Here’s something most people don’t know about curling: if the ice were perfectly smooth, the stone wouldn’t glide. It would stop dead. A curling stone has a concave bottom. Place it on a flat, polished surface and it creates a vacuum — a suction effect that kills all momentum. A 20kg granite stone, going nowhere. … Read more
Twelve weeks ago, I released Thriving in Turbulence on Leanpub and Kindle. The subtitle read: “Diagnose conditions. Apply the right lever. Build capability.” Accurate. Structural. Forgettable. The book sold. Readers engaged. Feedback arrived. And somewhere in that feedback loop, a pattern emerged that I should have spotted earlier. The Feedback That Changed Everything Three themes … Read more
Originally written in 2023, never published, see Note below. I was sitting in a room with about forty people. A large organisation, several hundred developers across multiple teams, running a Scrum of Scrums-style event to surface their biggest impediments. The usual suspects came up — dependencies, unclear requirements, technical debt. But the issue that kept … Read more
Two days ago at Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister delivered a blunt diagnosis. The “rules-based international order” is over. It’s now a “pleasant fiction.” Middle powers can no longer assume the old architecture will hold. “If you are not at the table,” he warned, “you are on the menu.” His prescription: stop relying on what worked … Read more
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 … Read more
The question isn’t whether you’re changing. It’s whether you’re changing fast enough. The manuscript hit 150,000 words before I stopped counting. Too big. A motivated leader doesn’t have time for a 600-page read. They need something they can finish in a single sitting and apply on Monday. So I cut it. Ruthlessly. Down to around … Read more