The career behind the framework

Financial services was the laboratory — NatWest, Bank of England, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Capital One and a series of engagements that gave me the pattern recognition that comes only from seeing the same organisation types under different pressures at different speeds.

Two moments from that period shaped everything that followed.

I identified a single redundant process step in a staff workflow at NatWest. When the fix was rolled out across 75,000 staff, the saving exceeded a million pounds. One step. The lesson: the most expensive problems in organisations are the ones nobody’s been asked to diagnose.

Decades later, as a Programme Lead at a 140,000-person firm, my team produced a 60-page monthly report. Suspecting the exercise was more performative than practical, I buried half a page of Lorem Ipsum on page 20 and hit send. No one noticed. That single report consumed seven days of effort every month — and mine was one of 500 active initiatives doing the exact same thing. Conservatively, 2,500 days of effort, costing over £1 million. Every month. On reports that no one was reading beyond the executive summary. Word spread.

I reduced it to a two-page summary. This isn’t just a story about wasted hours; it’s a diagnostic for the gap between visible activity and actual utility — the exact chasm where most transformation programmes disappear into.

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From delivery to diagnosis

The 2000s moved me from delivery into practice management and leading engagements with enterprise clients. Practice management widened the lens: running the business, building capability, and paying attention to whether an organisation was building the capacity to adapt, not just the capacity to execute.

In the mid-2000s I discovered that recovering troubled practices and programmes was rarely just a delivery problem. What made the difference was organisation-wide agility used strategically — not Agile as method, but agility as a way of removing the systemic impediments others were imposing on the work.

At CGI I managed the Microsoft practice across UK and Northern Europe — recovery and relationship management at scale, where the diagnostic question was whether the practice itself had the conditions to perform. The first major validation came at Capital One UK, where I served as Business Delivery Assurance Lead on a £100M flagship transformation programme: 60 concurrent projects, 1,200+ dependencies, three entirely different underlying conditions presenting identical surface symptoms. Applying condition-specific interventions across the portfolio produced £15M in cost reductions, a 33% improvement in delivery time on Agile business products, and £4.75M in benefit realisation through risk and compliance work. More importantly, it confirmed that the same diagnostic approach worked consistently across radically different project types within the same organisation. This wasn’t instinct. It was a replicable pattern.

In 2010 I joined services firm ATOS, leading a c£12.5M portfolio of concurrent business improvement projects for the Ministry of Justice. The central diagnostic challenge was distinguishing when the same surface symptoms — delivery delays, stakeholder friction, meetings that produced no decisions — indicated structurally incompatible mandates, unclear interdependencies, or broken trust between ATOS, the client, and suppliers. Each condition required a different intervention. Applying the same response to all three would have made at least two of them worse. This period became the empirical foundation of CIRCA-CLEAR — documenting which interventions worked for which conditions, why standard responses backfired, and how leading indicators could reveal turbulence weeks before traditional metrics showed any degradation.

In 2015 I recovered a troubled c£10M programme transforming a c£90–100M social care service at Staffordshire County Council — an organisation that had attempted the same transformation for six years using qualified practitioners and proven frameworks, and failed. The diagnostic challenge was three conditions operating simultaneously, each credibly explaining the failure, with interventions that directly contradicted each other. The sequencing mattered as much as the interventions: Contradictory conditions addressed first, Complex second, Insecure third. A new operational service was delivered in three months against a historical baseline of twelve to eighteen. £5.2M was financially recovered in nine months. Six years of prior failure; three months to first delivery. The only variable that changed was diagnostic precision and sequencing discipline.

At Royal Mail (2016–2018), leading a £20M portfolio across five major suppliers, the problem shifted from condition diagnosis to early signal detection. By the time a project appeared troubled in a traditional portfolio dashboard, the intervention cost had multiplied several times over. This is where ThroughFlow and Human Pulse were developed — paired leading indicators that detect turbulence two to six weeks before traditional metrics show degradation. Conditions are measurable before they are visible. That insight made the diagnostic framework operational rather than retrospective.

I co-founded the Business Agility Institute UK in 2019. When the direction diverged from that ambition, I stepped back, but the conversations it convened fed directly into CIRCA-CLEAR.

Concurrent fractional work at the RNLI during COVID proved the framework in a context as different from financial services as it’s possible to find: a volunteer-heavy charity absorbing a 60% funding drop while operational costs held fixed. Resilience and Learning levers applied to Rapid and Complex conditions produced a 50% reduction in delivery lead time and a 500% increase in velocity for one team moving from poor to high-performing. Different context. Same conditions. Same results.

My final employed role was at BJSS — joining their business consulting practice to bring genuine business agility to what had been a largely methodology-led offering. The first engagement was as Agility Lead on British Airways’ Nexus programme. I produced a written diagnostic at week four: conditions identified, symptoms mapped, treatments proposed. It was not acted on. The findings were set aside in favour of velocity surveillance. Seven months in, BJSS lost the contract. The replacement supplier subsequently encountered the same problems — because the conditions that caused them were never diagnosed. I was right on 90% of the predictions.

That experience added the sharpest insight in the pattern library: diagnostic precision is necessary but not sufficient. Organisational access to apply the diagnosis is the second requirement. The failure to diagnose before intervening isn’t always a practitioner error. Sometimes it’s a structural choice. And it has structural consequences.

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The intellectual lineage

CIRCA-CLEAR didn’t emerge from a single tradition. It emerged from forty years of testing ideas against conditions — and the framework’s architecture reflects which ideas survived that test.

The foundational logic — that context determines appropriate response — comes from the complexity thinking of Stacey and Snowden. The Stacey Matrix and Cynefin framework both established that identical interventions produce different outcomes depending on the nature of the problem. CIRCA-CLEAR applies that principle diagnostically: before choosing a method, name the condition.

Lean contributed the discipline of reading waste as a signal rather than an efficiency problem. Systems thinking contributed something more fundamental: the recognition that organisational behaviour emerges from structure, not from individual failure. People don’t underperform; conditions make underperformance likely. That distinction changes everything about where you intervene.

Agile and Design Thinking both shaped the framework’s orientation toward human experience as a leading indicator — not a soft concern, but the earliest signal of whether an organisation’s adaptive capacity is functioning or eroding.

Two books by Tom Peters — Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations (1993) and The Pursuit of WOW! (1994) — and a conversation with Peters around that period shifted something that formal methodology hadn’t: the idea that turbulence isn’t an aberration to be corrected but the permanent condition to be designed for. That reframe sits at the foundation of everything CIRCA-CLEAR does.

Ward Cunningham’s technical debt metaphor — introduced in 1992 — provided the language for what I’d been observing for a decade: that adaptive capacity erodes silently while organisations appear to function, compounding like financial debt until a crisis makes it visible. I’ve developed Adaptation Debt in dialogue with Cunningham directly.

Jim Highsmith wrote a piece directly inspired by that work. Matthew Skelton’s Team Topologies and Nigel Thurlow’s Flow System inform CIRCA-CLEAR’s thinking on cognitive load and flow. The difference is altitude: those frameworks answer “how should we work?” CIRCA-CLEAR answers the prior question — what condition are we in, and what’s blocking those frameworks from working?

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The practice today

I founded Influxion LLP in 2025. The practice is deliberately small — diagnostic work doesn’t scale through headcount, it scales through precision. Two hundred implementations, mostly solo or small teams. The blade gets sharper through use, not through scale.

Thriving in Turbulence was published in November 2025. Adaptation Debt — the prequel, written for the board-level leaders who commission recovery work — is in development.

The question I started with in 1984 is still the same question. The diagnostic precision has a forty-year head start.