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 leader 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:
1. Personal sensemaking: regulating emotion, building resilience, understanding how your nervous system affects the organisation.
2. 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.