Complexity Coach — Meridian's Senior-Leader Program

A four-round, advanced executive-education simulation set inside Meridian Infrastructure Group Ltd, a Melbourne-headquartered diversified infrastructure operator (6,800 staff, AUD 3.1B revenue, 31% EBITDA margin, super-fund owners) mid-way through a once-in-a-generation operating-model change — decarbonising energy assets, absorbing two acquired water utilities, and standing up an integrated control centre, all at once. After 'Project Confluence' failed (two technically outstanding senior leaders escalated a politically charged regulatory-and-community trade-off rather than holding the tension — costing six weeks and a regulator's goodwill), the board's verdict is blunt: 'We don't have a strategy problem. We have a senior-leadership-complexity problem.' As Leadership-Development Director you are handed a hard, no-contingency budget of AUD 2.4M (~AUD 20,000 per leader) to lift the 120 senior leaders from a complexity-readiness baseline of 2.4/5 toward a board-set target of 3.6/5, with a credible 12-month read-out as the deadline. Playing across four rounds you (1) diagnose the gap as a developmental capacity for complexity (per Floris) rather than a skills/training gap, and segment the cohort instead of going one-size-fits-all; (2) design a costed intervention mix within the AUD 2.4M cap that resolves breadth-versus-depth and weights the 70-20-10 logic toward challenging experience and relationships over formal content — resisting the prestige AUD 38,000 external AMP that would blow the budget; (3) allocate scarce executive coaching (a 6-session, AUD 9,000 engagement that only covers 40 of 120 leaders at behaviour-changing depth) under an explicit, defensible rule, extend reach with peer-coaching circles, and hold the line against a sponsoring line executive who lobbies for their own people; and (4) specify a measurement model that evidences observable behaviour change on live trade-offs — not happy-sheets or self-report — connects leading to lagging indicators, embeds a manager-reinforcement sustain mechanism, and survives a board pitch. The math rewards a developmental diagnosis, a 70-20-10-weighted design inside budget, depth-over-dilution coaching under a rule held under pressure, and a transfer-and-sustainment measurement model — and punishes the five classic L&D errors: treating development as training, breaking the budget for prestige, diluting coaching to be 'fair', abandoning the allocation rule to a lobbying sponsor, and measuring satisfaction instead of transfer. Final KPIs track Complexity-Readiness (toward 3.6/5), Budget committed against the AUD 2.4M cap, Time-off-the-job load against a transformation-tolerable envelope, and Board Credibility for the 12-month read-out.