Diagnostic Triage

Smooth Ice Makes Stones Stick: What Curling Reveals About Organisational Friction

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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

Diagnosing My Own Misdiagnosis

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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

Beyond Cynefin: Nine Months Later—What We’ve Learned

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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

When “Be Resilient” Isn’t Enough: Three Cases That Expose the BANI Gap

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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

From Weather Report to Navigation System

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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

BANI Is Right. It’s Also Not Enough.

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Kevin Kruse’s recent Forbes piece declares VUCA dead. BANI is the new lens. He’s not wrong. Kruse articulates it sharply: VUCA assumed volatility had rhythm, uncertainty could be waited out, and complexity followed patterns. Those assumptions no longer hold. Today’s systems are brittle, anxiety is endemic, outcomes are nonlinear, and comprehensibility feels impossible. The diagnosis … Read more