Change moves in a precise, repeatable pattern.
Every change you will ever navigate - a career pivot, a company restructure, a relationship transformation, a personal reinvention - moves through the same sequence of challenges, in the same order, drawn from the same underlying structure. A restaurant opens. A startup pivots. A team rebuilds itself after a loss. A person crosses a threshold they did not choose. The content differs. The pattern does not.
Riding Change describes that pattern.
At the centre of this book is The Code: a map of how change actually moves. Two operations (something holds, something crosses). Four realms (Potentiality, Construction, Encounter, Conservation). Sixteen challenges in fixed sequence. Four threshold crossings where the nature of the work changes. The geometry is drawn from the oldest cosmological frameworks human beings have produced - the I Ching, the four directions of indigenous cosmologies, the elemental quadrants of medieval Europe - arrived at independently across cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. The Code is what those frameworks were tracking.
Raimo van der Klein has spent twenty-five years inside change. Co-founder of Layar (the world's first mobile augmented reality browser). C-suite roles at the healthcare scaleups Incision and Pacmed, running surgical-training and clinical-AI transformations under real conditions. Hundreds of teams across corporates, ventures, scaleups, and change programmes. The cycle described in this book was his working instrument throughout - tested in every direction the work allowed, refined under the pressure of decisions that actually had to be made, until what had begun as a careful description had become an everyday reading.
This is a book about timing. About honesty. About the structure that runs underneath every change you will ever navigate.
You will learn to:
- Read where you are in the cycle - what the current moment is asking of you, and what you are likely skipping because it is uncomfortable
- Recognise the four realms of change and the work each one demands
- Navigate the sixteen challenges that appear in every transformation, in the same order, regardless of domain
- Cross the four threshold events (Birth, Death, Release, Integration) that mark every passage from one state to the next
- See nested cycles - why the team's cycle, the project's cycle, and the company's cycle are not the same cycle, and why most "stuck" situations are actually mismatched cycles in disguise
Change has a reliable shape. Once you have seen it, you keep seeing it. Riding Change gives you the map.
Van Der Klein, Raimo: - Raimo van der Klein has spent twenty-five yearsworking with transformation: the messy, structural kind that companies, fields, and people go through when the old form no longer fits and the new one is not yet built.He joined Nokia in the late 1990s, during the company's extraordinary years at the centre of the mobile world, and watched from inside as one of the most powerful companies on earth failed to navigate its own transformation. That experience planted the question this book eventually answers.In 2009 he co-founded Layar in Amsterdam with Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald and Claire Boonstra. Layar became the world's first mobile augmented reality browser, reached more than forty million users, and featured in the Verizon Droid campaign that helped Android find its consumer audience. The company was named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2010. It proved that augmented reality could work as a medium, and it taught its founder what happens when a vision is right and the timing is not.In the years since Layar, he has worked with hundreds of teams across every kind of structure: teams inside corporates, new ventures, scaleups, internal change programmes, and one-off initiatives carrying disproportionate weight. Most recently he has held C-suite roles in the healthcare scaleups Incision and Pacmed, running surgical-training and clinical-AI transformations under real conditions. The cycle described in this book was his working instrument throughout, tested in every direction the work allowed until what had once been a careful description had become an everyday reading.His current research interest is the structure of dissipative systems, in particular how the same cycle described in this book shows up in cancer. He writes about that work at encounter.bio.He lives in the Netherlands.
