Published Work & Thinking
Resources
Books, articles, perspectives, and events — thirty years of practice, fifteen years of public thinking.
Books
Explore my library to keep learning
Written for senior leaders mid-crisis, not for academics. The case material is real, the conclusions are earned from 200+ diagnostic engagements.
Published November 2025
Thriving in Turbulence
The Misdiagnosis Stalling Your Transformation
Most transformation failures aren’t execution problems. They’re misdiagnosis. Organisations apply the wrong intervention to a misread condition, and then apply it harder when it doesn’t work. The diagnostic system for leaders who’ve tried the standard approaches and are looking for something grounded in why transformations actually stall.
Foreword by Giles Lindsay, author of Clearly Agile and The Adaptive Leader. Named in the PMI Agile Alliance Manifesto for Enterprise Agility.
Kindle £9.99 · Paperback £19.99
“Neil’s concepts and insights are still making a difference here over a year after we finished working together.”
Jan Otterbach
Head of Transformation & Agility, Elavon Europe
“A framework that cuts through the noise and focuses on what actually matters — getting the diagnosis right before reaching for a solution.”
Giles Lindsay
Foreword author, CEO at Adeo Group
In Development — Book 0
Adaptation Debt
The Invisible Liability Compounding Beneath Your Organisation
The prequel to Thriving in Turbulence. Written for CxOs and board-level leaders — the people who commission recovery work rather than deliver it. Makes the case for why the change management industry has operated without diagnostic triage for thirty years, and what it costs organisations running on borrowed adaptive capacity.
Written in collaboration with Ward Cunningham, who introduced the technical debt metaphor in 1992. Adaptation Debt extends that metaphor to the organisational altitude: the invisible liability that accumulates when organisations defer the adaptive work their environment demands of them.
Follow the development on Substack →Other published work
Gower Handbook of People in Project Management — co-authored chapter on key relationships in project environments. Published by Gower, the definitive reference on people-side project management.
PMI Agile Alliance Manifesto for Enterprise Agility — named contributor, recognising the CIRCA-CLEAR framework and Adaptation Debt concept as contributions to enterprise agility thinking, endorsed by Pierre Le Manh, CEO of PMI.
Perspectives
No-nonsense insights for leaders
Short-form pattern recognition, diagnostic observations, and practitioner commentary — published three times a week on LinkedIn. The kind of insight that earns its place in two minutes or not at all.
Topics follow the six content pillars: Transformation Recovery, Adaptation Debt, Diagnostic Triage, Frameworks Carry Conditions of Origin, Capacity Before Strategy, and Pattern Recognition Boot Room Briefings.
Follow on LinkedIn →What to expect
- Pattern recognition applied to what’s happening now
- Diagnostic reframes of common transformation failures
- Boot room briefings — practitioner-level, no preamble
- Three posts per week — Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
Articles
In-depth insights to help your transformation
Long-form thinking on transformation recovery, adaptation debt, and the diagnostic patterns emerging from current engagements — published on Substack since November 2025.
The Substack carries post-publication thinking, including the ongoing development of Adaptation Debt and the Project Fallacy series — challenging project-as-default as the dominant transformation model.
Read on Substack →Recent series
- The Project Fallacy — why project-as-default stalls transformation
- Adaptation Debt — the development of Book 0
- Diagnostic Triage — applying CIRCA to current patterns
- Four articles per month
Blog Archive
Expert advice — the intellectual origin story
Over 200 posts from 2010 to 2025, documenting the development of CIRCA-CLEAR and the thinking behind Thriving in Turbulence. The evolution from Agile practice to diagnostic recovery methodology, published in real time.
Most consulting methodology arrives fully formed, without a documented intellectual history. The archive is the record of how CIRCA-CLEAR developed — what evidence shaped it, what the framework was trying to solve when it was still being named. Fifteen years of public thinking, not a retrospective reconstruction.
For practitioners interested in the methodology, this is the extended working. For leaders doing due diligence, it’s evidence that the framework wasn’t invented for the book.
Browse the archive →Live Events
The latest in business and transformation
Speaking engagements, workshops, and events where I’m presenting or participating. If you’re organising an event and want to discuss a keynote or workshop, the Working With Me page has details of what I cover.
Sergio Seelocahan’s Event
April 2026 · Details to be confirmed
Speaking on transformation recovery and diagnostic precision. Sergio’s work explores organisational hierarchy, power structures, and structural gravity — overlapping territory with the CIRCA-CLEAR conditions and what makes adaptive work structurally deferred.
Speaking availability
Available for keynotes, panel sessions, and workshops on transformation recovery, diagnostic triage, adaptation debt, and the conditions that cause change programmes to stall. Topics calibrated to your audience — from executive teams to practitioner conferences.
Enquire about speaking →Start with a conversation
If the thinking resonates, the next step is a diagnostic conversation
30 minutes is enough to establish whether your pattern is recognisable and whether what I do is a fit for what you’re facing.
Book a 30-minute conversation →