My Journey with Adaptive Thinking

01

It Started With a Question

Looking back at my career, many of the situations I found most interesting had one thing in common: they required a decision. Sometimes financial. Sometimes operational. Sometimes related to systems, people or change.

Like most managers, I naturally focused on making those decisions better. Better data. Better analysis. Better tools. Over time, however, I began to wonder whether the decision itself was really the right place to start.

A decision can be perfectly rational based on the available information and still lead to the wrong outcome. The analysis may be sound. Each function may act reasonably within its own boundaries. Yet the organisation as a whole may become less coherent.

What if better decisions begin not with more analysis, but with seeing the situation more clearly?

That question shifted my attention from the quality of a decision to the quality of the thinking that precedes it. There was no framework at that point. I was simply becoming more interested in the questions that came before the answer.

02

The Problem Was Larger Than the Project

The same pattern kept returning. A project could meet its milestones while the surrounding organisation remained unable to use what had been delivered. A system could work technically while decisions, incentives and ownership remained disconnected.

I saw this in finance, operations, technology, mobility and integration work across different countries. The visible issue changed, but the deeper problem often did not.

Organisations are managed vertically. Value, risk and consequences move horizontally.

Every function had an owner. The relationships between functions often did not. Before designing change, the organisation first needed to understand the reality it was changing.

03

Preparing the Ground

Only later did I recognise that several questions I kept returning to were not steps in analysis. They were conditions that had to exist before meaningful analysis could begin.

These ideas became Preparing the Ground. They determine whether the organisation can examine reality honestly enough for the real work to begin.

04

Why a Spiral

We often describe learning as a cycle. We act, observe, reflect and try again. But after a meaningful intervention, we do not return to the same starting point. Reality has changed. People know different things. Relationships may have shifted.

Learning does not simply improve the next answer. It changes the point from which we ask the next question.

The Spiral begins with reality, opens the situation to different perspectives, reveals relationships and builds system understanding. The organisation designs a response and observes the new reality created by action. That new reality becomes the starting point for the next turn.

05

When the Pieces Started to Connect

A practical challenge in electrification made this way of thinking tangible. Vehicles, energy, charging infrastructure, financing and data had traditionally been managed as separate domains. Increasingly, the economics of each depended on decisions made in the others.

What changes when we stop optimising individual components and start looking at the outcome they create together?

The most important thing EMaaS gave me was not another mobility model. It was a different way of seeing the problem. The value was often not inside the components. It was in the relationships between them.

Once I began looking for those relationships, I saw them elsewhere: in treasury, working capital, production, technology and transformation. Different contexts revealed the same possibility. Value often sits in flows and relationships that the organisational structure makes difficult to see.

06

Connected Was Not Enough

Businesses were already connected. Capital, operations, customers, technology, energy and data influenced one another whether the organisation managed them together or not.

Connected is the reality. Adaptive is the capability.

Preparing the Ground created the conditions for inquiry. The Adaptive Spiral described how understanding could evolve through action. Perspectives such as EMaaS and the Connected Enterprise showed how the same logic could reveal value in different systems.

But something was still missing. Principles and process did not explain who would protect coherence when the inquiry crossed functional boundaries.

07

The Integrating Mandate

Complex organisations rarely connect themselves. Each function carries legitimate responsibilities, targets and expertise. The method therefore required an integrating mandate that could work across those boundaries.

Without an integrating role, the foundations remain principles and the Spiral remains a diagram.

I began describing this role as the Business System Architect. The role prepares the conditions for honest inquiry, connects partial perspectives, mobilises a coherent response and transfers the capability into the organisation.

The Business System Architect does not replace executive accountability, specialist expertise or operational ownership. The role protects the relationships between them and keeps the whole system visible while decisions remain with named human owners.

08

AI as an Intellectual Mirror

AI entered this journey in a way I did not initially expect. At first, I treated it mainly as a tool that could analyse information, structure ideas and accelerate work. Over time, I noticed that its more important contribution was cognitive.

AI was not giving me the answers. It was helping me hear my own questions more clearly.

Today I see AI as cognitive support across the entire Adaptive Spiral. It can detect more signals, expand perspectives, reveal possible relationships, challenge explanations, compare responses and preserve the reasoning behind decisions.

AI-generated coherence is not verified truth. Synthetic perspectives are hypotheses, not substitutes for real people. More information creates value only when attention is protected from noise.

AI expands what the organisation can see. Human judgement determines what matters and what should be done.

09

When Thinking Becomes a Habit

One evening, while watching a film, I found myself noticing a familiar pattern. Individual decisions that made sense on their own were creating an outcome that made much less sense as a whole.

I had not consciously applied a framework. The question appeared almost automatically: what if rational decisions can create an irrational organisation?

Adaptive Thinking was changing not only how I analysed problems, but what I noticed.

This is where the method now needs to grow: through application. Each business case can test the architecture, expose its limits and make the next turn of the Spiral more informed.

10

Looking Back from a Different Point

None of this followed a plan. I did not begin with Adaptive Thinking and search for situations where it could be applied. The method emerged in the opposite direction.

A question about better decisions drew my attention to the thinking that preceded them. Learning made the spiral meaningful. Mobility revealed the importance of relationships. Earlier experiences gained a different meaning. The need for an integrating mandate became visible. AI extended the scale and continuity of inquiry.

The journey itself resembles the Spiral.

Each observation changed the perspective from which I approached the next question. There was never a return to the starting point.