A three-month leadership retainer that transformed reactive interactions into proactive strategic alignment through structured conversations, visible priorities, and genuine team accountability.

The challenge: Capable but reactive

We worked with one of Hydro Tasmania's senior leadership teams leading many of their internal functions: people, corporate affairs, safety and DEI. As Tasmania's renewable energy leader navigated rapid industry change, the team consistently delivered results and excelled at what they do, but they recognised something important: the organisation's evolution demanded a different way of working together.

The pattern was clear. Collaboration was strong in crisis but reactive by default. Strategic conversations lacked structure to connect daily work with broader priorities. Team capacity remained invisible across the business unit, creating bottlenecks and missed opportunities for support.

Multiple 'people' initiatives have sprouted across the organization. Each valuable yet creating confusion about what mattered most. The team needed strategic clarity and a shift from crisis-driven to proactive, systematic collaboration.

The team had the courage to invest in structured team effectiveness of work—not because things were broken, but because working differently was essential for the organization's future.

Our approach: Creating Structures for Strategic Work

Simple Nimble worked collaboratively with the Hydro team over a three-month retainer program focused on practical systems for collaboration and strategic alignment.

Building Strategic alignment and prioritisation

• Coordinating with the leadership team on annual strategic priorities and actions
• Facilitating strategic sessions to problem solve a new People Strategy to help guide the whole function
• Leading a prioritisation session with an extended leaders' group to identify four strategic focus areas
  

Delivering and integrating prioritised initiatives

• Leading the delivery of a People Strategy, including a communications plan for its roll out and supporting the leader as she engaged stakeholders
• Designing meeting rhythms for the whole function leading over 100 people, separating strategic from operational conversations
• Refining the Meeting Framework through seeking feedback and testing
• Providing coaching to initiative owners as they engaged with stakeholders and rolled out critical work to support the function, including the People Strategy and a whole-of-function shared calendar of priorities
  

Building Team Accountability

• Working closely with the leadership team to build on the effectiveness of their communication and connection
• Supporting the team to build a Team Charter, establishing commitments, communication protocols, and accountability mechanism.

The transformation

Strategic clarity emerged when the team consolidated multiple initiatives into one unified framework. For the first time, leadership could discuss not just what they were doing, but what they were deliberately choosing not to do—a signal of genuine strategic maturity.

The practical infrastructure took shape through tools the team continues to use: a meeting framework separating strategic from operational conversations, a shared calendar making capacity visible, and a Team Charter with explicit accountability. Ad-hoc requests decreased. Issues surfaced systematically rather than erupting crises.

When capacity constraints became visible through simple tracking, conversations transformed from defensive justifications to collaborative problem-solving. The team hadn't learned to do more; they'd learned to work differently together.

The Lesson: Strategic Infrastructure Enables Agility  

When leadership teams invest in the practical infrastructure of collaboration, clear frameworks, structured conversations, visible priorities, explicit accountability, they create conditions for both strategic discipline and responsive agility.

Hydro Tasmania's leadership team didn't need fixing. They needed intentional design of how a high-performing team operates at the next level of organizational complexity. The courage to acknowledge that good performance wasn't sufficient for future challenges opened the door to genuine transformation.