Design the Programme — Thames Leadership Studio

A four-round, advanced executive-education simulation set inside Thames Leadership Studio, the custom leadership practice of a leading London business school (founded 2009, ~35 bespoke engagements a year, GBP 9M revenue at a ~28% margin, ~120 contracted faculty and coaches). You are the Executive Education Director. Britannia Severn plc — a FTSE-250 infrastructure group bruised by a difficult merger and a regulatory crisis — has hired the Studio to design a leadership programme for its top 120 senior leaders. The client set firm parameters: a hard GBP 600,000 delivery budget, a 9-month journey, and a sceptical board sponsor who will judge the programme not on satisfaction scores but on measurable capability uplift and transfer to practice. Across four rounds you (1) DIAGNOSE the capability gaps — separating the presenting symptoms (slow decisions, silos) from the underlying gaps (low self-awareness, weak collective leadership, poor complexity navigation) and choosing which two or three to target; (2) BLEND the three development elements — self-awareness, collective leadership through teams, and navigating complexity — in proportion to the diagnosis, avoiding the lopsided design that deepens one capability and leaves the priority gap untouched; (3) ALLOCATE delivery formats within GBP 600,000 — faculty masterclasses, action-learning projects, one-to-one coaching (~GBP 1,800–2,400 a set, GBP 250,000+ for all 120), immersive labs, and peer/digital reinforcement — engineering the mix that maximises transfer-to-practice per pound without breaching budget; and (4) DEFEND the design to the board sponsor and build in a Kirkpatrick-level measurement of transfer at the 9-month review. The math rewards a diagnosis-led, balanced, transfer-heavy-but-budgeted, measured design and punishes the five classic errors: activities before diagnosis, a lopsided blend that ignores the merger-silo gap, a cheap faculty-led design that engages in the room and changes nothing, a budget blow-out chasing every high-transfer format for all 120, and optimising for the happy sheet instead of behaviour change. Final KPIs track Capability Uplift, Transfer-to-Practice, Sponsor Confidence, and Budget Discipline.