Thriving in Turbulence is live on Amazon. Here’s the diagnostic system behind it. Monday morning. Your transformation is three months in. Everyone’s working harder than ever. Standups happen. Retrospectives are religious. You’ve got OKRs, Kanban boards, and detailed roadmaps. Yet delivery is slowing. Dependencies multiply. Your best people look exhausted. Stakeholders escalate to your boss. … Read more
Why DSO might be the right destination reached by the wrong path BOTTOM LINE Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership isn’t wrong. The diagnostic sequence is. Harvard Business School is already writing the case study. The question they’re examining: “Could fewer bosses truly drive innovation, or was this an unsustainable gamble?” CIRCA-CLEAR suggests a different question: Is … Read more
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
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
In hundreds of organizations I’ve worked with over the past two decades, one pattern repeats itself: well-intentioned efforts to implement agility often fail—not because teams aren’t trying, but because the underlying problem is misdiagnosed. I’ve seen this both as a leader of initiatives and as an expert recovery practitioner, repeatedly drafted in to turn around … Read more