Why Your Transformation Just Stalled (And What to Do About It)

Thriving in Turbulence is live on Amazon. Here’s the diagnostic system behind it.

Monday morning. Your transformation is three months in. Everyone’s working harder than ever. Standups happen. Retrospectives are religious. You’ve got OKRs, Kanban boards, and detailed roadmaps.

Yet delivery is slowing. Dependencies multiply. Your best people look exhausted. Stakeholders escalate to your boss.

Something fundamental isn’t working. You feel it. You can’t name it.

This is the gap I’ve spent 30 years watching leaders fall into—and the reason I wrote Thriving in Turbulence.

The Pattern Nobody Talks About

Same symptom. Different root causes. Different required responses.

Three workstreams show declining velocity. Leadership applies the same fix to all three: “We need better alignment.” Standard playbook. Reasonable assumption.

Here’s what actually happened:

Workstream A had seven parallel initiatives. Their problem was Rapid conditions: pace overwhelming decision capacity. They needed WIP limits, not alignment workshops.

Workstream B had engineers afraid to surface blockers. Their problem was Insecure conditions: trust deficit preventing candid information flow. They needed psychological safety, not process improvements.

Workstream C had conflicting stakeholder priorities. Their problem was Contradictory conditions: impossible binds created by competing demands. They needed forced ranking, not more communication.

One symptom. Three conditions. Three opposite interventions.

Apply the wrong lever, and you make things worse. Demand agility from an insecure workstream and they’ll hide deeper. Push psychological safety onto a rapid workstream and they’ll feel patronised while drowning.

This is why 70% of transformations fail. Not execution problems. Diagnostic errors.

What CIRCA-CLEAR Actually Does

CIRCA-CLEAR provides the missing diagnostic layer for organisational turbulence.

CIRCA identifies five turbulence conditions:

Complex — System behaviour emerging from interactions nobody fully understands
Insecure — Trust deficit preventing candid information flow
Rapid — Pace, overwhelming decision, and delivery capacity
Contradictory — Competing priorities creating impossible binds
Anxious — Uncertainty paralysing present action

CLEAR matches five response levers:

Clarity — Force-rank priorities, establish decision rights
Learning — Build collective intelligence through systematic exploration
Empathy — Restore psychological safety through leadership vulnerability
Agility — Right-size response, replace prediction with adaptation
Resilience — Create buffers, manage sustainable pace

Diagnostic precision matters because identical symptoms require opposite interventions depending on the underlying conditions.

What This Is NOT

Not another framework to adopt. CIRCA-CLEAR occupies meta-framework territory—it’s the diagnostic operating system that makes your existing frameworks context-aware. Your OKRs stay. Your Team Topologies structure stays. Your SAFe ceremonies stay. They work better.

Not organisational transformation. This is navigation capability—detecting conditions early and responding effectively. Think weather radar, not weather control.

Not a universal solution. CIRCA-CLEAR won’t fix strategic misalignment, talent gaps, or structural dysfunction. It addresses the gap between environmental conditions and organisational response capability. When fundamentals are broken, you need different interventions first.

Most frameworks claim universal applicability. We claim honest boundaries.

The Leading Indicators That Change Everything

Traditional metrics are lagging. You discover problems after they’ve broken people and throughput. CIRCA-CLEAR uses two leading indicators that provide 2-4 weeks’ advance warning.

ThroughFlow = Completed work ÷ (Completed + Rework)

When ThroughFlow drops below 70%, turbulence is forming. You have time to intervene before velocity collapses.

Human Pulse = Weekly sustainability signal (clarity, pace, psychological safety)

Three questions. Five minutes. When Human Pulse trends down, you’re burning capability debt. The work might still ship, but you’re eroding your capacity to ship next quarter.

One platform workstream tracked both signals weekly. ThroughFlow dropped from 78% to 64% over three weeks. Human Pulse showed “pace” concerns rising. They diagnosed Rapid conditions forming before delivery metrics showed problems.

The intervention: WIP cap at 80% of finish rate. Pull only when Done moves.

Four weeks later: ThroughFlow back to 76%. No late nights. No heroics. No crisis.

Typical outcome: 40-60% ThroughFlow improvement within 12 weeks when the right lever matches the right condition.

Why Frameworks Fail Without Diagnosis

Your OKRs are stalling. What do you do?

Standard response: better Key Results, more check-ins, clearer ownership.

But OKRs stall for different reasons requiring different interventions:

Complex conditions — KRs can’t be specified precisely because nobody knows what success looks like yet. You need Learning experiments, not clearer goals.
Insecure conditions — Workstreams won’t commit ambitious KRs because failure feels dangerous. You need Empathy interventions restoring trust, not performance pressure.
Contradictory conditions — Multiple stakeholders own conflicting KRs. You need Clarity through forced ranking, not compromised goals that satisfy no one.

Same framework. Same stall pattern. Opposite fixes.

CIRCA-CLEAR augments OKRs by adding diagnostic precision: “Which condition blocked progress this week?” Five-minute addition to your existing check-in. Proves value within one cycle.

The same integration pattern works for Team Topologies, SAFe, ADKAR, and Lean Change Management. Your framework defines what to do. CIRCA diagnoses why it’s not working. CLEAR provides how to fix it.

The Hardest Lesson

Here’s what took me 30 years to learn:

Applying Agility to Insecurity makes things worse.

When workstreams feel unsafe, demanding agile behaviours (transparency, experimentation, fast failure, etc.) creates the opposite response. People hide deeper. They protect themselves. The very capabilities you’re trying to build become threats.

The intervention that appears to be progress becomes the accelerant of dysfunction.

This is the core diagnostic error I see repeatedly: treating every problem with the leader’s favourite lever. The Agility leader applies Agility everywhere. The Clarity leader forces ranking on everything. The Learning leader runs experiments when workstreams need psychological safety first.

Single-lever discipline matters. Test one intervention at a time. Measure signals. Adjust course. Most workstreams misdiagnose the first cycle—that’s learning, not failure.

What the Book Provides

Thriving in Turbulence gives you the complete system:

Part I: Understanding Turbulence — Why frameworks fail without diagnosis. The hidden costs you’re already paying. How CIRCA-CLEAR operates.

Part II: Quick Start — 5-minute entry diagnostic. Pattern recognition table. First moves you can test within 48 hours. You’ll probably misdiagnose—that’s the point. Productive failure accelerates learning.

Part III: The Five Conditions — Deep pattern vocabulary for Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, and Anxious conditions. Observable indicators. Look-alikes that trap practitioners. Why standard responses backfire.

Part IV: Diagnostic Practice — 25-minute workstream diagnostic for everyday turbulence. 3-hour rigorous workshop for high-stakes contexts. Systematic approaches that build capability.

Part V: Building Organisational Capability — 18-24 month roadmap embedding CIRCA-CLEAR into measurement, leadership practice, and learning systems. Framework integration guides. Moving from 90% executive-led interventions to 15%.

The appendices include ready-to-use tools: pattern recognition tables, experiment templates, weekly dashboards, and intervention playbooks.

Typical Outcomes

Validated across 100+ implementations:

ThroughFlow improvement: 40-60% within 12 weeks
Human Pulse scores: 15-25 point improvement over 6 months
Decision velocity: 14 weeks → 5 days (typical for Contradictory conditions)
Escalation rate: 90% executive-led → 15% after distributed capability matures
WIP reduction: 60-70% typical

Contexts vary. Your mileage will differ.

But the pattern holds: accurate diagnosis followed by matched intervention produces measurably better outcomes than applying favourite frameworks regardless of conditions.

Who This Is For

CxOs and senior executives seeking bottom-line impact and delegation guidance. Every chapter opens with 100-word executive summaries. Skip to Executive Insight boxes for strategic decision points.

Transformation leaders requiring detailed implementation guidance. Read sequentially to build diagnostic fluency.

Consultants and coaches needing communication patterns and engagement scoping. Includes guidance on when CIRCA-CLEAR is the wrong tool—protecting client outcomes and professional integrity.

You need organisational authority to influence priorities, decision rights, or capacity allocation, even at the workstream level.

The Real Goal

This book isn’t about creating CIRCA-CLEAR experts. It’s about building distributed organisational capability.

After 18-24 months of systematic practice, the framework becomes invisible. Workstreams notice Rapid forming before checking indicators. Conversations naturally incorporate “let’s cap WIP” when coordination chaos looms. Pattern recognition is embedded in culture.

The vocabulary fades. The capability strengthens.

That’s the real goal: organisations that navigate turbulence automatically, not ones dependent on consultants or frameworks.

Thriving in Turbulence: Diagnose Conditions. Apply the Right Lever. Build Capability.

Available now on Amazon.

Your transformation is already teaching you which conditions dominate. The question is whether you’re reading the signals—or applying your favourite lever regardless.

What turbulence patterns are you seeing in your organisation right now? I’d be curious what conditions you’re navigating.

NEIL WALKER