Leading the Turn — Transform Meridian Freight Without Breaking Its People

A four-round, advanced leadership simulation set inside Meridian Freight & Fulfilment plc, a Coventry-based mid-cap UK third-party logistics firm (GBP 740M revenue, 4.2% EBIT, 5,800 staff, 11-year average tenure) newly listed on AIM and stalling. Three weeks into your tenure as an outside-hire CEO, the anchor fashion-marketplace client (GBP 154M, 21% of revenue) puts its contract 'under strategic review' because Meridian cannot offer automated, data-integrated fulfilment; the grocery client (GBP 186M) demands a 9% cost-down; the share price falls 18%; and the board gives you 12 months to prove a credible transformation. You have GBP 60M of investment over three years against GBP 31M EBIT and GBP 22M free cash flow, and a workforce whose 11-year tenure loyalty is the company's only cultural asset — yet engagement sits at 41% and only 23% of staff can articulate where the company is going. Across four rounds you (1) DIAGNOSE the turn — classifying it as a survival transformation and naming the human-and-culture problem rather than jumping to a robotics plan, mapping stakeholders on power vs disposition and the load-bearing beliefs that must change; (2) FRAME the why before the what — crafting a change narrative that mobilises rather than terrifies, choosing the first move and sequencing one coherent message across the board, union, and depot floor who each hear something different; (3) PACE the change under a human-centered constraint — allocating the GBP 60M, choosing pilot-and-scale vs big-bang automation, and committing to redeploy-and-reskill vs voluntary vs compulsory redundancy for the ~900 affected roles, negotiating with a 62%-unionised workforce while engineering deliverable early wins before month 11; and (4) HOLD THE LINE at the mid-transformation trough when the pilot go-live slips eight weeks, a reskilling cohort disappoints, and a leaked 'headcount efficiencies' memo reaches the union and the press — deciding whether to hold, slow, or double down, re-communicating honestly, and defending a board-and-client update. The scoring operationalises Andrew White's EY-Oxford 2024 human-centered transformation evidence: every technical decision carries an engagement and trust consequence, and the five classic errors — technology-first, the burning platform, speed-over-capacity, over-promised wins, and one-message-for-all — each measurably underperform. Final KPIs track Employee Engagement %, Transformation Progress, Stakeholder Trust, Roles Protected of 900, and Investment committed against the GBP 60M cap.