From Design to Delivery Drag: A Founder’s Story

I didn’t start my career in M&A. I started it on the factory floor of product, design, and engineering teams. For years, I was the one trying to make the work move inside systems that seemed designed to slow it down.

My last corporate role was leading a large, multi-disciplinary team through a major transformation. On paper, we had everything: a clear mandate, executive support, and a talented team. But six months in, the work was stalling. Decisions cycled. Frustration was high. The organisation looked productive from the outside but was quietly breaking people on the inside.

Like most leaders, I thought it was my job to fix it. I tried to shield the team, absorb the pressure, and force the work through. And eventually, I crashed.

The crash forced me to stop looking for a single root cause and start looking at the wiring of the organisation itself. What I had been treating as a series of complicated management problems was actually one, interconnected complex problem. The tools I was using (process, governance, and escalation) were making the situation worse, not better.

I could have taken that lesson and found another seat at another table. Instead, I built Unflocked to solve that specific problem for other leaders. My work is not about bringing in a new framework; it’s about making the invisible dynamics in your organisation visible, so you can navigate them before they turn into a crisis.

The journey from design to this work taught me that how people interact is the single greatest predictor of whether a strategy will succeed or fail. That’s the work we do.