Making Sense of Making Sense | Why the mess matters

Daniel Atlin, host · [00:36]Now, I often describe myself as winning the lottery, and that's for many reasons. I was born in Canada with two engaged parents. I was a middle child, number three or four, and I grew up in a really close family. I was curious by nature and enjoyed being with people. We lived in the country in a house full of books and interesting conversations, and tolerance and compassion for others were Important values in our home. And I think this is a large part stemming from my parents not having an easy time when in 1957, my Jewish father married my Anglican mother, and they weren't always treated well by small town Canada. It felt as if we had a foot in two religions, two cultures, but without really having a real home or tribe where you felt welcome. It felt different, at least to me. And in the early 1980s, when I was in my teens, I realized I was gay. And the notion of being different and grappling with my identity further made me feel even more different. It brought to the surface the recognition and knowledge that everyone has a backstory, that everyone is grappling with issues that you may not necessarily be able to see.

Daniel Atlin, host · [01:50]I got a university degree in political science and a minor in philosophy, and I traveled the world. And I discovered a love of different cultures and new experiences. I had a year abroad in France, and then lived in Montreal and worked in Montreal for a few years, and finally settled in Toronto. And for the past 30 years, I worked in senior roles in mission-based organizations where we were trying to do meaningful work in the world. First government, then the larger cooperative organization, and then the past 20 years in higher education. I kept seeing something that kept bothering me. Smart people, important missions, and good intentions, and yet great projects would stall. Promising initiatives would quietly disappear, energy would dissipate, and leadership, real leadership, felt larger than it should be, and sometimes it felt nearly impossible. I became curious. Why is leadership in these mission-oriented places so difficult? They aren't profit-maximizing corporations, they're purpose-driven institutions, and yet they often felt stuck. That curiosity eventually led me to step back and study leadership more formally. I enrolled in an executive master of leadership at Said Business School at the University of Oxford. It was a joint program with HEC Paris. I learned from an incredible cohort, from people from over 20 countries. I devoured the reading and engaged deeply with the material, and quite frankly, it opened my eyes. Not because I found the answer, but because of something much more humbling. I had previously not really known what leadership was, especially in complex mission-based organizations. We talk about strategy, we talk about execution, we talk about vision, we talk about bell scorecards, but none of these really capture what I was seeing in the field.

Daniel Atlin, host · [03:50]So I decided to go deeper. I reached out and interviewed 25 senior university leaders across Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, people carrying the weight of their position, and what I discovered really surprised me. They weren't surviving because they had perfect strategies. Some were just surviving, but some were doing better than others. They were doing better because they were constantly making sense of politics, of competing narratives, of incomplete data, of their own emotional reactions. They weren't driven by singular or multi-pronged goals and tight time horizons. Their leadership was not linear. It was messy. This idea of organizational sensemaking builds on the work of Carl Weick and later scholars like Deborah and Kona. But what I saw in these interviews was lived sensemaking, was exploration, constantly updating a map. It was storytelling, helping others interpret what was happening. With improvisation, adjusting when plans collided with reality and collaboration and adaptation, knowing they couldn't do it alone. But here's the part that really surprised me. When I wrote the dissertation and shared it back with them, many of these leaders said the same thing, thank you for naming the mess. And that reminded me of that famous line from David Foster Wallace's complication speech to Kenyon College, when he describes the story of an older fish swimming up to two younger fish, and the older fish says to them, how's the water? That fish swims off, and one of the raining fish turns to the other and asks, what the hell is water? The fish don't see the water they swim in. And this parable emphasizes that we take for granted our context and the world around us. And I found out that oftentimes leaders often don't see the complexity that they're immersed in it. They just feel exhausted by it. Naming it, calling it the mess, was oddly liberating and acknowledging it was even more so.

Daniel Atlin, host · [06:01]And when the research received very high marks in the program, backed by strong academic grounding, it didn't feel like a validation of me. It felt like a validation of the idea that this messy reality deserves serious attention. That was a turning point. I realized I didn't want to have to stop at the dissertation. I wanted to continue the conversations. I wanted to keep exploring how leaders survive and how some thrive in complexity. And that's why I started Messy with Daniel Atlin. And over the course of these conversations with leaders in healthcare, higher education, nonprofits, public service, I've noticed something deeper. The strongest leaders are balancing two forms of sensemaking at the same time. First, there's personal sensemaking. Understanding their emotions, regulating their reactions, building resilience muscles, because your nervous system is part of the leadership system. If you're dysregulated, the organization feels it. Second, organizational sensemaking, exploring the terrain, creating narratives that people can act on, improvising responsibility, and adapting collaboratively. Leadership failure, I've come to believe, often begins when these two forms of sensemaking disconnect. When leaders ignore their inner signals, or when they overfocus on themselves and lose the system. The work is both, and it's ongoing.

Daniel Atlin, host · [07:33]So where does this go next? I honestly don't really know exactly, and that's the part of the point, and that's part of the excitement. My curiosity about improving mission-based organizations hasn't gone away. If anything, it's intensified. I want to keep talking to leaders. I want to continue to broaden the conversation beyond higher education into charities, public agencies, and social enterprises. I want to explore how AI intersects with Sensemaking and how storytelling shapes policy, how humility becomes a strategic asset, and I'd love your help. What leadership problems are you wrestling with? What's the mess you're navigating? Who should I be talking to? This isn't about building an audience. It's more about building a messy community of practice, a space where we can acknowledge complexity without pretending we've solved it, where curiosity leads, where humility leads, and where we can ask better questions together. So if this resonates, reach out. Suggest a guest, suggest a theme, share the mess you're in, and watch this space, because the conversation is just getting started.