Fully Charged — Recharge Northgate's Platform Engineering Division

A four-round, advanced organisational-behaviour simulation set inside Northgate Systems Ltd, a Reading-based enterprise-software company (1,400 staff, £240M revenue) recently acquired by a private-equity group. You lead its 320-person Platform Engineering Division, once the company's pride, now spending more and delivering less. The data is a textbook signature of energy gone wrong: the division scores highest in the company on hours worked and lowest on 'I have energy for my work'. Engagement has fallen from 78% to 54%, 41% report high exhaustion, average overtime is 9.2 hrs/week, productive energy sits at 38/100, regretted attrition runs at 18% (company 9%), and on-time delivery has slipped from 94% to 81%. A new PE-appointed board gives a 12-week ultimatum: visibly raise productive energy and stabilise attrition, or the division is broken up and outsourced. You hold a one-time £600,000 change budget and roughly 12 weeks of leadership attention — enough to fund and personally sponsor TWO levers well, not five badly. Using the Vogel & Bruch Organizational Energy Matrix you (1) diagnose the dominant energy state across both axes — intensity and quality — resisting the trap of reading high hours as passion or simple burnout when cynicism and friction point to CORROSIVE energy; (2) set the destination (productive energy) and shortlist change levers, distinguishing 'Slaying the Dragon' (rally against a shared threat) from 'Winning the Princess' (mobilise toward a vision), plus structural, people and load fixes; (3) pick EXACTLY two levers and sequence them under the budget and attention cap, learning that vision-before-stabilisation breeds cynicism and that de-loading — not adding — beats the acceleration trap; and (4) defend a sustainable 12-week trajectory to the PE board chair, distinguishing durable productive energy from a short-lived adrenaline spike. The math rewards a sharp corrosive diagnosis, dragon-before-princess sequencing, real de-loading, focus on two levers, and a relational (not structure-only) move — and measurably punishes the five classic errors. Final KPIs track Productive Energy (0–100), Engagement %, Burnout Risk and Regretted Attrition % against the board's 12-week test.