Prudential created Next Generation to strengthen the pipeline of future leaders and critical specialists across the Group. The ambition was broader than preparing talented people for their first formal leadership role. Participants needed to become more confident navigating complexity, more connected across the organisation, and better able to deliver today while helping to shape Prudential’s future.
MJA worked with Prudential Group Talent, Imperial College Business School and other partners to turn that ambition into a developmental journey rather than a conventional programme. The experience combined two immersive modules with inter-module work, webinars, home groups, peer coaching, line-manager involvement and personal development planning. Participants were expected to work on themselves, but also on the real strategic and organisational questions around them.
The first module, in London, was deliberately weighted towards mindset. Participants explored the changing external landscape, digital and technological disruption, adaptive thinking, the roots of their own leadership, psychological resources such as confidence and resilience, and what it meant to lead change. They also had to look beyond their own business unit and understand Prudential as a whole — its different markets, businesses, histories and perspectives.
The second module shifted from the ‘balcony’ to the ‘dancefloor’. Learning became much more action-led: customer discovery, innovation sprints, live business challenges, rapid prototyping, teamwork under pressure, feedback on personal impact and practice in influencing without authority. Diverse teams had to understand a real problem through the eyes of customers, combine the knowledge and talents already in the room, and build and pitch a compelling response. The intention was not simply to teach innovation, collaboration or influence, but to put people into situations where they had to practise them.
This balance between reflection and action became a defining feature of Next Generation. The programme moved repeatedly between the individual, the business and the wider system: who am I as a leader; what is happening around me; where can I make a difference; and how do I mobilise other people to act with me? The curriculum evolved around those questions rather than around a fixed catalogue of leadership content.
The first cohort brought together 49 participants from across Prudential’s businesses and geographies. In the Module 1 evaluation, 93% said the module had fully met their expectations and 95% were clear about the actions they wanted to take away and implement. Participants particularly valued the cross-Group relationships, the chance to work on real adaptive challenges, the exposure to disruption and new technologies, and a stronger sense of belonging to something bigger than their own part of the organisation.
The intention was always that the formal programme should be the beginning rather than the end of the development process. Alumni were encouraged to sustain the relationships, learning and shared practice they had built — through peer networks, community activity, continued experimentation and paying the learning forward.
Next Generation treated future-leader development as a widening experience: broader perspectives, stronger cross-Group relationships, consequential work and repeated opportunities to test what participants were capable of changing. The development came not from adding more leadership content, but from increasing the range of situations in which people could think, act and contribute.