Your work spans three spaces—doing deep design, leading design teams, and amplifying design thinking. But they all collide on the same problem: the system around you is becoming more turbulent, not less capable.

You’re being asked to hold outcomes steady while the organisation becomes more political, more interdependent, more contradictory. Priorities that contradict each other go unnamed. Dependencies multiply. Governance treats every change as high-stakes.

You’re not moving slowly because designers lack craft. You’re slowing because the organisation is in turbulence—and turbulence demands responses different from working harder.

Your title has quietly shifted from owning the craft to defending outcomes in hostile conditions. Frameworks like OKRs, SAFe, and Team Topologies tell you something is wrong—missed KRs, poor predictability, overloaded teams. But they don’t tell you why your best efforts still stall.

CIRCA-CLEAR operates as a diagnostic lens that sits under these frameworks and explains what’s actually blocking flow.

The Diagnostic You Need

CIRCA-CLEAR identifies five organisational turbulence conditions—Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, Anxious—and pairs each with response levers that align with the problem. This matters because Rapid and Complex conditions demand opposite interventions.

You can walk into a steering meeting and say: “We don’t have a design problem. We have a Contradictory condition between three strategic objectives. Until we force a trade-off, design quality will erode regardless of headcount.”

You back uncomfortable trade-offs with patterns and outcomes, not personal credibility alone. And because CIRCA-CLEAR sits under your existing frameworks—OKRs, ADKAR, Agile, Team Topologies—you simply add a diagnostic layer into existing ceremonies.

Three Extensions To What You Already Do

Doing design: Your design recommendations now address how to change the surrounding organisation so the design actually lands. You move from “here’s what to build” to “here’s what to build, and here’s what the organisation needs to change first.”

Leading design: You can challenge competing priorities with a coherent language, explain why agile methods won’t work in Insecure conditions (rebuild trust first), or propose low-stakes experiments to rebuild confidence in Anxious cultures.

Amplifying design: Your storytelling moves from “here’s what should work” to honest case narratives: when Rapid conditions drowned design, what you actually did. When contradictory mandates sabotaged strategy, how you forced the trade-off. These stories teach diagnosis, not just method.

The Question That Matters Now

In organisations where design carries strategic weight, the question is no longer “Can design think big enough?”

It’s: “Can design leaders see the turbulence early enough, name it clearly enough, and intervene precisely enough that great design has a chance to land?”

The design you’re delivering is good. The organisation around it is turbulent. That’s the problem you actually need to solve.