Updated August 2026
A visual case study…
Lockheed Martin: 287 Leaders, 2 Days
In June 2022, Lockheed Martin’s Leadership Development Conference needed a capstone: data visualisation and storytelling training for 287 emerging leaders. The answer: eight concurrent virtual sessions over two days, delivered by Datalabs with Lockheed’s own leaders embedded as coaches in every room.
The engagement in one paragraph
What did the Datalabs Agency deliver for Lockheed Martin?
For Leadership Development Conference II (theme: Bold Leadership), the Datalabs Agency designed and facilitated virtual data visualisation and storytelling workshops for 287 Leadership Development Program participants — eight 90-minute sessions across four time slots on 14–15 June 2022, with custom Lockheed Martin-branded materials, 287 digital participant workbooks, and a full coach-support kit.
The Datalabs Agency is a Melbourne-based data visualization consultancy founded in 2012 that delivers corporate training workshops (Power BI, Tableau, data storytelling), dashboard design, and BI style guides for clients including Mercedes-Benz, Adidas, and UPS.
Watch the two days fill up
One capstone, eight rooms
Every one of the 287 participants landed in one of eight 90-minute sessions — small enough for exercises, concurrent enough to finish in two days.
The problem behind the brief
Why does a leadership program end with data storytelling?
The animation above is the delivery machine. The brief behind it: Lockheed’s LDP participants — leaders with 0–3 years’ experience drawn from six functions across the business — were finishing a program about leading boldly. The capstone had to teach the skill bold leadership runs on: making a case with data.
A capstone audience is an unforgiving one — 287 people at the end of a long program, all attending virtually, across functions with very different relationships to data. The design answer was concurrency and coaching: sessions capped at 40–50 participants so exercises stay personal, run eight times so nobody waits a month for their slot, and staffed with senior Lockheed Martin leaders embedded as coaches, so the conversation continues inside the business after the facilitator logs off.
Contract to capstone
The ten-week delivery timeline
The delivery cadence, contract to capstone.
| Milestone | What happened |
|---|---|
| Contract award | April 2022 — engagement confirmed |
| Inside seven business days | Audience consultation call — who the leaders are and what they need |
| Three weeks out | All participant materials submitted for review |
| One week out | Virtual overview session for the embedded coaches |
| Delivery | 14–15 June 2022 — eight sessions across four time slots |
All sessions delivered virtually, with the coach-support kit shipped ahead of the overview session.
The materials, full size
Inside the workshop deck
Click any card to view it full-screen — chapters from the custom Lockheed Martin-branded deck and the exercise dataset.
The core chapter
Telling Visual Stories
Design fundamentals, fast
White Space
The anti-patterns chapter
What Not To Do
Built for the final exercises
The Custom Dataset
The rules under every session
The principles behind the design
Six principles shaped all eight sessions — and the coach kit built on them stayed with Lockheed.
Delivered, documented, taught
What did Lockheed Martin receive at the end?
Lockheed received a custom 90-minute slide deck in its own branding, 287 professionally designed digital workbooks, visual examples and motion graphics built for virtual delivery, custom practice datasets for the final exercises, and a complete coach-support kit.
The coach kit is the part that outlasts the two days. Because the coaches were Lockheed’s own senior leaders, every session ended with someone inside the business who had seen the method work and could hold participants to it. Training that embeds the client’s own leaders becomes capability building rather than a guest lecture — and it has been the Datalabs Agency model ever since.
Lived experience beats generic case studies — a leader remembers the story of a real project, not a stock chart.
Otto Ottinger
The design principle behind the Lockheed sessions
Questions & Answers
The Lockheed Martin program
Attention is the deliverable
Designing a virtual workshop leaders do not tab away from
A virtual room is the hardest room. Nobody has to look at you; the second monitor is right there. So the Lockheed sessions were engineered around one number: something changes every four to eight minutes. A prompt, an exercise, a critique, a story — the format never sits still long enough for attention to leave.
The exercises did the heavy lifting. Deliberate practice — structured, repeatable exercises with feedback — beats demonstration every time, so participants spent their minutes building, not watching. The final exercises ran on custom-built practice datasets — dummy data shaped like the work — because a leader in operations or finance takes a lesson seriously when the exercise feels like their world.
The materials were built natively for the medium: motion graphics and visual examples designed for screen delivery, and a digital workbook for every participant — all 287 of them — so the session left something behind that survives the meeting-ends chime.
You will find the same care in our data visualisation training workshops — that rhythm of constant engagement is what virtual training owes its audience.
Ten weeks, no drift…
What a capstone workshop has to do
A capstone is not just another session — it is the last thing a development program says to its participants. Lockheed’s Leadership Development Conference II carried the theme Bold Leadership, and the closing argument was that boldness needs evidence: leaders who can make a case with data get their boldness funded.
The audience made the brief interesting. All 287 participants were early-career leaders — zero to three years in — but they came from six different functions. An engineer’s relationship with a chart is not an HR leader’s. The content held the middle: storytelling structure and visual judgement, taught through examples broad enough for every function and exercises specific enough to bite.
The delivery discipline mattered as much as the content. From contract award in April to delivery on 14–15 June, the timeline ran through a fixed sequence — audience consultation inside seven business days, materials submitted three weeks out, a coach overview one week out. Corporate training earns trust by hitting dates, and this engagement hit every one.
The embedded-coach layer is the piece I would keep from this project above all others — and the piece most programs skip. If you are planning a capstone, start with our Introduction to Data Visualization workshop as the base and ask about the coach kit; the format and economics are on our workshop pricing page.
The Data Design Firm for AI & Visualization
The Datalabs Agency
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