Fair Process — Roll Out the Verene Composites Consolidation

A Level-4 leadership-and-change simulation set at Verene Composites SAS, a French aerospace-and-wind composite manufacturer (EUR 380M revenue, 9% operating margin, 1,400 staff across Tours, Clermont and Limoges). On 9 June 2026 a draft plan to close the sub-scale, loss-making Limoges plant (250 staff) — saving EUR 14M a year — leaks through an internal email with no consultation, no rationale and no process. Within a day perceived fairness of management decision-making collapses from a 62% baseline to 34%; the question on the shop floor is no longer 'is this the right decision?' but 'do these people have any right to decide this to us?'. The closure itself is close to inevitable; what is entirely open is HOW it is made and communicated, and at Verene process has always been the blind spot. Playing the Site Transformation Lead with a 30-day board deadline, you run Ludo Van der Heyden's Fair Process / INVOLVE arc across four rounds: (1) DIAGNOSE the fairness gap — separate the content of the decision from the process, name which INVOLVE stages (engage, explore, explain, execute, evaluate) the leak skipped, and decide how honestly to admit it was the process, not the closure, that broke trust; (2) CALIBRATE engagement — choose a consultation design across the works council (CSE), Limoges staff, receiving sites and the customer, and scope decision rights honestly so you neither impose nor falsely democratise the settled closure, avoiding fair-process fraud; (3) EXPLAIN and communicate — set financial transparency on the EUR 14M and sub-scale economics, sequence the rollout (CSE first under French law), and choose clarity over comforting over-promises; (4) SECURE COMMITMENT and execute — design the redeployment and support package, retain the two key engineers needed for the transfer, build the 60-day evaluate checkpoint that closes the INVOLVE cycle, and reassure the aerospace customer. The engine prices every choice in Perceived Fairness (%), Commitment & Execution (%), Process Integrity (%) and Savings Secured (EUR M against the EUR 14M target, eroded by a 4-6 month CSE legal freeze and a EUR 9M output slip). Wrong strategies underperform on purpose: announcing the finished decision repeats the leak; opening the settled closure to a vote is fair-process fraud; consulting then ignoring the input breaks trust twice; skipping the why lets people invent worse stories; and over-promising no forced redundancies sets up a future trust breach. Track Fairness, Commitment, Integrity, Savings, the legal-freeze risk and whether the two engineers stay. Teaches procedural vs distributive justice, the INVOLVE toolkit, honest scoping of decision rights, calibrating voice against a deadline, and converting acceptance into committed execution.