CIRCA model

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

Why Thriving in Turbulence Lost Half Its Words — And Where They Went

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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

When Design Excellence Isn’t Enough

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Your work spans three spaces—doing deep design, leading design teams, and amplifying design thinking. But they all collide on the same problem: the system around you is becoming more turbulent, not less capable. You’re being asked to hold outcomes steady while the organisation becomes more political, more interdependent, more contradictory. Priorities that contradict each other … Read more

The Human Pulse Signals Published Metrics Can’t Capture

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What 15 years of ground-level observation reveals about DSO’s real trajectory BOTTOM LINE Published metrics tell one story. Ground-level observation tells another. I’ve watched Bayer’s evolution for over 15 years—close enough to see patterns that analyst reports miss. The signals that predict transformation success or failure aren’t in quarterly earnings. They’re in who stays, who … Read more