This first unit drops you into Vega’s announcement of the “One Vega, Two Hubs” strategy after acquiring the Indian firm JalTech. You’ll see how a global vision that sounds inspiring at the top triggers anxiety, status fears, and early “us vs them” stories across Paris, Toronto, and Bangalore. The focus is on how multi-layered culture (national, organizational, individual) and power dynamics quietly shape people’s first reactions to change.
In this unit we move into the first global virtual kickoff for the Mexico City bid. You’ll see how meeting structure, hierarchy, and time zones determine who speaks, who stays silent, and how quickly a “lead vs support” pattern solidifies. The core question: what are you really seeing when a global call ends with no questions and apparent alignment?
This unit shows how work begins to go off-track through documents and email, long before any public crisis. Emily in Toronto anchors on “world-class” North American designs; Ananya in Bangalore sees major context misfit but communicates in a hedged, high-context style that Emily misreads as minor concerns. You’ll explore how tacit knowledge, politeness, and Western reference bias silently shape design decisions.
This unit brings the teams together in Mexico City for a co-creation workshop, where corporate “flagship” designs collide with local politics, inequality, and community memory of foreign “solutions.” Mexican officials, engineers, and activists raise tough questions about equity, resilience, and ownership. Ananya’s public hint at a different design exposes internal misalignment, while side conversations and social time show how trust and relevance are really built.
This last unit of the Vega case study follows the global teams through the aftermath: internal fracture, a deliberate reset, a reworked hybrid bid that wins, and a real system incident two years later. You’ll see structural power redistribution (co-leadership, Core Design Council), people owning how their fears and instincts shaped their behavior, a junior engineer changing the design by raising a training gap, and a shift from blame to learning when things go wrong. It’s about what it takes to turn cultural breakdowns into organizational learning.
