Nine months ago, I published a piece positioning CIRCA-CLEAR as a complement to Cynefin—arguing that while Cynefin maps the terrain, CIRCA senses the turbulence. Check out the original post Beyond Cynefin: How CIRCA Helps Leaders Make Sense of Today’s Complexity

The response was thoughtful. But the ground has shifted again.

And this time, it’s teaching us something critical about diagnosis itself.

What’s Actually Happened

In July 2025, I described organisations facing complexity, insecurity, rapid change, contradiction, and anxiety as context. Fair assessment.

But the last nine months have revealed something more specific: organisations didn’t face these conditions. They misdiagnosed them.

Here’s the pattern I’m seeing repeatedly:

Organisations labelled their problems “Complex” when they were actually “Insecure.”

They launched AI initiatives, agile transformations, and process redesigns—all rooted in Cynefin’s Complex domain logic: probe, sense, respond. Experiment. Iterate. Learn by doing.

Except their teams weren’t psychologically safe enough to do that.

They were terrified.

The Insecurity Diagnosis Was Missed

Let’s be specific about what’s happened:

AI adoption accelerated. Job security became genuinely uncertain. Technical leaders wondered whether their judgment mattered anymore. Individual contributors couldn’t articulate their future role in an AI-augmented organisation.

And boards, seeing this uncertainty, did what uncertain systems do: they demanded more control.

Larger oversight committees. Governance frameworks. Risk gates. Approval processes.

All of it was rooted in the misdiagnosis.

The problem wasn’t insufficient agility. It was insufficient clarity about what came next.

The intervention matched the wrong diagnosis. Not this: faster decision-making, more experimentation, distributed authority. That’s what Insecurity doesn’t need.

This: clear narratives about value, transparent conversations about role transitions, honest acknowledgement of what we don’t know, and visible leadership behaviour showing psychological safety in the face of uncertainty.

That’s the Empathy lever at work.

The CIRCA-CLEAR response to Insecurity is Learning—not Agility.

Why This Matters for Your Diagnosis

Here’s what concerns me: if 60% of organisations misdiagnose on the first attempt (which I’ve long observed), then nine months of the wrong intervention doesn’t just delay progress. It erodes trust.

Teams that needed clarity about the future and received “let’s run an experiment” now carry an accumulated experience of leadership that has not listened to what they actually needed.

That’s not just a missed intervention. That’s “Adaptation Debt” accumulating in real time.

Adaptation Debt occurs when an organisation defers diagnostic work, implements interventions at speed, and observes outcomes that fall short of expectations—not because the interventions themselves are flawed, but because they were addressing the wrong problem.

Nine months into accelerated AI implementation, we’re seeing it everywhere:

• Agile transformation initiatives that stalled because teams needed safety, not velocity
• Governance frameworks that increased risk surface area because they were built without trust
• Capability programs that attracted cynicism rather than engagement
• Leadership communication that sounded like selling rather than sense-making

All of it traceable to diagnostic errors, not execution failures.

What’s Actually Shifted

Three things have changed meaningfully since July.

First: Insecurity has acute visibility now.

Back then, I positioned it as a system dynamic to be aware of. Now, it’s the dominant condition in knowledge-work organisations. The emotional and cultural undercurrents I mentioned aren’t ignorable—they’re urgent.

Second: Organisations have empirical evidence that their first intervention didn’t work.

Nine months is enough time to realise that the complexity framework didn’t yield the expected outcomes. That’s data. The question is: do they use it to diagnose differently, or double down?

Third: Contradictions have sharpened into genuine dilemmas.

“Accelerate AI adoption” vs. “Ensure governance rigour.” “Democratise capability” vs. “Protect institutional knowledge.” “Move with speed” vs. “Build sustainable capability.”

These aren’t false tensions. These are real contradictions that demand Agility responses—meaning holding both, finding the creative third way, and not choosing between them.

Instead, most organisations are fragmenting: some teams racing forward, others building guardrails, nobody aligned on what success looks like.

The Diagnostic Discipline This Reveals

Here’s what I want to underscore: this isn’t a failure of CIRCA-CLEAR. It’s a validation of something more fundamental.

Diagnosis is harder than execution, but leaders treat it as simpler.

We have frameworks for execution (Cynefin, Team Topologies, OKRs). We have languages for talking about change (ADKAR, Lean Change Management). We’re reasonably disciplined about implementation rigour.

But diagnosis? We often shorthand it.

“This looks like a complexity problem” (because it mentions emerging technology and distributed teams).

Rarely: “Let me genuinely test which turbulence condition is at play here, because identical symptoms require opposite interventions.”

That single-lever discipline—testing one diagnostic hypothesis at a time—is where most organisations fail before they even begin.

A Specific Example

Take an AI governance initiative we’ve seen repeatedly.

Surface symptom: Uncontrolled AI use creating compliance risk. Looks complex and requires a rapid response.

Cynefin response: Establish governance guardrails, define approved use cases, and build review processes.

Diagnosis check: But wait—is the problem that teams don’t understand the risks (Insecurity/Learning needed)? Or that they’re racing forward because leadership hasn’t clarified strategic priorities (Complexity/Clarity needed)? Or that risk-averse controls are being imposed without trust conversation (Insecurity/Empathy needed)?

Different diagnosis. Different lever. Different outcome.

Most initiatives stopped at “governance guardrails” without first testing the diagnosis.

Nine months later: governance frameworks in place, but adoption stalled, because the actual condition—unaddressed Insecurity—undermined the intervention.

What’s Worth Exploring in Your Organisation Right Now

Here are the diagnostic moves worth testing this quarter:

Are your “complexity” initiatives stalling? Pause. Diagnose whether the underlying condition is actually Insecurity. What would you learn if you asked your teams: “What clarity would help you move forward with confidence?” not “How would you run this experiment?”

Is your pace sustainable? You’re seeing signals of fatigue, cynicism, or disengagement. Not because change is hard, but because it feels directionless. That’s acute Anxiety. The Resilience lever isn’t about pace management—it’s about narrative coherence and visible progress toward something meaningful.

Are you building or burning psychological safety? This is the leading indicator. If your diagnostic interventions (regardless of which condition they address) are eroding team trust, the cost of Adaptation Debt is compounding. That’s worth course-correcting immediately, not in year two.

What would it look like to test one diagnosis with methodical discipline? Don’t stack five interventions simultaneously. Pick one turbulence condition you’re most confident about. Design one response lever. Test it rigorously. Learn. Adjust.

That’s the guardrail pair: Move with speed, but test one lever at a time. Speed never costs safety when you maintain diagnostic discipline.

The Updated Perspective

Nine months ago, I positioned CIRCA-CLEAR as a complementary upgrade to Cynefin.

Today, I’d sharpen that: CIRCA-CLEAR is what prevents the most common diagnostic error—confusing system dynamics with system type.

Cynefin asks: What kind of system am I in?

CIRCA asks: Why does it feel like this?

CLEAR asks: What kind of leader do I need to be?

But beneath all three is a more fundamental question: Did we validate the diagnosis before committing to the intervention?

That discipline—the willingness to pause, to genuinely diagnose, to resist shorthand—is what separates organisations that navigate turbulence from those that accumulate Adaptation Debt in the process.

Nine months of accelerated change have given us clear evidence: execution without diagnosis is expensive.

What Comes Next

I’m working through the implications of Adaptation Debt for a forthcoming piece—how to recognise when it’s building, what it costs, and how to avoid accumulating it through the next cycle of organisational change.

In the meantime, trust your diagnosis more than your instinct. Test it. Use it to scope your interventions. Let it guide what you don’t do, not just what you do.

The organisations that emerge from this period of turbulence intact won’t be the ones that moved fastest.

They’ll be the ones that diagnosed most accurately.

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What diagnostic errors have you seen in the last nine months? Where are organisations doubling down on interventions that aren’t landing? I’m actively learning from practitioners on the ground—reach out with what you’re observing.