Member Spotlight: Lucia Conconi - Formula 1 - Leadership. Trust. Collaboration

Your career has taken you from aerospace engineering to Formula 1 and now into work as an advisor, speaker, and writer rethinking how organisations build performance. Looking back, what have been the defining moments of your journey?

My background is in aerospace engineering, and I came into motorsport following my passion and technical knowledge. But Formula 1 teaches you very quickly that technical excellence alone doesn't win championships.

What makes Formula 1 unique is the speed of the environment and the intensity of the feedback loop at every race, with clear results. That compression forces extreme organisational optimisation: you cannot afford misalignments, slow decisions, or silos. Performance emerges from the whole system, technical and human. This makes Formula 1 a fascinating test bench for organisational models.

Major technology disruptions over the years have also shown in Formula 1 that successful integration always came down to collaboration, agility, and integration, not unlike what all industries face today with AI.

For these reasons, focusing on the organisational side, alongside the technical, feels completely natural to me, and this is where I also bring value in my current activity.

After reaching one of the most competitive environments in the world, Formula 1, you chose to start a new chapter. What inspired that transition?

I remain genuinely fond of Formula 1. It is an extraordinary environment that I haven't left behind so much as extended beyond. After many years and seeing the pace of innovation accelerating across industries, I wanted to apply what I had learned elsewhere while still creating value.

I have always had an entrepreneurial spirit: what energises me most is building things from the start, transforming them, and seeing them grow. Different sectors bring different constraints, but the underlying question of how organisations build performance turns out to be remarkably consistent.

I also believe that exploring outside your own field makes you better within it, David Epstein articulates this beautifully in Range. This transition wasn't really a departure, it was a natural extension of the same curiosity that drove me through more than twenty years in motorsport.

You often speak about high-performance teams. What lessons from Formula 1 apply equally well in everyday leadership?

The central lesson is that performance is never the result of individuals in isolation, it is always a system property. Behind every result are hundreds of people who must integrate their work seamlessly under extreme time pressure, with very little margin for error.

Systems thinking and integration become a constant discipline — connecting people, technology, and different functions. Fast decision-making and coherent action, even under uncertainty, occur not through rigid processes but when everyone deeply understands the objectives, constraints, and priorities, and when there are shared mental models and frameworks. These are not Formula 1-only concepts. They are leadership concepts that sit at the heart of the work I do with teams across industries.

What is something people assume about Formula 1 that is completely wrong?

What most people see of Formula 1 is the race weekend: the track, the pit lane, the podium. What is less visible is the work that goes on at the factory, where hundreds of engineers and specialists develop, test, and refine the car throughout the season.

Another is the idea of unlimited resources. Today the sport operates under a cost cap. Every decision about where to invest time, money, and engineering effort has to be made with discipline. In that sense, Formula 1 is a very good model for any organisation operating under real constraints,  which is most of them.

Many professionals worry about making a career change after years in one industry. What advice would you give someone considering a major pivot?

For me, this didn't feel like a major pivot, it felt like a natural extension. But I understand why career changes across industries can feel daunting.

A recent article in Il Sole 24 Ore, drawing on recent Deloitte and IBM research, was explaining how AI is accelerating exactly a shift in mindset at an organisational level — pushing companies to eliminate silos, move beyond narrow functional definitions, and adopt a more systemic approach. The professionals who will thrive in that environment are precisely those who have developed breadth alongside depth, a signal of a shift to the level of principles, not just domain knowledge.

Systems thinking, decision-making under pressure, handling complexity,  these don’t disappear. They transfer. What changes is the context and vocabulary, and those can be learned.

In a world increasingly shaped by AI and technology, which human skills will become even more important?

In my view, human skills become more important, not less, as AI becomes more embedded in how we work. Among others, maybe four important ones.

The first is critical thinking. AI gives you more information, faster, but it doesn't tell you which information to trust, which assumptions to question, or when the reasoning is wrong. That judgment remains entirely human.

The second is collaboration, with people, and I would extend that explicitly to collaboration with AI itself. Working alongside intelligent systems requires the same discipline as working across functions.

The third is empathy and authenticity. Often underestimated, the capacity to read people and build trust becomes essential for leadership when complexity and pressure rise.

And finally, leadership itself, not hierarchy, but direction, responsibility, and the ability to bring people together around a shared purpose. AI can inform decisions, but it cannot own them.

What role have networking and professional communities played throughout your career?

Networks have played an important role throughout my career, and I think about them in two distinct but complementary ways.

The first is the network within your field: the people who share your language, your context, your technical reference points. They challenge you, keep you sharp, and connect you with your own industry.

The second, the network outside your field, is where something different happens. When you bring together people from different disciplines and backgrounds, you get collisions of ideas that wouldn't occur inside any single domain. Frans Johansson described this beautifully in The Medici Effect: breakthrough innovation tends to happen at the intersection of different fields, not at their centres.

Networks are not just about opportunity. They are about learning.

What does being part of PWN Zug & Zürich mean to you?

I came to PWN to attend an initial networking event and was struck by the quality of the exchange and the atmosphere. It felt genuinely supportive, and the conversations had real substance. That is not always easy to find, and it made the decision to join straightforward. What kept me was the quality of professional exchange, but in a warm and friendly environment that always feels like returning to a familiar place.

I also find the work the network does in creating opportunities for discussion and exploration, including around new technologies, particularly inspiring.

More than a year later, I am still here and happy to attend all the events I can. That says more than anything else I could add.