Disrupt the Assumptions That Guide Everything They Do: Rethinking Leadership Learning

At its core, behaviour change isn’t triggered by information or instruction. It is activated by experiencing the impossible - situations that challenge assumptions, provoke emotion, and demand new responses.

When designed thoughtfully, these experiences rewire reflexes, create new mental models, and embed lasting change.

Behaviour is Changed by Experiencing the Impossible

Learning that sticks isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t simply present knowledge or examples. It:

• Challenges assumptions: participants confront patterns and reflexes that guide their decision-making. Often without them realising it.
• Engages emotions and cognition simultaneously: stress, surprise, awe, or curiosity amplifies retention and drives action.
• Shifts perspective: participants inhabit roles, systems, or contexts radically different from their own, seeing consequences of behaviour in ways they never expected.

Example: a leadership simulation where executives experience constraints their teams face daily, while team members navigate decisions with executive-level information. Their default behaviours fail, forcing real-time recalibration of instincts.

Another example: a high-stakes negotiation where rules are intentionally ambiguous. Success depends on abandoning old heuristics and inventing new approaches in the moment. Participants leave not just with insight, but with behaviours they can’t revert from.

Designing Experiences That Force Behaviour Change

Creating transformational experiences requires intentionality. Key elements include:

1. Impossible scenarios: design situations where conventional logic, prior experience, and default strategies fail. Participants must invent new ways to succeed. There is no “safe autopilot.”
2. Emotional intensity: embed stakes that provoke real emotional engagement - wonder, curiosity, urgency, even controlled tension. The more the experience engages both mind and body, the deeper the imprint on behaviour.
3. Safe experimentation: provide a structured environment where failure is visible but consequences are contained. This allows participants to take risks, explore novel approaches, and discover new behavioural pathways without fear of permanent cost.
4. Reflection embedded in action: integrate debriefs, prompts, or peer feedback during the experience itself, so participants immediately connect actions with consequences and begin internalising new patterns.
5. Behavioural anchoring: reinforce emerging behaviours through repetition, role variation, and multi-step scenarios. New responses must become reflexive, embedded in instinct rather than left as conscious knowledge.
6. Perspective inversion: temporarily shift participants into radically unfamiliar roles or contexts. For example, adopting the viewpoint of a competitor, a customer, or even an entirely different organisational function to expose hidden assumptions and trigger fresh strategies.

When these elements are combined, learning becomes a laboratory for recalibrating instincts. It moves beyond insight or inspiration: participants leave with behaviours that endure under pressure, in ambiguity, and in moments that truly matter.

Why This Approach Works

• It rewires default reflexes: participants leave with new ways of responding baked into their decision-making patterns.
• It creates resilience under uncertainty: experiences simulate high-stakes conditions, so behaviour under real stress improves.
• It scales impact beyond the session: new behaviours ripple through teams and organisations, influencing culture at multiple levels.

Transformational learning isn’t about comfort or predictability. It forces action where old instincts fail and that is how change sticks.

Closing Thought

Leadership learning is not about mastering concepts or techniques - it’s not a finance course, a project management module, or a strategy lecture. True transformation occurs when experiences reprogram the instincts that drive decisions, reveal hidden assumptions, and embed behaviours that persist under pressure.

The value of transformational learning lies in what participants do differently in the real world, not what they know differently. It’s behaviour that proves the learning worked, long after the session ends.

David O'Connor

David O’Connor is Director of Strategy & Innovation at Common Purpose. In his role, he leads the development of new approaches, and learning experiences that push the boundaries of leadership development. David is passionate about redefining how we prepare leaders to navigate complexity, and is driven by the belief that disruptive thinking can unlock powerful, inclusive impact in communities and organizations.