Neil Walker Why Bayer’s DSO transformation deserves its own series BOTTOM LINE When writing Thriving in Turbulence, I had to make difficult cuts. Some material was redundant. Some was tangential. But some was too current, too unfolding, too significant to compress into a paragraph—yet too valuable to discard. Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership experiment fell into the third … Read more
Pattern Recognition Across Contexts Thirty years troubleshooting transformations teaches you something valuable: the best explanations come from outside the problem domain. When banking executives struggle with trust deficits, I don’t reference other banks. I talk about bungy jumping. When government teams face decision paralysis, I describe hotel operations from my parents’ business. When retail leaders … Read more
In preparing for the Agile Business Consortium‘s recent Professional Masterclass, I found myself pondering the key case study. Months prior, I’d committed to a bold session title: ‘Decode the Chaos: A Masterclass in Leading with the CIRCA–CLEAR Framework.’ The workshop promise was significant: to equip leaders with the insight to diagnose systemic challenges and shift … Read more
How CIRCA-CLEAR Transforms Lean Six Sigma Into Human-Centered Excellence What if the most powerful improvement methodology in the world has been operating with one hand tied behind its back? For decades, Lean Six Sigma has dominated the organizational improvement landscape, delivering quantifiable results through its rigorous DMAIC methodology. Companies worldwide have achieved billions in savings … Read more
VUCA is dead. Long live BANI. Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares the shift complete. Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework – Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible – better captures the fractured reality leaders face. Kruse is right. VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm. It doesn’t anymore. But here’s what the VUCA-to-BANI conversation keeps missing: we’ve upgraded the weather … Read more
Work moves only between recurring sessions. Actions picked up right before the meeting, clarified during it, stalled until the next slot. Calendar inertia, not flow. Why this matters: Classic Lean waste: delays, over-processing, rework, bloated WIP. Decisions depend on people who may or may not attend. Leadership capacity burns on synchronisation rather than value. We’ve … Read more