The paper examines the role of leadership in facilitating collective learning and capacity building by utilising ideas from the fields of evolutionary learning, operations strategy, quality, project and risk management. Two contrasting cases are chosen to show how success and failure can depend upon collective capacity building through participative leadership and Organisational Learning (OL). The bulk of the literature surveyed concerns evolutionary OL in particular those that involve leadership which is rather a new development in this field. The paper welcomes the new trend but warns against the overenthusiastic views that ignore the reservations of the mainstream evolutionary/complexity perspective. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)