Global Insurance — Leadership Alignment
Aligning a global insurance leadership team around a single transformation thesis — in time to execute it, not just announce it.
Context
A global insurer with a committed transformation agenda and a leadership team whose public alignment on it did not survive private conversations. Each sub-leader had a slightly different version of what the transformation was for.
Challenge
The misalignment was polite and invisible from the top. From the middle, it was obvious — and expensive. Projects stalled waiting for which version of the brief the executive sponsor would defend this week.
Approach
We ran a short series of focused sessions whose output was deliberately uncomfortable: a one-page thesis the whole leadership team had to sign off in the room, with the contested phrases debated to resolution rather than finessed into vagueness.
The signed thesis was then published to the next two layers of management, with the explicit instruction to escalate drift back to the signatories, not to the middle.
What shifted
Middle-management execution speed increased. The leadership team stopped having to re-explain the thesis in every quarterly review. Disagreements, when they surfaced, surfaced earlier and higher.
What shifted: alignment stopped being a sentiment and became a published artefact.
Client identity anonymised. Specific metrics available under NDA.