The Challenge
The leadership team of a regional engineering company found themselves needing and wanting a different and more robust approach whilst operating in increasing complexity.
Markets – in the broadest sense – were developing faster than their planning cycles. Customer expectations were evolving. Internally, decisions were being made reactively rather than strategically.
The leaders described their environment as “slightly foggy,” “increasingly unpredictable,” and “exhausting.” In other words: – an almost typical VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
During the preparatory work in the form of interviews, some of the internal issues were identified as what you can call a strategic VACUUM and hence a need as well as a desire to address:
V – Vision – Values
A – Asking: – why and what if?
C – Criteria – Consequences and the Courage (to take risks)
U – Un-licensed to operate
U – Understanding the alternatives and their variables
M – Mindset too fixed – and not sufficient execution
Also, being engineers, they were focussed on what and how it should work: – gaining clarity, a common understanding, a greater unity and more meaning.
I recognised, that new tools were not enough – and I had to put my thinking cap on to find a way to inspire them to think differently or at least add different ways of thinking to their otherwise strong mindset.
The Turning Point
As I had been invited to prepare, design and facilitate an in‑house workshop focused on building a strategic mindset; I took the key findings from the pre-workshop interviews. and used them to build a highly interactive off-site, which was centred around:
- Real scenarios from their business
- Systems thinking exercises
- Strategic foresight tools
- Collective sense‑making
What was key in this case was that they had to come to a common agreement on the “problem” and this happened at the moment when we jointly mapped their current challenges onto the VUCA and VACUUM models.
I love the way engineers think and that they are so solution-orientated: – once the problem was defined, the leadership team could “label” and categorise, what they were experiencing off they went – the whole process became clearer and all aspects became much more manageable.
One leader said, “This is the first time, I can clearly see, why our decisions felt so chaotic.”
The Inner and Outer Work
The workshop was not just about yet another set of frameworks. It was about mindset.
I guided the team through exercises that required them to:
- Slow down their thinking (referring to Daniel Kahneman!)
- Zoom out from operational detail
- Challenge assumptions
- Identify underlying patterns rather than symptoms
- Make decisions based on strategic intent, not responding to urgency
This blend of inner clarity and outer structure created a noticeable shift.
The leadership group began to see themselves more like navigators or captains – rather than “firefighters – putting out fires”.
The Outcome
By the end of the workshop, the leadership group had:
- A shared language for complexity
- A strategic decision-making framework
- Clear priorities aligned with long-term goals
- A renewed sense of unity and purpose
Most importantly, they re-gained their drive for continuous improvement – a true engineer’s mindset: – complexity is not a threat – it is an opportunity in a landscape that can be navigated with the right tools and the right thinking.
One participant gave me this feedback in a personal email: “This workshop did more than challenge me to more strategic thinking and how to bring the company forward – it rattled and invigorated me!! OK, OK, after an initial bit of irritation – thank you!”
