Success Story

Motorola: Driving Better Leadership Decisions in a $6B Global Enterprise through Experiential Realization

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Company

Motorola Solutions Inc.

Industry

Project Management Office (PMO), APAC Region

Location

Penang Design Center, Malaysia

Motorola Solutions, an enterprise overseeing a high-value portfolio of government and enterprise projects, reported annual revenues of approximately $6.04 billion (FY2016). The Project Management Office (PMO) was tasked with coordinating complex global deliverables, often worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This engagement was part of a broader transformation effort aimed at aligning cultural and strategic leadership across the organization.

KEY CHALLENGES

Despite achieving high operational excellence through pioneering systems like Six Sigma, the leadership team faced growing internal tension: a conflict between site-level revenue targets and enterprise-level delivery success. This tension translated directly into high-risk, siloed behaviors in critical areas like government tender bids.

The underlying behavioral challenge was significant:

Siloed Thinking: Project Managers (PMs) bid aggressively, focusing narrowly on site-level quotas without visibility into the downstream failure points they were creating across the business.
Capacity Overload: Projects were awarded despite insufficient delivery capacity, leading to delays, quality issues, and reputational risk with high-stakes clients (e.g., national governments).
Lack of Visibility: The core problem was behavioral, PMs lacked clear visibility into the full, systemic consequences of misaligned choices made early in the bidding stage.

Our AFERR-Based Approach

Evivve deployed AFERR-Based Consulting, designing a custom behavioral simulation that precisely mirrored Motorola's tendering and delivery process. The entire approach was deliberately engineered to work backward from the essential Realization leaders needed to reach: that misaligned choices at the bidding stage create downstream failures.

The intervention leveraged the full AFERR Model cycle:

Activation: We triggered a sense of urgency by sharing critical delivery failures and the genuine reputational risks the PMO was currently facing.
Forecasting: Leaders were guided to anticipate and model the trade-offs between pricing, capacity, and long-term delivery capability.
Experimentation: Leaders participated in a high-stakes Evivve simulation, modeling complex tender and delivery cycles to stress-test their decisions in real-time.
Realization: Guided debriefs surfaced the cognitive dissonance between their expected outcomes and what they experienced, driving profound personal and systemic insight.
Reflection: Facilitated structured reflection sessions reinforced the core insights and explicitly connected individual bidding behavior to enterprise-level delivery outcomes.

“ We had several stated and unstated goals, because there’s only so much you can put into words when it comes to reducing silos across teams. I’m proud to say our partnership achieved all of those goals, improving collaboration and increasing margins through better alignment and efficiency. ”

Business Unit Director

Motorola Solutions

ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT

The project delivered fundamental behavioral shifts within the PMO leadership, replacing siloed thinking with strategic system-level awareness and improved forecasting.

Key Shifts Observed

The most profound shifts centered on system-level strategic behavior:

Improved Forecasting & Strategic Bidding: PMs immediately adopted the practice of proactively assessing delivery capability before committing to tenders.
Leadership Cohesion: Decision-making shifted from a singular focus on “winning the bid” to “ensuring client success” and long-term value delivery.

$6.4B

Revenue Target Success

Company revenue rose to this amount in 2017, reflecting improved contract execution.

Behavioral Intelligence: Managers developed acute awareness of how siloed thinking emerged and, crucially, how to counteract it in real-time discussions.
Open Communication: There was a significant increase in open communication regarding project risks and delivery limits, which directly led to a reduction in over-promising and under-delivering behavior.

Conclusion

This project serves as a prime example of AFERR-Based Consulting in Action. Evivve successfully used simulated experience to spark realization, effectively shift deeply ingrained leadership behavior, and enable systemic change across a complex global division. By surfacing real, high-stakes behaviors in a controlled environment, we helped Motorola create safer pathways for its PMO leaders to unlearn outdated patterns and commit to more sustainable, strategically aligned decision-making. The program reinforced Motorola Solutions’ trajectory toward increased operational effectiveness, with company revenue rising from $5.7 billion in 2015 to $6.4 billion in 2017.