With a vast amount of experience in management education, from heading up programmes like CEMS to roles at ESMT Berlin and ESCP Business School, we spoke with Roland Siegers about his role at CEDEP today and what he sees for the future of executive education. 

Here are his words:

Please introduce yourself and the organisation you are part of:

As Director ExEd & Innovation at CEDEP, the Global Executive Education Club, I am responsible for our broad portfolio of custom and open programmes. We develop learning journeys with our corporate members and with other organisations that are interested in our active learning approach, delivered by our suite of experts drawn from both industry and from some of the best business schools in the world. CEDEP is based in Fontainebleau, France and delivers programs on our newly refurbished campus as well online, and at customer and partner premises around the world.

What does it mean for executive education to become more experimental, and how is that different from simply making programmes more interactive?

Three major disruptions that have settled – following the Covid pandemic inflection point – are putting a lot of pressure on ExEd providers to fundamentally change the way we design learning journeys:

1. Selling a certificate for reputational gain and career advancement is no longer a sufficient value proposition – L&D are rightly demanding measurable impact.
2. Learner preferences change as a result of new forms of communication and entertainment deployed outside our space.
3. AI has commoditised knowledge so the true value of ExEd sits in curated interpersonal interaction that explores the thorny and wicked aspects of value creation that are inherently human: diverging values, deciphering the different dimensions of communication beyond the written word, energy levels and power dynamics, biases and the role of privilege, introvertion vs. extroversion etc.

Just getting people to speak as in “interactive” isn’t enough to fully understand how all of these things impact decision-making and management in complex organisations.

We need to test new forms of learning that allow us to explore what being “the human in or above the loop” actually means in this new world that’s populated by employees with emotions and social ties (us) and employees without (agents),

How do you create a safe environment where senior leaders can challenge assumptions, try new things and fail?

There’s two approaches we combine in our programmes. We introduce the notion of psychological safety, and what it requires in this very setting where you’re surrounded mostly by strangers and with facilitators pulling you out of your comfort zone. And how important it is as a leader to ensure, and as a follower to demand, that psychological safety is created in the workplace.

The notion carries many dimensions, such as understanding better how you come across, establishing rules for respectful communication especially when vulnerability is shown, feeling empowered to be authentic, and more.

The second approach comes from our promise to our participants and their companies that – unless explicitly encouraged – there will be only one company represented per industry in any given class – and what is discussed at CEDEP always is governed by Chatham House Rules. So when you do not have your competitor in the room, you can openly talk about current challenges you are facing and projects you are pursuing, including failures – and you can learn from others how they overcame issues that you may be currently facing.

What can executive education providers learn from CEDEP’s approach to peer learning, collective intelligence and diverse perspectives?

For CEDEP, the greatest learning resource is the very group of individuals that happened to come together at that given moment in time to onboard an education journey – which our facilitators have sketched out, but which any and all of them need to have the capacity to shape in different directions based on the demands of that very group in the moment. For some programmes such as our flagship GMP NEXT and AME NXT we have interviews with our participants prior to the programme start so that our facilitator can understand and work with their strengths and their needs.

We believe that anyone selected by their company to participate in a CEDEP programme is there because their employer sees a lot of potential – so our aim is to harness that potential for the benefit of everyone’s developmental success.

With AI making knowledge more accessible, what is the unique value of executive education? Does this make experiential and peer learning more important?

AI enters ExEd in three dimensions: as a subject, as an enabler and as a tool. The latter two have the potential to significantly improve the learning journeys we offer – by allowing us to focus on and by enhancing the interpersonal interactions we talked about above. But AI needs to be deployed wisely – and not as a show off. It is best used in three different ways: a/as a preparation to the live learning experience it can be used to cover the basic knowledge requirements, tailored to every participants’ specific starting point; b/ as a learning tool accompanying the journey, when we adapt the participants’ live cases to be used in the frame of the course; c/ as a post-course learning assistant that can create as many different approaches (and crucially, repetitions!) of course contents that a participants feels they need to continue engaging with, before they can safely integrate the learnings in their everyday work.

So in ExEd, where we have very little time to meaningfully impact a busy person’s professional behaviour, and their employer’s bottom line, AI really helps us to improve the group’s learning experience by more quickly establishing the common ground on which our live interpersonal learning can actually happen and thrive.

Looking ahead, what would executive education look like if it focused on experimentation, behaviour change and real-world impact?

Are you saying that’s not the case now ?! No truly, if ExEd isn’t aiming at making an immediate and tangible impact within a few months of completing a course, then it shouldn’t be offered. Otherwise four-digit per-person day rates simply cannot be justified. Experimentation – that’s where I see a distinction. Those of us who are willing to take some – controlled – risks to engage with topics that are just behind the horizon, with methodologies that haven’t been tried before, and with facilitators who hadn’t even thought of themselves as “educators” but who have a lot to share – those will move the boundary of our industry, and be the next leaders in creating sustainable value through personal development.

And this kind of experimentation will be much needed, in a world where the technological boundaries are constantly pushed and where megatrends such as demographics, energy transition and geopolitics continuously change what successful business practice actually looks like.

For additional insights, announcements, and perspectives, visit the conversation on Business Education.