We Teach People to Choose, Not to Navigate: The Flaw in Professional Learning
A few years ago, a product development team I advised stood at a strategic crossroads, staring down a massive product launch with a financial model as their only compass. On one side lay their legacy portfolio: consistent, profitable, but undeniably plateauing. On the other beckoned "Project Horizon": a capital-intensive moonshot promising market dominance, double-digit growth, and the kind of share price bump that defines careers. The pitch deck, with its neat rows of projected margins and acquisition costs, screamed "green light," assuring the board that the demand was verified and the ROI was imminent.
However, pro formas are notorious for what they omit. They are static maps of a dynamic ecosystem, and while they can calculate gross margin, they remain dangerously silent on the curve balls that markets inevitably throw.
Six months post-launch, the "optimal path" disintegrated under the weight of reality. A critical supply chain partner declared bankruptcy. The regulatory environment shifted, rendering a key feature non-compliant. Simultaneously, a competitor slashed prices, igniting a margin war just as the team needed cash flow. None of these events were irrational, rare, or even particularly shocking in isolation; they were simply business happening all at once. The team wasn't incompetent—in fact, they were industry veterans—but they were profoundly unprepared for the cascade of triage required to stabilize the ship.
They had prepared to choose a strategy, but they had not rehearsed how to navigate the consequences.
Have you ever made a decision that looked perfect on paper, only to have the reality of the situation unravel in ways you never anticipated? How did that gap between expectation and reality feel in the moment?
The Missing Stage in Our Learning Architecture
This scenario reveals a quiet but catastrophic failure in how we approach learning, preparation, and decision-making. From our earliest days in school through the most advanced professional development workshops, our learning models follow a seductive but incomplete pattern: we acquire new information, we demonstrate our understanding of it (usually through a test or a presentation), we apply it once to prove competence, and then we move on. We treat learning as a linear accumulation of facts, assuming that if we know the theory, we can handle the practice.
What is glaringly missing from this equation is rehearsal.
If you look at high-stakes domains like music, theater, professional athletics, aviation, or emergency response, you will find that rehearsal is not just a step in the process; it is the process. A concert pianist doesn’t just memorize the notes and hope for the best on opening night; they practice the transitions, the tempo changes, and even the potential for memory slips. An airline pilot doesn’t just read a manual about engine failure; they spend hours in a simulator where engines catch fire, landing gear fails, and storms rage, all while they are strapped into a cockpit that mimics the physical sensations of stress. They rehearse mistakes. They simulate pressure. They prepare for failure modes so that when the real crisis hits, their reaction is not panic, but procedure.
Yet, in business and life—domains where the stakes involve livelihoods, reputations, and mental health—we largely skip this step. We memorize frameworks, read sanitized case studies, and attend workshops where everything goes according to plan. Then, when reality refuses to follow the script and the "happy path" disappears, we are left stunned and scrambling.
Think about your current profession. Do you have a "simulator"—a safe place to practice failing—or are you expected to perform perfectly from day one?
The Danger of the "Happy Path"
One of the most damaging omissions in traditional corporate and academic learning is the exclusion of negative outcomes. When we teach leadership, strategy, or decision-making, we almost always focus on the survivor bias of success. We say, "Here is what worked for Company X," or "Here is the best practice for this situation," or "Here is the optimal path to growth." We polish the stories until they shine, removing the grit, the doubt, and the near-misses that actually define the experience.
But real decisions rarely unfold along an optimal path. In the real world, markets shift overnight, people behave irrationally, data arrives late or corrupted, assumptions break under the weight of new evidence, and office politics intervene. When we exclude these negative consequences from our learning models, we allow learners to develop a dangerous trait: fragile confidence.
Fragile confidence is what happens when you understand the plan but not the pressure. It is the state of knowing the theory behind a negotiation but having never felt the sweaty palms of a deal going south. It is knowing the tradeoffs intellectually without ever having to look a team member in the eye and deliver bad news. When we only study success, we rob ourselves of the immunity that comes from exposure to failure.
Experiential learning, when executed correctly, restores what rote memorization removes. It reintroduces consequences, uncertainty, emotional friction, and irreversibility. These elements are often viewed by educators as distractions from the "core material," but in a complex world, they are the core material.
A Case Study in Fragile Confidence
Consider a hypothetical technology company, "Lumina Tech," deciding whether to expand into a new geographic market. On the surface, the decision-making process looks rigorous and analytical. The team gathers data on market size, analyzes customer demand, scopes out the competitive landscape, and reviews the regulatory environment. They build a slide deck that shows a "hockey stick" growth chart. Everyone feels good. The logic holds.
But the real decision space—the terrain they will actually have to walk—is far more treacherous than the slide deck suggests.
What happens if their first local hire, the linchpin of the expansion, dramatically underperforms and poisons the team culture? What if a regulatory approval that was supposed to take three months takes twelve, bleeding the budget dry? What if a local competitor drops their prices by 40% the week Lumina launches? What if the core team back at headquarters becomes stretched so thin that the main product starts to suffer?
In most organizations, these risks are discussed abstractly, if at all. They are relegated to a "Risk Register"—a spreadsheet tab where bad things go to die, acknowledged but not felt. The team lists the risk, assigns it a probability, and moves on, assuming they can handle it if it comes.
A rehearsal-based learning model does something radically different. It places the decision-makers inside those scenarios before they occur. It forces them to simulate the board meeting where they have to explain the delay. It requires them to role-play the conversation with the underperforming hire. It makes them make the hard budget cuts in a simulated environment to see what breaks. By the time the real expansion begins, they are not encountering these dynamics for the first time. They have been there before—mentally, emotionally, and strategically.
If you could "rehearse" one major challenge you are facing right now, what specific "disaster scenario" would be most valuable for you to practice navigating?
Mental Memory vs. Information
When veterans of any industry say, "I’ve been there and done that," they are rarely referring to book knowledge. They are referring to mental memory.
Mental memory is distinct from the information you store in your hippocampus. It is built through pattern recognition, emotional recall, and cause-and-effect sequencing. It is the deep, intuitive knowing that comes from having recovered from a misstep. This kind of memory changes how people respond under pressure because it shifts cognitive processing from the slow, deliberate "Type 2" thinking to the fast, intuitive "Type 1" thinking.
When you have rehearsed a difficult conversation, you don’t freeze when the other person gets angry. When you have practiced responding to bad data, you don’t overreact and scrap the whole project. When you have simulated failure, you recover faster because your brain recognizes the pattern. You are not standing in the wreckage wondering what happened; you are already executing the recovery protocol.
Every rehearsal reduces the cognitive load in the real moment. You are no longer inventing responses from scratch while your adrenaline is spiking; you are simply selecting from a library of experiences you have already banked.
Complexity Has Changed the Game
Why is this shift from preparation to rehearsal so urgent right now? Because the environments we operate in have fundamentally changed. We are living in a world that is more interconnected, more volatile, more ambiguous, and significantly less forgiving than the world our education systems were designed for.
Linear learning models—read the chapter, take the test, get the job—evolved for predictable systems where variables were stable and authority defined the "right answers." In a factory or a rigid bureaucracy, memorization works because tomorrow looks a lot like today.
But modern challenges—career pivots, market expansions, leading diverse teams, navigating systemic change—do not behave linearly. They require judgment, not recall. They demand adaptation, not compliance. They require sense-making, not script-reading. In this environment, "knowing the answer" is less important than knowing how to find a new answer when the old one stops working.
Rehearsal as a New Learning Model
So, what does a rehearsal-based learning model look like? It shifts the focus from knowing to navigating.
Instead of asking a learner, "Do you understand the concept of sunk cost fallacy?", a rehearsal model asks, "You are three months into a failing project, and you have spent 40% of your budget. Your sponsor wants to continue, but the data says stop. What do you say to them in the next five minutes?"
Instead of asking, "What are the five pillars of crisis communication?", it asks, "Your server just crashed, losing customer data, and social media is trending with complaints. Draft the response you release in the next 15 minutes. Go."
In these scenarios, there is no perfect option. Information is incomplete. Time pressure is real. Consequences persist. Reflection is still a vital part of the process, but it comes after the experience, not instead of it. We learn by doing, failing, reflecting, and then doing it again.
Why This Matters for You
For individuals, adopting a rehearsal mindset builds profound resilience. It shortens the recovery time when life throws those inevitable curve balls. It replaces the shock of "Why is this happening to me?" with the recognition of "Ah, I know this dynamic, and I know how to move through it."
For organizations, it improves decision quality. Teams that rehearse together argue less about abstract theory and more about tangible implications. They surface hidden assumptions earlier because the simulation forces those assumptions into the light. They align faster because they have "experienced" the system together, creating a shared mental model of the risks and rewards.
Most importantly, rehearsal changes how we relate to uncertainty. When we rely solely on plans and spreadsheets, uncertainty is a threat—a monster to be feared. But when we rehearse, uncertainty stops being a threat and simply becomes the terrain we navigate.
The Shift We Need to Make
We do not need more content. We are drowning in content, swimming in slides, and buried under "best practices." We do not need more information about how to lead or how to decide.
What we need are learning environments where people can practice being wrong safely, before they are forced to be wrong expensively. We need "sandboxes" where the cost of failure is a bruised ego, not a lost career.
The future belongs to those who rehearse—not because they can predict the future with a better spreadsheet, but because they have trained themselves to respond to whatever the future holds. In complex, unpredictable systems, memorization prepares you for the past, but rehearsal prepares you for what is coming next.
What is one step you could take this week to stop "studying" your next big move and start "rehearsing" it?
Would you like me to help you design a specific "rehearsal scenario" for a decision or challenge you are currently facing?