The model was lived before it was written.

I started as a software engineer in Shiraz, and the first thing my work taught me was that the technology is almost never the hard part.

My first real transformation project was an ERP rollout for the Ministry of Water and Agriculture in Hormozgan Province. I wrote the code, mapped the infrastructure, and configured the system for each category of user. That part was tractable. What I could not stop noticing was everything happening around it — which groups had been consulted and which had not, which routines people were being quietly asked to abandon with no one saying so out loud, and how much of the actual change was taking place in conversations that appeared on no plan.

I did not have language for any of it yet. I only knew that the interesting problem was not the one I had been hired to solve.

Learning to work in someone else's system

Malaysia came next, for an MBA in IT management — the first time I had to rebuild my professional vocabulary in a second language and discovered how much of what I thought was expertise had actually been fluency in one particular way of doing things.

Then Germany. The University of Mannheim funded my doctorate twice through the German Science Foundation, and for four of those years I was embedded inside SAP — not studying it from the outside, but sitting in it, watching a very large and very successful company try to become something other than what it was.

My dissertation was a field study of twenty-eight agile teams across five countries: how they self-organized, how they learned, why some of them genuinely adapted while others performed adaptation without changing at all. Amy Edmondson invited me to Paris to observe her teaching executives about team learning. Doctoral consortiums in Utrecht and Oslo took the work in.

The pattern I kept returning to was not about talent or planning. The teams that changed were the ones that could let go of something. The ones that could not kept adding — new practices on top of old ones, new rituals beside the ones nobody had retired — until the weight of everything they were still carrying made the new thing impossible.

In my last months in Mannheim I volunteered at a settlement centre, helping people who had just arrived rebuild a life inside a system whose rules no one had explained to them. I had done my own version of that three times by then. It is not a metaphor for organizational change. It is the same thing at a different scale: a human system meeting a new environment, having to decide what to keep.

Twenty years, and the same job

Canada was the fourth system. I led the people side of a bank-wide agile transformation at TD Bank. I designed and ran the workshops that carried four thousand Enbridge and Union Gas employees through a merger, across Ontario, in rooms where the mistrust was real and mostly earned. I built change capability for the City of Toronto's transformation team, and spent years as a design-thinking partner at Prompta. I am currently embedded at Enbridge again, leading change and communications on a $100M+ Oracle Cloud ERP programme.

Twenty years after Hormozgan, I am still doing a version of the same job: standing between a system that has already been decided on and the people who have to live inside it.

What changed is that I stopped being surprised. The same stall kept appearing in organizations with nothing else in common — different countries, different industries, different decades — and always the same shape underneath. Adding without subtracting. Deciding without reallocating. Piloting without integrating.

What the model is

I did not set out to build a framework. I set out to explain a pattern I had watched from the inside for seventeen years and then studied at doctoral depth, and the explanation turned out to be a system of five interdependent capabilities: Sensing, Meaning Making, Decision Plasticity, Elimination, and Integration.

That is the whole claim. It is falsifiable, which is the point of making it. The model is peer-reviewed — a research note accepted at the 27th CINet Conference on continuous innovation in Genoa, with a journal article in development and a formal interview study proceeding through 2026. I teach design thinking and strategy at University Canada West, and I write a weekly newsletter, Change Complexity Decoded™, where the thinking gets worked out in public before it is finished.

Outside the work

I dance flamenco — three consecutive years performing at the Vancouver Playhouse. I throw pots. I paint in watercolour, not especially well, and keep doing it anyway. I speak Farsi and English, and I have lived in Iran, Malaysia, Germany, and Canada, which is either a long detour or the entire education, depending on the day you ask me.