Most transformation efforts fail not because leaders lack frameworks or metrics, but because change is treated as an optimization problem rather than a design challenge.

Building on Boland and Collopy's Managing as Designing, the essay contrasts the conventional decision attitude — which selects among existing options — with a design attitude, which invents new possibilities. Applied to program management, this reframes transformation as an act of organizational architecture: aligning vision, structure, and culture in conditions where no adequate option yet exists.

The essay also examines why interim leadership may be especially compatible with a design orientation, and examines what it genuinely takes to move from endorsing a design orientation to leading from one.

The full essay is available upon request.

Design as Possibility argues that transformation fails not only through poor execution but through weak architecture — and that shaping that architecture is a core leadership responsibility, not a technical matter to be delegated.

Drawing on Managing as Designing, the essay treats governance, sequencing, coordination, and decision logic not as administrative defaults but as design decisions. It introduces the concept of emotional architecture to describe how transformation structures carry meaning as well as function: a steering committee whose decisions are repeatedly reopened teaches participants not to trust it, and that loss of credibility spreads. Structures must therefore be designed for experiential as well as operational coherence.

The essay's practical claim is that transformation architecture should be treated as a set of testable propositions — revisable under live conditions rather than defended as fixed design.

Leadership as Human Art argues that effective transformation requires more than well-designed structures or coherent plans. It requires leaders who can give form to uncertainty, exercise authority with gravity, and hold open the space in which others commit to a future not yet fully realized.

Drawing on Zaleznik's account of leadership in serious organizational settings, the essay develops four interconnected themes: character as an operating condition of authority; imagination as the capacity to make an unrealized future organizationally actionable; interpretation as the recognition that organizations read change through the meanings they attach to conduct, timing, and decision; and command as the disciplined exercise of authority under conditions that resist full resolution.

Together with Design as Possibility and Design Attitude in Leadership, this essay completes a trilogy that reframes transformation as a leadership-led, design-informed endeavor: leadership provides judgment, design provides form, and the architecture of change carries both into practice.

Eric Teunissen presented his groundbreaking research on industrial relocation projects in a paper for Rabobank.

“Large-scale industrial relocation projects can be effectively executed by deploying a universal organizational structure, despite unique technical, organizational, and logistical project characteristics.”

The project received international acclaim and was awarded the Benelux Enterprise Award. Division Group was later named “Best Banking Temporary Management Resources Provider” by EU Business News in 2020.

Eric Teunissen presented research on forecasting profits within matrix organizations in a paper for Van Nieuwpoort Prefab Beton’s product group, Construction Elements.

He subsequently developed and implemented a breakthrough solution that enabled the project management department to reliably forecast profits for all precast concrete infrastructure projects.