Better Business Design
Designing organisations for sustainable performance.
“Better” in Better Business by Design means two things simultaneously. It means better-performing: able to deliver strategy reliably, adapt as conditions change, and sustain performance over the long term. And it means better for the world around it: creating value without degrading customers, communities, or natural systems. This isn’t ethics versus economics — it’s a design challenge. Long-term viability and generative purpose are the same problem, addressed together.
Five intellectual pillars for designing organisations.
Better Business Design
Designing organisations for sustainable performance.
These five pillars aren’t a methodology or a checklist. They’re lenses — distinctive ways of seeing and structuring organisations. Each is necessary, none sufficient alone. Most work with one or two. Few hold all five credibly.
“Better” in Better Business by Design means two things simultaneously. It means better-performing: able to deliver strategy reliably, adapt as conditions change, and sustain performance over the long term. And it means better for the world around it: creating value without degrading customers, communities, or natural systems. This isn’t ethics versus economics — it’s a design challenge. Long-term viability and generative purpose are the same problem, addressed together.
They underpin how I design for both performance and sustainability. Here I set them out in sequence, each treated fully: outside-in design, meaningful purpose and sustainable advantage, systems thinking, design-led approach, and time, pace, tempo.
Combined, they produce work that holds up in the real world — commercially, operationally, structurally, and systemically.
Five intellectual pillars for designing organisations.
These five pillars aren’t a methodology or a checklist. They’re lenses — distinctive ways of seeing and structuring organisations. Each is necessary, none sufficient alone. Most work with one or two. Few hold all five credibly.
They underpin how I design for both performance and sustainability. Here I set them out in sequence, each treated fully: outside-in design, meaningful purpose and sustainable advantage, systems thinking, design-led approach, and time, pace, tempo.
Combined, they produce work that holds up in the real world — commercially, operationally, structurally, and systemically.
Pillar 1 — Context first - then design
Most operating model work starts from the inside — the current structure, the current capabilities, the world the leadership team knows. The result is an organisation optimised for today's assumptions, or worse, yesterday's.
In a world of structural uncertainty, that's a design flaw, not a safe bet. Good business design starts from the outside. How does the organisation create and capture value — for customers, for stakeholders, in the environment that's emerging, not just the one that's familiar? What will that require in three years, not just today?
The structural choices — what to combine, separate, or connect - follow from those answers. They don't precede them.
Pillar 2 — Generative, not extractive
Meaningful purpose and sustainable advantage. Maximising short-term returns by extracting value from customers, suppliers, and natural systems is fragile — eventually, the system you rely on fails you.
The challenge is building advantage by strengthening the broader system. Sustainability becomes a design principle — embedded, not parallel. That means business models and supply chains that create value and reduce harm together.
Commercial viability and system health aren’t separate. The cases align; the challenge is making them operational, not rhetorical.
Pillar 3 — Everything is connected, most of it is underdesigned
Pillar 3 — Everything is connected, most of it is underdesigned
Organisations are complex systems, not machines. Machines have parts to optimise. Systems have relationships, feedback, and emergence. Interventions ripple beyond their initial aim.
The least-designed aspects are the connections: interfaces, dependencies, feedback loops — where one team’s rationality creates another’s constraint. A restructure that fails to account for system dynamics makes things worse, not better.
Systems thinking makes relationships visible, nameable, and designable. Complex systems resist reduction; good design works with, not against, that complexity.
Pillar 4 — Design thinking
Most executives are trained to analyse, decide, then act — in that order. The problems I work on don't respond well to that sequence. They're too interconnected, too ambiguous, and too consequential for straight-line thinking.
Design thinking works differently. It explores before it decides. It holds multiple possibilities open. It builds understanding through the act of designing — iteratively, visually, and non-linearly. The process feels squiggly, and for many leaders that's uncomfortable.
My role is to guide teams through that discomfort — and to show that the squiggle is what produces genuine clarity, not premature certainty.
Ready to paste. What do you want to work on next?
Pillar 5 — Time, pace, and tempo
Organisations run at multiple speeds. The design challenge isn't "go faster" — it's building structural capacity to operate at different tempos across different domains, and to change gear when conditions shift. Innovation needs speed. Assurance needs deliberation. Infrastructure needs patience.
When these collide — fast teams blocked by slow governance, slow functions battered by artificial urgency — the result is what I call temporal incoherence. It's one of the most common and least diagnosed sources of strategic underperformance.
Requisite Pace is my framework for diagnosing and designing the temporal structure of organisations — making the misalignment visible before it becomes a crisis.