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
Work moves only between recurring sessions. Actions picked up right before the meeting, clarified during it, stalled until the next slot. Calendar inertia, not flow. Why this matters: Classic Lean waste: delays, over-processing, rework, bloated WIP. Decisions depend on people who may or may not attend. Leadership capacity burns on synchronisation rather than value. We’ve … Read more
In 2007, David Snowden and Mary Boone published a groundbreaking article in Harvard Business Review titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.” It introduced the Cynefin framework to a wider audience—offering a way to categorise different types of problems and match them with the right decision-making approach. It was a timely gift. The world was … Read more