Systems thinking development workshop for second-level managers. Client not named for confidentiality reasons.
The need
Developing systems thinking in second-line managers is one of the most recurring — and most difficult to meet — requests we receive from HR Managers and L&D Managers in medium-sized and large companies.
The difficulty has a specific cause: the systems thinking models taught in traditional training (SWOT Analysis, Porter's 5 forces) are designed for Top Management, which decides the direction of the company. The middle manager does not decide the strategy: they interpret it and translate it into daily actions, within constraints they have not chosen.
Often, in fact, training courses are developed “drop” models disconnected from people's professional context, leaving them — not necessarily a given — with the task of translating them into their own work. This is where classroom training loses its effectiveness: systems thinking is a contextual competence, which cannot be developed by isolating it from the actual role of the person who needs to exercise it.
For HR and L&D, the question becomes concrete: how can a cognitive ability — not a technique to be explained — be reliably developed while keeping it anchored to each individual's context?
How we worked
For a multinational services company, as part of a skills development programme aimed at middle managers and experts, we designed a workshop that breaks down the separation between the classroom and real work.
- Three areas of knowledge targeted to the role, not a single model: understanding customer needs (including weak signals, before they become trends), analysing business evolution to understand the impact of external conditions on one's managerial role, adopting an agile strategy approach instead of linear thinking.
- Flipped methodology: pre-reading on case studies of profoundly transformed sectors to build a common language before the classroom sessions, maximising face-to-face time for applied work.
- Two parallel classes that, at the end of the programme, compare their approaches: each group presents to the other how it intends to apply the topics in its own context, transforming learning into a public commitment to colleagues, not just to the trainer.
- Work anchored to the participants' real professional content through specific learning methodologies: each person develops scenarios and strategy based on their own role, objectives and the actual constraints of their context — not on generic case studies.
This approach is consistent with what the literature on adult learning transfer has long indicated: competencies are transferred to real work only when they are exercised in conditions close to the context of use, not when they are taught in the abstract and entrusted to the individual's ability to “translate” them after the classroom sessions.
The results
Participants left the workshop with a personal strategy defined around their own role — not a theoretical model to be adapted at a later stage.
- 72% reported having applied at least one of the strategies developed in the classroom within the following 30 days.
- The client requested that a programme on the topic of collaboration between teams be designed using the same methodologies, confirming the impact generated — in line with the stated objective of replicating the effectiveness already achieved with a previous Design Thinking programme.
- The approach is now a methodological reference for base 9 in the development of the soft skills that are most difficult to isolate from their context: competencies that, for us, do not exist in the abstract but are always a function of the role and the scope of autonomy of those who exercise them.