Writing, interviews and conversations on decisions in crisis, risk and change. Most pieces are in Romanian; each has a short English summary, and the link goes to the original. For interviews and comments, write to [email protected]. Keynotes and talks are on the Speaking page.
Business Review · five parts
One guide in five chapters, written in English for Business Review. It builds on the field guide “Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis”, by Dave Snowden and Alessandro Rancati, European Commission Joint Research Centre, 2021. For people who decide when the plan no longer fits.
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The five parts are being collected into one free document. Ask for a copy →
September 24, 2026
Most crisis plans are written for one kind of problem and meet another. The chapter explains how to tell which kind of situation you are in, and why the capacity to adapt matters more than the plan once reality stops fitting it.
October 1, 2026
In a crisis, decisions get pulled up the hierarchy and slow down. The piece argues for distributing decisions while keeping coordination central, and for using different forms of control in different parts of the same crisis.
October 7, 2026
Between adapting and inventing, pause and map what is actually happening. It uses exaptation, giving something existing a new use, as the idea for finding value in what the crisis produced.
October 14, 2026
Getting back to normal can mean throwing away what the crisis just taught. The piece asks which emergency fixes deserve to stay, how fast to relax the rest, and how to turn lessons into rehearsed capability.
October 20, 2026
Years of being right turn decisions from hypotheses into truths, and the signal that matters gets explained away in the meeting. The closing chapter shows how to map what can actually change from where the organization stands, and how to protect the people who notice what the majority misses.
Featured essay
Republica · October 5, 2026 · in Romanian
Two common ways of talking about change: it all depends on the individual, or nothing the individual does matters. The article looks at the space between them, using the idea of posture from martial arts, and introduces “wayshaping”: finding the room to move that exists in a situation, however small, and working from it.
Wayshaping, a term from recent work in applied complexity (James, Jamaluddin, Froese and colleagues, including Dave Snowden, 2025), used here for how an executive team finds room to move inside its constraints.
Ziarul Financiar · March 12, 2026 · in Romanian
Not whether you support transformation, but how much of the rules of the game you are willing to change, and at what cost.
wall-street.ro · June 10, 2026 · in Romanian
On the risks that send signs long before they reach the numbers.
clubantreprenor.ro · June 23, 2026 · in Romanian
What a leader steadies first when decisions have to be made in hours.
Business Magazin · August 11, 2025 · in Romanian
Crises no longer come one at a time; rebuilding cannot wait for the storm to pass.
Revista Progresiv · May 26, 2026 · in Romanian
Why new risks weigh so heavily on the owning family, and why a crisis tests relationships before it tests strategy.
ZF Live, with Cristian Hostiuc · January 29, 2026 · in Romanian
Real leaders do not show when things are calm; a crisis brings them to light.
November 21, 2025
On the chair-CEO relationship: most rare events are only rare because nobody named what they were seeing. First in a series.
November 25, 2025
Second in the series: how governance failures grow in the gap between what the chair and the CEO each see.
March 5, 2026
When trade-offs become implicit or quietly delegated to the machine, human judgement matters more, not less.
For journalists
Mihai Stănescu works on applied anthro-complexity: decision-making frameworks and adaptive capacity for boards and executive teams facing problems that have resisted budget, teams and planning.
He brings over 20 years of work with executives and business owners across Romania and the European Union, a background in anthropology, psychology and cognitive science, and experience in turbulent, high-risk decisions. He is a non-executive director on several business boards and advises the founders of outcome1.ai. He served two mandates on the WWF CEE Board and now sits on the WWF CEE Council. He writes “A Field Guide for Decision Makers” in Business Review.
Outside work he reads, sails and is a die-hard jazz listener, from small clubs to North Sea Jazz and Montreux. He returns to Homer and to Byzantine history and culture.
Press contact: [email protected]
