What formation is not

The standard leadership programme has a recognisable shape. A distinguished figure speaks for fifty minutes. There are slides. There is a question at the end which is really a statement. Participants leave with notes, a photograph and a sense of having been in the room.

Almost nothing that matters is transmitted this way. Judgment is not transferred in a lecture. It is exercised, corrected, and exercised again, preferably in front of people whose respect one wants and has not yet earned.

Formation therefore requires conditions that a conference cannot provide. It requires time, because an argument that can be settled in twenty minutes was not worth having. It requires difficulty, because texts that yield on first reading do not teach anyone to read. It requires closure, because people will not risk an unfinished thought in a room that is being recorded. And it requires continuity, because the value of the exercise appears years later, in decisions taken alone.

It also requires something that programmes are reluctant to name: the possibility of being shown to be wrong, in public, and having to say so. This is the specific discomfort that formation is organised around. Remove it and the seminar becomes a panel discussion.

None of this is novel. It is the ordinary practice of good seminars, and it has been for a very long time. What is unusual is treating it as the central activity of an institution rather than as an ornament attached to one.