Building resilience and capability: Shaping the future of Morgan Sindall Construction

Case study

Nevil Friggens Senior Design Manager Central and West – South West Time with business: 3 years, 2 months

I was taking part in our internal Developing Management Excellence course when they invited volunteers to be part of Shaping our Future. I found the programme very interesting on a personal level, and a bit of an eye opener professionally. While I’ve been on management training programmes before, they have always been very specific to our industry. I found all the learning around the science of human behaviour, responses and group thinking absolutely fascinating. I also think having that guidance up front on setting goals was useful in terms of bringing efficiency and output to the process. I think Shaping our Future was a brilliant programme: drawing together a diverse cross-section of people from across the business and putting them in a room together to answer a common question or expand on an issue worked really well. Having the opportunity to spend time with people who, even though they may be in the same industry and the same business, think about things in a different way and approach issues from a different perspective was enlightening. Watching the room react to itself and seeing people bounce off each other and how sharing different perspectives can lead a conversation was really interesting. One of the main takeaways for me was around how productive it can be to get diverse people together in a room to talk about a subject or issue. Having that led by experts from Cranfield School of Management, who were able to steer some of the conversation and bring some of the known practices to bear to invite that engagement and participation, was really effective from my perspective. Having the opportunity to share my view was flattering, and I definitely think the business has listened to what we said in our presentation and the learnings have been taken forward.

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