The Morrison Alley difference
Why experiential learning works.
Traditional training often falls short because it fails to engage adults in the way they learn best: through action, reflection, and real-world application. Morrison Alley redefines leadership and team development with an experiential approach built for immediate impact and lasting change.
What our clients say
In their words.
Your engagement was simply awesome. The team was buzzing after the experience. It struck a great chord and was perfect reinforcement for what we are trying to convey and accomplish. The idea of carrying through the Cornerstones could not have been better. We cannot thank you enough for taking the time to spend with the team and for a phenomenal event.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
Morrison Alley helped us confront real organizational dynamics through experiential learning. It was not just fun. It was transformational. We saw immediate improvements in communication, accountability, and morale across the board.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
The Morrison Alley experience was a game changer for our leadership team. We left with practical tools, renewed trust, and a shared sense of direction. Our collaboration and strategic alignment improved noticeably within weeks of the event.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
Nothing close to this level of depth and effectiveness. The blend of challenge, reflection, and real business insight made this program the most valuable leadership investment we have made.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
We did not know what to expect and you totally blew us away. It is hard to explain, but we became closer in a way none of us expected.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
Truly life changing for me personally. Thank you so much for helping us get to know each other as human beings.
Fortune 50 C-Suite Business Leader
The evidence
No single study reduces all of this to one tidy percentage. Here is the evidence for the pieces, each from a primary source you can open and read.
Experience, not lecture
Leadership grows mostly from doing hard things, and only a little from sitting in a classroom.
The share of leadership development that comes from challenging experience, from developmental relationships, and from formal coursework, in the widely used Center for Creative Leadership model.
Center for Creative Leadership [5]
Leadership programs built on hands-on practice and feedback far outperform lecture-only formats, with roughly triple the effect (effect sizes of 0.96 versus 0.31), across a meta-analysis of 335 studies.
Lacerenza et al., Journal of Applied Psychology, 2017 [4]
Trust multiplies performance
When trust is high, people give more and hold back less, and the differences are large.
Higher productivity at high-trust companies compared with low-trust ones.
Zak, Harvard Business Review, 2017 [2]
More engagement at work among people in high-trust companies.
Zak, Harvard Business Review, 2017 [2]
More energy at work among people in high-trust companies.
Zak, Harvard Business Review, 2017 [2]
How a team works beats who is on it
The biggest driver of team performance is whether people feel safe to speak, question, and admit mistakes.
Psychological safety was the single most important factor in team effectiveness across the 180 teams Google studied, ahead of talent, seniority, and team size.
Google Project Aristotle; Edmondson, 1999 [3]
Engagement shows up in results
Engaged teams are not simply happier. They perform better on the measures leaders already track.
The odds of success on financial, customer, retention, safety, and quality measures for business units in the top half of their organization for engagement.
Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis [1]
Higher productivity in highly engaged business units, alongside fewer safety incidents and fewer quality defects.
Gallup Q12 Meta-Analysis [1]
Better decisions
Teams that include and actually hear everyone decide better than individuals do.
Of the time, inclusive teams made better business decisions than individual decision-makers, across 600 decisions studied. They also decided faster, with fewer meetings.
Cloverpop, 2017 [6]
The difference
What sets us apart.
Hands-on learning. Teams tackle active challenges that mirror real-world business complexities, building problem-solving through experimentation, collaboration, and trial and error.
Emotional engagement. Our dramatic, high-energy activities sharpen focus and anchor learning, so the lessons stick long after the experience ends.
Level playing field. Novel scenarios break down hierarchies, drawing contributions from every team member, often from unexpected sources.
Real consequences. Success and failure in our programs carry weight, mirroring workplace dynamics and driving accountability.
Powerful metaphors. Our custom adventures are designed to reflect your organizational challenges directly, building a bridge between the experience and real workplace solutions.
Proven transferability. Research-backed outcomes show participants applying their skills to live projects, delivering measurable results.
See the research in practice
The evidence points one way: leaders and teams change through experience. That is the whole of what we build.
Start a conversation →Sources
- Gallup, Inc. Q12 Meta-Analysis (Harter and colleagues), the ongoing study now spanning more than 183,000 business units. gallup.com
- Zak, P. J. (2017). The Neuroscience of Trust. Harvard Business Review, 95(1), 84 to 90. Winner of the 2018 Warren Bennis Prize. hbr.org
- Google, Project Aristotle (re:Work, 2012 to 2014); popularized in Charles Duhigg, The New York Times Magazine (2016). Underlying construct from Amy C. Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly (1999).
- Lacerenza, C. N., Reyes, D. L., Marlow, S. L., Joseph, D. L., and Salas, E. (2017). Leadership training design, delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(12), 1686 to 1718. doi.org/10.1037/apl0000241
- Center for Creative Leadership, drawing on McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison, The Lessons of Experience (1988). The 70-20-10 split is a widely used model rather than a precise measured figure.
- Cloverpop, Hacking Diversity with Inclusive Decision Making (Erik Larson, 2017), analyzing 600 business decisions made by 200 teams.
Note: Gallup revises its figures with each edition of the meta-analysis. The percentages above reflect widely reported findings and are rounded. We update them to the current edition when they change.