Stretching across Peru’s desert plains are the Nazca Lines — vast geoglyphs depicting animals, plants, spirals and geometric figures. Some are over 300 metres long, yet remarkably, they can only be fully understood from above. When viewed from ground level, they appear as random lines. From a higher altitude, they reveal extraordinary coherence and intention.

This is one of the most powerful leadership metaphors in the world.

In every transformation project that we lead four clients at Engaged Strategy, we see leaders struggling with the weight of daily operations. They are pulled into firefighting, urgent deadlines, fragmented information and the constant pressure of quarterly results. From this ground-level perspective, everything looks urgent, everything feels important and everything seems like a priority.

But from this position, patterns are impossible to see.

  • Customer dissatisfaction appears episodic rather than systemic.
  • Employee disengagement feels like an HR issue rather than a cultural imbalance.
  • NPS fluctuations get interpreted as random rather than reflective of underlying value gaps.
  • Competitor advances seem sudden rather than predictable.

The truth is that leaders who stay too close to the ground lose visibility of the bigger picture.

  • They see activities, not alignment.
  • They react to symptoms, not causes.
  • They focus on isolated issues rather than understanding the strategic pattern shaping customer and employee behaviour.

The Nazca Lines teach us an essential truth:
Understanding emerges only when you elevate.

When leaders rise above the operational dust, they begin to see:

  • patterns in customer complaints
  • emotional drivers behind promoter and detractor behaviour
  • cultural gaps affecting performance
  • misaligned incentives causing experience failures
  • process bottlenecks damaging loyalty
  • fragmented accountability causing friction
  • opportunities competitors are quietly exploiting

This altitude shift is the foundation of Engaged Strategy’s approach.
Through NPS analytics, emotional driver modelling and journey diagnostics, we help leaders see their organisation from a higher vantage point. This is the vantage point that is required to design meaningful transformation.

When CEOs gain altitude, everything changes: decisions become sharper, priorities become clearer and the organisation finally starts moving as one coherent system.

The Nazca Lines were not meant for ground-level interpretation.
Similarly, strategy cannot be understood from ground-level thinking.

Leadership requires the courage to step back, rise above and view the organisation not as a collection of activities, but as a connected pattern with a clear purpose. When leaders embrace this altitude, what once looked chaotic begins to reveal coherence, opportunity, and direction.

The desert always had a story. You just needed to rise high enough to see it.
Your organisation is no different.

 

NPS®, Net Promoter® and Net Promoter Score® are registered trademarks of NICE Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.