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 kept surfacing in reader messages:
“I wish I’d found this two years ago.” Transformation leaders who’d cycled through frameworks, each one promising what the last one failed to deliver. They weren’t looking for another methodology. They were looking for an explanation of why the previous ones hadn’t worked.
“The misdiagnosis chapter hit hard.” The section explaining why identical symptoms require opposite interventions — why the velocity drop that needs psychological safety gets treated with WIP limits, why the priority conflict that needs forced ranking gets another alignment workshop — resonated more than anything else.
“Can I get this in paperback?” Enough requests that I couldn’t ignore the pattern. Digital works for searching and highlighting. Physical works for thinking and returning.
What I Learned From My Own Framework
Here’s the uncomfortable part: I made the classic error I warn against in Chapter 3.
In the subtitle, I described the mechanism instead of naming the pain.
“Diagnose conditions. Apply the right lever. Build capability.” explains what the book does. It reads like a table of contents. It assumes the reader already understands their problem well enough to recognise the solution.
But the readers who needed this book most didn’t know they had a diagnosis problem. They thought they had an execution problem. A framework problem. A people problem.
The subtitle needed to name what they felt, not explain what they’d learn.
The New Subtitle
Thriving in Turbulence: The Misdiagnosis Stalling Your Transformation
Six words. Every one earns its place.
“Misdiagnosis” — because that’s the actual pattern. Organisations don’t lack interventions. They apply the wrong intervention to the actual condition. Then blame the framework. Or worse, their people.
“Stalling” — because that’s the recognisable symptom. Not failing dramatically. Not collapsing. Stalling. The quarterly fire drills. The escalation spirals. The 35-40% of leadership capacity lost to firefighting.
“Your Transformation” — because it’s personal. Not transformations in general. The one keeping you awake. The one your reputation is attached to.
Why Paperback, Why Now
Digital-first made sense for iteration. Leanpub let me refine based on early feedback. Kindle provided reach. But something happens when practitioners work with physical books.
They annotate differently. They return to sections without searching. They leave the book on their desk as a visible commitment to try something different on Monday.
Several readers told me they’d printed sections from the ebook to mark up. That’s a signal. When people print digital content, they’re telling you the format isn’t serving how they actually work.
The paperback isn’t a prestige format. It’s a usability decision.
What’s Actually In the Book
The core meta-framework hasn’t changed. CIRCA-CLEAR remains what it was: a diagnostic system that bridges the gap between sensing something’s wrong and knowing what to do about it.
CIRCA diagnoses the condition driving friction — Complex, Insecure, Rapid, Contradictory, or Anxious. Five patterns that account for most organisational turbulence.
CLEAR matches the response — Clarity, Learning, Empathy, Agility, or Resilience. One lever at a time. Reversible experiments. Evidence before commitment.
The discipline is simple: five minutes to diagnose, two weeks to prove, built-in rollback triggers if you get it wrong.
What’s different about this approach? Your existing frameworks stay — OKRs, SAFe, Team Topologies, ADKAR, Lean Change Management, and others. They just start working as intended. CIRCA-CLEAR isn’t competing for airtime. It’s the diagnostic layer that makes everything else deliver.
CIRCA-CLEAR isn’t competing for airtime. It’s the diagnostic layer that makes everything else deliver; it replaces “try everything and hope” with “match the condition, apply the lever.”
The Pattern I Keep Seeing
Thirty years recovering stalled transformations taught me one thing: organisations rarely lack capability. They lack diagnosis. This pattern held across technology, operations, product, and business model change.
The paralysis that needs small wins gets bigger business cases. The priority conflict that needs forced ranking gets another alignment workshop. The fear-driven silence that needs psychological safety gets more surveys.
Apply the wrong lever and you make things worse. Most organisations do exactly that — then blame the framework, or in some cases, their people.
This book exists because that pattern is fixable. Not with another framework. With better diagnosis.
Who This Is For
CxOs tired of being the escalation endpoint for every stalled initiative. You don’t need more frameworks. You need teams that diagnose their own conditions and choose their own responses.
Transformation leaders who need teams that adapt without constant intervention. The playbook here is testable, replicable, and designed to build capability rather than dependency.
Consultants and coaches building client capability rather than billing models. CIRCA-CLEAR isn’t intellectual property you license. It’s a thinking tool you use.
The Outcomes
This isn’t theory. It’s what survived when theory met real-world turbulence.
Drawing from 200+ implementations across ATOS, Barclays, Bank of England, Capital One, CGI, and others. Documented outcomes including a 6-year stalled programme recovered in 3 months, a loss-making consulting business returned to £5M profit in 12 months, £15M+ cost reductions, and 75% time compression.
The meta-framework works. The question is whether you’re ready to try something different.
The Call
The paperback is available now on Amazon.
If your transformation is stalled — if you’re cycling through the same fire drills, watching your best people quietly disengage, losing 35-40% of leadership capacity to firefighting — this book won’t give you another framework.
It will help you spot the misdiagnosis that’s keeping you stuck.
Spot the misdiagnosis. Unblock your transformation.
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