Welcome back to this week’s Sunday Story, and this series is all about helping you prepare for disruption as a leader. In part 1, we addressed the importance of preserving your cognitive bandwidth, which is all about being able to focus on what really matters. In part 2, we described how something as simple as a bag can help you preserve cognitive bandwidth. Part 3 and part 4 were all about what to put in the bag, and now that you’ve completed your bag of tricks we’re ready for the 5th and final part of this series which is sharing with you the two biggest secrets for disruption resiliency, and we’re going to illustrate these by sharing with you a story that is timely and relevant to the week ahead, and talks about a Las Vegas wedding, complete with booze-stocked limousines and a “Rent a Rev” pastor doing the vows.
You’re wondering what I’m talking about now, aren’t you?
Well, despite visions of drive through cathedrals with Elvis or - appropriately, an alien - doing the officiating, the wedding wasn’t quite that shotgun or spur of the moment, and I know this because it was my wedding that I’m writing about. 12 years ago, on February 27th, I got married to my partner, soulmate, and love of my life, and this story directly relates to how you lead every day (I promise).
The decision making around this date and location was pretty simple: we had two large communities of people we loved and trusted, one in Ontario and one in Alberta. We didn’t think folks would want to spend their hard-earned money going from Alberta to Ontario or vice versa when the plane tickets to more interesting places (for us locals, anyway) cost about the same, but at the same time my parents weren’t keen on going anywhere too far away and tropical on account of not liking heat. So, we settled on Las Vegas, Nevada - accessible, fun, and relatively cheap to get to.
The timing of the wedding was entirely driven by our desire to bring people together. I have been incredibly lucky to have worked in higher education alongside student services professionals for my career. These are people who dedicate their entire lives to looking after other peoples’ kids in some of the most dire situations like when young people suffer from sexual violence or suicide. These folks aren’t well paid, and they have never worked “only” an 8-hour day, because especially in student housing (where I met most of them), incidents don’t only happen during office hours. In my opinion, these folks represent some of the best of humanity - they look after other people and help them because it’s the right thing to do, full stop, and I’m honoured to have been a part of this industry and count so many of these fine people as friends.
Anyway, two of the biggest professional organizations in the student affairs world - ACPA and NASPA - had decided to come together and host a joint annual conference. Individually, these conferences attract about 3,000 people each from all over the world, and so together, the draw was massive for subject matter experts, vendors, and more, and they needed a city that could host this massive influx of people. This city was Las Vegas, and the conference was in March. Knowing that many of my friends and peers would want to attend this conference anyway, we decided to host our wedding just a few days before the conference kicked off, so folks could afford both experiences on the same plane ticket expense.
We were so blessed to have 50 people show up to celebrate our union, and it still stands as one of the most magical moments of my life - not only because I got to marry Teryn, but because I got to see so many good people all in one place.
So many moments stand out to me about this, but I also need to tell you that I planned the entire wedding myself. I’ve been planning events for students for years at that point, and I can organize a huge event without too much effort. From hotel blocks to catering to the Preacher to the legal licensing to the airfare to live-streaming the ceremony for folks who couldn’t attend in person (and this was 2013 before that was a popular thing) to photography, and including pre-events like the rehearsal dinner and all that stuff - I had everything planned and figured out. To put this into the context of your own leadership: This was my version of “operations” at that time, and it was, if I do say so myself, an extremely well-oiled machine.
This brings me to the first secret of disruption resiliency: Your day-to-day business operations are essential during a disruption. Disruptions are inherently unpredictable, and you don’t know exactly how they are going to impact your operation. But, if your operation is a bit loosey-goosey, you are compounding the problem because not only is the disruption creating an unknown force in your spaces, but your spaces themselves are unknown to you. To put this another way, you need to have your operational elements very well mapped out, documented, and have a robust shared understanding of how everything works to have a good operation, and a good operation is a major bulwark against the forces of disruption.
This does not mean you need to know every single detail of your business - we are not telling you to become a micromanager here; quite the opposite. Micromanaging significantly gets in the way of disruption resiliency, because your people will not at all feel empowered to navigate uncertainty (more on that in a moment). But it does mean that as a leader you need to spend time on the boring stuff - policy, procedure, and process maps all documented that show how you administer your products and services. User experience focus groups so you know exactly how your customers find and interact with your business. Clear structures and definitions of who is responsible for what business outcome. These are all essential, but leaders often ignore them in favour of focusing on the more interesting or fun problems ahead of them.
What usually happens is that without the above, the leader likely finds themselves running around with a fire extinguisher in each hand - instead of spending time on the important stuff, you are putting out fires and solving problems for your team all over the place. Sometimes, leaders need to be like the Roman Emperor Nero. Despite the accusations of ‘fiddling while Rome burned,’ Nero actually helped lead the response to the fires when they were happening, and afterwards he took the opportunity to rethink Rome’s urban design, introducing fire-resistant building codes and strengthening firefighting efforts and abilities - in other words, he spent time focusing on the brass tacks and basics, and that’s what leaders need to do if they don’t want to feel like they are constantly fighting fires. If you make good operations a priority, you create systems and structures that lend themselves to resilience in disruption.
Finally, a good leader needs to make sure they are constantly reevaluating the efficacy of those operations. Folks on the front lines will take shortcuts and tend to waver off standard operating procedures, and this happens in every organization. It is important for the leader to iterate on this process of good operations, and keep communications with those you lead open to ensure there is always alignment between your documented practices and the actual behaviours of your team. This is the secret to a high functioning organization, and a high functioning organization is naturally disruption resilient, but only because solid operations enable the second secret of disruption resiliency. To explain that, come back to February of 2013 and join me for another quick story about my wedding.
Like I said, I had a well-oiled machine when it came to the operations of my wedding; it wasn’t just a day, it was a week of events and activities with a single goal: Bring great people together to celebrate our declaration of our intentions of spending our lives together. Truly, the legal stuff was secondary to us - while we would not have used these terms at that time, this was really about bringing good spirits together to create an environment where our spirits could be forever intertwined.
To support this experience, I had all of these events well planned, which brings me to the moment where everything went wrong. You see, we had worked with a hotel and casino to hold a room block, and because of that room block, we had a Coordinator with the hotel that was helping us with a whole bunch of the logistics of the pre-events. For example, when I needed to reserve transportation, they coordinated the shuttles. When I needed to reserve 50 seats at a restaurant for the rehearsal/welcome to Vegas dinner (we included all guests in that event because why not), they were the point of contact with the restaurant that would ensure they were ready. The actual wedding was off site at a different venue, and those contracts were organized separately, but a lot of the pre-experiences had the hotel coordinator at the centre of the plan.
Fortunately, one of our guests found an amazing deal online that included both airfare and hotel for less than the hotel was charging with our room block, and we are so grateful they did find it because it meant more people were able to attend. However, this discovery had a side effect - it meant that we didn’t hit our room minimum, and we didn’t find that out until we arrived to check in. Beyond that, we also didn’t realize that not hitting our room booking meant that every single part of our plan that the coordinator had helped us with was subsequently cancelled.
Worth mentioning - we found this out a matter of hours before that first rehearsal/welcome dinner at the restaurant. And it was a Saturday. Can you imagine trying to get a reservation for 50 people on a Saturday night on the Las Vegas Strip? Well, if you were me, you didn’t have to imagine it - that was our reality. Talk about disruption!!
However, despite that, right on schedule we had 50 people who were well fed, laughing, and having the time of their lives at a restaurant. The actual way we did that was absolutely simple - me and my incredibly charming friend and groomsman Galen went to the restaurant that previously held our reservation to explain the situation and see if there was anything they could do. The hostess was apologetic but explained it wasn’t possible, so we doubled down on the charm, got a few laughs, but ultimately still got told no. So, then I pulled out a wad of cash, and a few hundred dollars later we had our tables. That’s how Vegas works, folks, that shouldn’t be a surprise!
But here’s how we were able to do that in a way that will make sense to your leadership and context:
By having absolutely airtight operations, I was able to go through my entire plan and simply ask “What if…”. What if the Reverend didn’t show up? What’s my contingency? What if the venue was offline? What if the dinner was undercooked? What if the reservation was cancelled?This contingency was part of my operation plan, but without a robust operational plan I wouldn’t be able to properly answer the “what ifs” - that’s why it’s essential. And as it turns out, it was also one of the driving factors in choosing Las Vegas for our wedding. Weddings are notoriously expensive, but all they really are is a big party in terms of logistics, so we went to a place that has a highly competitive industry on hosting parties. You can rent a limo or a venue for a lot less money in Vegas than you can elsewhere, because it’s a highly competitive environment. That meant out of our relatively modest wedding budget, we were able to carve out several thousand dollars in cash for our contingency plan. Your specific context may necessitate a different contingency - but without knowing about your operations, you cannot fully understand your specific context. So those are the first two secrets to disruption resiliency.
But there’s a third one - remember how I said that my charming friend Galen accompanied me to that interaction with the hostess? It wouldn’t have gone as well without him. If I had walked up there flashing cash expecting an outcome, it may have even offended the hostess. But by being funny, engaging, and kind, Galen was able to build a wonderful rapport with the hostess, and the three of us became a team against the problem instead of two against one in conflict. And, we had our community - all 50 people - on standby waiting for confirmation of the plan, which they knew was a bit up in the air, but because they are good, kind people, they understood the situation and were standing by to help us.
This is the third and most powerful secret to disaster resiliency: Your community is your strength. The other people in your life will determine if you thrive of falter - we all have tough times, and we all struggle, and despite the common narrative from some sectors it’s never a case of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps (in fact that exact phrase was coined because it’s impossible to do). There are no self-made people - we are all the product of incredibly gifts by those who have helped shape us. Those people are your community, and you need that community to be strong and connected to thrive in a disruption.
And the time to do that isn’t when the disruption hits - it is something you need to do all the time. Every. Single. Day. Foster those connections with love and care, because having a community - beyond bags, beans, bullets, and bandaids - is what will help you weather disruption in a good way and make it a transformation instead.
Candidly - and more difficulty - take stock of those in your life that aren’t the above. Who doesn’t help you when asked? Who breaks you down instead of building you up? There might be some. Don’t be mad at them - their journey isn’t yours, and it just means that you might not be a part of theirs in the way you might want to be. But also, don’t be afraid of letting these go. Like the famous book “He’s just not that into you” - you cannot force someone to be in your community if they do not wish to be so.
If you take only one thing from this entire series, let it be this: Think about those you care about, the ones who are in your corner and who you can rely on. Reach out to them and see how they are doing. Connect with them. That can be a text message, a phone call, or share that funny instagram reel you just saw that made you think of them (I got one from Galen just now, that I will look at when I’m done writing this piece).
As Ben Lee said in his song, “We’re all in this together”. That’s truer now than maybe ever before, as the whole world seems full of forces that wish to divide us. But by fostering our community, we stand against those forces and to channel Patton Oswalt’s sentiments following the Boston Marathon bombing, we can look these evil forces of division in the eye and say “I’m not afraid of you or the disruption you are trying to cause. The good outnumber you, and we always will”.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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