Promoting safety in transportation through cultural transformation
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Client need
A leading global aluminum manufacturer faced a pivotal challenge: how to create a unified, empowered workforce in a highly decentralized organization. Each business unit operated autonomously, making it difficult to align global learning with local needs. The company recognized the need for enterprise-wide development programs that supported its business and HR strategies while preserving local flexibility.
To meet this challenge, the organization launched a Corporate Learning University—a multi-year initiative to transform its approach to employee development. BTS collaborated with HR and L&D leaders to co-create a comprehensive portfolio of programs tailored to different roles and career stages across the enterprise.
Solution
The transformation began with a clear vision: align learning with strategic outcomes to unify and empower a decentralized workforce. BTS worked with the company to create an impact map linking business priorities—financial performance, safety, and employee engagement—to the behaviors and skills required at each level of the organization.
The map established three key learning objectives:
- Foster unity and collaboration across a decentralized structure.
- Strengthen business acumen to improve contribution and decision-making.
- Build a shared leadership identity aligned with company values.
Using these objectives as a foundation, BTS and the client designed programs for every stage of the employee journey.
For mid-level leaders, a nine-month Leadership Development Program combined two in-depth workshops with an online learning journey:
- Leading Self: Introduced Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers framework, enabling leaders to expand their teams’ capacity through role-plays and practical exercises.
- Leading the Business: A three-day custom business simulation where participants acted as CEOs, balancing profitability, safety, and customer satisfaction across simulated fiscal years.
The learning ecosystem expanded beyond mid-level management to include: Frontline leader training focused on operational excellence and people management.
Executive development sessions designed for senior leaders to strengthen strategic alignment and culture building.
By embedding strategy directly into every program, the company built a cohesive, enterprise-wide learning culture that reinforced leadership capability, collaboration, and business impact.
Results
The co-created programs delivered measurable, strategic outcomes across safety, engagement, and financial performance.
Key results included:
- Financial performance: Optimized production schedules and reduced inventory, improving cash flow.
- Operational efficiency: Empowered managers to focus on asset utilization and controllable budget items.
- Cultural transformation: Embedded the Multipliers framework to drive collaboration, daily CapEx reviews, and safety-oriented onboarding for new hires.
- Leadership excellence: Increased coaching and feedback frequency, improving communication and alignment across teams.
These initiatives not only elevated employee engagement but also positioned the company as an industry leader in workplace culture and performance.
By integrating business and HR strategy into a unified learning ecosystem, BTS helped the manufacturer achieve its vision of becoming the most exciting place to work and invest—demonstrating the power of tailored, results-driven leadership development.
Client need
A global medical-device company with over 53,000 employees recognized the need to build its talent pipeline and create future-ready capabilities by preparing senior managers for advanced leadership roles. Many had strong technical skills but lacked self-awareness, relationship-building, enterprise thinking, and business & financial acumen. A siloed structure also limited knowledge sharing, restricting growth and talent mobility.
To drive strategy—launching innovative devices that transform patient care, advancing corporate responsibility commitments, and achieving ambitious revenue targets—the organization needed greater talent mobility, stronger cross-functional collaboration, and new capabilities.
A redesigned program
The company partnered with BTS to redesign its leadership program for high-potential managers, informed by HR leaders, stakeholders, and past participants. The new initiative focused on five core areas:
- Increased self-awareness to identify leadership strengths and opportunities
- Coaching and delegation skills to develop team growth and performance
- Strategic and enterprise thinking for informed, big-picture decisions
- Collaborative leadership to build strong cross-functional relationships
- Financial and business acumen to connect work to outcomes and value creation
Launched in 2021, the eight-month program combined two primary modules—leadership immersion and business immersion—integrating 1:1 coaching and peer collaboration to connect learning with real-world application.
Solution
Participants engaged in two customized simulations:
- Leadership simulation: practice for pivotal leadership moments, strengthening presence, influence, and inclusive leadership.
- Business simulation: participants acted as the C-suite, running the business over three years to drive profitable growth while balancing internal and external stakeholder expectations.
Program phases:
- Kick-off and assessment: senior leader sponsorship, 360 feedback, and coaching to shape individual development plans.
- Leadership simulation: two half-day virtual sessions to define and practice effective behaviors.
- Business simulation: four half-day virtual sessions to build enterprise thinking and business acumen.
- Go-do experiments: on-the-job application to reinforce key skills.
- Executive panel and coaching: exposure to diverse leader perspectives and refined coaching approaches.
- Program conclusion: celebratory wrap-up to share insights and build cross-division connections.
Results
The program accelerated readiness for future roles. In a survey of 187 graduates from 2022–2023 cohorts:
- 94% increased self-awareness of strengths and development needs
- 95% enhanced strategic thinking capabilities
- 93% became more inclusive leaders
- 88% made measurable progress on development goals
- 79% improved coaching and feedback skills
Participant insight: “The simulations provided me with a new perspective on decision-making. I now understand the importance of cross-functional collaboration and how it influences outcomes across the company.”
Client need
The energy industry is undergoing a seismic shift. While demand for oil and gas remains strong, the pressure to move toward more sustainable, low-carbon solutions is intensifying. Investors, regulators, and customers are no longer asking if energy companies will evolve—they’re asking how fast.
For one global oil and gas company, the message was clear: the future could not be postponed. To compete—and lead—they needed to reinvent how the business worked while continuing to deliver results today.
They committed to three urgent goals:
- Boost business results in an increasingly volatile market
Rising geopolitical tensions and market fluctuations had made financial resilience a top priority. The company needed to protect short-term performance without slowing long-term transformation. - Grow revenue from low-carbon and non-traditional businesses
The energy landscape is shifting. The company had to accelerate innovation and build new revenue streams to stay relevant as global demand evolves. - Achieve net-zero carbon emissions
Net-zero had become more than a climate commitment—it was a requirement for credibility and continued license to operate.
Each goal reflected a broader truth: transformation wasn’t a future project for a small team. It had to happen now, across the business, and especially at the front line.
Frontline Managers were identified as the critical force to make that happen. These leaders oversee the people, operations, and decisions that drive day-to-day impact. But they were being asked to do something new: lead through complexity, align their teams around change, and deliver both performance and progress.
To make that possible, the company turned to BTS—partnering to equip Frontline Managers with the skills, confidence, and mindset to lead the energy transition from within.
Solution
To turn strategy into action, the company partnered with BTS to design a four-month leadership journey tailored to one goal: empowering Frontline Managers to lead the energy transition—while delivering on today’s business needs.
The program focused on building the capabilities these leaders needed most:
- Operational acumen to drive performance and efficiency
- Leadership presence to inspire teams and manage through uncertainty
- Ownership of sustainability goals—not as an add-on, but as part of everyday decision-making
- Communication and collaboration skills to align cross-functional efforts
To ensure relevance, BTS conducted in-depth interviews with leaders across the business. These insights shaped a high-impact experience that blended digital learning, in-person workshops, and real-world application.
The journey included:
- Self-assessments to surface strengths, gaps, and set individual goals
- A custom digital platform for on-demand learning, peer discussions, and progress tracking
- Live kickoff session to align on the company’s sustainability strategy and what it demanded of leaders
- In-person and virtual workshops focused on influence, decision-making, and leading through complexity
- A gamified business simulation where teams tackled realistic sustainability tradeoffs in a dynamic, risk-reward environment
- Multiple customized self-paced learning modules to reinforce concepts in flexible, scalable ways
- On-the-job ‘Go-Dos’—practical leadership actions supported by coaching to drive daily impact
- A culminating face-to-face session with senior leaders to reflect, celebrate progress, and sustain momentum
This immersive, behavior-focused approach ensured that Frontline Managers didn’t just learn about sustainability leadership—they practiced it, owned it, and brought it to life in their roles.
Results
What started as a leadership program became a catalyst for culture change—activating thousands of leaders to drive the company’s transformation from the ground up.
- Scale: More than 1,500 frontline leaders nominated for this journey
- Engagement: 96% of participants completed the journey
- Execution: 96% Go-Do completion rate—showing strong follow-through on application of learnings from the workshops into real-world actions
- Satisfaction: Overall rating of 4.45/5 and a Net Promoter Score of 73
One of the most immediate shifts? Communication. Participants repeatedly cited improved connection and alignment with their teams as a critical outcome:
“The workshops made communication with my team smoother—I now understand their styles better.”
“Recognizing different communication styles improves strategic thinking and teamwork.”
By investing in the people closest to the work, the company is proving that meaningful transformation doesn’t start at the top—it scales from the center. And with each cohort, they’re not just talking about change. They’re leading it.
Related content
Over the years, BTS has expanded its global footprint through thoughtful acquisitions and collaborations, bringing new creative capabilities and local expertise into the fold. From digital design studios to leadership consultancies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, we’ve built a community that blends shared values with local perspective. That diversity has become one of our greatest strengths, shaping how we design and deliver learning that feels deeply personal everywhere we work.
Whether someone is in a leadership journey in Singapore, a coaching program in São Paulo, or a strategy workshop in Stockholm, the goal is always the same: to make the experience feel like it was made just for them.
Many of those experiences live on Momenta, BTS’s digital experience platform, powering journeys like Coaching, Multipliers, and other core programs.
As those experiences grew, so did the need for nuance. Every journey had to feel local, not just sound translated. Tone, humor, and cultural context have always been central to the BTS approach, and as demand expanded across formats and regions, our translation model was ready for its next evolution.
In early 2024, the team began exploring how AI could help. Rather than treating technology as the destination, we saw it as a catalyst, a way to rethink translation and deliver richer, more customized client experiences at scale. That curiosity sparked one of BTS’s most ambitious AI-first experiments, led by our Global Product Enablement Function team in partnership with our global network of linguists and translators.
Shifting to AI-first
The next step was finding the right place to experiment. Enter Phrase, a cloud-based translation management platform that quickly became our test lab. Phrase brings every part of the translation process into one place, from machine translation engines to human review, terminology management, and workflow tracking. It gives our linguists, designers, and project teams a shared space to collaborate, test ideas, and learn.
Over the next few months, two key discoveries reshaped how we think about translation, and ultimately, how we work.
Key discovery 1: Making AI a teammate
We began with a clear goal: make translation faster and more consistent. Using Phrase, AI handled the first drafts while our linguists refined them. Quickly, we realized there was potential for AI-value that went far beyond speed.
With AI completing the first 80% of the work in a fraction of the time, our linguists could focus on what matters most: nuance, tone, and cultural resonance. The relationship evolved from oversight to collaboration, AI structured and scaled, humans shaped and elevated.
The result was more than efficiency. It was better work, created by people and technology learning to amplify each other.
Key discovery 2: Turning a roadblock into a redesign
Next came a design challenge. Phrase, like most translation tools, struggled with text embedded in graphics, a hallmark of many BTS learning experiences. Instead of forcing the tool to adapt, we changed how we created.
We began designing with translation in mind: simplifying visuals, reducing text, and using modular components that could flex across languages. The constraint sparked better design, easier to scale, more consistent, and more inclusive for every audience.
Key discovery 3: Integrating systems for scale
With people, AI, and design in sync, the last barrier was process. Managing translations between Phrase and Momenta still required manual effort.
To fix that, we built an API integration linking the two platforms. Now, files move automatically, progress is tracked in real time, and everything stays connected.
That integration turned our workflow into a unified ecosystem, fast, transparent, and ready to scale globally.
Business impact
Just 18 months ago, our translation reviews lived in double-column Word docs. Today, we work in a fully connected, AI-first ecosystem. Each project feeds the next, refining prompts, tone profiles, and design patterns, so our translation process keeps getting faster, smarter, and more aligned with BTS’s voice.
Speed and quality. Translation cycles that once took months now wrap up in weeks, cutting turnaround times by over 40%. Phrase’s tools and AI-powered workflows accelerate production while maintaining quality through expert-approved reuse, glossaries, and automated quality checks. Even complex formats like videos and animations are localized faster, with AI supporting linguists at every step.
Smarter workflows. The integration between Momenta and Phrase automates project transfers and tracking, saving an estimated 2.5 hours per project. Teams across language, digital, and project management now collaborate in one streamlined environment.
Human focus. Our linguists remain the engine of quality and innovation. With AI managing repetitive tasks, they focus on nuance and meaning, and go further by creating specialized GPTs, training databases, and testing translation engines to continually raise the bar.
A BTS next gen innovation story
When BTS invented business simulations in the 1980s, leadership development was mostly theoretical – case studies, lectures, and frameworks about what good decisions looked like. Simulations changed that. They let leaders learn by doing, stepping into a realistic version of their business to test strategy, make decisions, and see the impact before the stakes were real.
Since then, simulations have evolved from spreadsheets to digital platforms to immersive virtual experiences that capture the complexity of leading in today’s world. Now, large language models and agentic AI are opening a new frontier, one where simulations evolve as fast as the world they reflect and experiential learning scales with the pace of change.
Creating space for exploration
Test quickly, abandon what doesn’t work, and share what you learn.
– Jessica Skon, CEO, BTS
A handful of simulation experts were pulled out of their day-to-day work and given the freedom to set their own direction. They had the authority to shape the roadmap and the protection to explore bold ideas without fear of critique. The brief was simple: go figure out what’s possible.
They had cover to fail fast, freedom to explore, and permission to get a little messy. Early wins were interesting but small. AI could draft faster, automate a few things – helpful, sure. Transformative? Not yet.
The breakthrough came when we stopped trying to bolt AI on to what we already did. We rebuilt our simulation platforms, our processes, and tools from the ground up around AI. Suddenly it wasn’t just about micro-gains & efficiencies, the canvas of possibility was much larger.
From experimentation to acceleration
So, we tested. Some tools showed promise, others, not so much. Every experiment taught us something. Each “failure” made us sharper about where AI could actually help, and where it would just get in the way.
What began as small experiments turned into a new way of working, a process and platform working as one.
AI now accelerates the first 80% of the work, the structure, synthesis, and early drafts, freeing BTS consultants to focus on the high-impact moments that drive behavior change: dilemmas, trade-offs, and conversations that build conviction.
Our new AI simulation platform and AI-First development process operationalizes that process:
- Enabling live co-creation and branching edits with clients
- Applying light guardrails for quality and security
- Integrating with enterprise systems for compliance and control
AI accelerates, people transform. That combination is what makes BTS… BTS.
Clients feel the impact in four ways
- Fast spin-ups for focused needs
For targeted challenges like coaching a customer conversation, debriefing a safety incident, aligning a sales team, we can now stand up bespoke simulations in days, not weeks. Teams co-create live; scenarios adjust in the room; relevance is immediate. - Enterprise simulations for strategy alignment
For multi-round, high-fidelity simulations, AI accelerates the structure without compromising quality. BTS experts still craft the dilemmas and trade-offs that drive conviction. - A broader platform portfolio
Beyond enterprise simulations, we now support conversational practice, skill drills, workflow redesign, and company or market modeling, helping clients choose the right tool for each need. - On-demand, without the risk
Clients can use our AI platform for self-authored micro-sims, where speed and iteration matter most. Our toolchain scaffolds the flow, enforces guardrails, and keeps quality high.
The best model is flexible: enable where DIY shines, co-build for complex challenges, and experts lead end-to-end when outcomes matter most.
What clients are already seeing
- Weeks to hours: Work that once took six weeks was delivered as a high-fidelity experience in just 13 hours, specific enough to engage a CEO on first pass.
- Lean, agile teams: Projects that required seven consultants now take two, with no loss in quality or impact.
- Live collaboration: Simulations are built with clients, not for them, adjusted in real time during design and delivery.
The result: faster delivery, deeper relevance, and experiences that scale across an enterprise without losing the human touch.
The bigger picture
BTS simulations have always given leaders a safe place to wrestle with real dilemmas. AI hasn’t changed that, it’s expanded the canvas. By rebuilding how we design and deliver simulations, we’ve removed the trade-off between speed and substance.
Focused needs can now be met in days. Complex transformations can move at the pace of business. Clients can engage however they choose, DIY, co-create, or end-to-end, with BTS expertise guiding every step.
We’re still early in this chapter, just like our clients. But the direction is clear: faster, smarter, more scalable experiential learning, anchored in human judgment, strategic alignment, and the craft that defines BTS.
Client need
A leading global media company, serving audiences in 170+ countries, had built its reputation on delivering high-quality content through a vast network of regional operations. With over 20,000 employees, its business relied on leaders at every level making fast, effective decisions in their markets while staying aligned to global strategy.
The company saw an opportunity to better support new leaders joining the organization globally and seasoned leaders seeking additional development opportunities, focusing on those responsible for bringing strategy to life every day.
To bridge that gap, the company set out to pilot a scalable leadership coaching program focused on:
- Building six leadership capabilities critical to business success
- Creating consistency across regions while respecting cultural and language nuance
- Measuring progress at individual, regional, and organizational levels
- Enabling development that lasts beyond the coaching engagement
The goal: strengthen alignment and elevate leadership impact across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia–Pacific region.
Solution
The challenge wasn’t just delivering coaching, it was creating a leadership development system that could work across continents, prove its impact, and adapt to local realities without diluting global priorities.
The company partnered with Sounding Board, a BTS company, to design a pilot that blended human expertise with scaled, tech-enabled insight to meet four imperatives:
- Activating frontline and mid-level leadership – Focused on people leaders who directly shape day-to-day execution and culture.
- Building the capabilities that matter – Six leadership behaviors rooted in the company’s unique culture, values, and strategic operating principles, ensuring development was relevant to how leaders drive success within the organization.
- Ensuring quality at scale – AI-driven matching connected each leader to a coach with relevant industry, regional, and cultural experience.
- Making growth measurable and sustainable – Biweekly coaching reinforced through a digital platform for goal tracking, reflection, and feedback, plus structured manager check-ins to keep progress aligned to business needs.
Scaled coaching gave the company a consistent platform and approach to leadership development, developing leaders in every region to the same leadership expectations and behaviors. Real-time insights surfaced trends in behavior change, engagement, and alignment early enough to adjust the program midstream. The data struck the right balance between consistency and cultural relevance, showing where local adaptations strengthened leadership and where global priorities needed to hold firm.
Results
By the end of the program, leaders across continents were working from the same playbook, speaking a shared leadership language, and working in ways that respected local context and in alignment to how they wanted leaders to show up in the organization. Managers noticed stronger alignment with their direct reports, leaders felt more confident in their roles, and the data showed tangible shifts in the behaviors tied to business success.
Impact at a glance:
- 84% completion rate demonstrated sustained engagement.
- 92% of coachees advanced their development goals, with nearly as many showing measurable improvement in targeted leadership behaviors.
- 84% of coachees and 64% of managers reported stronger alignment in how they approached priorities and collaboration.
- 76% of leaders progressed toward broader career goals, signaling a stronger leadership pipeline.
- 87% satisfaction rate with coaching, reinforced by a 95% coach match success rate.
- 30% of coachees reported increased job satisfaction—critical in a competitive talent market.
What’s next:
The company expanded coaching to 50+ additional team leaders and began planning its rollout to mid-level managers worldwide, confident they have a model that delivers measurable growth, alignment, and cultural agility at scale.
Testimonials
“I have seen [my report] take it to another, more strategic level, particularly as she engages with her senior stakeholder. She spent time reflecting on what she wanted to get out of their first meeting, how to present herself as his new partner, what kind of questions would solicit the most meaningful responses etc.” — Senior Manager
“[My report] increased her capacity to appreciate the views of others and to work to develop them. She expanded her horizons to think outside of her comfort zones and to draw out some fine work from others. She showed improved capacity to help others develop their own ideas, rather than imposing her own on them.” — Senior Manager
“[Coaching] has helped me have a better understanding of where I enjoy working and developing most so I can continue to do so.” — Coachee