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 organization looked productive from the outside but was quietly breaking people on the inside.

I thought it was my job to fix it, so I tried to shield the team, absorb the pressure, and force the work through. Eventually, I stepped away from the role.

Stepping away gave me space to stop looking for a single root cause and start looking at the wiring of the organization 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 organization 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.