Books & Thought Leadership

From Turbulence to Structural Change

An integrated body of work on diagnosis, navigation, and scale: from the invisible drag of adaptation debt to the practical operating system that lets leaders move with discipline in persistent turbulence

Adaptation Debt (Book 0)

Adaptation Debt — How Leaders Restart When Learning Slows
Pre-release available soon

The book leaders need before they commit to capability building. When your organisation “knows it needs to change” but feels no urgency, you’re not facing a motivation problem—you’re carrying adaptation debt.

The invisible liability

Adaptation debt is the cumulative cost of deferred structural change.
It compounds silently until it triggers a crisis and narrows your options.
Most organisations only notice it when the cost of paying it down has already doubled.

The real question: What structural change have you deferred for two years or more? That’s not a “nice to have”. That’s debt.

Thriving in Turbulence (Book 1)

Thriving in Turbulence — Stop Applying the Wrong Solution to the Wrong Condition
Published November 2025 · Available on Leanpub and Amazon.

The operating system for single‑team and department‑level navigation when conditions won’t sit still.

The problem nobody names

Transformation doesn’t fail for lack of frameworks; it fails when identical symptoms receive opposite, mismatched treatments.
Applying “more agility” to an insecure team accelerates attrition, while adding governance to a complexity problem freezes learning.

While others cycle through Agile, SAFe, ADKAR, and OKRs hoping something sticks, this book teaches you to diagnose precisely and intervene with single‑lever discipline using the CIRCA‑CLEAR model.

“Walker’s approach helps you pinpoint exactly what kind of turbulence you’re facing, and then gives you practical, short‑cycle levers to get back to flow rapidly.” — Nigel Thurlow, Co‑Creator of The Flow System®.

How these pieces work together

Adaptation Debt (Book 0) creates urgency through diagnosis, revealing the cost of deferred structural change before crisis forces your hand.
Thriving in Turbulence (Book 1) builds navigation capability at the team and strategic-initiative levels using CIRCA‑CLEAR, ThroughFlow, and Human Pulse.
Forthcoming work extends this architecture to portfolio‑level navigation and organisational evolution, so you can scale without collapse.

Together, they form a coherent architecture: diagnosis first, then disciplined response, then scale.

Thought Leadership & Published Research

Earlier Books

Gower’s Handbook of People in Project Management (2013)
Co-author. Grounding for how capability and culture interact in transformation contexts.

Organisational Agility & Transformation

Business Agility Institute
Strategic thought leadership on simplicity, adaptive strategy, diagnostic precision, and the precursor to CIRCA-CLEAR framework, and why transformation stalls.

APM (Association for Project Management)
White papers and briefing materials on adaptive programme and transformation delivery and adaptive governance at scale.

PMI (Project Management Institute)
Research and guidance on business agility as adaptive capacity.

ABC (Agile Business Consortium)
Strategic thought leadership on simplicity, adaptive leadership, organisational transformation, and culture

Pedagogy & Capability Building

ICAgile — First UK Business Agility Course
Co-created the foundational curriculum for business agility as a discipline for Agile Business Consortium, then ICAgile

Trained cohorts across FTSE organisations, Government, and regional systems.

What These Pieces Do Together

They form an architecture, not a scattered portfolio:

Diagnostic precision: How to name what’s real (Adaptation Debt, CIRCA-CLEAR)
Operational specificity: How to move without burning out (Thriving in Turbulence)
Systems thinking: How to scale without collapse (Books 2–3)
Credibility: 30+ years of pattern-spotting across finance, health, retail, government, and technology

How to Engage

Want the urgency-maker?
Pre-order Adaptation Debt

Already sold on the need to move?
Get Thriving in Turbulence

Building capability at scale?
Explore the CIRCA-CLEAR framework

Want to understand the thinking?
Read the latest post or subscribe to updates

In Practice

This work has shaped outcomes across:

£25M annual value swings
£15M cost reductions
75% time compression in transformation delivery
8,500+ member community navigating turbulence

Not because frameworks are magic.
Because diagnosis before action actually works.

A Note on Approach

These books and papers avoid:

Promotional language
Framework jargon without translation
Academic abstraction divorced from reality
Consultant mystification

They’re written for people who need to move, not for people who like to talk about moving.

Stay connected

[Read the latest posts] — CIRCA‑CLEAR, adaptation, and leadership in persistent turbulence.
[Subscribe to Substack] — monthly insights on adaptation debt, turbulence navigation, and what’s shifting in organisational life, not noise.
[Follow on LinkedIn] — Weekly patterns and provocations
[Explore resources] — Diagnostics, checklists, and tools you can run with your teams this week.

Neil Walker — Helping organisations recognise the debt before it recognises them. 30+ years in transformation, co‑creating business agility communities and operating systems for navigating complexity. Business Agility Institute UK co-founder. Currently: Writing the book on why change stalls (and how to fix it).

CIRCA Fluency ™ 2025 by Neil A Walker

Ingenious Agility ™ 2025 by Neil A Walker