Articles, interviews and conversations on decision-making and adaptive capacity. Most are in Romanian; each one 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.
Coming soon
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 · December 8, 2025 · in Romanian
Handing over a family business needs the same rigor as building it.
Capital · December 22, 2025 · in Romanian
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
wall-street.ro · February 27, 2026 · in Romanian
What burnout says about the maturity of an organization.
clubantreprenor.ro · June 23, 2026 · in Romanian
Ziarul Financiar, September 26, 2026, and Business Magazin, September 7, 2026 · in Romanian
Business Magazin · October 16, 2025 · in Romanian
A heavy ship as a mirror for how large systems change course.
Business Magazin · August 11, 2025 · in Romanian
economedia.ro · February 12, 2026 · in Romanian
On where Romanian leaders get organization wrong, and why people do not leave over pay.
economedia.ro · February 28, 2026 · in Romanian
On AI rollouts: whoever fights the smoke gets nowhere; you have to find the fire.
Revista Progresiv · February 18, 2026 · in Romanian
Revista Progresiv · October 13, 2025 · in Romanian
Revista Progresiv · May 26, 2026 · in Romanian
October 2026 · about 1 hour 40 minutes · in Romanian
A long conversation about the path behind his current work with leadership teams.
Recurring live conversation · in Romanian
On business, decisions and the Romanian economy.
October 2025 · December 2025 · April 2026 · June 2026 · September 2026
Also: ZF Live, August 1, 2025 · ZF Live, “Leaders are revealed in crisis”, January 29, 2026
March 21, 2025
A long-form article: what the Athenian strategoi, evolutionary psychology, anthropology and complexity science agree on – leadership is adaptability, not a fixed set of traits.
May 6, 2025
A long-form article: what ecosystems and animal societies teach leadership teams in transition – adaptability, a healthy stress response and collective behavior.
June 16, 2025
Exaptation: how what a system already has, built for one purpose, can become its breakthrough for another.
July 17, 2025
On how constraints shape what a human system can do, long before anyone decides anything.
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.
Short essays
On the illusion of explanatory depth in decision-making · On accountability · On what makes boards work · On adaptive leadership in hard transitions · On succession in family businesses (in Romanian): 1, 2
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]
