Publishing October 2026
Work, Governance, and Design in a Spiked World
Most books on the future of work assume the instability is temporary. This one argues it is the new baseline, and that organizations designed for stability are now structurally exposed.
A message when the book is out, and occasional news about it after that. One click to stop, whenever you like.
Argument
Organizations are being asked to operate in a spiked world: faster, less predictable, more synthetic, more distributed, more exposed.
The old model assumed relative stability. The liquid organization is designed for movement without losing judgment, trust, or accountability.
Thesis
Organizations, like organisms, survive by evolving. The environment does not negotiate. What worked in the last conditions is not what survives the next ones, and structures that cannot change are selected out, slowly enough that the leadership rarely sees it happening.
But evolution is not dissolution. Every species that endures carries a core it never trades away, and so does every organization: the product, the purpose and the mission that made it viable in the first place. Lose that in the name of adaptation and there is nothing left to adapt.
The point is not to make organizations fluid for its own sake. It is to make them capable of evolving without losing the core, the heart that guaranteed survival in the first place.
Structure
Part I
Automation, complexity, distributed work, geopolitics and speed. The external conditions that have made older organizational designs too rigid for the world they now face.
Part II
Judgment, safety, energy, ethics and talent mobility. The human capabilities required when machines accelerate output but consequence remains human.
Working architecture
About the authors
Between us the argument covers transformation, operating model design, AI and work design, finance, capital discipline and the governance that connects them. That matters, because the book is not only about how organizations work. It is about how they fund, govern and sustain adaptation when the environment stops rewarding structures built for stability.
Five ways to work with it
Enter wherever the case is already made. Nothing is wasted if you move up later, because every level reads the organization through the same ten dimensions.
Read and reflect
The full argument in one volume, with the scenes, mechanisms and target states your leaders can recognize in their own organization.
Build shared language
A two day executive programme that turns the book into a working vocabulary, and sends every participant home with a ninety day plan.
Find the rigidity
A structured read of where the organization is brittle, on which dimensions, at which altitudes, and what liquid would look like instead.
Design the change
The diagnosis converted into a designed, funded and measurable change programme that your own people can carry.
Install and embed
Delivery alongside your teams until the new practice holds without us, with the tools taught to your people as we go.
Keynotes, author conversations and the two day programme are arranged directly with either author. Write to whichever of us is closer to the question.
October 2026
A message on publication, then occasional news about the book and the talks and training around it. Sent by hand rather than by an automated sequence. The list is never shared or sold, and every message carries a way to stop it.
Prefer email? Write to either of us, at kwafo@kwafo.com or beate@beatevanlooborn.com.