Answering the Business School Challenge
Over 10 years of vertical development on the University of Galway Executive MBA
In 2005, David Rooke and Bill Torbert published Seven Transformations of Leadership in Harvard Business Review - still among the most widely read introductions to adult development in leadership. The article contains both a compliment to MBA programmes and a challenge that most business schools have yet to answer.
The compliment: MBA programmes are genuinely effective at one developmental transformation. Their heavy workloads, ambiguous case studies, and constant teamwork frustrate the perfectionist Expert Action Logic and cultivate the pragmatic, results-oriented Achiever. This is real development, and it is valuable.
The challenge: when it comes to supporting leaders beyond Achiever - toward the Individualist and Strategist Action Logics, where the research locates the consistent capacity to transform organisations - business schools, Rooke and Torbert wrote, have a dismal record. Development beyond Achiever cannot be delivered as content. It asks leaders to inquire into their goals themselves, not merely their accomplishment; it requires sustained self-awareness, genuine encounter with other worldviews, and long-term or repeated intense experiences. Programmes of that kind, they noted, existed at only a few universities around the globe.
A decade later, Nick Petrie of the Centre for Creative Leadership reached the same diagnosis from a different direction. Most leadership programmes fail, his research suggested, for four reasons: they focus on content rather than the development of the person; they are disconnected from the leader's real work; they leave the leader isolated; and they are designed as events rather than processes. Drawing on interviews with thirty experts in the field - David Rooke among them - Petrie identified three conditions that must combine for vertical development to occur: heat experiences that disrupt habitual ways of making sense, colliding perspectives that expand them, and elevated sensemaking that integrates them. Most programmes achieve one or two. Development takes off only when all three are present.
The Vertical Leadership Development module
For ten consecutive years, Harthill's Nial O'Reilly has facilitated the Vertical Leadership Development module on the Executive MBA at the University of Galway. The module was designed to sit squarely in the gap those articles describe - bringing the Leadership Development Framework, developed by David Rooke, Bill Torbert, and Susanne Cook-Greuter, into the heart of a business school curriculum. Its architecture maps directly onto the conditions the research prescribes.
**A process, not an event**
The module runs across the programme rather than across a weekend, giving development what it actually requires: time, repetition, and the opportunity to consolidate, rather than the short-term lift of a workshop that fades on contact with Monday morning.
**Development inseparable from real work**
Each participant designs leadership experiments in their own organisation - real interventions, in real roles, where results matter and important people are watching. This is developmental heat generated by the participant's working life, not simulated in a classroom.
**A developmental network, not a leader in isolation**
At the heart of the module is the Deliberately Developmental Group (DDG), Harthill's core group facilitation format. In small, sustained groups, participants bring their experiments back and subject them to action inquiry together. An Executive MBA cohort is naturally a maximum mix - engineers, clinicians, founders, public servants - so every experiment is examined through perspectives its owner could not have generated alone. The DDG supplies both the strong developmental network and the colliding perspectives that the research identifies as core drivers of vertical growth.
**Elevated sensemaking, built into the structure**
Participants complete the Leadership Development Profile - a sentence-completion instrument in the tradition Petrie explicitly recommends - and receive a personal debrief. The Action Logics give each participant a stage map: a way of seeing not only how they lead, but how their meaning-making itself is evolving. Kolb's experiential learning cycle underpins the rhythm of experiment, reflection, and re-engagement. Time, map, and guide - the three ingredients of vertical sensemaking - are designed in rather than squeezed into the margins.
Above all, the module attends to the person rather than the syllabus. Executive MBA participants are accomplished professionals whose store of leadership knowledge is already substantial. What the module works on is the one doing the knowing - mindset, identity, and mental models - which is the essential distinction between horizontal development (adding knowledge and skills) and vertical development (transforming how a leader makes sense of the world).
Twenty years on
Rooke and Torbert wrote that path-breaking programmes of this kind existed at only a few universities around the globe. Two decades later, one of them is in Galway. Over ten years of continuous delivery, and the cohorts who have passed through it, suggest that the business school challenge can be answered - not with more content, but with a developmental focus.
