The situation

Having been established for 18 months as a collaborative venture by government and the aerospace industry, the ATI’s purpose was to develop and maintain the UK’s prominence in the sector.  Now up to full complement, and with a newly agreed strategy, the executive team wanted to strive for a high performance culture that would be able to act as an example of an agile, collaborative and strategic organisation focused on raising the ambition of the industry.

The challenge

High performance for the ATI was about bringing to life their espoused values of collaboration, agility and independence as they developed their processes and ways of working from scratch – when their employees’ mindset was forged in careers with aerospace giants.  The risk was that this new, small organisation would become weighed down by process-heavy ways of working typical of a large corporate, and not reach its potential to make an impact in the sector.

The solution

We worked with the ATI to do two things.  Firstly, we brought everyone together for the first time and facilitated conversations about how to maximise inclusion, shape a high performance culture and listen to all perspectives in the room.  The day’s design was created with a representative design team from the ATI, and based on hot topics surfaced through a bespoke survey.  The outcomes were; deeper and more trusting relationships across functions which helped dissolve an emergent ‘silo’ mentality, greater collective ownership of a common sense of purpose and practical solutions to real-work problems like how to make decisions, engage stakeholders, and ensure their professional development.

Then, we provided ongoing consulting support to the COO and HR lead on embedding the emerging ways of working, as the ATI celebrated its second birthday.

The results

The ATI had a model for collaborative working, as well as cross-organisational solutions for critical processes that balanced the ‘what’ of real work, with the ‘how’ of values-based behaviours and mindset.  They also had greater confidence and capability to continue to embed a high performance, agile culture themselves.