Despite the considerable resources, in terms of both finance and time, organizations pour into developing their leaders, the world continues to be beset by challenges and crises that poor leadership has either created or exacerbated.

If airline pilot training had the success rate that the leadership development sector achieves, we would see very few people voluntarily taking to the skies. What lessons can we learn from the skills development process critically flight simulation that airline pilots immerse themselves in, and can that be transferred to the leadership development sector?

A complex new world requires a new set of leadership skills

It is widely accepted that the challenges facing today’s business leaders are increasingly complex and unpredictable. Working environments have become increasingly interconnected and globalized, organizations have become flatter leadership more distributed, and constant flux has become the norm.

In this new world, leaders need a new and expanded skillset, which includes:

• the judgment required to make decisions in ambiguous, complex, and rapidly changing contexts

• the communication and influencing skills needed to work effectively with increasingly diverse groups of internal and external stakeholders

• the ability to lead teams spread across geographical, organizational, and cultural boundaries

• the creativity required to devise innovative products and services, and the problem-solving and project management skills required to deliver them

In addition, leaders still face the challenges of articulating a vision, acting ethically, building trust, and ultimately creating value for a broad range of stakeholders.

In this new world, organizations are often failing to achieve their key objectives

There are countless examples of failure in the business world: visible failures such as corporate crises, mergers that destroy value, major delays and cost over-runs on projects, loss of market share to more nimble entrants, and profits that come with negative social and environmental impacts; there are also less visible failures, such as missed opportunities, failed change initiatives, and more generally, poorly led teams and departments.

There appears to be something failing with how leaders are trying to develop the complex set of skills needed

Given all the failures, and given the importance of leadership skills in determining organizational outcomes, leaders do not always appear to have the necessary skills.

However, leaders are not short of traditional learning resources. The amount of learning resources about leadership is almost limitless. There are tens of thousands of books, journal papers, magazine articles, case studies, blogs and vlogs, discussion forums, online videos, knowledge bases and hubs, conference presentations, and an avalanche of social media postings, as well as thousands of content heavy courses offered by training companies and some less progressive business schools.

Every day, this mountain of material gets bigger, and the pace of producing it doesn’t seem to be slowing. A lack of learning resources is not the problem.

So, is there something wrong with how leaders are trying to develop their skills? There appears to be something failing with how leaders are trying to develop the complex set of skills needed in this new world.

Typically, the only practice grounds for leaders are their real organizations, real customers, and real projects

Educators and organizations should therefore carefully examine why the methods currently used to develop complex leadership skills, in some of the world’s business schools and corporate training centers and the workplace, are not working.

Too many leadership educators are still using ‘old world’ learning methods

Despite radical and unprecedented innovation taking place in many industries, the teaching methods used by some of the leadership development industry have not changed much from those used by the first universities in the 14th century. While innovative, experiential, learning methods have raised the quality of executive education in many progressive business schools around the world, at too many institutions students of leadership are still ‘learning by listening, reading and discussing’.

The leadership development industry is also prone to creating many ‘pseudo innovations’, such as computer-based training, eLearning, virtual lectures, virtual reality case studies, hologram lecturers, MOOCs, SPOCs, video-learning, micro-learning, and, mobile learning. These ‘innovations’ are just new ways of packaging content; they are still based on the old old-worldhood of learning by listening, reading, and, discussing.

Old Old-worlding methods are effective for transferring knowledge, collating and sharing research findings, spreading ideas, presenting arguments (as in this article!), for helping leaders to ‘know that…’. Many leadership academics would argue that their role is just that: to do research, and articulate their findings, i.e. create and share knowledge. But there is a big difference between ‘acquiring knowledge’ and ‘developing skills’. In the workplace, knowledge is not much use on its own if the leader cannot apply it. There is a crucial difference between knowing what good leaders should do, and being able to do it; there is a difference between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.

Many educators are either missing the point that leaders need skills in this knowledge or trying but failing to address how people develop complex skills such as leadership.

People do not develop complex skills by listening to an expert explain what to do, or by reading a book or article, or by discussing cases. However interesting the lecture, however well researched the book, and very stimulating the discussion was, these methods have limited impact on students’ subsequent behavior.

In contrast with old-world learning methods, artificial practice grounds can allow students to put their knowledge into practice, to see whether they can apply it

In order to actually develop complex skills, students need opportunities to ‘learn by doing’; people only develop complex skills by:

• practicing them (taking actions), and

• getting clear feedback (seeing the outcomes and the causal connections between their actions and the outcomes)

‘Developing expertise depends essentially on quality and speed of feedback, and the opportunity to practice’ Dan Kahneman in ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.

In the workplace, leaders get lots of practice, but it is expensive and they do not always learn from it. Organizations hire leaders with experience because they accept the basic premise that the knowledge they have accumulated with old-world learning methods must be complemented by the skills they have developed in practice.

Typically, the only practice grounds for leaders are their real organizations, real customers, and real projects. This real experience addresses the fundamental flaw of old world learning methods, but the real experience is not only expensive and time-consuming, it is also not very effective for learning. The real world is often a bad place to practise.

Leadership in a complex, dynamic world can involve making many decisions, usually taken over long periods of time, with numerous other variables in play that affect multiple outcomes that might take months or years to unravel, and some outcomes will remain opaque or invisible forever. In the real world, we do not always get clear feedback on our actions, let alone visibility of what caused what, and so we don’t always learn from our experience.

“We learn best from experience, but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions” Peter Senge, systems scientist and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Artificial practice grounds can be an effective way to develop leadership skills

 Artificial practice grounds are environments outside the real world, in which students can learn by doing. These include indoor and outdoor group activities, role plays, serious games, numerical simulations, and group-based action learning projects.

 In contrast with old-world learning methods, artificial practice grounds can give students an opportunity to put their knowledge into practice, to see whether they can apply it.

In contrast with getting experience in the real world, artificial practice grounds can be faster, lower risk, lower cost, and more effective if they make the link between cause and effect easier to see.

Artificial practice grounds potentially offer the best of both worlds: the safety and speed of the classroom, but also the emotional and transparent experience of carrying out a mission and seeing what happens.

The urgent need for a more effective method for developing the skills of modern leaders is clear

Many other professions have proved the value of artificial practice grounds. Using artificial practice grounds for developing skills is vital in many fields of activity: pilots use flight simulators, military strategists play war games, and surgeons practice on virtual organs.

The main reasons are:

• these professions understand the power of learning by doing

• the cost of mistakes in these fields is high

• the necessary investments in realistic practice grounds have been made

The practice grounds are not just used for developing skills. They are also used for certification. To qualify as an airline pilot, you not only have to pass the ‘written test’, you have to pass the ‘simulator test’ also. The incredible safety record of modern civil aviation is partly a result of the industry’s sophisticated approach to pilot training and certification.

Imagine if flight training was like business training there are some similarities between flight training methods and current leadership development methods. Trainee pilots attend classes and listen to presentations about aerodynamic theory, engine compression ratios, and hydraulic schematics. Trainee pilots study lengthy manuals for the aircraft type they intend to fly. Expert instructors show and explain videos of emergency evacuation procedures.

But imagine if those trainee pilots, instead of spending many hours practicing all aspects of flying a commercial airliner in a $50 million simulator, went through a series of eLearning modules, watched virtual lectures, enrolled in an MOOC, and were then assessed using multiple choice quizzes. This approach to training and certification would be completely irresponsible, and airlines would never hire graduates of this flight school.

Current artificial practice grounds for developing complex leadership skills are not always effective.

There are many different types of artificial practice grounds used by educators to try to develop leadership skills, with varying levels of effectiveness.

• indoor and outdoor group activities, such as playing with plastic bricks, and board games, and conducting outdoor tasks like raft building, are useful for observing basic team behaviors and for team building but do not mimic real world complexity

• role plays can be very realistic, but are limited to practising short timeframe interpersonal scenarios, and are difficult to deploy consistently and at scale

• serious games often have an attractive interface with photo-realistic images and videos, and present plausible management dilemmas, but are often just a façade to a multiple-choice quiz, or a formulaic and simple algorithm with right and wrong answers

• numerical simulations can realistically model the more quantifiable elements of a business (e.g. strategic marketing decisions and financial results) but are limited to developing acumen and skills in finance, marketing, and operations

• group based action learning projects, such as an in-class planning exercise for a real business challenge, are practical and relevant, but rather than seeing real outcomes, feedback is limited to subjective self-diagnosis and facilitator observations.

None of the artificial practice grounds above replicate the ambiguity, the dynamic or systemic, multi-variable complexity and long timeframes, and the social complexity element of real leadership challenges in a VUCA world.

An artificial practice ground for developing leadership skills (a ‘leadership simulation’) needs to be highly realistic, immersing students in a dynamic environment that mimics the complexity of the real world, with a specific scenario and challenge. It must compress time so that long timeframes (several months or even years) can be covered in several hours.

Students make decisions and take actions that correspond to what they would do in the real world, and see what happens as a consequence of those decisions and actions. The experience should provoke some strong emotions. After the simulation run, they can then ‘pull off the covers’ and see the complexity of the underlying model, and in particular the complex causal connections between their actions and the outcomes observed. Accordingly, students receive the crucial objective feedback that is necessary for learning.

Building realistic leadership simulations is difficult. One reason for the lack of effective leadership simulations is that simulating organizations (i.e. complex social systems) is not easy.

Building a leadership simulation requires a profound understanding of:

• leadership and organizational theory, and

• leadership practice (i.e. what happens in the real world)

At the heart of the simulation is a model, that needs to articulate, with much greater clarity and rigor than the written word, the dynamic and non-linear complexity of a leadership challenge. In a simulation model, there is no room for hiding behind the ambiguous language.

At the same time, the leadership simulation must strike a careful balance between realism and ‘understandability’, so that what happens in the simulation can be explained, with clear feedback to the students.

In a world where skills have become much more valuable than knowledge, the urgent need for a more effective method for developing the skills of modern leaders is clear.

The leadership development industry has the technology to address this need and the opportunity to deliver a real innovation should be seized. As the civil aviation industry did several decades ago, it is time to complement its current methods with a new generation of advanced, ultra-realistic organizational leadership simulations. Leaders should be much more demanding of their educators and should seek out progressive providers that offer more than old learning methods, that were not designed to develop skills for the modern, complex and uncertain world.