Antonacopoulou, E., Dilek, U. D., Mintzberg, H.,… Wright, R. P. (2023, August). Taking learning to work: The impact of reflexive learning in executive education and leadership development. Professional Development Workshop / PDW accepted, 83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Boston, USA. “A” Grade Conference

Despite calls to mark this the ‘decade of action’ (UN, 2021) and the priority of responsible leadership to take centre stage (WEF, 2021), business schools are still lagging in demonstrating that the education and learning that they foster does lead to marked improvements in action (Mintzberg, 2009; 2015) which Antonacopoulou (2010) explains ought to be the essence of impact (IMProving ACTion) and the way it is measured. Calls for advancing a Responsible Management Learning agenda (Laasch et al., 2020) and frameworks of curriculum development that promote competence-based approaches (Laasch et al., 2023), a civility-based orientation (Colombo, 2022) or call for returning to experimentation as a central feature of executive education (Birkenshaw & Gudka, 2022) are growing. However, the prospect that education itself may be responsible for the limited sense of responsibility is becoming more alarming (Schinkel, 2022). This is especially so, given education is heralded as central to social change necessary for sustainable development not least, because human action is at the epicentre of the ecological crisis marking the new epoch of the Anthropocene – human destructive impact on the ecosystem.