Turbulence

Turbulence

Flèche Marine has spent twenty-seven years building sport-fishing hulls that bring people home from fifty miles offshore in rough seas. Now the company that survived on precision and trust is facing a threat no weld can fix: their insurance carrier has more than tripled the premium, quietly declaring coastal South Florida manufacturing "becoming uninsurable." At the same time, a once-in-a-generation Pentagon contract is within reach - if Flèche Marine can prove, under evaluation, that it can manage risk systematically rather than react to crisis after crisis.

Founder Marcus Rodriguez built the company on his Cuban refugee father's conviction that hard work and quality would always be enough. That belief is about to be tested by something hard work alone can't out-build: uncertainty itself. Risk analyst Sarah Chen, who left the insurance industry because she was tired of consultants telling clients what they wanted to hear, brings Marcus a framework instead of a fix - a way of naming, owning, and acting on risk before it becomes a crisis. Her brother Tommy, a veteran turned production lead, will be the one standing in the workshop at 3 AM when the framework is tested for real: a forty-two-foot hull, torn loose by hurricane winds, driven straight through the north wall.

What happens in the hours that follow - who acts, who decides, who documents, who calls it right - becomes the difference between a company that survives its own turbulence and one that doesn't. As the Pentagon evaluators watch and the storm damage is tallied, Marcus, Sarah, Tommy, and the rest of the Flèche Marine team have to answer an uncomfortable question honestly, before they ever answer it for anyone else: did the framework work, or did they just get lucky?

Turbulence is a novel of family, craft, and the quiet discipline of seeing danger early enough to still have a choice about it.

About the book

Turbulence is part of the Collision Series from Vector Switch Press - novels that teach internationally recognised management standards invisibly, through story rather than textbook. Where most professional training separates the theory from the people who have to live it, the Collision Series does the opposite: every principle is dramatised through characters under real pressure, so the standard is absorbed the way it's actually used - in the middle of a decision, not in a classroom.

Turbulence brings ISO 31000, the international standard for risk management, to life through the story of a family boatbuilding business navigating an insurance crisis, a defence contract evaluation, and a hurricane - showing how a genuine risk framework changes what a team notices, how fast they act, and how they explain themselves afterward. The novel closes with a Framework Reference Guide, mapping each stage of Flèche Marine's transformation to the corresponding principles of the standard, making it a resource risk professionals, safety leaders, and business owners can return to long after they've finished the story.

Written by John Huckstepp - a Fellow of the International Institute of Risk and Safety Management, Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, and co-author of the IIRSM Risk Management and Leadership Competence Framework - in collaboration with Ruya Selcuk, Turbulence continues the Collision Series' mission: proving that the standards which quietly hold organisations together deserve stories as compelling as the risks they're built to manage.