Messy with Daniel Atlin

How would you teach someone to play tennis? You could hire five coaches to teach the mechanics of a serve, the physics of a bouncing ball, the history of the game, and the science of the racket. You could even have the student practise serving against a wall. But how well would they play if they’d never faced an opponent? Minerva founder Ben Nelson uses that analogy to ask what happens when we teach students a series of disconnected courses and expect them to put it all together when they graduate. Last week on Messy, Art Markman drew on his experience leading inside a large public university to talk about how established institutions can better serve their students. This week, in the companion episode and my first video episode, Ben comes at the same challenge from the outside. What would a university look like if you started with what you wanted students to be able to do? Ben argues for teaching thinking tools explicitly, giving students repeated practice across courses and settings, and helping them develop the judgment to know when to use those tools on their own. One of my favourite moments came when I connected Ben’s idea of critical wisdom to inner sensemaking (how we understand our own reactions and assumptions) and outer sensemaking (how we read what’s happening around us). Ben told me that Minerva already uses sensemaking as the framework for its high school curriculum. He describes it as “orienting, analyzing, and doing.” We also talk about my own attempt to build a campus that would do things differently, and why so much of the original idea fell away. That experience made me curious about Ben’s plans for a wider Minerva system. How much could existing universities change about the way students learn while working within familiar structures like degrees, majors, and credits? And how might each institution adapt those ideas to its own context? Connect with Ben on LinkedIn · The Minerva Project · Website · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

What happens when a cognitive scientist and writer, who has spent more than three decades inside universities, decides to help change higher education from a different vantage point? This week on "Messy", Daniel Atlin speaks with Art Markman, a former senior academic leader at the University of Texas at Austin and now Chief Academic Officer at Minerva Project. It is the first of two linked conversations about rethinking higher education, with Minerva founder Ben Nelson joining Daniel next week. Art brings the perspective of someone who knows both how people learn and how universities work. He reflects on the personal and professional changes behind his move to Minerva, and on a challenging realization: being an engaging professor does not necessarily mean creating an effective learning experience. Together, Daniel and Art explore why students are so often left to connect the pieces of their education themselves, why grades tell us less about learning than we might assume, and how a more intentional curriculum can help students apply what they learn in unfamiliar situations. Art also offers a practical example of AI supporting skill development through negotiation practice and individual feedback. Running through the conversation is a leadership question familiar well beyond universities: how do you help knowledgeable, independent people see the need for change and participate in making it happen? Art and Ben have arrived at Minerva through different paths. Art brings decades of experience working within an established institution; Ben brings an entrepreneur’s determination to rethink university education from first principles. Their conversations offer complementary perspectives on a shared ambition: helping higher education prepare students for a world that will keep changing. Key takeaways from this episode: - Engaging teaching does not guarantee learning. Art reflects on the difference between being an entertaining professor and designing experiences that help students develop lasting capabilities. - Grades offer an incomplete picture. Universities collect what Art calls “learning adjacent data,” while often knowing much less about what students have actually learned. - Students need help connecting the pieces. An intentional curriculum makes clear how skills develop across courses, rather than leaving students to discover those connections themselves. - Learning becomes powerful when it travels. Education should help students recognize when and how to apply their knowledge and skills in unfamiliar situations. - AI can create opportunities for practice and feedback. Art’s negotiation example shows how carefully designed tools could support students at different levels. - Institutional change requires faculty participation. Building a shared understanding of the need for change, alongside manageable steps forward, can help turn resistance into engagement. - Communication strengthens leadership. Explaining complex ideas to different audiences can help leaders understand the systems behind the problems they face. If you like this episode, please like it, write a review, and share it! Connect with Art Markman on LinkedIN · Art Markman and Bob Duke · The Minerva Project · Website · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

Strategist and researcher Zora Artis on the real work of alignment. Leadership is messy, ongoing, and stubbornly resistant to five-step programs. What does it take for people to move forward together when they see the world differently? Strategist, facilitator, coach, and researcher Zora Artis joins Daniel Atlin to explore what alignment means, what it costs when it is missing, and why sustaining it requires continual care and attention. Zora’s story begins with a childhood moving between Yugoslavia and Australia, learning to read unfamiliar environments and find belonging while retaining her own perspective. That experience helped shape her curiosity about how people make sense of situations and work through differences. Together, Zora and Daniel explore why apparent agreement can conceal very different understandings, what separates an executive team from a team of executives, and how avoiding difficult conversations means “banking future conflict.” Zora describes how ego, fear, and a sense that speaking up will change nothing can undermine alignment, even in seemingly successful teams. She also explains how leaders can build shared clarity through dialogue: giving everyone a voice, listening to understand, and asking questions that uncover assumptions and meaning. These practices connect alignment with a central theme of Messy: collective sensemaking, or how people work through different interpretations to figure out what to do next, together. As strategy cycles shorten and AI accelerates the pace of work, Zora argues that technology amplifies whatever alignment or misalignment already exists. The ongoing work of connecting purpose, priorities and everyday decisions becomes even more consequential. The conversation closes with Zora’s advice to her younger self: nurture curiosity, seek out different perspectives, and keep asking questions when something is unclear. Connect with Zora Artis on LinkedIn · Jonathan Trevor - Strategic Alignment Research, Said Business School · Michael Bungay Stanier - The Coaching Habit and The Conspiracy community · IABC - International Association of Business Communicators · Website · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

Eight jazz principles for leading in uncertain, unscripted environments. This episode is for leaders who feel the ground shifting beneath them and who must keep moving forward despite having no reliable script, no guaranteed outcome, and no clear map. In Part 2 of our conversation, Frank Barrett, author of Say Yes to the Mess, draws on jazz improvisation to offer a practical framework for leading well in exactly those conditions. Frank walks through eight jazz-derived leadership practices: mastering the art of unlearning (following Sonny Rollins' legendary retreat to the Brooklyn Bridge), saying yes to the mess through affirmative competence, performing and experimenting simultaneously, and building minimal structure for maximal autonomy. The conversation covers how Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue in a single take with no rehearsal - provoking musicians just enough to demand fresh attention - and what that teaches about provocative competence and double vision in leadership. The discussion also tackles followership - a discipline jazz calls 'comping' - and why organisations that only celebrate soloists are missing half the picture. Henry Mintzberg's concept of communityship gets a mention, and the episode explores how hanging out and serendipity (from Edison's Menlo Park to the Navy's O Club) drive the kind of innovation that formal structures cannot manufacture. Frank then turns the lens on universities as loosely coupled, gloriously messy organisations where autonomy, redundancy, and narcissistic passion somehow produce extraordinary results - and warns what is lost when control is tightened. The episode closes with a sharp-edged argument about AI: useful for surfacing patterns across compressed expertise, but dangerous when used to offload the struggle of learning itself. Saying yes to the mess means resisting the temptation to let a machine clean up the very friction through which judgment, identity, and wisdom are formed. Relevant to leaders in higher education, the military, technology, and anywhere uncertainty is the default operating condition. Connect with Frank Barrett on LinkedIn · Say Yes to the Mess by Frank Barrett (Harvard Business Review Press) · Sonny Rollins - The Bridge (album) · Miles Davis - Kind of Blue (album) · Website · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

Jazz pianist and organizational scholar Frank Barrett on play, shame, and finding your voice. This episode is for anyone who has ever felt held back by a voice telling them they are doing it wrong. Frank Barrett, jazz pianist, organizational scholar, and author of Yes to the Mess, traces the roots of improvisation back to where it really begins: childhood, play, shame, and the difference between learning that is alive and learning that is rule-bound. If you love music, suspect that fear of mistakes is quietly limiting you, or want to understand what jazz can genuinely teach leaders about navigating uncertainty, this conversation is for you. Frank's story starts at his grandfather's piano in a small Irish-American home in Cleveland, where ragtime and laughter shaped a different relationship with mistakes than any formal lesson ever could. He traces how that early experience of playful, joyful learning was replaced by shame when structured piano lessons began, and how that shame became the main enemy of improvisation throughout his life and career. The contrast between mistakes that generate laughter and mistakes that generate silence is one of the most practical insights in this episode. The conversation moves through Frank's accidental journey into jazz: teaching himself by ear, playing with the late great jazz clarinetist Ken Popowski, surviving a very public humiliation in the wrong key with the Tommy Dorsey Band at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, and receiving the bluntest possible feedback to find his own voice. These are not polished success stories. They are exactly the kind of messes that turn into wisdom. Frank also traces how his lived experience as a musician collided with the organizational thinking of Karl Weick, whose concept of sense-making and compressed expertise runs through this episode. He describes the 1996-97 Academy of Management symposium on jazz that sparked his research career, his early connection to David Cooperrider and the birth of appreciative inquiry at the Cleveland Clinic, and his relationship with Deborah Ancona's work on leadership and the family ghosts we carry into our professional lives. The episode closes on the phrase that anchors Frank's entire framework: yes to the mess is an appreciative move. Part two (next week) covers leadership, unlearning, minimal structure, maximal autonomy, and AI. Connect with Frank on LinkedIn · Yes to the Mess · Karl Weick's Social Psychology of Organizing · Deborah Ancona's research at MIT Sloan · Website · Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn