The practitioner behind TIDE.
The recurring pattern, and the response to it.
I have been an enterprise architect focused on transformation and change for over 25 years. In that time I have been called into major change programmes to help set them up for success, brought in midway to programmes that are off track and need help identifying the problem then course correcting. And I have been called in the aftermath of a failed transformation to answer "what next?"
Throughout this time, I've watched the same pattern repeat across every sector. A budget gets committed before the readiness picture is honest. The risks that are obvious to anyone close to the work stay invisible to the sponsors writing the cheque. By the time the gap shows up in delivery, usually six to nine months in, the cost of correction is several times the cost of having looked properly at the start.
It can take several weeks to review and make sure the programme is set up for success. It can take months to identify and fix issues midway, and it can take years to recover from a failed programme.
TIDE exists to make that proper look possible before the budget commits, without a several-week diagnostic engagement.
A team of agents, taught the way I work.
TIDE runs on a team of AI agents I have trained to ask the questions the way I would. Each one started like a bright intern who has read everything and done none of the job. I showed it the work, gave it the knowledge that isn't written down anywhere, then oversaw, corrected and retrained it until it could take on the role.
The key elements of knowledge, scoring and logic are structured to give AI the grounding it needs - a deterministic core in a probabilistic shell.
Each works under the governance I would use with people: a clear role, a set level of authority, and everything it does audited. Trust grows as it is earned. The agents do the asking. What the findings mean for your organisation stays a human judgement.
What it reads. What it produces.
The first TIDE tool is a readiness diagnostic. It tests a programme against the questions that decide whether it succeeds: is it the right change, can we build it, will it take hold, and what could hit it from outside. The Full Diagnostic works through all of them with your leadership team in the room. The free Signal Diagnostic is a 15-minute sample that gives a first read on part of this.
It returns a readiness report: the risks that showed up, how serious they are, and what to do about them. The risks it looks for come from real programmes, from what actually went wrong in delivery rather than what looked plausible in a board pack.
Where this came from.
I have worked in and around transformation programmes across many sectors: insurance, higher education, government, membership bodies, energy, retail and manufacturing among them. What's in TIDE comes from watching what actually derails programmes, repeated enough times to be patterns rather than war stories. It's what I'd want to see assessed before I'd take on a programme myself.
To get the full picture I have also analysed dozens of publicly available sources of troubled programmes (and successful ones), to make sure that I have those covered, as well as ensure the diagnostic can identify similar tell-tale signs.
Four principles run through the methodology.
- Risk shows up before scope does.
The structural fragilities are visible at scoping. Most of them get assumed away.
- Most transformations fail at change-side capacity, not strategic clarity.
Boards over-invest in strategy and under-invest in absorption. The methodology weights both.
- AI doesn't need a new kind of change management.
It needs change management that works, which most organisations don't have. AI is another external driver, like the internet before it, and the disciplines that worked then still work.
- Honest readiness beats optimistic launch plans every time.
The Signal is designed to be useful even when, especially when, the read is uncomfortable.
Take the Signal, or get in touch.
The fastest way to see what TIDE surfaces is the Signal: fifteen minutes, free, returns your readiness report and your top risks.