Writing, research, and ideas.
Practitioners should contribute to the intellectual development of their discipline, not just consume it.
This is where I share research in progress, published work, and emerging thinking on how organisations create value, adapt to change, and remain effective over time.
Much of my work sits at the intersection of operating model design, organisation design, technology, sustainability and systems thinking. Increasingly, I find myself returning to a common question:
How should organisations be designed to adapt at the pace their environment requires?
Time for Organisation Design.
Organisation design has built a rich discipline around structure: roles, reporting lines, governance, operating models, accountabilities and capabilities.
Yet many organisational failures are not fundamentally structural.
Markets move faster than decisions. AI accelerates work faster than review and governance can absorb it. Sustainability demands longer horizons than financial cycles encourage. Strategy changes faster than organisations can reconfigure around it.
The result is familiar: capable people working hard inside systems that struggle to adapt.
Organisation design has always been better at structure than timing because structure is easier to see. You can draw a reporting line, map a process, or assign an accountability. Time is harder. It lives in the relationships between parts of the system, in the rhythms of decisions, learning, investment and change.
The discipline built many of its tools around what it could hold still.
The question I am exploring is whether organisation design needs a stronger theory of time.
I've written about how this thinking came together, and why these threads turned out to be one question, in The Territory I Find Myself Exploring.
This work currently centres on several connected ideas:
Requisite Pace — how quickly different parts of an organisation need to sense, decide, act and adapt.
Coupling — how timing mismatches between interdependent activities create delay, overload and fragility.
Value Cycles — the recurring cycles through which organisations create, deliver, capture and renew value.
Pace Debt — the accumulated cost of temporal misalignment, often visible as management overload, decision delays, transformation fatigue and declining adaptability.
This is work in progress rather than a finished framework. The purpose is practical: to help leaders understand a class of organisational problems that are often diagnosed as culture, capability or execution issues, but may actually be problems of timing and design.
Current writing and research.
Requisite Pace: designing organisations that can change gear.
Why do organisations that invest heavily in transformation still become slower, more brittle and harder to change?
One answer is that different parts of the organisation are running at different speeds, and nobody has designed how those speeds fit together.
Requisite Pace explores how organisations can create value at the right speed, across multiple speeds, and change those arrangements before circumstances force them to.
The work is currently being developed through writing, diagnostics, case analysis and practical experimentation.
Research in progress
AI and the Operating Model.
Most discussion of AI focuses on productivity.
The more interesting question is what AI does to the way organisations already work.
AI has changed two things simultaneously.
First, it has accelerated the production of first-pass work while leaving many review, governance, funding and decision processes operating at their previous cadence.
Second, it has dramatically expanded what organisations can attempt. The bottleneck increasingly shifts from producing work to evaluating, prioritising and governing it.
This series explores the implications for operating models, management, teams and organisational design.
Writing in progress
Operating Models and Business Design.
Operating Models and Business Design.
Much of my earlier work focused on helping organisations align strategy, operations and organisation.
This includes the development of the Operating Model Canvas with Andrew Campbell and Mikel Gutierrez, and subsequent work on value chain design, customer value propositions, organisational alignment and business transformation.
Current areas of interest include:
Value chain mapping and organisation design
Designing for multiple customer value propositions
Operating models for innovation and adaptation
The relationship between value creation and organisational structure
The transition to a more sustainable economy is not simply a technology challenge or a reporting challenge.
It is a design challenge.
Many organisations are trying to reconcile short-term commercial cycles with longer-term environmental, social and systemic realities. This creates tensions between competing time horizons, incentives and value systems.
My work in this area explores circular business models, systems change, sustainable enterprise and the organisational implications of long-term value creation.
The most interesting work often starts with questions rather than answers.
Some of the questions I am currently exploring include:
Where does temporal design genuinely extend organisation design, and where is it simply better organisation design?
Can pace debt be measured, or only recognised?
What does an organisation deliberately designed around multiple speeds actually look like?
How should governance change when technology accelerates parts of the system?
Are hierarchy and management partly mechanisms for separating different tempo bands?
How do organisations balance short-term performance cycles with longer-term value cycles?
If any of these questions resonate with your work, I would be interested in hearing from you.
The Operating Model Canvas.
Co-authored with Andrew Campbell and Mikel Gutierrez, developed from the Hult Ashridge Designing Operating Models programme. A practical framework for translating strategy into operating model design — used by thousands of practitioners and taught in executive education programmes globally.
Circular Business Model Design Guide.
Developed as an Ellen MacArthur Foundation collaborative project, whilst at PA Consulting, with The University of Exeter's Circular Economy Research Centre. A practical playbook to help business leaders identify circular opportunities and design business models that create, deliver and capture value.
Nature for Boards: A Primer.
Co-authored whilst at Korn Ferry with Chapter Zero and Pollination. Practical Board-level guidance on nature-related risks, dependencies, and governance — helping Non-Executive Directors navigate one of the fastest-moving areas of corporate responsibility.
Framework for Breakthrough Impact on the SDGs through Innovation.
Framework for Breakthrough Impact on the SDGs through Innovation.
Developed between the UN Global Compact, Volans and PA Consulting, and launched at the Web Summit in 2019. Provides practical guidance to companies on how to use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an inspiration for innovation and orient their innovation processes to better address the SDGs.
Leading for Impact.
Developed with Korn Ferry Institute and launched for COP28. Thought Leadership paper on solving the 'profit vs planet' dilemma by reinventing leadership.
© 2026 Better Business Design Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved.
© 2026 Better Business Design Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved.