When you pick up a book about transformation, it can feel like stepping into a dense forest. So many frameworks, models, and success stories jostle for attention. The challenge isn’t just understanding the theories—it’s figuring out how to apply them in the messy, human reality of your own work.
Whatever Next? was written with that reality firmly in mind. It doesn’t pretend that transformation is straightforward or that there’s a single path that works for everyone. Instead, it offers a series of lenses—ways of seeing—that help you notice what’s really happening, both in your organisation and in yourself.
What you’ll find here
Inside the book you’ll find a blend of lived experience, practical tools, and thought-provoking stories. It draws on decades of work across architecture, change, design, and leadership, but it is not a playbook. Instead, it invites you to reflect, to connect, and to experiment.
You’ll discover five core lenses:
- Reflect – pausing to understand where you are and how you got here.
- Reimagine – opening up new possibilities, collectively shaping what the future could look like.
- Reframe – shifting perspectives, questioning assumptions, and finding better ways of seeing old problems.
- Rewire – putting the right structures, systems, and practices in place to make progress real.
- Reconnect – ensuring the human side isn’t forgotten, nurturing trust, relationships, and meaning.
These lenses are not sequential steps. They are points of focus, ways of paying attention that can be revisited again and again. Transformation is never linear—it’s cyclical, iterative, and deeply human.
Rather than handing you a checklist, Whatever Next? shares stories and provocations that will resonate differently depending on your role and your moment. A portfolio lead might hear echoes in the tension between strategy and delivery. A designer might see their practice reflected in the call to reconnect. An architect might find energy in reframing entrenched ways of working.
Where to start
So, where should you begin?
That’s the question many readers ask, especially if they’re used to books that prescribe “Start here, then do this.” But transformation rarely works that way. The best starting point is where your energy—and your organisation’s energy—currently lies.
If you’re wrestling with broken processes and clunky systems, the Rewire lens may speak loudest.
If you sense people are weary and disconnected, perhaps Reconnect is the most urgent.
If your future vision feels unclear or fragmented, Reimagine will open new space.
If you’re overwhelmed by complexity, take time in Reflect.
And if you feel stuck in familiar patterns, Reframe might unlock something new.
In practice, you may find yourself circling between them. Reflection sparks reimagination. Rewiring surfaces the need to reconnect. Reframing shifts how you reflect. That’s the cycle—and the momentum—that keeps transformation alive.
An invitation
This book is for leaders, architects, change makers, designers—anyone trying to make transformation more human and more honest. It doesn’t promise easy answers. Instead, it offers companionship, perspective, and provocation for the journey you’re already on.
So, as you turn the pages, notice what resonates. Follow the stories that make you pause. Revisit the questions that stick. And most of all, ask yourself: Whatever next?
