Experiential Learning · Leadership Development
Why 90% of Leadership Training Fails — and What to Do About It
Fred Van de Walle has spent 25 years watching leadership programmes produce exactly nothing. The trainer leaves, the certificates get filed, and within three weeks, everyone is back to working the way they always did. He built ArrowHead to solve that problem. This is an interview about what goes wrong — and what actually works.
You talk about a 90% problem. What does that mean exactly?
In less than three weeks after a training, 90% of people return to exactly how they worked before. The tickbox gets checked. The training report gets filed. And nothing changes. I have watched this happen hundreds of times across organisations in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore — everywhere. It is not a European problem or a sector problem. It is a structural problem with how leadership development is typically delivered.
The companies are spending real money. The trainers are often good. The content is often solid. But the environment is wrong, the preparation is wrong, and the follow-through is wrong. Three weeks later, the default wins.
"In less than three weeks after a training, 90% of people return to exactly how they worked before. The default always wins — unless you change the conditions."
Why does the conference room fail as a learning environment?
Because nothing is at stake. When you are sitting in a meeting room being told about leadership, you are in your most comfortable environment. You are fed. You are warm. You know where the toilets are. Your phone works. And critically — nothing bad will happen if you ignore what is being said.
Leadership is a skill that only shows itself under pressure. You can describe assertiveness to someone for three hours, but the moment they are cold, tired, and responsible for a decision that affects the group, you see the truth. The conference room hides everything.
Confucius said it better than I can: I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. That has been known for 2,500 years. We have just forgotten it in the way we design corporate training.
What does ArrowHead do differently?
Two things. First, we profile before we train. Every participant completes a Management Drives assessment before the programme starts. This reveals their individual motivators, their blind spots, and exactly how their behaviour changes under stress. Without this, any training is generic. With it, every conversation is about the specific person sitting in front of you.
Second, we move the learning into an environment where the pressure is real. In the Swiss Alps, in a mountain hut overnight, at minus fifteen in Lapland — the leadership profile gets tested in conditions where nothing can be faked. The insight you earn when you are physically uncomfortable and responsible for others does not fade the way classroom content does. It becomes part of how you think.
Does it have to be extreme to work? Not every corporate team wants to go to the Arctic.
It does not have to be extreme. It has to be real. There is a difference. The one-day programme in the Swiss Alps — our Alpine Spark — is accessible to anyone. You do not need to be fit. You do not need outdoor experience. What you need is to be in an environment that is slightly unfamiliar, where the normal hierarchy and office dynamics do not apply, and where you are genuinely responsible for something other than your email inbox.
The Arctic and Kyrgyzstan exist for teams that want to go further. But Switzerland itself — the mountains, the weather, the terrain — provides more than enough pressure to make leadership visible. We have mountain huts twenty minutes from Zürich that will show you more about your team in two days than two years of performance reviews.
"We have mountain huts twenty minutes from Zürich that will show you more about your team in two days than two years of performance reviews."
What about after the programme? How do you prevent the 90% problem in your own work?
Every participant leaves with a personal action plan built around their specific profile and the habits we identified together. And they leave with access to Management Drives tools — the books, the app, the frameworks — that allow them to keep working on the same insights back in the office.
But the honest answer is: the outdoor experience itself does most of the work. When you have had a real insight in a real environment — when you have seen your own behaviour clearly, in a situation where it mattered — that is very difficult to unsee. The field does what the classroom cannot.
What type of organisations benefit most from ArrowHead?
Management teams that are performing but not yet performing at their potential. Companies where the individuals are good but the team dynamic is limiting what they can achieve together. And leaders who have done the standard training programmes and know — if they are being honest — that nothing really changed.
We work across Switzerland, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. We deliver in English, French, and Dutch. The profile assessment takes thirty minutes. The outdoor programme starts with one day. There is no reason to wait.