This article examines a pedagogical challenge often encountered in professional schools but not frequently discussed as compared with ‘normal’ semester-long classroom teaching. How can we make short-duration executive education programmes (EPs), typically conducted for mid-career professionals, a meaningful learning experience for the participants?
The course aims to provide training to today’s leaders in public management. Imagine the following scenario:

Configurations vary, but some of the most challenging EPs in our School of Public Policy (and probably elsewhere) have several characteristics of the above scenario:

• Time-on-task is both short and high-intensity: participants receive several hours of instruction per day either with the same or different instructor, for several days at a time;
  
• The instructor often has little or no knowledge of the participants prior to the session;
  
• The class may be both diverse and non-cohesive as the participants come from different countries solely for the purpose of attending the session;

• The ‘stakes’ of the training for participants are limited since there is generally no assessment and since third parties (e.g. governments or donors) are often paying for the training;

A daunting teaching assignment, or is it mission impossible? The answer depends, of course, on one’s ambitions. It is not particularly difficult to keep the class occupied for the time required; indeed, this requires little more than an adaptation of teaching materials typically used in one’s semester-long courses. But what could make this format actually useful for participants?

Some lessons learned

The following five guidelines have grown out of my active experimentation in EPs over the past five years:

1. Keep it simple. This piece of advice, true enough in our normal classes, is even more relevant for EPs. The temptation to take the ambitious and externally imposed learning objectives (such as those listed in the scenario above) too literally can and will lead to information overload and an easily forgotten session. This leads to the next point, which may be more controversial.

2. Leverage learning by encouraging small shifts in perspective rather than formal content. Einstein once said that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Whether or not this applies to a semester-long calculus course, I take it is as my North Star when designing EP sessions. I know the EP sessions I facilitate have worked as intended when they leave participants with an unexpected insight—one that helps them to see a complexity behind an otherwise familiar aspect of their work. To accomplish this, I look for relatively simple but intuitive frameworks that essentially invite participants to organise their own extensive professional experience in new ways. My aim is for such heuristics to be remembered and to prove useful even several months after the session. But this requires going beyond a lecture presentation of a particular framework, which brings us to point three.

3. Build the session around interactive problem-solving. One benefit of an ‘imagination’-driven approach to EP teaching is that it allows more time for what may really wake participants up—interactive problem-solving. For my sessions, this typically takes the form of joint analysis of case studies. Participants are presented with an open-ended policy or managerial dilemma and asked to develop and present their own recommendations for its resolution using one of the frameworks taught in the session. I find that by mixing challenging and easy questions, I can reach almost all participants at some point during the session.

4. Raise the stakes. As noted above, the lack of any form of participant assessment, coupled with the fatigue factor caused by an often gruelling EP schedule, means that participant motivation and energy can often wane. The interactive, problem-solving approach may help combat fatigue, as do small-group work, presentations of case analysis and organised debates between teams of participants. Such activities turn up the heat in the classroom. As successful professionals, participants are often eager to demonstrate their creative problem-solving skills to their peers du jour (and at least not appear unprepared).
   
   Incentives matter for the instructor as well. Participant evaluation forms are common (but still not universal) practice. But since the evaluation results are typically not linked to any obvious consequences, they can often fail to motivate instructors to make an extra effort in these ‘one-off’ courses. One well-known principle is to make participant feedback on all EP sessions available to all instructors involved. Having joint planning and debriefing sessions among faculty members and EP clients can also help create an enabling environment for continuous improvement and sustained instructor effort. These steps additionally help promote the customisation and coordination of content that are essential for high-impact EPs.

5. Innovate! The Executive Programme practice is constantly evolving. We are only now beginning to incorporate distance and e-learning tools into EPs. Such tools may help overcome some constraints inherent in the EP format (for instance, enabling even short programmes to include assessed participant work).

Whatever the form EPs take in the future, the core principles of focus, interactivity, attention to learner and instructor motivation, as well as continuous innovation are likely to be just as important as they are today.