You are Camille Rousseau, Programme Director at Méridian Learning Studio, the course-design unit of a private business school on the French Riviera. The Dean has sold a new flagship certificate to the board, and you have fourteen weeks to launch it. Before you spend a euro, you must say why the school's executives stop showing up.
The situation
It is 6 January 2026. "Leading Transformation" is a ten-week executive certificate at €6,900 a seat for a cohort of 120 senior managers: about €828,000 in tuition. Forty-seven seats are already sold. The Dean has presented it to the board as the centrepiece of the October accreditation visit. Your design-and-production budget is fixed at €540,000.
Five years of completion data sit on your desk. The school's executive certificates finish at a median of 61%, and the losses are not spread evenly: between weeks three and five, about a third of each cohort quietly stops logging in. The board wants completion above 85%, and anything under 70% in the pilot will be read as a failed design. Two internal scores start low: learning-outcome attainment at 2.5 out of 5, and engagement quality at 30 out of 100. Your bonus, like every designer's at the Studio, rides on the first of those, not on how many people finish.
There are also three memos. The faculty lead wants live residentials; the digital learning producer wants a fully self-paced online build; the finance and operations manager wants whatever protects the margin. Added up, they ask for €880,000. Each is sure the other two are wrong, and each brings its own idea of why executives leave: courses that feel like lectures, with no momentum and no one to answer to; material too shallow for senior people; or video and slides that look cheaper than a €6,900 seat.