kennedy School because it works. We are not teaching leadership experientially because we like it (we do), but because we want results for our clients, and know that if we create a safe, comfortable and cozy learning environment in our leadership classes, it will not mirror the conditions of real life. Collaboration is the new normal and change is the task of the real work, and that is where leadership is practiced day after day.

We are convinced that leadership learning will not happen if the practice field doesn’t look like the playing field. And in the playing field today complexity is the new normal. In this context experiential leadership learning is a declaration of interdependence: it’s the interdependence of the work in today’s organization, a statement about the need to build the adaptive capacity that allows a system – like an organization – to step into the unknown while being at peace with confusion and frustration.

When people are productive in ambiguity, when they drop “best practices” to experiment with “next practices”, those readjustments spring from their capacity to move:

1.  From execution/focusing on getting things done to think more about adaptation;
2. From problem solving/focusing on fixing to running experiments;
3. From autonomy/individuality to relationship building, connections and inter-dependence;
4. From resolving/managing conflict to orchestrating conflict as a systemic expression of deeply held values to be reconciled;