Building the next generation of senior leaders through a multi-year partnership

Spanning four global cohorts and more than 100 high-potential senior leaders, Ignite's nine-month leadership journey delivered measurable behaviour change and organisational impact that extended well beyond the program.

• Net Promoter Score of 75–76 maintained consistently across cohorts, including through full virtualisation during Covid-19
• Participants scored the programme strongly as a worthwhile investment in their (Average 4.85/5)
• The programme was focused on Leadership development to deliver business impact, Participants recorded their success, a typical example, is where one participant delivered 19%year-on-year local business growth.
• Multiple business challenge projects were created, aligning development to strategic business priorities. Many of these projects were adopted by the business and delivered significant impact.

Novartis is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, with 105,000 employees globally and a mission to reimagine medicine. Under CEO Vas Narasimhan, the organisation committed to a fundamental culture shift, from expertise-driven leadership to one defined by curiosity, self-awareness, and experimentation. The ambition, in Narasimhan's words: to create "leaders for the world."

The challenge was significant. Novartis needed to move leaders away from "knowing the answer" toward being comfortable with uncertainty, leading through others, and taking intelligent risks. This required more than a traditional program — it needed an extended, immersive experience with real-world application built in from the start.

The result of a strong multi-year partnership, Ignite was created to develop the next generation of senior leaders within one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies. Following a competitive RFP in 2018, LIW partnered with Novartis to design and deliver this nine-month leadership journey for high-potential leaders in, or preparing to step into, critical global roles. The program was built around three core capabilities, self-awareness, curiosity and experimentation, directly aligned with Novartis' cultural aspiration of becoming inspired, curious and unbossed.

Key design features included a custom 2030 simulation putting leaders in the future of global medicine; pod sprints using agile principles to embed new habits through real-world experimentation; executive coaching, peer pods, and manager connection throughout; and a second immersion placing leaders in complex, unfamiliar environments to test and deepen their capabilities.

When Covid-19 struck, the team made the decision not to pause but to innovate. IGNITEfm is a radio show format for leadership development that was created to maintain engagement and connection in a fully virtual environment. The second immersion was redesigned around Novartis' Access to Medicine Principles, with participants working on real access-to-medicine challenges in underserved communities in Brazil. Program scores improved, not declined, through the transition.

What makes this engagement distinctive is the depth of the partnership and its ability to evolve. LIW and Novartis co-designed, iterated, and scaled a program that delivered genuine cultural change with evidenced not just in participant scores, but in team dynamics and business outcomes. The innovations created for Ignite including the FM radio format have since been adopted across the broader Novartis organisation, reaching well beyond the original program cohorts.