In the current economic climate, organizations are highly motivated to keep adapting to changing conditions and the brunt of this effort has to be shouldered by their key decision-makers.  No wonder, then, that companies ask for tangible and applicable results when they invest in executive development, by external or internal methods. Senior employees are expected to make a practical difference on their return to day-to-day obligations at their companies and the educational attainment is expected to directly translate into actions.  More often than not, the idea behind sending leaders for programs is to expose them to certain issues before they are exposed to them by experience, assuring that they are one step ahead of the trying business reality.  With all these expectations perfectly clear to anyone who is involved in high-powered business ventures, there is an ongoing search for learning systems which are geared towards well-defined and rigorous outcomes that permeate executive management education.

It has been well-established in business research that nothing teaches better than experience and it is specific events or situations leaders rely on in developing their acumen.  The real challenge for educators is whether they are capable of recreating real-life experiences in such a way that it emulates the effects they have on trainees.  No easy job by any standards, its difficulty is seriously compounded by the fact that any education takes place in a safe environment, very typical for schooling, extremely atypical for business.  Even with levels of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation among participants superior to those of ordinary students, strong doubts remain whether the impact of controlled education can match, or even remotely approximate, the directness of active participation.  The answer might be no, for now, but this should not frustrate the attempts at making executive management education more effective.

In fact, some such attempts are beginning to show promising insights and to enrich our knowledge of how to educate better for high-powered responsibilities. For example, Britain's Ashridge Business School has relied on tailored simulation techniques that let its students go through unfavorable or otherwise challenging conditions in a bid to hone their reactions.  What its researchers believe is that a safe learning environment facilitates the acquisition process by developing what they call a muscle memory, a term borrowed from neuroscience, that may be accessed when a genuine need arises. Importantly, for this faculty to form successfully and, by consequence, to aid the learning process, it is necessary for trainees to relate emotionally to situations which are meant to provoke it.

All in all, executive management education specialists that aim at helping leaders not only to understand but also to outpace and outsmart markets have to keep looking for effective ways of developing business skills in training contexts and the idea of the muscle memory is a useful addition to this growing repertoire of tools at their disposal.