Crafting continuing learning and development: a positive design tool for leadership development

The purpose of this paper is to consider leaders as continuing learning and development (L&D) crafters.

To maximize leaders’ “self-awareness” and “learning agility”, this article addresses itself to positive, purposeful and planned self-development by means of continuing L&D crafting.

Executing leader’s structured and personalized developmental portfolios produce both personal and organizational gains, as reported by participants in the global “Learning Entrepreneurs” research project.

The article offers a “designy” tool that executives can use in the workplace and outside.

Apart from the fact that it seems highly practical to employ L&D crafting as a business leadership development method, one can extrapolate this idea, and recommend this technique to leaders outside of business. This may transform institutions at large into learning organizations.

Rooted in design thinking and positive organizational studies, the article advances a “continuing developmental portfolio” made up of two components: a continuing executive development “Check-in” and “Design”. These together are a mechanism for natural and disciplined learning from opportunistic incidents.