Are you the next best thing? Istiaan Lubbe certainly is. The professional service sector celebrated a major win as Istiaan was named the winner of the prestigious TransUnion Rising Star Award in the highly competitive Professional Service category.
This award is specifically designed to identify and celebrate young professionals under the age of 40 who demonstrate exceptional leadership, visionary thinking, and profound influence within their respective fields. It marks Istiaan as a future leader in global infrastructure development.
As a professionally registered engineer with ECSA, Istiaan’s success is rooted not just in technical competence but in a philosophy, which he outlines in his prepared remarks for the event: “Engineering the Human Connection.”
“This recognition isn’t just about individual achievement, it’s about the extraordinary power of people coming together around a shared vision,” said Istiaan. He emphasised that while the engineering world often encourages professionals to remain “behind their designs,” the complexities of modern, large-scale projects demand a shift in focus.
Istiaan credits this realisation to a key professional moment that highlighted the limitations of purely technical approaches. “We faced a challenge that numbers and models couldn’t solve; it required something more: we had to engineer the human connection,” he stated.
This perspective was forged during his time as a Technical Integrator on NEOM’s The Line, one of the most ambitious urban planning projects in history. This smart city, which is being constructed in the Saudi Arabian desert, aims to completely reimagine how people will live, move, and connect, vertically integrated, carbon-neutral, and entirely human-centred. Istiaan’s role required him to synchronise work across vast geographic and cultural distances.
“Our challenge was not just technical; it was human,” he reflected. “We were engineers, designers, and specialists spread across continents and time zones, from South Africa to the UK, from the Middle East to Australia, collaborating in real time to deliver something that had never been done before.”
The friction points, Istiaan explained, were rarely found in the software or the calculations. “There were moments where the technology wasn’t the hardest part. It was the language barriers, the cultural nuances, the time differences, and the simple human moments of misunderstanding that tested our connection,” he wrote. “But that’s where the true integration happened, not in the systems, but between people.”
Zutari deeply supports this belief in prioritising human understanding. He highlighted how the Zutari encourages an empathetic approach to problem-solving. “Zutari has always believed that engineering is not just about solving problems, it’s about understanding people. It’s about listening before designing, connecting before constructing,” he explained. “As a company, Zutari gives us the freedom to explore, to learn, and to bring empathy into the heart of every solution.”
Winning the Transunion Rising Star Award, Istiaan Lubbe sets a new standard for professional service, showing that future innovation will depend less on raw computational power and more on deliberate collaboration and empathy. He ended his prepared statement with a strong rallying cry, reminding the industry that people ultimately determine the value of their creations: “Working on NEOM taught me that even the most advanced city of the future will only be as strong as the human connections that build it. Technology can design systems, but people design the purpose. Here’s to rising with purpose.”
