Describe a situation in which you failed as a leader. What did you learn from it? (Word limit 300)
Because IMD is primarily a leadership development program, as Sean Meehan mentions, they want to know you are ready for what they deliver.
Regarding the failure part, they want to know you have enough self-awareness to observe where you might have failed, which makes you coachable and more receptive to change. Regarding the leader part, they want to know you have worked at a high enough level to benefit from a leadership program. If you haven’t worked in a leadership capacity in some form, you won’t have a frame of reference and there isn’t much for their curriculum and experiential exercises to “hang on.”