I spent forty years watching organisations tell themselves stories about how they work. The gap between those stories and what is actually happening is where I live professionally.

The career starts at a Big Four firm, auditing electronic data processing systems in the early 1980s. Back then, organisations had no reliable way to verify whether their systems actually behaved the way they believed. That question stuck. Then CFO, appointed at 28. COO. CEO of a €5.5 billion food company. Each step taught me something the previous one couldn't. Systems fail in specific, predictable ways. Organisations construct comfortable fictions about their own operations. Decisions made in quiet rooms tend to land loudly somewhere else.

I am a Certified Public Accountant (RA / CPA), a Supervisory Board Chairman, and a senior strategic advisor. I also designed 3SAH.

3SAH, Three Steps Ahead, is a business and geopolitical intelligence system. It tracks where power is shifting, where capital is moving, and where the next structural break is forming, before consensus settles around it. Six portfolios span geopolitical security, AI and technology power, the monetary order, resource security, health, and biosecurity. t is a system for detecting what is actually happening before the market names it, the media frames it, and the committee convenes to decide what to think.

The business application of 3SAH runs through GRIP, a human operating model for steering under pressure. Where 3SAH surfaces what is happening in the business, GRIP translates that intelligence into organisational motion. The core unit of work in GRIP is not a project or a quarterly goal. It is a tension: the structural gap between what a business believes and what the environment is actually doing. Five cards replace the quarterly offsite with a weekly cycle that converts intelligence into decisions, and decisions into receipts: COMMIT, SENSE, TENSION, SOLVE, DEPLOY. GRIP: A Human Operating Model for Steering Under Pressure is the forthcoming book.

Alongside the intelligence work, I chair supervisory boards, advise at senior level on strategic and organisational questions, and write books.

What I care about: early signals, leverage points, and decisions that hold under real pressure. What I distrust: confidence that hasn't been tested, frameworks that survive only because nobody challenged them, and the habit of treating activity as progress.

I read Aurelius, Herbert, Asimov, Adams, Manson, and Kant. I play chess. I fly flight simulators. I play golf without apology for how badly.

If something on this site is useful to you, take it. If something irritates you, it was probably put there on purpose.

My philosophy is simple: Sense Early, Move What Matters, Steer Smart

Ronald Lotgerink — ROLO