Lea Im Obersteg

Lea Im Obersteg did not arrive in water through engineering, and that is the whole point of her. She studied sociology at the University of Lucerne and then took a master’s in organizational studies and cultural theory at the University of St. Gallen, so she came at innovation from the side of people rather than pipes. Her first real lesson in what customers actually want came earlier and far more concretely, because at eighteen she was selling watches at Bucherer in Lucerne, the Swiss luxury house, to a stream of tourists arriving mostly from China. She speaks Mandarin thanks to her Taiwanese mother, and standing behind that counter she learned to read what someone needs from their face before they have the words for it, which is the same muscle that design thinking later asked her to flex at industrial scale.

Lea Im Obersteg turned that instinct into a job most heavy-industry companies do not think to create. She joined Georg Fischer as a Design Thinking Champion in 2018 and by 2020 was Head of Global Design Thinking at GF Piping Systems, the part of the 200-year-old Swiss group that makes the plastic and metal piping, valves and fittings that move water through buildings, utilities and factories, which puts her squarely in the water-technology world even though her job title never mentions water. Design thinking is a method for solving problems by starting with the human who has the problem, in her own words an iterative approach where “you start with a problem statement, you dig deeper, you open up yourself to a lot of opportunities,” and then you build rough, cheap prototypes fast. That is genuinely counterintuitive inside a firm used to perfecting a mold before it ever sees a customer, and getting an organization that successful to “fail faster” on purpose was the harder, more interesting half of her work.

Lea Im Obersteg has a way of making the method memorable for people who would otherwise glaze over. She explains empathy with a chair (is it for sitting, or for showing off that you can afford an expensive one in a beautiful home?), and she swaps the familiar startup acronym for a warmer one of her own: not the minimum viable product but the minimum lovable product, the smallest thing you can ship that customers actually love rather than merely tolerate. Her advice for getting innovation moving inside a big company is to resist the urge to plan the whole world, because as she puts it, if you decide to change everything “we’ll be sitting here and drafting a plan for the next 40 years and don’t do anything.” She would rather find the early believers, the lead users with a real pain, and win something small and quick.

Lea Im Obersteg has since taken her own advice and started something of her own. In 2023 she left GF, after roughly seven years that ended in a Head of Collaborative Innovation role, to found Im Obersteg Connect, a Zürich firm that helps organizations through strategy, transformation and facilitation work, run as a network of experts rather than a traditional agency, which makes her one of the quieter builders in the water world, working on the people side rather than the hardware. Her broader read on where innovation should point is what she calls a planet-centric approach, aimed squarely at the water, resource and pollution problems she sees coming, which is the thread that ties a sociologist who sold watches back to the water sector she came on the show to talk about.

“If you say we want to change the whole world, we’ll be sitting here and drafting a plan for the next 40 years and don’t do anything.”

Lea Im Obersteg is, in the end, proof that the softest skill in water, actually listening to the person in front of you, scales all the way up to a 200-year-old industrial group and then out into a business of her own.