Lisa Woodall’s Whatever Next? arrives with quiet assurance—neither a manifesto nor a mashup of management platitudes, but instead a subtle interrogation of why transformation in organisations so often fails to endure. The prose is judicious, even gentle, yet carries the weight of hard-won insight, a tone reminiscent of leaders who have lived through more disappointments than victories.
The five lenses—Reflect, Reimagine, Reframe, Rewire, Reconnect—are presented not as serial prescriptions, but as recurring stances, urging readers to return again and again to their most elusive work. Each lens acts as a vantage point from which to see the fragility of progress and the resilience that is possible if we choose to notice what’s really happening.
When transformation efforts falter, it is seldom because of poor timing or lack of budget. More often it is because we have failed to notice the human undercurrents eroding belief: the silences that settle into meetings, the reluctance to speak truth to power, the quiet withdrawal of energy. Woodall elevates those moments into the centre of the conversation.
If this review has a quibble, it might be that Whatever Next? resists the comfort of neat diagrams and refuses the siren call of bullet-point frameworks. For some readers, that will frustrate. Yet, perhaps in our frantic age, that is precisely what we need. A book that asks us to pause, to dwell, and in that pause to discover what truly holds organisations together.
