Imagine a chief learning officer who must explain the selection of next year’s leadership program for company executives to a skeptical finance director. The sums are large, and while participants speak warmly of their cohorts and facilitators, the evidence of any measurable change in how the company is led is thin. Whether the program works matters to her and her colleagues who participate, and whether she can defend choosing and paying for it matters as well.
Her dilemma sits inside a larger puzzle, because despite sustained criticism from prominent scholars, leadership development continues to command billions in annual spending. Since the 2010s, critics have found scant objective evidence that teaching leadership works and have charged that the industry serves money more than evidence (Kellerman, 2012; Pfeffer, 2015). A special September 2026 issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education (AOMLE) has more recently widened the chorus of questioning voices across disciplines, conceding that money is poured into programs with questionable theoretical grounding and therefore probably little practical benefit (Leroy et al., 2026, p. 305). Few executives strongly endorse the results of their own programs, according to a McKinsey survey, and organizations keep buying anyway (Feser et al., 2017).
In this series, I will argue that the puzzle of leadership development’s persistence, and of buying that seems indifferent to whether a given program works, largely dissolves once we recognize that a leadership program sells more than the capabilities and impacts promised in its brochure. Among the additional goods a program sells, the one that carries the most weight in this series is what I call the defensible purchase, one that its buyer, whoever commissions or funds the program, can justify to a finance office, a CEO, or a board regardless of what the program delivers. Defensibility carries value of its own. Participants receive belonging and reassurance, buyers receive defensibility, and the surrounding institutions receive revenue, authority, and standing, which I use to mean the recognized authority that lets a choice or a claim count as legitimate. None of these benefits requires that leaders actually improve, which is why buying can persist even when a program achieves little.
The research community that studies development, with the Academy of Management prominent among its institutions, takes part in this arrangement as well as analyzing it, as do I, a longtime leadership development program director, professor, and executive coach whose roles this series will examine. Five positional figures, scholars among them, each defined by the place it holds in the purchase, operate that arrangement, and the questioning voice that each position provokes, its shadow of dissent, helps give the industry its shape and move it forward by increments.
Money gives the puzzle its edge, since companies worldwide spent an estimated $394.5 billion on training in 2025, against roughly $356 billion in 2015, the year before a Harvard Business Review analysis by Michael Beer and colleagues judged the return on much of it disappointing (Training Industry, n.d.; Beer et al., 2016). That amounts to roughly 11 percent nominal growth in a decade, likely a decline in real expenditures, and because the totals cover all training and come from different sources for each year, leadership development’s own share and trajectory remain nearly impossible to pinpoint.
Estimates for the whole enterprise diverge widely, from $14 billion to $366 billion a year across the sources that one analysis of the industry in the AOMLE special issue reviews, while other articles in that issue cite figures from almost $60 billion to hundreds of billions (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 432; Ashford et al., 2026, p. 313; Detert & McKee, 2026, p. 452). Much of the spread reflects disagreement over what counts as leadership development, and that vagueness itself matters, because a product whose boundaries its sellers can redraw at will escapes meaningful accountability. Even spending that merely holds flat at this scale gives real consequences to what buyers believe they are purchasing.
The phrase “organizations keep buying” therefore needs careful reading across a field that has widened and whose boundaries have grown more jagged. Alongside business schools and large consultancies, buyers now choose from among online course libraries, platform catalogs, independent coaches, and small-shop advisories, each with its own pricing and evidence standards. That variety makes aggregate buying harder to count, since a modest decline in spending on traditional programs could coexist with growth in cheaper or less visible purchases that conventional surveys do not capture. The expanding range of providers and programs also complicates any claim about how buyers respond to the critics. I therefore treat the totals above as rough indications of continuing substantial demand and look to buyers’ conduct, discussed at the end of this article, for firmer evidence.
Readers short on time can take three points from this opening installment of the series. First, the bleakest verdict, that programs deliver nothing, overreaches, since the research shows that well-designed development can work, which turns the original puzzle into a sharper one about why buying seems indifferent to whether a given program was well designed. Second, buyers seldom see rigorous evidence of effects, and the field’s growing variety makes the market harder to read than trends in spending totals suggest. Third, programs also deliver belonging, reassurance, and a defensible decision for participants and organizations alike, which lets purchasing persist despite weak results, and executives who want development to work should ask what their own purchase is doing for them, a question that grows more pressing as AI becomes the urgent subject that nearly every program promises to address.
I. Institutions, Ventures, and the Series Ahead
Behind the massive sums of money stand established institutions that set the standards within which the spending occurs, with business schools supplying brands and accreditation. Primary examples include the more than a thousand schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the annual Financial Times rankings of business schools that provide open and custom executive education (AACSB, 2023; Financial Times, 2026). Rankings matter partly because they feed a self-reinforcing loop in which graduate placement lifts ranking, ranking lifts applications and tuition, and alumni gifts fund the programs and buildings that raise status further, as a recent and much-discussed New York Times essay by Cambridge business school professor Christopher Marquis describes for degree programs (Marquis, 2026). The same loop plausibly extends to open and custom executive education, which carries the same brands.
Publishers and consultancies turn scholarship into prescription and diagnoses of failure into redesigns for sale as corporate learning, as Harvard Business Impact and McKinsey do (Harvard Business Publishing, 2025; Gurdjian et al., 2014). Other professional associations certify skills, with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) defining coaching credentials (International Coaching Federation, n.d.). Scholarly societies such as the Academy of Management publish the journals that supply the research from which most other institutions draw their claims to evidence, and their members teach in the programs, advise the consultancies, and take the conference stages to circulate these ideas and standards (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 442-443). Together these institutions shape and legitimate what counts as leadership development, who may supply it, and how a respectable buyer behaves, requiring every newer entrant to earn their approval or borrow their legitimacy.
Entrepreneurial ventures and platforms change who sells what to whom, borrowing the legitimacy of established institutions and the ideas they generate while competing on reach and price. Among many examples, Strategyzer and the Disruptive Leadership Institute package frameworks and books as masterclasses, coaching, and “solution” packages (Strategyzer, n.d.; Disruptive Leadership Institute, n.d.). MasterClass, LinkedIn Learning, and Coursera for Business sell celebrity-taught and partner-taught catalogs to employers, in a market that increasingly consolidates online offerings (MasterClass, n.d.; LinkedIn Learning, n.d.; Coursera, n.d.; Coursera, 2025).
Generative AI now enters every part of these arrangements, confronting an enterprise long criticized for modest results with a technology that changes how its products are made, sold, and evaluated. The pressure on leaders to learn how to manage AI and to lead its integration into their organizations has quickly become the lead selling point of programs and coaching packages, and that urgency may displace the attention to efficacy these offerings might otherwise attract, since a buyer who needs leaders ready for AI this year has little patience for asking whether the program works, a possibility that I’ll examine in Part IV.
The discourse that circulates around these institutions and ventures shapes what buyers think leadership development is and the value it potentially offers and, in turn, what they want. In my reading, much of that discourse, from daily business-media newsletters to the endless slurry of LinkedIn posts, reinforces shared assumptions about the value of programs and tools and rarely questions their efficacy or return on investment, a pattern consistent with the wider culture of belief in leaders and leadership that the next section here describes. As generative AI multiplies the volume of leadership commentary, it also reproduces and reinforces the same predominant ideas about leadership, echoing what the existing corpus already says and leaving unexamined the programs, coaching, and assessments built around them (Slocum, 2025c).
Popular leadership discourse rewards visibility and certainty over judgment, algorithmic systems pull leaders toward an aspirational average, and zombie ideas in leadership and coaching alike keep circulating after the evidence for them thins, as several of my recent essays have traced (Slocum, 2025a, 2025b, 2026). Those arguments left open a question that this series takes up in five parts, namely what else a program sells beyond its stated promises of leadership transformation and impact.
In this opening installment, I examine the evidence on effectiveness, which reframes the puzzle as purchasing that seems indifferent to whether a program works, draw on sociological thinking about the functions that practices serve beyond their stated purposes to ask what else a program sells, and turn to a cultural-industries analysis of the field to ask who helps produce the demand for it. In Part II, I will explain why buyers inspect so little and will introduce the five positional figures who operate the arrangement. Next, in Part III, I will follow three kinds of standing as they travel through channels of recognition, procurement, and trust among those figures, and will ask how feeds, platforms, and machines speed that circulation and absorb the dissent that the figures breed. In Part IV, I will consider what generative AI changes for the figures and their shadows and how buyers can make defensibility serve evidence. Finally, in Part V, I will state what the evidence supports, ask which of the five shadows can move the field, and show how the field can move forward with buyers by practicing what it teaches.
II. A Puzzle About Evidence
Three diagnoses locate the failure in different places, namely the results, the market, and the buyer’s own organization. The first diagnosis holds that decades of expansion in the “leadership industry” have produced no evident gains in the quality of leadership (Kellerman, 2016). The second locates the problem in a market where hope outweighs data. The third, which Beer’s earlier Harvard Business Review analysis develops at length, traces the disappointing return to the buyer’s own organization, where six barriers, among them unclear strategy and values, senior teams that do not work as teams, and employees’ fear of telling the top what stands in the way, block any meaningful application of the takeaways and let capable, motivated people soon revert to old habits. This third diagnosis is essential because it implicates the buyer. An organization that sends capable people to learn while leaving its strategy, top team, and candor unexamined purchases something other than better leadership, and the possibility that buyers prefer the purchase to the resulting examination anticipates the argument of this series.
Although the three arguments differ in emphasis, they converge on one troubling conclusion, that the industry fails at its stated purpose. Executives who experience the programs concur, which matters greatly for our efforts to make sense of the puzzle. Only 11 percent of the more than 500 executives in the McKinsey survey strongly agreed that their leadership development interventions achieve and sustain the desired results, a top-box (strongest-agreement) self-report from a firm that itself sells redesigns. The figure dates from 2017 and rests on a respondent pool that may mix participants and purchasers, which means it signals disappointment among those closest to programs without isolating the people who sign the purchase orders.
Perhaps predictably, the research community’s diagnosis differs, holding that seventy-five years of research have accumulated compelling evidence that leadership is both important and developable, and that the failure lies in the absence of theoretical clarity about how development should proceed (Leroy et al., 2026, p. 305). The special AOMLE issue, which I will examine more closely in Part III, works within the same premise by building or extending theory around leadership as a proven good. Here, we will accept that premise as far as the meta-analyses summarized below reach.
The premise also coincides with the industry’s own coordinating logic, which holds together competing providers by affirming “the power, authority, and crucial need for leaders, leadership, and leadership development” (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 428). Reform that begins from that shared starting point tends to improve individual programs while leaving the larger market for them uninspected. Marquis’s essay about business schools makes the point in its sharpest form, calling for the abolition of such schools on the grounds that an ethics elective, a sustainability center, or a “responsible leadership” badge legitimizes the machine without changing what it produces. Its remedy goes further than this series will, and its argument draws mainly on first-hand experience and selected studies, but its diagnosis, that an institution can function as designed while its stated aims serve to legitimize the design, anticipates the functional analysis in Section IV, below, and the essay itself insists that abolition cannot mean abandoning the people inside the schools. The larger market for programs is the subject of this series.
III. What the Meta-Analyses Show, and What Buyers See
The evidence proves less bleak than the charge, common among critics, that development programs deliver little or no benefit, and it consequently warrants a closer look. As a reminder, a meta-analysis pools the results of many separate studies into a single estimate, and its effect size, written as δ, expresses the average gain in standard deviations, so that a δ of .5 means participants gain half a standard deviation, measured against a control group or their own earlier performance depending on the study design. Executives must decide whether a program’s benefits justify its costs, and the standard deviation figures below serve as a common yardstick, one that lets a CEO or CHRO compare the size of an effect across studies and then express that effect in the units of performance the organization already tracks, such as sales, retention, or promotion readiness, which allows the gain to be priced against what the program would cost.
A meta-analysis by American organizational psychologists that pooled 335 independent samples found that leadership development improved participants’ reactions, learning, transfer to the job, and organizational results, with average effects between δ = .63 and δ = .82 (Lacerenza et al., 2017). The same analysis showed that design shaped outcomes, with stronger results from programs that began with a needs analysis, supplied feedback and practice, spaced their sessions over time, ran on-site, and relied on face-to-face instruction that was not self-administered.
Workplace coaching shows a similar pattern, though a meta-analysis of seventeen studies by British researchers rests on a much thinner literature (Jones et al., 2016). Coaching improved organizational outcomes by δ = .36 overall, with larger gains in affective outcomes (δ = .51), which concern attitudes and feelings, than in skill-based outcomes (δ = .28), a gap I read as suggestive only, and with a much larger gain in individual-level results (δ = 1.24) that the thin literature warrants treating cautiously. Read together, the two analyses complicate the verdict on program effectiveness by showing that development can work and by identifying the conditions under which it does. The coaching analysis also found internal coaches outperforming external ones, an awkward result for a market that rests largely on external credentials, and its gap between feeling and skill will matter when I turn to what buyers and participants actually receive.
These findings answer the charge that programs deliver nothing but leave untouched the broader observation that decades of industry expansion have produced no evident gains in the quality of leadership at large, since average program effects need not aggregate into improvement across firms or societies. They also sharpen a rival explanation, that buyers act sensibly on decent average evidence, which the gaps in evaluation below put to the test. To be precise, these samples span many settings and populations, and the estimates describe leadership training in general more than executive education in particular. Both meta-analyses also predate generative AI, so neither speaks to programs built around it or to the offerings that now claim buyers’ attention.
Several considerations keep the finding in proportion and shift the puzzle from what the evidence shows to what buyers can see of it. For one, evaluations that reach publication probably come from organizations able to conduct them, which means the market average sits below the meta-analytic mean by an unknown margin. Another is that rigorous evaluation remains scarce, since leading providers estimate, off the record, that fewer than one in ten programs undergo it and that most evaluations capture only immediate participant reactions (Kaiser & Curphy, 2013). A 2025 survey of 277 practitioners by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), which covers training generally, points the same way, with 93 percent collecting participant satisfaction data, 29 percent neither measuring nor evaluating their programs, and only 15 percent feeling ready to isolate a program’s effect on results (Association for Talent Development, 2025).
A further consideration is that effect sizes describe what happens when programs work while saying nothing of whether what works is what buyers purchase, a gap that the leadership-training meta-analysis underscores in observing that leadership training absorbs much of training budgets while few organizations rate their programs highly effective. Scarce evaluation alone would explain continued buying through ignorance, so the puzzle holds only for buyers who see disconfirming signals, as the McKinsey respondents do, and buy anyway.
IV. From Efficacy to Function: Terms and the Rain Ceremonial
Taken together, the meta-analyses and the gaps in evaluation turn the initial puzzle into a second and sharper one. In the first, we asked why organizations keep buying programs that critics say do not work, and the evidence shows that well-designed programs can work, so the harder question becomes why purchasing stays indifferent to whether a given program was well designed, a pattern that the critics’ focus on efficacy leaves largely unexamined. A rival explanation holds that buyers simply act on decent average evidence, and the scarcity of rigorous evaluation bears on it, because a buyer who cannot see whether a program was built to the right design cannot be responding to its quality. Buyers who evaluate rigorously and change course doubtless exist and show where evidence does constrain purchasing; the puzzle concerns those who do not.
The existing evidence spans cohort programs and coaching, and I treat the two here as an increasingly convergent enterprise. That working assumption is based on my own professional observation and direct experience that many programs now bundle individual coaching, that coaches contribute to cohort workshops, and that the same assessments, vendors, and buyers serve both, although no purchasing data so far isolate the bundles. I use leadership development as broadly as many in the industry do, for everything from one-to-one coaching of a single executive to programs meant to build capacity across a whole organization, and I reserve the industry for that commercial enterprise, the research community for the scholars who study it, and the field for the two together.
A common distinction separates leader development, which builds the individual, from leadership development, which builds capacity across an organization, and the practical constraint noted in that literature, that the individual is often the only client a developer can reach, matters below (Palanski & Barclay, 2026, p. 332). A market that selects weakly for effectiveness may be selecting for something else, and the distinction between manifest and latent functions supplies concepts for finding out what. Foundational American sociologist Robert Merton developed that distinction in Social Theory and Social Structure, where it guards against a confusion common in his discipline, the habit of equating the motives people give for an action with the consequences the action actually has (Merton, 1968, pp. 73-138).
The Hopi rain ceremonial, a ritual performed to bring rain to an arid land, provided the central illustration for Merton. Because the ceremony does not produce rain, an analysis that stops at its avowed purpose would ordinarily classify it as superstition, a condescending verdict that the functional analysis sets out to correct. When attention turns to the ceremony’s consequences for the group, a function that nobody advertised comes into view, since the ritual gives scattered members of a community a periodic occasion to assemble and reaffirm a shared identity. The manifest function, rain, goes unmet, while the latent function, cohesion, succeeds. I use “rain ceremonial” to name, by analogy, any practice whose stated purpose and actual consequences diverge (Merton, 1968, pp. 118-122).
Under the distinction between manifest and latent functions, a consequence counts as latent when participants neither intend nor recognize it and as manifest when they do both, a distinction that redirects analysis from whether a practice attains its avowed purpose to what else it accomplishes. That shift explains why practices that fail their stated aims can persist with considerable stability and import, provided they perform some other function that someone values, although the mechanism usually depends on participants continuing to believe in the stated aim. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) illustrates the pattern, since its use has persisted through accumulating doubts about its validity (Stein & Swan, 2019).
Institutional theory has long observed that organizations adopt practices to win legitimacy from their environments, often with loose coupling to technical results, a lineage that Part II takes up (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). My use of the “rain ceremonial” in the title here thus carries a qualified meaning, because development programs built to the right design can produce some rain; the power of the analogy derives from calling attention to how weakly the buying depends on whether rain falls.
V. What a Program Delivers Beyond Its Brochure
A leadership program delivers different things to different people, and only the advertised skills depend on leaders actually improving. The organization receives those skills, participants receive private comforts, and the buyer receives a defensible decision. Merton’s distinction sorts these deliveries once we ask two questions of each, the first being whether the seller announces it and the second who receives it. Functions that sellers announce and buyers expect, I call manifest, and they include the capabilities that a brochure or website promises and, as firms often state, a signal of investment in senior, high-potential, or other talented employees. Functions that sellers leave unadvertised I call undeclared, and the second question divides them into private functions, which benefit participants, and institutional functions, which benefit organizations and the buyers who act for them.
Among the private functions, anxiety relief and belonging stand out, and both reach participants whether or not the program improves their leadership. A program can ease the anxiety of uncertainty by converting it into a framework, and it can offer belonging, which research on business schools as identity workspaces, where people revise their professional identities during career transitions, helps explain (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010). The uncertainty that AI creates for leaders may heighten the demand for relief, because a program that turns an unsettling technology into a framework of readiness, roles, and questions to ask can ease worry long before it changes anyone’s practice. In Part IV of this series, I will consider whether the use of generative AI, as a shared subject, also supplies belonging.
The most consequential institutional function is defensibility, the advantage that a credentialed program gives a purchaser who can point to a visible action when performance disappoints. A buyer who chose a recognized provider can say that the organization followed accepted practice, and that statement protects the buyer whether or not anyone evaluated the program. Boards and chief executives who now ask what the organization is doing about AI make a program on leading with AI an especially easy purchase to defend, since a buyer who declines one may invite more scrutiny than a buyer who purchases one that no one evaluates. Defensibility therefore carries the most weight in this series, as the function that most directly explains buying that stays indifferent to whether a program works.
Compliance forms a separate category because a rule generates the demand, and the program’s benefits play no part in it. It arises where an association or regulator ties continuing education to a license or designation. The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) illustrates the pattern, since its Fellow credential (FACHE) rests on accredited continuing education and often appears as a hard requirement in senior executive job descriptions, hospital-system advancement, and board appointments (ACHE, n.d.). Such demand holds regardless of the value the buyer assigns to the content, and it reaches leadership development only where the content qualifies for credit. I treat compliance as a boundary case, since most leadership purchases face no comparable requirement, and look to private and institutional functions to explain persistence across the wider market.
The label undeclared warrants a word of justification, because Merton’s latent covers only consequences that participants neither intend nor recognize. Many buyers do recognize that defensibility forms part of what they purchase, even though no brochure says so, and a term that turned on recognition would misdescribe it. Undeclared therefore means only that sellers do not advertise a function, whether or not buyers see it. Latent remains available for the narrower set of undeclared consequences that escape everyone involved, as the Hopi ceremonial’s reaffirmation of group identity escaped its participants, and some private comforts, such as relief from anxiety, may qualify. The vocabulary thus narrows in steps, with manifest functions advertised, undeclared functions unadvertised, and latent functions the undeclared ones that no one recognizes, a gradation of recognition that the next section uses to ask who shapes what buyers and participants see.
VI. Co-producing the Purchase
Merton’s Hopi participants inherited their understanding of the ceremonial from a community that shared it, whereas buyers and participants in leadership programs form theirs inside a crowded market, and a functional analysis of the latter cannot alone say who shapes what they come to believe. The sociology of cultural industries, which reaches a neighboring conclusion from a different tradition, supplies the missing producers. Copenhagen Business School’s Eric Guthey and Nicole Ferry argue that leadership development sells goods consumed as much for their symbolic and emotional associations as for their use in preparing leaders, and that critics who hastily dismiss the industry assume its proper function is to produce better leaders while ignoring its cultural, symbolic, and humanizing work (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 428-429). Their account adds that the industry coproduces the demand it serves, because a program is never fully produced until participants consume and interpret it (427).
Guthey and Ferry’s account of assessment, coaching, and executive education shows these producers at work, as the following summary of their sector analyses indicates (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 433-436). In assessment, slogans of scientific objectivity accompany scores that function as symbolic markers independent of their predictive efficacy, and both need constant mediation from administrators, consultants, content creators, and sales staff to carry authority. In coaching, low barriers to entry have multiplied certification routes, from two-day online courses to thirty-month master’s programs, and the associations that try to regulate them have multiplied alongside. In executive education, business schools tailor offerings around executive hot topics such as leading with AI, frame development as an inner journey, and signal through selection that a participant has leadership potential or executive stature. Each intermediary has a stake in how a program is described, and those descriptions become the language that a buyer later uses to explain the purchase.
Drawing together the accounts presented by Merton and by Guthey and Ferry suggests that latency in this market may be partly manufactured, because the parties who sell programs also shape how buyers understand them. Guthey and Ferry trace the root to the difficulty of showing that organizational outcomes flow from leadership at all, a difficulty that leaves meaning to do much of the work and leads programs to socialize participants into attributing causal power to leaders. For private functions such as relief from anxiety, a program presented as an inner journey toward leadership invites participants to credit the journey, and that framing can keep them from recognizing what they receive.
For defensibility, which many buyers do recognize, coproduction supplies the plausible story of effectiveness that buyers need to keep citing the purchase, whether the story arrives as personal transformation or as a claim to scientific objectivity. The chief learning officer meets this vocabulary as common sense, in a field where 82 percent of her counterparts rank leadership the top learning priority for executives (Jack, 2021, as cited in Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 433).
The research community stands inside this arrangement as well. Scholars who distance themselves from commercialized development claim the authority to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge, and many of them also sell fee-based services to commercial organizations, in part to shore up their relevance (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 437). Coproduction remains an inference from theory and adjacent evidence, because no significant survey of buyers has measured these functions, and Guthey and Ferry themselves caution against reading the industry’s logic as purely instrumental or calculating (439). The inference can fail, and I’ll show how in the next section, since buyers who change providers after credible evidence of no effect would count against it. A way to say which undeclared functions buyers value and where inspection threatens them therefore matters more than any verdict on motives.
VII. Two Buyers and a Test
Returning to the chief learning officer, whom I will call the Gatekeeper in Part II, and her skeptical finance director, whose questions will become the Gatekeeper’s shadow of dissent, we can see that the preceding sections have changed what her question means. The research gives her reason to believe that a program built around a needs analysis, feedback and practice, and spaced sessions can produce average gains between δ = .63 and δ = .82. She has little means of knowing whether the program in front of her was built that way, since leading providers estimate off the record that fewer than one in ten programs undergo rigorous evaluation. And the functional lens shows her that the purchase can deliver belonging for her executives and an explainable decision for herself, even if the quality of leadership in her company never changes.
That last benefit falls differently on different parties, since functions are always relative to a unit of analysis. Defensibility protects the buyer who can cite a visible action when results disappoint, though it can undermine the participant whose program was chosen for its brand, and the straightforward framework that allays a leader’s anxiety may cost the situational attention that good judgment requires. Even the academy’s constructive turn toward context, included in the AOMLE issue, follows the pattern, since proposals to teach leaders to read the systems around them acknowledge that the individual is usually the only client a developer can reach, which leaves the organization’s own design as uninspected as before (Palanski & Barclay, 2026, pp. 332, 335; Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 438).
The finance director’s meeting can therefore go in two ways, and the difference between them is the test that this series proposes. In the first version, the chief learning officer asks the provider for a needs analysis, a schedule of feedback and practice, a comparison group, and a fee partly tied to measured change in how the executives lead. In the second, she accepts attendance figures and satisfaction scores, which 93 percent of the surveyed practitioners already collect.
Buyers who want behavior to change will hold the first meeting, while those who want belonging, reassurance, and cover will find the second entirely sufficient. Were behavior change the goal, buyers would demand evidence of it, yet the thin evaluation described above suggests few do. The test also answers the charge that functional explanations run in circles. Persistence alone proves nothing, but a buyer who keeps a credentialed provider after seeing credible evidence of no effect, or who passes over a cheaper AI coaching tool offering similar feedback and reassurance, reveals what the purchase was really for.
If a buyer switches in those situations, the rival explanation gains support: ignorance drove the purchase. Generative AI makes this test easier to run and harder to read. Dashboards of usage, engagement, and sentiment arrive automatically and can lend the appearance of measurement to what remains attendance and satisfaction. But those same tools may lower the cost of tracking behavioral change enough to make demanding evaluations practical.
Nothing here is meant to suggest that buyers are cynics or providers charlatans, since producers and consumers alike invest in leadership development out of real aspirations to agency and to more humane organizations (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 439-440). The research does indicate, though, that executives who want development to work should ask what their own purchase is actually doing for them, and by the end of this series I will propose four signs that those buyers should ask for. Those signs are procurement requests that specify outcomes beyond participant reactions, fees tied to measured change, published evaluations that name a comparison group, and associations and rankings that require behavioral evidence alongside attendance.
Part II will ask why buyers inspect these functions so little, drawing on credence-good economics, which studies goods whose quality buyers cannot judge even after use, institutional theory, and the study of management fashion.
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