Today’s leaders face extraordinary challenges. This is particularly true in work environments that focus on the public good. So what keeps these leaders going?
Every few weeks, I’ll share an episode of my new podcast, MESSY, where I talk to leaders in higher education, healthcare, non-profit and other complex environments about their lived experiences and make sense of their leadership journeys. Join me and listen to the conversations on Apple or Spotify, or stream the latest episode below.
Episode 19
Guest: David Agnew, President of Seneca Polytechnic
Don't be afraid to try something new.
What does it take to lead in systems that are complex, constrained, and constantly changing?
Daniel Atlin sits down with David Agnew, President of Seneca Polytechnic, whose career has spanned politics, finance, international development, and higher education. One commonality is stepping into organisations at moments of tension, transition, and uncertainty.
This conversation explores what leadership really looks like in public institutions, where the stakes are high, the problems are rarely neat, and the pressure to act is constant. It’s about navigating competing demands, making decisions you know will be unpopular, and holding steady in the storm.
Key insights:
Leadership is holding tension, not resolving it. Organisations want stability, but reality demands change.
Not all “mess” is the same. It can be a transition, a leadership gap, or a system under pressure
Public institutions operate under different rules. Unlike businesses, they don’t choose their customers and can’t walk away from problems
Leadership is not a popularity contest. Leaders must make decisions without full agreement, withstand criticism, and accept that not everyone will be satisfied
Inner sensemaking shapes outer action. Before decisions, there is a process happening internally: What matters? What do I stand for? What am I willing to act on?
Time horizons matter. In many public systems, today's decisions may not yield results for years. Leaders must think long-term but act in the present, and manage expectations in between
Careers and leadership journeys are rarely linear. Plans change, opportunities emerge, and growth often comes from stepping into the unknown
If you like this episode, please write a review and share it with a friend. David Agnew’s LinkedIn· Seneca Polytechnic Website· Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.
Episode 18
Guest: Sara Hurley, former Chief Dental Officer, England
Putting the Mouth Back into the Body Politic
Public Service = Designing Fairness at Scale.
In this episode of Messy, Daniel Atlin is joined by Sara Hurley, former Chief Dental Officer for England, a leader whose career spans frontline clinical care, military service, and senior government leadership. Few have operated as consistently at the intersection of individual care, institutional complexity, and public policy.
Sara offers a deeply reflective account of leadership in the mess.
Drawing on her experience during COVID, she describes what it feels like to make decisions when there are no good options — only trade-offs. In these moments, she argues, leadership is not about projecting certainty, but about holding uncertainty on behalf of others, while maintaining trust, clarity, and integrity.
The conversation moves fluidly between the personal and the systemic:
The shift from authority to trust as the foundation of leadership
The emotional labour of carrying responsibility in complex systems
The challenge of leading in environments where outcomes are delayed, diffuse, and often invisible
The importance of stewardship — leaving systems better than you found them, even if the impact unfolds long after you’ve left
Sara also makes a compelling case for public service as one of the last places where fairness can be intentionally designed into systems at scale — an idea that feels increasingly urgent in a time of institutional mistrust.
At its core, this episode is about sensemaking: how leaders navigate ambiguity internally, while shaping systems externally.
It’s a conversation about leadership in the real world: messy, human, and deeply consequential.
If you like this episode, please write a review and share it with a friend. Sara Hurley's LinkedIn · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.
Episode 17
Guest: Tim Blackman, Vice-Chancellor and President Emeritus, Open University
Is the University Model Broken?
Rethinking higher education — and finding your purpose.
What if the real problem with higher education isn’t funding, technology, or rankings, but the model itself?
In this episode, Daniel Atlin speaks with Tim Blackman, former Vice-Chancellor and President of the Open University, about whether the dominant university model is simply out of sync with modern life.
While most universities still organise learning around a single intensive period in early adulthood, Tim argues that the future lies in lifelong learning, shorter credentials, and education woven throughout people’s working lives. Drawing on his experience leading one of the largest and most distinctive universities in the UK, he reflects on the challenge of changing institutions that are structurally designed to protect the status quo.
But this conversation is also deeply personal.
While in his role leading the Open University, Tim was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. The experience forced a profound pause, prompting him to reflect on legacy, responsibility, and a simple but powerful question: What kind of world do I want to leave my grandchildren?
That moment sharpened his focus on the larger purpose of higher education. In his recent paper for the Higher Education Policy Institute, Tim argues that universities should orient themselves around a guiding mission: helping to build a sustainable economy, environmentally, socially, and financially.
The discussion ranges from institutional leadership and lifelong learning to the challenge of misinformation in an increasingly fragmented knowledge landscape.
Above all, it’s a conversation about purpose and the reminder that it is never too late to rethink your work, your impact, and the difference you want to make. In a messy world, Tim reminds us that leadership isn’t just about managing institutions - it’s about deciding what really matters with the time we have.
Connect with Tim on LinkedIn · The HEPI paper · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn.
Host Daniel Atlin offers his thoughts on the challenges of leadership in mission-driven organisations.
Making Sense of Making Sense | Why the mess matters
This episode is different.
There’s no guest. It’s just me, Daniel Atlin, answering the question I ask every leader who comes on Messy: to riff off the Kierkegaard quote “Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards."
I look back at the moments that shaped my curiosity about leadership, complexity, and what I now call “the mess.” I talk about growing up between cultures and religions, about realising I was gay in the 1980s, about feeling different and discovering that everyone carries a backstory you can’t see.
After senior roles across government, cooperative organisations, and higher education, I kept noticing the same pattern: smart people, important missions, and good intentions. And… stalled initiatives, quiet failures, and exhausted leaders.
Why is leadership in mission-driven organisations so difficult?
That question led me to study leadership more formally at Oxford and HEC Paris and to interview 25 university leaders across four countries. What I discovered surprised me.
Leaders who navigated complexity most effectively weren’t the ones with perfect strategies but the ones who could make sense of politics, competing narratives, incomplete data, and their own emotional reactions.
They were practicing two forms of sensemaking at the same time:
Personal sensemaking: regulating emotion, building resilience, understanding how your nervous system affects the organisation.
Organisational sensemaking: exploring the terrain, shaping narrative, improvising when plans collide with reality, and adapting collaboratively.
When those two disconnect, leadership falters. When they align, something powerful happens.
This episode explains what I’ve learned so far, and why naming complexity is oddly liberating.
If you’re wrestling with leadership in uncertain times, this episode and the series is for you.
Episode 15
Guest: Iain Martin, Vice Chancellor and President, Deakin University
Between the Dance Floor and the Balcony
Leading across Australia, the UK, and New Zealand.
What does it mean to lead a university when trust in public institutions is eroding, and the rules keep changing?
In this episode of Messy, I speak with Iain Martin, President and Vice-Chancellor of Deakin University, about navigating leadership in the thick of complexity. From global rankings and political scrutiny to AI, massification, and polarisation, the conversation surfaces the often unseen pressures shaping modern universities.
The “dance floor and balcony” metaphor comes from the adaptive leadership work of Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky. It captures the leadership challenge of staying grounded in day-to-day realities while also stepping back to see system-level patterns.
Iain reflects on his leadership journey across three Commonwealth systems. He shares how curiosity, narrative, and sensemaking (rather than rigid planning) have guided his approach. Central to the discussion is the idea of social license: who grants it, how easily it can be lost, and why rebuilding it requires leaders to think beyond their own institutions.
Without offering simple solutions, this episode sits with the mess, exploring how leaders balance the dance floor and the balcony, strategy and stewardship, optimism and realism. It underscores why universities still matter as places for difficult conversations in a fractured world.
Key highlights:
Why universities cannot “go it alone” on social license
The leadership cost of ignoring community expectations
Universities as complex adaptive systems that require “productive chaos”
Transparency as a practical trust-building strategy
The future of assessment and learning in an AI-enabled world
Why narrative and storytelling are essential leadership tools
I hope you enjoy this conversation. If you do, please write a review and share it with a friend.
Living and leading in the mess is easier with others.
Episode 14
Guest: John Yip, President and CEO, SE Health
Structured Chaos in a Messy System
A little playbook, a little Picasso.
Healthcare is often treated as a hospital story until you need care at home.
In this episode of Messy, I am joined by John Yip, President & CEO of SE Health, to talk about leading at the intersection of health systems, digital transformation, workforce innovation, and social purpose.
John shares how his early work in the digital economy still echoes today, why home and community care is both essential and misunderstood, and what it takes to build alignment across a complex, distributed organisation operating in Canada’s fragmented provincial landscape. The conversation goes deep on COVID-era leadership: uncertainty, moral pressure, scarcity, and the real-world improvisation required when there is no playbook.
We also explore what “digital transformation” should mean now and how to ensure technology serves care (not the other way around), why safe experimentation matters, and the potential of healthcare data to improve aging and wellbeing. John offers a powerful metaphor from his personal endurance project: “running every street” as a practice of curiosity, resilience, and rewiring your perspective.
Key themes:
Sensemaking across long arcs of change
Healthcare as a complex, fragmented ecosystem
Leadership in distributed, mission-driven systems
Frontline intimacy and relational care
Crisis leadership requires improvisation
Resilience through exploration and “structured chaos”
If leadership sometimes feels like chopping wood, this episode is a reminder: the grind is part of the work, and purpose is what helps you stay even-keeled through the mess.
Episode 13
Guest: Meric Gertler, President Emeritus, University of Toronto
Universities at the Boundary
Sensemaking and Placemaking.
In June 2025, Meric Gertler completed a 12-year term as President of the University of Toronto.
I had the privilege and good fortune to first meet and work with Meric Gertler in 2007 when he was then the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. What stood out most was his curious, thoughtful, and deeply empathetic approach to leadership.
Now, 18 years later, I thoroughly enjoyed our "Messy" conversation. A great deal of it explores how sensemaking is a crucial but often unrecognised function of university presidents, involving engaging with communities in all its definitions, interpreting signals, global trends and events to help their institutions understand their role in addressing societal challenges.
We cover lots more ground in our conversation:
Why sensemaking is a non-delegable responsibility of senior leaders
How universities build (or lose) legitimacy and public trust
What higher education truly owes society
Universities as engines of access, inclusion, and opportunity
The challenge of fostering real debate & “disagreeing well”
Leading through the pandemic
Navigating geopolitical disruption and social media fragmentation
How U of T became a global leader in sustainability
Lessons about mobilising change in complex systems
Practical leadership lessons on delegation, listening, and sustaining yourself in demanding roles
This episode is a powerful reflection on leadership at the boundary: between institutions and society, certainty and ambiguity, responsibility and possibility.
If you’re navigating complexity, questioning institutional purpose, or trying to lead with integrity in uncertain times, this conversation will stay with you.
Episode 12
Guest: Heather Anderson, Chief Executive Officer, Global Health Corps
Guest: David Kamau, Chief Program Officer, Global Health Corps
Why global health needs collective leadership
Lasting impact happens inside people, and adaptation is the critical skill.
“That trusted network of peers is what keeps leaders standing when the work feels overwhelming.”
In this episode of Messy with Daniel Atlin, I have a conversation with Heather Anderson (CEO) and David Kamau (Chief Program Officer) from Global Health Corps to explore what leadership really looks like when the stakes are high, the data is incomplete, and the path forward isn’t clear.
GHC was built on a core belief that systems don’t have agency, people do. It is focused on building capacity in health systems through fostering leadership competencies and skills in early and mid-career leaders in Africa and the U.S.
David and Heather unpack how GHC built a “movement” of emerging health leaders across Africa and the U.S., and they do that through tapping into lived and shared experiences, building coaching muscles and a peer community, and harnessing the power of public narrative. They talk candidly about adaptability in crisis, navigating equity and power and preventing burnout in under-resourced systems.
If you’ve ever wondered how leaders in a global non-profit keep going in the mess, this conversation is your blueprint.
Episode 11
Guest: Mark Walton, President and Chief Executive Officer, Guelph General Hospital
Leading like a jazz conductor, not a classical maestro
Hospitals are messy, complex, adaptive systems.
In this episode, I speak with Mark Walton, President and CEO of Guelph General Hospital. Together, we explore what leadership looks like inside one of the messiest systems we have: a community hospital under relentless pressure. We'll learn lessons to get through the mess.
Mark traces his health care journey from a 17-year-old ward clerk to finally realising his teenage dream of becoming a hospital CEO and why he cried in the middle of Canadian Tire when he got the call offering him the role of his dreams.
He makes the case that hospitals and universities are a different species of organization and are really complex adaptive systems that don't act like a traditional business. They are mission-driven, financially constrained, and constantly juggling patient care, staff well-being, community trust, donors, and regulators.
Mark shares what he learned in previous roles, leading Ontario’s COVID-19 response: the importance of naming uncertainty, the long shadow of trauma on health-care workers, and a powerful story of learning a key leadership lesson by stepping into the “cracks between systems” to support migrant farm workers when “no help was coming.”
Along the way, he talks about AI in healthcare, the loneliness of the CEO role, why he leads more like a jazz conductor than a classical maestro, and how music, teaching, and rest help him stay grounded.
It's a candid, hopeful conversation about complexity, values, and leading humans in a system that never sleeps.
Episode 10
Guest: Tania Rhodes-Taylor, Executive Director Communications, King's College London
Stewardship in an Age of Noise
“When leadership goes wrong is when people cling to the baton — and you have to peel their cold, dead hands off it."
In this episode, I sit down with Tania Rhodes-Taylor, Executive Director of Communications and External Affairs at King’s College London, and Chair of the World 100 Reputation Network, to explore what it really takes to lead in a purpose-driven institution in turbulent times.
She shares her origin story, being the first in her family to go to university, her experience and perspective gained from working in multiple industries and countries, and what drives her personally.
Central themes are the importance of reputation, purpose, and stewardship in an age of noise. She says that "reputation is our currency" and that leaders should be stewards rather than trying to be main character heroes.
Episode 9
Guest: Dr. Lynn Wells, President and Vice-Chancellor, Laurentian University
Changing the narrative – regreening a community
Leading through renewal and reinvention.
What does it take to lead after an institutional trauma without making it about you?
Dr. Lynn Wells, President and Vice-Chancellor of Laurentian University, traces a steady path from crisis to renewal: changing a damaging narrative, rebuilding trust, and putting “student-first” at the centre of every hard call.
Drawing on her earlier chapters at other institutions, from reconciliation work at First Nations University of Canada to student-centred leadership at MacEwan and pandemic decision-making at Brock — Lynn shows how process, patience, and humility become anchors when the ground keeps shifting.
Lynn is candid about the human work beneath the headlines: helping a community heal, rejecting doom language, and choosing to lead alongside rather than from the front. She unpacks Laurentian’s tricultural identity, the deep bond with the city of Sudbury, and a powerful metaphor for recovery is the city’s decades-long “regreening,” a science-led restoration that mirrors the university’s rebuild.
Along the way Lynn addresses why good governance beats quick fixes, how to keep purpose intact under political and financial pressure, and the disciplines that keep leaders steady: clear boundaries, exercise, and grace for human fallibility.
Episode 8
Guest: Daniel Sharaiha, Chief Human Resources Officer and Customer Experience, Bank-al-Etihad
A foot in two different worlds | Balancing heart and mind
What does it mean to lead when your head and heart pull in different directions?
Daniel Sharaiha, a senior bank executive and humanitarian based in Jordan, has spent his career moving between the corporate and NGO worlds, finding clarity in the tension between them. From welcoming millions of refugees in a water-scarce country to championing women’s participation in the workforce, he shares how empathy, humour, and hope shape his approach to leadership.
In this candid conversation, Daniel reframes empathy as a strategic advantage, explores why influence and trust are a leader’s most valuable currency, and reflects on how humour and improvisation help him navigate complexity.
A grounded and inspiring look at what it means to bridge head and heart, profit and purpose, and to lead with curiosity, courage, and compassion.
Check out Daniel Sharaiha's convocation speech at HEC Paris.
Episode 7
Guest: Dr. Diana Beech, Director of Finsbury Institute, Professor and Assistant Vice-President of Policy and Government Affairs, City St George’s, University of London
Lead with purpose, not position
What does it mean to lead with purpose in complex systems shaped by politics, policy, and change?
In this reflective conversation, Dr Diana Beech, inaugural Director of the Finsbury Institute at City St George’s, University of London, traces her unconventional path across academia, government, and policy to reveal how curiosity, courage, and moral purpose define leadership. She shares lessons from failure and resilience, and the challenge of building something new from the ground up.
A grounded exploration of what it means to lead with purpose, not position — and to find opportunity and meaning in the mess of higher education and public life.
Episode 6
Guest: Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of British Columbia
Leading through healing
What does it really mean to lead with authenticity? And how does healing your own wounds shape the way you show up as a leader?
Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of British Columbia, shares his extraordinary journey—from a difficult childhood and years of substance use to recovery, self-awareness, and purpose-driven leadership. He speaks candidly about fear, shame, and the inner work required to lead with compassion and love.
A powerful reflection on courage, vulnerability, and the lifelong work of becoming whole—both as a person and as a leader.
Episode 5
Guest: Dr. Tim McTiernan, President Emeritus, Ontario Tech University
Tap into an outsider mindset
What can being an outsider teach you about leadership?
Irish-Canadian leader Tim McTiernan shares how growing up between two worlds shaped his approach to collaboration, negotiation, and change across governments and universities. His story is a masterclass in listening, learning before acting, and finding clarity in complexity.
Episode 4
Guest: Sheldon Levy, President Emeritus, Ryerson University (TMU)
No risk, no reward - innovators needed
What does it take to truly innovate in higher education?
Sheldon Levy—one of Canada’s most recognisable post-secondary leaders—shares how bold thinking, risk-taking, and trusting students can transform institutions. From creating the DMZ at Ryerson (now TMU) to challenging universities and governments to embrace experimentation, Sheldon calls for leaders who break rules thoughtfully and align education with society’s needs.
A candid conversation on courage, change, and what it really means to lead innovation in complex systems.
Episode 3
Guest: Dr. Julia Christensen Hughes, President and Vice Chancellor, Yorkville University
Powered by passion and purpose
What happens when leadership and learning are truly aligned?
Dr. Julia Christensen Hughes reflects on her journey through higher education—from early disappointments as a student to leading change at the University of Guelph and Yorkville University. She shares how purpose, ethical leadership, and storytelling can drive transformation, even in systems resistant to change.
A thoughtful exploration of what it means to lead with conviction, measure impact through values, and reimagine universities as learning organisations.
Episode 2
Guest: Vivek Goel, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Waterloo
The doctor will see you now | Leadership and AI
What does it take to lead with both science and soul?
Dr. Vivek Goel, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waterloo, shares how his background in medicine and public health shaped a leadership philosophy grounded in evidence, empathy, and long-term vision. He reflects on his bold “Waterloo at 100” plan—reimagining the university’s next century—and explores how AI can transform learning, research, and human connection.
A timely look at leadership, foresight, and the future of education in an age defined by technology and change.
Episode 1
Welcome to Messy | Making sense of leadership
Ever wonder if leaders really matter in complex organizations?
I’m Daniel Atlin, an executive coach with over 30 years steering Canada’s universities, co-ops, and government sectors. In Messy, I dive into the chaotic world of purpose-driven leadership—think higher education, healthcare, and NGOs. Join me as I talk with global leaders about navigating stakeholder conflicts, geopolitical shifts, and crises, all while balancing influence over authority. It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s not for the faint of heart.