About the Founder

Craig
Fazzini-Jones

Three decades at the intersection of complexity and change — turning insight into outcomes.

Portrait of Craig Fazzini-Jones

The practitioner

30+

Shaped by doing,
not by theorising

Thinking Different is curated by a practitioner. The thinking here has been lived — across thirty years working inside complex financial services organisations, spanning banking and insurance. Enterprise transformations, turnarounds, business builds, and exits. Mutuals, listed organisations, and private equity–backed platforms.

The perspective here is relentlessly practical: what actually scales, what consistently fails, where value leaks quietly out of organisations, and why outcomes so often diverge from the intent behind them.

This isn’t a platform for ideas that haven’t been tested. It’s a record of patterns observed from the inside.

What thirty years taught me

The most valuable lessons didn’t come from strategy decks — they came from the moments when things didn’t go to plan.

What actually scales

Most organisations mistake activity for progress. What scales is clarity of intent, distributed ownership, and execution discipline — not more process.

Where value leaks

Value rarely disappears in a single moment. It seeps — through misaligned incentives, decision latency, and the gap between stated and lived strategy.

What consistently fails

Transformation programmes that lack genuine executive ownership, honest diagnosis, and the patience to build capability — rather than just buying it — fail at a striking rate.

Why outcomes diverge

Intent and outcome diverge most sharply when organisations skip the hard work of understanding their own culture before asking it to change.

A personal turning point

Learning to see
the world through
different eyes

Some of the most important learning in my career didn’t come from a boardroom. It came from my children.

Discovering that my children are neurodivergent — living with dyslexia, autism, and ADHD — changed how I see the world. It challenged assumptions I didn’t even know I was carrying. It taught me, with real force, not to judge a book by its cover, to genuinely inhabit other people’s perspectives, and to recognise that difference is rarely a limitation — it’s often a signal that someone is processing the world in a way that has real value.

That discovery set in motion a period of deep personal reflection and growth. It made me a more patient leader, a more curious listener, and a more honest thinker. It also connects directly to work I care about deeply — including re-imagining how we educate children and prepare them for the modern world.

The personal and the professional aren’t as separate as we pretend.

“The work is to keep thinking — and to share what’s worth sharing.”

Thinking Different — Craig Fazzini-Jones