If you’ve ever been burned by promoting a star performer who then struggles in a bigger, messier role, you’ve already met the problem learning agility is trying to solve.

Most organizations still lean heavily on past performance to predict who’s ready for more. But the data tells a different story: while most high potentials are high performers, a large share of high performers are not high potentials. In other words, being great at today’s job doesn’t guarantee someone can thrive in tomorrow’s.

That’s where learning agility comes in.

At its core, learning agility is someone’s willingness and ability to learn from experience—and then apply that learning to new, different situations. It’s about how fast a person gets better in the face of unfamiliar challenges, not just how well they execute what they already know.

Used well, it’s one of the strongest signals of leadership potential. Used blindly, it can become just another buzzword. Let’s keep it in the useful camp.

Why Learning Agility Beats Past Performance

Past performance is comforting because it’s visible and quantifiable. But it typically reflects success in known, stable contexts. Senior roles, however, live in VUCA territory—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

That’s the real test:

• Can this person step into a situation they’ve never seen before…
• Learn quickly what matters…
• Adjust their approach…
• And still deliver a meaningful result?

Research on learning agility suggests:

• It is significantly related to supervisor ratings of performance and promotability.
• It predicts success above and beyond factors like IQ and personality in many models.
• It helps explain the gap between solid high performers and the smaller subset of truly high-potential leaders.

So instead of asking only, “How good have you been?” learning agility invites a more critical question:

“How quickly and effectively do you get better when the game changes?”

That’s the question that separates someone who shines in a predictable environment from someone who can scale into complex, ambiguous leadership roles.

The Caveats: Where the Science Gets Messy

Of course, nothing this useful comes without debate. Academics and practitioners regularly challenge learning agility on two big fronts:

1. Overlap with Intelligence and Personality

Critics ask: Is learning agility actually new—or just a remix of things we already measure?

There is overlap:

• Mental Agility (processing complex ideas, seeing patterns, making fresh connections) clearly relates to cognitive ability.
• People Agility (navigating tough interpersonal situations, working with diverse others) overlaps with emotional intelligence and aspects of personality (like agreeableness or openness).

Where practitioners see the value is not in claiming LA is a completely “pure” construct, but in how it integrates these traits into observable action.

It’s less about “what you have” (intelligence, traits) and more about what you actually do with what you have when the situation is new, messy, or high stakes.

2. Definitional and Measurement Issues

Early on, learning agility suffered from definition creep:

• Some definitions sounded suspiciously like outcomes or were circular in nature: “successful people in new situations are learning agile”.
• Different vendors and researchers used different scales, sub-facets, and labels.

This led to a second wave of work focused on cleaner definitions and better measurement tools—ones that don’t just re-describe performance but isolate the underlying capacity to learn and adapt.

Bottom line:
Learning agility is a useful, evidence-backed construct, but it’s not magic. Treat it as a working indicator, not a flawless label—and always pair it with real behavior and real results.

From Concept to Behavior: What Learning-Agile Leaders Actually Do

The safest, most practical way to use learning agility is to anchor it in observable behavior. Modern models typically break it into several facets; below are four that map cleanly to real-world actions you can actually look for.

1. Change Agility → Speed and Quality of Iteration

Change-agile leaders seek out novelty instead of avoiding it. When they hit a new problem, they:

• Run small, low-cost experiments instead of waiting for perfect information.
• Generate multiple options or angles, not just a single, obvious solution.
• Iterate quickly based on what they’re learning.

What to look for:

• How quickly do they move from “I don’t know” to “Here’s a hypothesis we can test”?
• When a pilot fails, do they get defensive—or curious?
• Do their iterations noticeably improve in quality over time, or are they just trying the same thing faster?

2. Risking Agility → Stretch Assignments and Real Discomfort

Risking agility is about voluntarily stepping into situations where success isn’t guaranteed. Learning-agile leaders:

• Put their hand up for stretch roles, cross-functional projects, or “first of its kind” initiatives.
• Accept that some things will not go well—and still opt in.
• See discomfort as a signal to grow, not a warning to retreat.

What to look for:

• Their track record of taking on assignments with uncertain outcomes.
• Whether they’ve ever chosen to leave a comfortable role for a harder one with more learning.
• How they describe those experiences: as “career detours” or as “the most important learning moments” they’ve had.

3. Reflecting Agility → Depth of Post-Mortems and Feedback Loops

Reflecting agility is where experience actually becomes learning. These leaders:

• Conduct genuine after-action reviews, not box-ticking post-mortems.
• Seek out critical feedback, especially from those who see things differently.
• Can clearly articulate what they’d do differently next time—and why.

What to look for:

• Ask, “Tell me about a time you missed the mark. What did you learn, and what changed afterward?” Then:
  • Listen for specific, behavior-level changes, not vague clichés (“I learned the importance of communication”).
  • Note whether the person takes ownership rather than blaming context, resources, or other people.
• Look for evidence that lessons learned in one context show up as better decisions in another.

4. Results Agility → Outcomes in Genuinely Novel Work

Finally, results agility is about delivering when the playbook doesn’t exist yet.

These leaders:

• Stay resourceful under pressure and ambiguity.
• Rally others around a clear direction, even when there’s no precedent.
• Turn experiments and insights into tangible outcomes—a product shipped, a team established, a process redesigned.

What to look for:

• Concrete examples of success in truly first-time situations, not just “bigger versions” of past roles.
• How they led others through those moments—did they create clarity, or add to the chaos?
• Evidence of sustained performance when the rules of the game were changing.

How to Use Learning Agility in Talent Decisions

Given the promise and the caveats, here’s a practical way to bring learning agility into your talent processes without overclaiming:

1. Treat LA as a “redirection tool,” not a verdict.
   Use it to challenge assumptions about who’s ready for more—especially when you see high performers who have never been truly stretched.
2. Combine formal assessment with real-world evidence.
   If you use LA assessments or 360s, pair them with:
   • Examples of novel challenges the person has faced.
   • The speed and quality of their iterations.
   • The depth of their post-mortems.
   • The results they achieved in unfamiliar situations.

1. Interview for the four facets.
   Build questions that probe Change, Risking, Reflecting, and Results agility. Make “Tell me about a time you…” questions tied to new, ambiguous, or first-time situations standard for leadership roles.
2. Design stretch assignments intentionally.
   Use assignments that force people into new terrain and then watch:

1. How quickly they learn.
2. How they seek feedback.
3. Whether they can convert learning into concrete results.

The Takeaway

Learning agility is one of the best working indicators of leadership potential we have—especially when the future looks nothing like the past. It’s not perfect. It overlaps with intelligence and personality, and measuring it cleanly is hard.

But if you:

• Anchor it in observable behaviors,
• Focus on how quickly someone improves in new situations, and
• Pair assessment with real-world outcomes on genuinely novel work,

you dramatically reduce the odds of mistaking a strong performer for a true high-potential leader.

In other words: don’t just ask, “How good are you right now?”
Ask, “How fast do you get better when everything changes?”