Framing the Change — Calderwood's Project Horizon

A four-round, advanced change-leadership simulation built on Cliff Oswick's organisational-discourse theory and set inside Calderwood Building Society, a 740,000-member UK mutual in Manchester (92 branches, a GBP 14.2bn mortgage-and-savings book, 3,100 staff of whom 1,850 are front-line, and a cost-to-income ratio of 62% that must fall to 54% to stay viable against digital challengers). On 9 March 2026 the board approves Project Horizon: consolidate 92 branches into 64 hub-and-spoke sites, move 480 of 1,850 front-line roles into a centralised digital-and-phone centre, retrain affected staff at ~GBP 9,000 each, and launch within three weeks — by 31 March — or push GBP 6m of savings into next year. Trust is already low: a pulse survey shows only 34% of staff believe leadership is honest about why change happens, 28 of the 28 closures are the only bank left in their town, the union wants consultation, and the press is circling. Playing the change leader, you (1) diagnose the discourse landscape — the existing 'family', 'fortress' and 'machine' metaphors already shaping how Horizon will be heard, and the 34% credibility gap you must close; (2) choose ONE governing metaphor (journey, renewal/growth, machine/efficiency, or organism/adaptation), naming what it enables and what it suppresses for a people-first mutual; (3) write three audience-tuned messages (staff, members/community, union) within that one metaphor and decide whether to engage, contain, or route around dissent under the clock; and (4) absorb a launch-day counter-narrative — a viral staff post reframing 'Horizon' and a community protest — choosing to reframe, hold, or suppress. The math rewards an identity-fit metaphor that names the loss honestly, dialogic engagement of the union, audience-tuned messages, and reframing over suppression; it punishes the five classic errors: a machine/efficiency frame on a people-first identity, euphemism that papers over 480 lost roles, routing around the union and ceding authorship of the narrative, one-message-fits-all, and a 'cease and correct' suppression of the counter-story. Final KPIs track Buy-in, Message Clarity, Resistance Incidents (lower better) and Rollout Speed (% of the deadline protected), so every framing trade-off is computable in the debrief.