Hey, I’m Mike Topalovich, a strategic fractional systems architect based in Chicago. Thanks for finding my site in the sea of noise!
I help enterprises, teams, and individuals navigate systemic complexity, offering flexible on-demand and ongoing strategic thinking and guidance. My focus is on helping you think about and approach complex structural challenges in an uncertain world.
I am here to help you become structurally better at what you do over time. Together we can make sense of the systems that shape your world, understand how everything connects, and find the right levers to pull to move things towards your ideal outcomes.
Approaches We Can Take Together
Whether you want to “start at the beginning” with a specific challenge and work towards possible solutions, or you prefer to “begin with the end in mind” and find a path to an outcome you hope to achieve, every business problem, risk or opportunity requires a thoughtful and disciplined approach to sense making, problem solving, and systems design.
Challenges We Can Face Together
Whether you are addressing problems that exists right in front of you today, exploring potential future opportunities, or anticipating and mitigating possible risks, when you begin with a specific business challenge you can “start at the beginning” and work your way towards desired outcomes.
Opportunities
Pursuing new ways of growing relationships and capabilities.
Outcomes We Can Realize Together
Some organizations are wired to be outcome-driven and “begin with the end in mind” by starting with a shared vision and working backward from there. If you prefer to backcast and identify potential paths from the future back to the present, we can orient and align around possible tactical, strategic, or transformational outcomes and find the best approach to take.
Strategic
Aligning vision and execution for meaningful long-term impact.
Transformational
Creating leverage for holistic change and sustainable growth.
Ideas for Structuring Our Time Together
We have many options for shaping our time together independent of specific business challenges or outcomes.
Fractional Capacities
Models for scaling our focus and relationship commitment.
Flexible and Scalable Models for Engaging
Not everyone has the same need and budget, and I have designed a number of options to optimize our time together and ensure you get exponential value from our engagements, whether on-demand or ongoing.
Original Thinking from Mike Topalovich
I create original written and video thought leadership content from time to time, including blogs, long form series, and captures of raw, unfiltered and unsynthesized thoughts.
Thinking Like an Architect
Understanding how we interact with structure in our world.
The Ontology of Mike Topalovich
This is my attempt to catalog and connect my knowledge, broken down into 7 core areas central to nearly all of my thinking: Architect Thinking, Technology Thinking, Systems Thinking, Human Thinking, Business Thinking, Market Thinking, and Strategic Thinking.
About Mike Topalovich
A little about me, including my professional background and notable engagement history, my technical and systems design expertise, my core philosophy and how I see the world, and past events that I have spoken at and podcasts that I have appeared on.
