About me – NEIL WALKER

I’m the person organisations call when transformation stalls..

Not by design. I started as a practitioner solving operational problems. But four decades navigating enterprise turbulence taught me a fundamental truth: the hardest challenges aren’t technical—they’re pattern recognition under pressure.

The pattern recognition started early. In the early 1990s, I was one of a handful chosen from 70,000 NatWest Bank employees to explore lightweight software development—a full decade before the Agile Manifesto existed. We didn’t have a name for what we were doing. We just noticed that smaller batches, faster feedback, and trust produced better outcomes than heavyweight planning and control.

That noticing became a career.

The patterns kept recurring. From architectural troubleshooting at the Bank of England, JP Morgan, and UBS, to recovering sprawling programmes at Barclays, CGI, and across UK Government, to coaching startups through scaling walls—the same turbulence patterns appeared regardless of sector, size, or methodology.

Teams drowning in work whilst nothing finished. Leaders paralysed by competing priorities. Organisations frozen by fear despite having all the information they needed. Trust so eroded that problems hid until they became crises.

I saw these patterns hundreds of times. I saw frameworks applied that made them worse. And I started documenting what actually worked.

CIRCA-CLEAR emerged from that documentation. Not invented in a workshop or in academia, but uncovered through 200+ implementations across banking, government, retail, healthcare, and technology. Five turbulence conditions (Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, Anxious). Five matched response levers (Clarity, Learning, Empathy, Agility, Resilience). Simple to describe. Difficult to apply without diagnostic discipline.

The framework doesn’t replace your existing tools. It tells you why they’re not working. And crucially, which lever to pull when they stall.

The outcomes are documented. £15M cost reductions delivered in six months. 75% time compressions on complex deliverables. Programmes unstuck in weeks that had been stalled for months. Not because I’m exceptional, because accurate diagnosis makes simple interventions work.

I wrote the book on it. Thriving in Turbulence captures three decades of pattern recognition in a form teams can apply without me in the room. The goal isn’t consultant dependency. It’s distributed capability, organisations that navigate turbulence faster than competitors because the pattern recognition lives in their teams, not in external experts.

I co-founded the Business Agility Institute in the UK. I’ve worked with thousands of leaders across continents. I still take on troubled transformations when the pattern is interesting enough.

Outside of work, I ride a Halfbike, a stand-up, pedal-powered, body steered “bike” that requires balance, constant adaptation, and a willingness to look slightly ridiculous. It turns heads and sparks conversations. More importantly, it reminds me to stay present, experiment often, and notice what’s actually happening rather than what I expect to see.

That noticing is the whole game. Turbulence doesn’t announce itself. Patterns emerge before metrics catch up. The skill is seeing them early enough to act—and knowing which lever actually fits the condition.

I live in Staffordshire, England, where I walk my labradors in the Peak District and use the quiet time to notice emerging patterns.

If your transformation has stalled and the usual fixes aren’t working, we should talk.

Neil