Messy with Daniel Atlin

About Messy with Daniel Atlin

Make Sense of the Mess of Leadership. Today’s leaders are facing unprecedented challenges. It’s a messy, complex world that requires a different approach and mindset to get things done. This is where you'll find conversations on how leaders in complex organizations navigate and make sense of the mess they find themselves in.

Publisher

Solid Gold Podcasts #BeHeard

Category

business · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Jun 2025

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

28 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Say Yes To The Mess Part 2: Frank Barrett On Improvisation, AI, and Leading Without A Script

   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.

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Yes to the Mess Part 1: What Jazz Teaches Us About Learning, Failure, and Finding Your Voice

   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.

3. 

   16 Sept 2026

   Sir Anton Muscatelli on Leading Public Institutions Through Complexity, Slow Growth, and the AI Age

   Sensemaking leadership as a team sport. This episode is for anyone who cares about the future of public institutions and what it takes to lead them well in a world of slow growth, eroding trust, and rapid technological change. Sir Anton Muscatelli, economist, former Principal of the University of Glasgow, and current President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, shares a rare combination: deep academic expertise, two decades of institutional leadership, and an immigrant's perspective shaped by childhood across Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. Anton lays out a three-part framework for how expert institutions must communicate to preserve public trust: show your reasoning, be honest about where expertise ends and judgment begins, and be accountable when you get things wrong. He applies this directly to flashpoint debates including Brexit, climate change, and US tariffs - explaining why experts are losing credibility and what they must change. The conversation moves into the structural pressures facing advanced economies: why slower growth makes politics more zero-sum and fuels populism, what the history of the interwar years tells us about today's protectionism, and why Anton remains an optimist about democracy, technology, and humanity's capacity to overcome adversity. Anton reflects on interdisciplinary research and institutional design, including the Advanced Research Centre at Glasgow and parallels with Cambridge, and what form-follows-function really means when building institutions for wicked problems. He humbly shares his personal leadership philosophy: curiosity first, team leadership always, and the player-coach model as the practical antidote to the lonely decisions at the top. The episode closes with a distinction that cuts to the heart of the AI era: knowledge is becoming abundant and easy to access, but wisdom, the judgment to know how to use knowledge in a particular situation, remains scarce and irreducibly human. That, Anton argues, is exactly the role universities and national academies must own going forward.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

5,835

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Podcast Authority Score: 23 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

17

Social presence

0

YouTube

74

Engagement

0