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?
Messy is a podcast about what leadership really looks like when there are no simple answers.
Through candid conversations with leaders working in complex, purpose-driven organizations, I explore how they navigate ambiguity, change, competing expectations and the human side of leadership.
The conversations also continue to shape my Leading in the Mess framework, offering new perspectives on how leaders make sense of themselves, their organizations and the world around them.
Latest episode
Here’s the newest conversation from Messy with Daniel Atlin, exploring how leaders navigate complexity, change and uncertainty.
Here are some of my solo episodes of “MESSY”
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.
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.
One year of “Messy”
Learning what it’s like and what takes to lead in the mess.
After a year and 23 conversations, I stepped back to ask what these leaders had collectively taught me about leading in complexity.
