LEARNING LABS
The problem you bring is the curriculum.
A Learning Lab is a small group of leaders — four or five, never more — who meet every four to six weeks to work on what they are actually carrying. Facilitated Action Learning, not a syllabus. You leave each session with a move you chose, and you come back having made it.
WHY A LAB
Courses teach what's known. A Lab works on what isn't.
Each session, one member puts a live problem in front of the group — a decision they keep deferring, a team that won't move, a relationship that has gone quiet. The group's job is not to advise. It is to ask the questions that let the owner see it differently.
Then they go and act, and report back to people who will remember. Real problem, real questions, real action, reported back. That loop is slower than a workshop and it changes more, because none of it is hypothetical.
HOW A LAB RUNS
Months, not hours.
The group forms
Four or five leaders at a similar altitude, from different functions or organizations. Never more — everyone has to get real airtime.
You bring something live
Not a case study. Something you are carrying now and have not solved.
The group works it
Half to a full day, facilitated. Questions before advice. You leave with a move you chose.
You act, then return
Four to six weeks later you report what you tried and what happened.
WHO JOINS A LAB
Two reasons people are in the room.
Most Labs form around a shared transition, so the problems in the room rhyme. But transition isn't a requirement. Plenty of members are settled in the role and are simply carrying something they have not carried before.
REASON ONE · YOU'RE IN A TRANSITION
Individual contributor → leader of people
The first time your results are someone else's work. The craft that got you promoted is no longer the job.
Manager → leader of leaders
You stop running the work and start running the people who run it. Stepping in is now the failure mode, not the fix.
Function head → enterprise leader
Your own function stops being the point. You are accountable for trade-offs between functions, including against your own.
Settled in the job, handed something you haven't done before.
You don't have to be in transition to need a Lab. Members join because they've inherited a team that isn't working, picked up a mandate outside anything they've run, been handed their first big cross-functional project, or found the role has quietly grown into a different job underneath them. The title is the same. The problem is new, and there is no course for it.
Not sure which one you're in? The Leadership Under Pressure Assessment reads how you lead when the stakes are high — and what slips first.
Take the Leadership AssessmentLAB, COHORT, OR COACH?
Three ways to work, and they are not the same.
They sit on the same ladder. Which rung you want depends on whether what you need is a topic, a problem, or an edge.
A cohort
A group learns one thing together over four to six weeks — a defined curriculum, practice in real work, a coach in the room. Best when everyone needs the same shift.
See cohorts →A Learning Lab
Four or five peers over months, with no curriculum at all — your live problems are the work. Best when what you need isn't a topic.
You are here.
Coaching
One to one, for the edges that rarely resolve in a group — and for what a leader won't say out loud in front of peers.
See coaching →Tell us what you're carrying.
A Lab forms when there are enough leaders making the same shift. Tell us where you are and we'll let you know when one is forming — or we'll design one inside your organization.
