Laing O’Rourke’s Guns programme was designed for talented construction, project, programme, business-unit and functional leaders approaching a significant transition in their careers.
The ambition went well beyond providing a senior-management curriculum. Laing O’Rourke wanted people to think and behave differently back in the business, build a powerful network across the organisation and look back on the experience as a genuine turning point in their development.
MJA directed the programme with Imperial College Business School as a six-module journey. It combined business-school thinking with skill development, practice, personal inquiry, workplace application and a strategic project that required participants to bring different strands of learning together around an important organisational challenge.
The opening work was deliberately personal. Participants explored the future context for leadership, their values and strengths, the behaviours that could trip them up and the impact they had on others. They developed a leadership signature and manifesto before moving progressively into strategy, finance, change, clients, markets, trusted-adviser relationships and the wider work of leading an enterprise.
Home Groups created continuity between modules. Participants brought back successes and failures from the workplace, received challenge from colleagues and used the programme as a place to examine real leadership experience. Deliberate surprises occasionally pushed people outside familiar territory.
The strategic project created another bridge to practice. Participants had to apply their developing judgement to a live organisational issue rather than simply demonstrate what they had learned.
The transition from expert to enterprise leader was therefore not about discarding expertise. It was about expanding the field of attention — from one project or function to strategy, markets, people, relationships and the wider system — while becoming increasingly able to achieve through others.