Forthcoming book
Work, Governance, and Design in a Spiked World
Most books on the future of work assume the instability is temporary. This one argues it is the new baseline, and that organisations designed for stability are now structurally exposed.
Publication: October 2026
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Argument
Organisations are being asked to operate in a spiked world: faster, less predictable, more synthetic, more distributed, more exposed.
The old model assumed relative stability. The liquid organisation is designed for movement without losing judgment, trust, or accountability.
Thesis
Organisations, like organisms, survive by evolving. The environment does not negotiate. What worked in the last conditions is not what survives the next ones, and structures that cannot change are selected out, slowly enough that the leadership rarely sees it happening.
But evolution is not dissolution. Every species that endures carries a core it never trades away, and so does every organisation: the product, the purpose and the mission that made it viable in the first place. Lose that in the name of adaptation and there is nothing left to adapt.
The point is not to make organisations fluid for its own sake. It is to make them capable of evolving without losing the core, the heart that guaranteed survival in the first place.
Structure
Automation, complexity, distributed work, geopolitics and speed. The external conditions that have made older organisational designs too rigid for the world they now face.
Judgment, safety, energy, ethics and talent mobility. The human capabilities required when machines accelerate output but consequence remains human.
Liquidity principles
Working architecture
About the authors
Between us the argument covers transformation, governance, AI and work design on one side, and finance, capital discipline and sustainability on the other. That matters, because the book is not only about how organisations work. It is about how they fund, govern and sustain adaptation when the environment stops rewarding structures built for stability.
Group CFO of Physik Instrumente until founding the Advisory, with fifteen years at UBS across Zürich, Melbourne and Singapore before that, and COO roles at SIX Group and Climate Arc. Master's degrees from Cambridge and the Sorbonne, doctoral research at Antwerp on performance in dysfunctional ecosystems.
Works at the intersection of transformation, operating model, governance and AI. Previously VP and Senior Partner at IBM, VP Technology Strategy at TIAA and VP Governance at PNC and BNY Mellon. Board member at StrandSense AI, GAICD, MBA from the University of Pittsburgh.
Five ways to work with it
Enter wherever the case is already made. Nothing is wasted if you move up later, because every level reads your organisation through the same ten dimensions.
Read and reflect
The full argument in one volume, with the scenes, mechanisms and target states your leaders can recognise in their own organisation.
What it asks of you. Reading time. Nothing to organise.
Build shared language
The executive programme that turns the book into a working vocabulary and sends every participant home with a personal ninety day plan.
What it asks of you. Two days of leadership time, plus a light nomination process.
Find the rigidity
A structured read of where your organisation is brittle, on which dimensions, at which altitudes, and what liquid would look like instead.
What it asks of you. Access to people and data, a sponsor, and a small internal counterpart.
Design the change
The diagnosis converted into a designed, funded and measurable change programme that your own people can carry.
What it asks of you. A named programme owner, a steering forum, and committed budget.
Install and embed
Delivery alongside your teams until the new practice holds without us, with the tools taught to your own people as we go.
What it asks of you. Dedicated internal team, sustained sponsorship, and a multi-quarter horizon.
Runs alongside all five
A liquid operating model asks leaders to hold authority differently, and most have never been coached through that shift. Coaching sits beside every level, as a standalone engagement or as the personal counterpart to a structural change already under way.
Six or twelve sessions for a leader carrying a change personally.
For the executive owning a level 04 or 05 programme.
Action learning groups carrying the practice between sessions.
A keynote, an author conversation, or the two day programme. Tell me the audience and the question you want them to leave with.
Start a conversation