The 70:20:10 Model — Why Most Learning Happens When Things Go Wrong
There is a question worth asking before any leadership development conversation: where does real learning actually happen? Not where it is designed to happen. Where it actually does.
Research from the Centre for Creative Leadership, established through the work of McCall, Lombardo and Eichinger, suggests that roughly 70% of significant leadership development comes from challenging on-the-job experiences, 20% from social learning, feedback and coaching, and 10% from formal training and education. These proportions are indicative rather than precise — they are not a formula — but the principle they describe is well-evidenced: the most formative learning happens in context, through experience, when the stakes are real.
This has a direct implication for how leaders approach their own development. If 70% of what you learn as a leader comes from lived experience, then the critical question is not "what am I being taught?" but "what am I learning from what I am living through?"
Why Challenge Is the Primary Driver of Development
The research on informal and incidental learning consistently shows that people develop most significantly when they are genuinely stretched. A 2025 Oxford Review study on collaborative informal learning found that managers learn most productively through on-the-job challenge, particularly when that challenge involves working with complexity they have not encountered before.
This is counterintuitive in a world where development is often equated with comfort. The neuroscience, however, is clear: the brain forms stronger, more durable learning pathways through challenge, difficulty and productive struggle than through the smooth delivery of new information. Difficulty is not the enemy of development. Unprocessed difficulty is.
The distinction matters. The same difficult experience can leave one leader depleted and another significantly more capable. The differentiating variable is not the experience itself. It is whether the leader has a structure for converting it into learning.
“The most formative leadership development does not happen in a training room. It happens in the moments of genuine difficulty that a leader is equipped to learn from.”
Working through challenging situations (with reflection!) enables the best learning. Photo Vitaly Gariev Unsplash
The 20%: Why Social Learning Is Not Soft
The 20% — the social learning that comes from feedback, coaching, mentoring and peer challenge — is frequently underinvested in, because it is less visible than formal training and harder to schedule. It is also the component most likely to determine whether the 70% produces learning or simply produces experience.
Oxford Review research on managerial team coaching found that a manager’s coaching skill and learning orientation has a direct and measurable impact on their team’s performance. The mechanism is worth noting: it is not the transfer of information that produces this effect. It is the quality of the developmental conversation.
Coaching — specifically Resilient Leader Coaching grounded in The Resilience Wheel — sits at the heart of the 20%. It is the structured relationship that creates the accountability and reflection that converts challenging experience into deliberate learning. Without it, the 70% accumulates as history rather than as capability.
The 10%: What Formal Training Is and Is Not Responsible For
Formal training — workshops, programmes, courses — is not unimportant. It provides frameworks, language and structured knowledge that give leaders something to take back into the 70%. The Resilience Wheel, introduced in a programme context, becomes a lens through which the daily texture of leadership can be seen more clearly.
The mistake is expecting the 10% to do the work of the other 90%. A one-day workshop on resilience, however well designed, will not produce sustained behaviour change if it returns people to an environment with no structure for application, reflection or accountability. The Oxford Review’s research on making leadership training stick found that mindset and structured follow-through — not programme quality alone — are the primary predictors of whether formal development translates into changed behaviour.
The Resilience Wheel as the Structure That Connects All Three
The Resilience Wheel is not a formal training tool or a coaching model or a peer learning framework. It is all three, depending on how it is used. That is what makes it structurally useful across the entire 70:20:10 spectrum.
In the 70%: the three reflective questions — what has been serving me well behaviourally, what has not been serving me well, and how can I do more of the first — convert daily experience into deliberate learning. They require under ten minutes and work precisely because they are grounded in specific, observable behaviour rather than general reflection.
In the 20%: coaching conversations anchored to The Resilience Wheel give the coach and coachee a shared language and a specific, seven-dimension framework against which progress is visible and measurable.
In the 10%: The Resilient Leader Programme introduces the Wheel and the Strengthscope psychometric, establishing the foundation from which both on-the-job learning and coaching conversations become significantly more precise.
What This Means in Practice
Think back over the last year of your leadership. The moments of genuine learning — the ones that changed how you operate — almost certainly came from the 70%. A difficult conversation that you handled better than you expected. A period of change that stretched you in ways a training programme never could. A decision made in ambiguity that you learned from, one way or another.
The question is whether you had a structure for converting those moments into deliberate capability. Or whether they accumulated as experience without quite becoming development.
At Cooplands Bakery, the Resilient Leader Programme was built around this principle. Participants brought real business improvement projects into the programme — applying their learning directly in context. The result was not just individual development. It was £500,000 in provable commercial returns from a single cohort. The 70% was not left to chance. It was deliberately structured.
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