This week, I’m going to write the story of these Sunday Stories. We’ve officially published 29 Sunday Stories weekly, and this will be number 30, so it felt fitting to celebrate that number with a bit of a reflection of this experience and where we’re going next. They’ve run the gamut from stories of being held at gunpoint in Jordan, to the power of hope after a genocide, to how our systems are ripe for disruption by AI and UFOs. That’s quite a spread of topics, isn’t it? Just what the hell am I doing here?
You won’t be the first to ask me that question - it happens to me quite often actually - but I’ve learned that those who are willing to watch my method come together will often get a lot more than just an answer to their question, and you can too.
The practice of writing has been enjoyable for me, though I’ve not really paid attention to how many people read what I write in terms of my blog’s analytics and metrics until I began writing this post. I’ve never assumed anyone wanted to hear what I had to say - quite the opposite. It never stopped me from speaking, but that was never from a place of truly believing I was adding value - it was usually from a place of noticing something that of course everyone else in the room simply must have noticed already, and because it was so obvious to everyone else, they just didn’t feel the need to mention it. But I was just an idiot kid from the Northern Ontario bush, and I had to say the obvious thing out loud so I could better understand the situation.
At least that’s what I believed. It took me 30+ years (and many amazing leaders and mentors) for me to realize that just maybe I had something worth bringing to the table in these rooms, and that the obvious thing to me wasn’t so obvious to everyone else. That slow realization was a gift to me, too — those who work with me will know that I use the same off-the-wall analogies and turns of phrase whether I’m talking to a pauper or a President, and I always have. The thing is, when you don’t feel you belong anywhere, it allows you to be yourself everywhere; if you already don’t belong in the room, being yourself and speaking your mind means that the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get kicked out of a room that you weren’t supposed to be in anyway. With that perspective, what have I really got to lose?
I was surprised every time I wasn’t immediately shown the door after asking for a used Volkswagen shy of a million dollars worth of a budget increase or explaining how a super volcano in Indonesia 70,000 years ago created an evolutionary bottleneck for our species was directly related to a student services crisis vis a vis the resilience of the human species. Those things were obvious to me, so I told the story, and then they seemed to make sense to the people in those rooms too. Rinse and repeat for nearly 20 years. My feelings of surprise are still there every time, but I’m far more comfortable with it. I’ve leaned into it and am now proud to say that I try to be the same person in every room I’m in. I never assume that I belong in that room or am entitled to be there, but when I am in those rooms, I am myself and say what’s on my mind to tell people what I’m seeing. So far, that’s worked out for me.
But that has been a challenge with running my own business. My professional journey has put me in a lot of important rooms by lucky accident or organic happenstance (with a good dose of privilege mixed in). In my experience, when you work in organizations and make the choice show up and contribute however you can, the leaders in those organizations start inviting you into the important rooms more regularly, whenever they think your type of contribution is needed, even if your title suggests you don’t belong there (and I’ve never really cared about titles - mine or others).
But when you spin up your own business, you need to be invited into those rooms on the strength of your brand; if it’s not abundantly clear what value your business will bring to those who own the room, you won’t get invited in. With Authentik, that’s not clear.
What do we do at Authentik? Conflict resolution courses? Policy development? Educational Consulting? AI Development? Current Issues Analysis? Dynamic tabletop exercises? Investigation training? Disruptive Leadership support? Articles about actual UFOs and solar storms and volcanoes?
The answer is an easy “Yes”.
To me, all those things are related and fit together, and I can tell you exactly how they relate to each other if you were willing to read a book, but this is Sunday Story not Sunday novel (though this one might push that a bit). The reality is that it’s absolutely not clear to most folks what we do, and I know that; that’s a barrier to the traditional ‘success’ of this business. When you hang your own shingle, you don’t get to contribute a perspective at the weekly meeting full of other salaried employees at Big Business Inc., and that contribution doesn’t get to plant the seed in the Executive Director’s head, which later makes them think “Hey, maybe we should get that guy’s opinion on this, he had some insight last week”. You must be invited in, and your potential contribution must be clear to get the invitation.
Sunday Stories have forced me to reflect in ways that my daily journal does not, and it has crystallized that the above description has been the story of my career. Early on, I found myself in rooms where important matters were being discussed - like the culture of egregious and harmful hazing of students living in residence - but the discussion was a bunch of people saying “we can’t fix it”.
My perspective was and remains that whether we felt we could fix it or not was irrelevant - we had a responsibility to try. And I was told “We tried already! It didn’t work!”.
“Let’s try again, then”.
And so we did.
The job of a student housing professionals is to look after other people’s kids, keep them safe, and help them become the person they are becoming. “We can’t fix it!” isn’t an option when the thing that is broken is getting in the way of that mission, and I know that my colleagues would take that same attitude if it were my son in an environment that was putting him at that level of unnecessary risk.
But professionals are humans first, and humans get discouraged. Our most precious resource is our hope; it’s easy to lose when faced with insurmountable challenges. But if we can keep an ember of it alive, it can be enough to torch the largest obstacles from our path towards solutions. In these early career rooms, I found I was blowing on the embers a lot. Sometimes from a place of frustration, but often from a place of love. With some amazing colleagues, “we can’t fix it” became “it’s been fixed”. It wasn’t easy, nor was it done in the best way, nor was it perfect when that chapter of work was done - but other people’s kids were less likely to die of alcohol poisoning, suicide, and experience severe isolation and loneliness when we were finished. I still think of the ones we were too late for - not from a place of guilt or shame, but of honour. If we could have blown on that ember sooner, they might still be here in person, but since that cannot be, I keep their memory alive in my head and my heart as a reminder to why the work matters. I am grateful to them for this – their lives may have been unnecessarily short, but they have meaning and impact to this day, and I hope somehow they know that.
Later in my career, I got to be in rooms that had different important conversations happening. In these rooms, I had a job I was assigned by another boss who is a good friend and mentor: Reform an entire institution’s approach to student conduct and behaviour - policy, procedure, practice, training, all of it. Unlike fixing hazing, which had little support from the administration until it became a PR issue, the community at this institution at that time was united in the desire to do this in a good way, and the cooperation from students, staff, and institutional leadership while we figured this stuff out was clear: They all wanted to transform this part of the institution, and we had a shared desire to make things better. The contrast was starkly different from my prior experience where it seemed an uphill battle to convince people that the hazing was even a problem, and that’s when I first started realizing that disruption and transformation are the same fundamental processes. The common factor is how people respond to change, and the difference between disruption and transformation is how much it just happens to you (disruption) versus how much you go through it with intention (transformation). With that transformation done, I was then incredibly lucky to work with another amazing mentor, friend, and leader at that institution (among many others) as we embarked on a really difficult process of transforming how we did student services in a context of financial hardship.
Then the pandemic hit. I remember having a conversation in December of 2019 with a friend about COVID-19 - I read widely; rarely am I not absorbing information from somewhere, and I had read about this new virus that was cropping up in Wuhan. The reason I noticed it is because earlier in my career, one of the rooms I was in was related to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. We had students returning from that area and my boss, friend, and mentor called me into his office (you’ll notice a theme here - each time I’ve referred to boss, friend, and mentor I’m referring to different people. I’ve been very lucky in this regard and am grateful).
He asked me to put together a plan on what we would do if one of these students tested positive for Ebola after returning to our housing system. That exposed me to information related to disease and pandemic, such as the historically disruptive ones that transformed society like the Black Death in Europe or the Spanish Flu of 1918. I learned how and why one strain of Ebola is named Ebola Reston, after Reston, Virginia, because we came really close to a real-world version of the movie “Outbreak” in the early 1990s. And I learned about the wilder examples like the Dancing Plague of 1518 where over 400 people in Strasbourg were overcome with the need to dance non-stop for weeks with rumours of some even dancing themselves to death. Yes, that happened, and we still don’t really know what that was about. The leading theory is moldy wheat - Ergot poisoning - or maybe they just really wanted to dance. Alas, I digress - the point is, these pandemic and epidemic diseases were clearly a disruptive force.
With the Ebola incident, it didn’t take long to realize that our plan was “call for help, we’re not equipped for this”, but the path to get there taught me a lot about the risk to the global system that an outbreak of a significant disease would cause, and so when the news started reporting a strange new virus in China, I filed it in the back of my mind as something to pay attention to. At my sister’s wedding in early 2020, I remember having conversations with my neighbours from my home town about this disease - which at this point had landed in North America a couple of weeks before. I advised that I expected it would be impactful, and that it was likely we would be seeing steps taken to prevent it’s spread. I also said those steps might be more than folks are used to; I had noticed that our current political leadership tended to have a flexible relationship with the written rules when they deemed it expedient or just to do so (SNC Lavalin, for instance), which is not a comment on the merits of their decision making, just a recognition of how flexible they are in justifying decisions that are outside “the done thing” . This element caused me to discount folks who commented on the January 23rd Wuhan lockdown, saying “Good thing we aren’t like China, Canada won’t get locked down like that”; I felt and stated that lockdowns were likely based on the data I had ingested. We didn’t know a lot about the disease then, other than it was making people very sick and it spread very easily, and since I was paying attention to it, I had seen early indications of how hard it was for healthcare systems to cope.
I felt at the time that this was worthy of paying attention to, because the reality of that is obvious and simple in my view: Sick people can’t drive trucks, and if trucks aren’t being driven, grocery stores won’t get filled up, and if grocery stores don’t get filled up people get very angry, very fast, and stop following the rules.
That’s a big problem that folks running the show want to avoid, so I figured they’d take steps to keep truck drivers healthy (truck drivers being a stand-in for essential services of every kind). And my prior knowledge and experience taught me that those steps would have to balance rights, freedoms, safety, and science in a nearly impossible mix that was going to upset some people almost no matter what.
I think some folks listening to the conversation probably thought I was being “Chicken Little” claiming the sky is falling. I had similar conversations at work with trusted colleagues, and I think that was a similar reaction from some of them. But some felt my assessment was accurate because they had known me for years - I don’t claim the sky is falling. I show you the pieces of it on the ground that I’ve noticed, share with you how they connect using logic and reason, and let you decide for yourself. I find often those pieces are ones other people miss. We all know how this one worked out; in March our world changed, and we shut down everything to keep the essential services working.
Later, in my private consulting world, I shared some insight on the international student situation in Canada which was, in my view, compounding with a rocky political foundation for our leading federal party and a major housing crisis. I suggested that a cap on international student admissions was likely a future outcome to prepare for. I was told that would never happen by experts in international education.
A few months later there was a cap on international students.
The first stories of change taught me about the difference between disruption and transformation. The latter examples taught me how important it is to lean into disruption on purpose and prepare for it, so you can transform instead. I’m not writing about these examples to brag about all the times that I’ve been correct about things. If I make an assessment, I usually give a level of confidence to it based on my evidence, and that’s usually accurate; some stuff is 50/50, some stuff is 90%; it depends on the data. But this is absolutely not about being right or wrong for me. I truly do not care about how “being right” might serve my ego or reputation; one of these days I’ll write the story of how one time I died, and that experience gave me a deep appreciation for what actually matters in this world (Spoiler: being the one who is right about stuff isn’t one of those things) (Extra spoiler: I did not remain dead).
I’ve always believed “do good work and let the reputation take care of itself”, and so I do not care if people think I am right or not - I care about doing good work. Good work to me is helping leaders figure out problems, ideally in advance when the gift of time is still wrapped up rather than when it’s too late, forcing someone to react in a panic at the last minute.
Reactions rarely breed good leadership. The right planning and intentionally does every time. Good leadership is what turns disruption into transformation.
The latter stories of my attempts to prepare leaders for what’s next are based on a simple habit: I pay attention to things (though “hyper fixate” might be a better word to describe it), and for some reason I notice some things that connect with other things. The brain I’ve been gifted and my lived experience allows me to connect these disparate things into an assessment of probable outcomes. This is the skill that has allowed me to be a pretty good investigator of conduct issues ranging from air horn pranks after quiet hours to violent sexual assaults. In the thousands of cases I’ve investigated, I’ve only ever had 3 appeals, and none were successful because I believe it’s my duty to assess the information and reach the right conclusion the first time (though as a human, I’m very aware I make mistakes, and welcome appeal processes to address those errors).
To do this requires me to be able to consume a lot of information, which as I mentioned is a habit of mine anyway, and then separate the noise from the real signals. Then I figure out which of those signals are related to each other and how they might intersect. I can’t really tell you how I do it other than relying on tools of logic, reason, and decades of studying how people interact and behave; as a child of two Irish immigrants, who were really trying to blend into Canadian culture, I didn’t know how to interact with others. I didn’t really know how Irish people interacted, because we weren’t around Irish people as a family in our small Canadian town. And I also didn’t understand how Canadians interacted, because my parents were trying to figure that out for themselves too. From a young age, I hyper-fixated on data - like watching how people interact and putting myself in their shoes to understand why they acted the way they did - to figure out how to do it so I could bring that behaviour into my own life.
I’m quite comfortable saying I was successful in the knowledge acquisition and figuring out the problem parts, but I absolutely failed at that last bit about bringing it to my life - my family and I share a 130 square foot home on a beach on an island (it is tiny, but bursting with love), and this way of life is not what most people would choose. Nor was it really our choice, but it’s a place we ended up in that fits us like a tailored glove. We know that glove wouldn’t fit many other families, and that’s OK. Whatever glove we get next, we’ll make that fit too - we are adventurers at heart, and the road well-travelled by others is usually not the one we take.
So what does this have to do with Sunday Stories? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I finally looked at my metrics. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw.
The Bluey Series was popular and I’d say my third most successful bit of writing based on metrics and impact. Folks love the Heeler family - for good reason - and my writing about it helped people feel good, learn a bit about leadership, and relate to a bit of pop culture that’s loved around the world.
My Mother’s Day tribute to Teryn was in second place, and I know why that was popular too. First and foremost, Teryn is absolutely amazing and of course everyone wants to read about her. But I also have since learned that it was popular because I once again stated something obvious to me that apparently doesn’t get mentioned enough: motherhood is leadership, and maternity leave is an MBA-level education in the craft.
My most popular series was The Disruptions Series. This post is the reason why; in the Disruption Series I spoke to the nature of our complex systems, the human reaction to disruptive times, and how disruption was not only inevitable, but of increasing impact and velocity. I threaded together disparate elements and topics, and shared with you some of the types of signals and frames that I pay attention to that allow me to make accurate assessments of the how things will affect other things. These are just a few of the signals and frames that have allowed me to successfully show up in the room whether I belong there or not, and when I’m there these skills have allowed me to say what I think will happen or what we need to pay attention to with reasonable, regular, and repeated accuracy. And that’s why I’ve had the career I’ve had - I’m good at spotting the signals and using them to inform solutions to problems.
The final piece of the Disruption series was by far my most popular bit of writing, with twice as many people reading it as any other post out of all 30, a number that is rising every day. It was about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena - that’s what we call UFOs these days - and that could explain its popularity. UFOs are one of those topics that pique people’s curiosity, after all, and so that would explain the booming metrics that I’m seeing on that piece.
But that doesn’t explain the messages. I have never had anyone reach out to me on anything I’ve written before. But on that piece I got several people taking the time to send me a text or a note or a message on LinkedIn, usually along the themes of “Thanks for writing about that, I’ve been wondering about it”. This was also before I started seeing it exceed my usual numbers, so it’s not just a function of “bigger audience, bigger odds of contact”. My writing about that made a difference to some of you. That is not something I take lightly - it is something I’m deeply moved by and am so grateful to those who reached out.
UFOs used to be the realm of conspiracy theory and crazy people - and for that reason I was quite scared to say “Hey, I’m noticing some signals on this topic” - but it’s not a fringe topic anymore. There’s a shocking level of real attention - senate and congressional legislation, government divisions and reports, and more - and they all are pointing to the fact that there’s something going on here. Setting aside the subject itself, what this issue is really about is how the people we elect fulfill their responsibilities of good governance, and how it’s impossible for them to do that on any topic if the systems that support good governance aren’t working (and according to credible US Senators just this week, that appears to be the case, and this issue highlighted it.) In other words, even if we totally ignore the idea of UFOs and non-human intelligence as irrelevant and unimportant, it’s an issue that is increasingly showing us that our system needs fixing. That’s a problem - there’s not much we can do about that now, but the signals are telling me we need to pay attention to this one because of its disruptive potential, and I’m here to help you do that by translation those signals into something useful for you, on this and many other topics.
I’m not telling you Authentik is becoming a UAP & UFO blog. There’s a lot more you need to know about – the housing crisis, the toxic drug crisis, artificial intelligence, and more are all going to change our world in their own way, and being prepared for that helps you set your context up for transformation instead of disruption. We are still going to do conflict and investigation training. We will keep developing AI resources like our White Papers and our new tool, Procedure Pilot, and provide interactive table-top exercises to teach your teams to thrive. But the common theme here is this: At Authentik, we help you handle disruption and give you the best odds of making it transformation instead. and we’re going to keep doing it until we can’t do it anymore. That means helping you learn lessons from past disruptions. That means helping you understand the human reactions to disruptive forces like conflict. That means building tools to take advantage of these disruptions like Procedure Pilot which helps you navigate your organizations policies, which in turn frees up your cognitive bandwidth and capacity to lead people from disruption into transformation. And this also means keeping you informed of disruptions that are coming - even if some of them seem a little out of this world.
More important than what we do is why we do it. Authentik is about helping you become the best leader you can be in disruptive times, because for me, this is still about helping take care of other people’s kids. That’s all of us — we are all other people’s kids, and we are at our best when we are helping each other thrive in uncertain times.
I am doing this work because I need you to know that I am an “other people”, and I have a kid.
His name is Kincaid. He’s 4 years old and he inspires me every day with his curiosity, his courage, and his kindness. I’m counting on all of you to build a world that he can thrive in, in the same way I want to help build a world that your kids can thrive in, or your grandkids, or your neighbours kids. There are many disruptive forces on the horizon, and as Ben Lee sang in his song, we are all in this together.
That will be the focus of these Sunday stories moving forward. And if you look back, you’ll see it’s been the focus all along - we just didn’t tell you explicitly.
So back to that question: What the heck are we doing here? It’s what I’ve written here today, and truly it always has been. I hope now you see it with more clarity, and I promise to try to show it to others in under 4500 words next time.
If you find our content useful - please share it. It takes two seconds to forward a link. It takes a few seconds longer to cut and paste a paragraph that’s relevant into an email. It takes only a moment to bring up a story or fact or bit of knowledge that I’ve written about in one of your meetings or conversations - but don’t do it for me, and know that I’m not asking you to do this to drive clicks or engagement. I don’t care about that.
I’m asking you to do it for the people in the room, because it might help them - and helping them will help you avoid thinking that you don’t deserve to be there. You matter, and your perspective matters. Let my seemingly-random hyper-fixation on disparate topics help inform your perspective, so you to help the other people in the room. Some of those rooms will decide the fate of lots of other people, and that matters.
I just finished reading Kincaid “The Hobbit”, and he couldn’t wait to get into Lord of the Rings so we started that story at bedtime this last week. There’s a quote in the “Fellowship of the Ring” that I think is a good place to end this long blog on (or slog, maybe, if you’ve read this far): after Gandalf the Grey describes to Frodo the great challenges Middle Earth was going to face during a time of great disruption, Frodo said woefully, “I wish this need not have happened in my time”.
“So do I” said Gandalf. “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us”.
We’ve decided - we’re going to help you lead through disruption. And we’re going to do it the only way we know how - Authentically.
Have a great day, thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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