Case Study: Aerospace & Defence HR team, building a culture of adaptability

ADAPTABILITY ASSESSMENTS  ·  CASE STUDY

Two HR teams set out to build a culture of adaptability, and left with the shared definition their business conversations now run on.

Two HR teams came together for a joint offsite inside a multinational defence and aerospace manufacturer. The businesses they support were shifting on several fronts at once: manufacturing methods evolving, digital strategy accelerating, government regulation moving quickly, and leadership turning over. One of the two teams was newly formed.

Defence and aerospace has historically been built for engineering programmes whose planning, manufacturing and delivery span decades, not quarters. The pace of change has since accelerated, and the software and hardware inside those programmes now age faster than the programmes carrying them. An HR function asked to lead change across that business had no shared way to name or discuss adaptability, and no view of whether its own teams could absorb the pace they were about to set.

To answer that question, AQai built the pilot around three objectives: establish adaptability as an enabler of transformation, put the teams’ own data in front of them, and turn that into personal action on change readiness. All 20 participants completed the AQme™ assessment, and results were aggregated into AQteam reports at team level, giving the group a shared picture of how it adapts. The live session was designed for the teams to lead the interpretation. Their context is what made the data mean something.

• The teams left with a common definition of adaptability that carried into ongoing business conversations.
• The two teams recorded near-identical averages, while their members sat in very different places within them. That pointed each team toward different development work.
• One team had recently been hired to disrupt the status quo. High Explore & Transform across that group, with nobody in the low band, confirmed for the leader that the right people were in the right seats.
• Asked for one word to describe the session, participants offered: insightful, intrigued, interested, curious, safety.