The Leader Fast Lane - Episode 8 - with Jamie McIntosh

In this episode, I talk with Jamie McIntosh, an accomplished senior non-profit leader who shares lessons learned from his time leading work with International Justice Mission Canada, Compassion Canada, and World Vision Canada, among others. We talk about how to make wise decisions with heavy consequences, operating in the tension between mission purpose/passion and operational discipline, how to use AI as a tool, and finding your purpose and taking your shot.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello, and welcome to the Leader Fastly, the podcast where I talk with accomplished leaders from higher education, public service, and beyond to share real stories, practical principles, and hard-earned lessons listeners can apply immediately. No buzzwords, no shortcuts, just real leaders sharing real lessons you can apply right away. I'm Lane Mears, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Leader and Culture Development at the Texas Tech University System. Today I am joined by Jamie McIntosh. Jamie has spent decades at the helm of some of Canada's most respected humanitarian development and justice organizations, serving as CEO of World Renew, International Justice Mission Canada, and Mercy Ships Canada, and as a vice president of both programs and philanthropy at Compassion Canada and World Vision Canada. Across those roles, he has led through crises ranging from modern slavery and human trafficking to famine response and organizational transformation, often at the intersection of urgent human need and institutional constraint. He has served on boards across the international development sector and writes and coaches on governance as well as executive leadership. Today he works with charity leaders and boards navigating complexity, transition, and change, helping them lead with wisdom, courage, and hope. He writes Waypoints, a newsletter for mission-driven leaders, which listeners can find on LinkedIn. It's great to have you on the podcast, Jamie. My pleasure. So you've I want to dive right in with a couple questions, but you've spent much of your career confronting some of the hardest realities in the world. Modern-day slavery, human trafficking, and severe injustice. What first compelled you to get into this kind of work?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

It's been said that you don't really recognize justice. It's sort of in the abstract until you are confronted with injustice, that sort of brutal ugliness of a situation that you just can't knock out of your mind. For me, I think part of it, there are many routes to this, but one of the routes is a friend came back from spending some time in a leadership role serving amongst uh children on the street in some favelas in Brazil. And through that situation, um, she was encountering and confronted with street children who were being uh abused, even to the point of being executed by uh paramilitary police who were trying to clean up a blight, who were trying to address, you know, narco trafficking. And sadly, it crushes the lives of the most vulnerable who are caught in the crossfire, those who are um, you know, pressed into this. And I uh I remember hearing her sharing these stories, and my mind, the gears just ground to a halt because I thought, well, what would I do if I saw kids who were being uh shot by somebody? Well, I'd run to the police. But what do you do if it is the police who are on the other end of that barrel pulling the trigger? What do you do when the institutions themselves that are set up to protect the rights and the dignity of the vulnerable and the oppressed actually themselves become instruments of that oppression? And my uh 18-year-old brain at the time could not compute, could not work out a solution to the problem. But there was something in me that was like an ember that had been ignited that would simmer for uh years to come, thinking God must have a solution to this problem. Uh, and I was bound and determined to figure out what that must look like and do whatever I could to respond. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Well, that that's that's great. Um, and it's amazing how those unexpected, profound moments can turn a life. Um my my experience is a bit similar when when I was a young lawyer in Austin, we were happy, we were had a house and community and a good church. And then a friend from high school whose wife worked for International Justice Mission, IJM, sent me a book written by Gary Haugen, the founder, uh, about trafficking in Cambodia and how Vietnamese little kids were were trafficked and sold into the sex trade in in Cambodia. And I read this and I was like, holy cow, I can't know this happens, have my skill set as a young lawyer, Christian, and a daughter the same same age as some of these kids I'm reading about, and not do something about it. And it was that moment, that inflection moment of what what do I do with this now? Um and so it's great to hear that you were 18 years old when when when you had that inflection moment. I was probably 30, uh 33 or 35 or something, but what uh I'm I'm I'm glad, and I'm there are lots that are that are glad that you chose the way to uh you know invest your life in getting involved in in that justice work.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

It would be another decade, I would say, between the ignition point of the recognition of this grievous injustice and the ignition point of being able to do something specifically for that type of scenario. In between, I went to uh, you know, I thought I was gonna go to law school actually to equip myself for these types of things. Um, and I got rerooted uh through uh in a different path where I ended up studying theology, worked with youth at risk in different settings in uh in California, uh in the San Francisco Bay Area, and um uh was involved in a lot of short-term missions to places where I started to see the way the world was, uh, some of the injustices economically, the um the lack of protections for the poor. And then I got involved with an organization that was doing something practical to um help educate children who were in these communities where they had the lack of resources to uh go with go to school or stay in school. Um and so I was involved with trying to meet some of those material needs, those economic needs, um to watch children thrive and flourish. And that was amazing. Um, but even through that work, I found myself in places like the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where I saw for my own through my own eyes, uh children who were being exploited. I learned of the situation of Restovics, uh, modern-day slaves who have an existence very much like Cinderella with no fairy godmother on site. These were girls and boys taken into extended relatives' homes, ostensibly to be cared for, to be looked after if their own family couldn't provide for their educational uh journey. And uh they would be taken into home, sometimes cared for well, but other times um really treated as virtual slaves within that system, exploited and abused. And so when I learned even more of these situations, and the organization I was with was doing great work, but was not countering, was not set up to address that everyday low-level intimidation and violence. That set me in motion for about a year and a half to find somebody who was. I reached out to the heads of World Vision, to the head of uh Amnesty International in Canada. Um, and they also saw the need for this type of intervention, but they didn't have the model to deal with these things in a collaborative casework way. And Lane, it wasn't until I was uh um just driving some VIPs to a board meeting uh when one of the gentlemen in the backseat of my Volkswagen Jetta uh started telling me about an organization that was looking for people who could do some of the work that I was doing to promote an organization. And I said, Well, what are you talking about? What is this? I've never heard of this IJM. Um, what does that even mean? This was early 2000s. Um and he said International Justice Mission. And when the word justice slipped out of his mouth, it was like a Rottweiler like got its teeth right into my heart. I was like, there's something worth paying attention here. So I asked, Well, what's your model? How effective is it? And as he's the more he started to unveil, the more I realized here it was, somebody far smarter than me. Uh, that doesn't take much, but truly, uh, who had been the officer in charge uh for the United Nations investigation into the Rwandan genocide, um, he came back broken over uh this atrocity that happened on our watch while we were asleep at the switch, and recognized that there was this level of intimidation and violence that affected the poor globally, that our institutions didn't have a clear solution to. And he developed and devised, I think, a very effective, compelling, collaborative casework model to address it. And so as I was sitting in this vehicle, it was quite funny. The global head of Compassion International, Wes Stafford, was in the car and he was jokingly saying, Hey, what are you doing? You know, trying to steal, poach one of my staff to go help with this. What's going on here? And uh, but it was all good natured fun. But then he said something so profound. He said, Jamie, I would lay 85% of the types of poverty that I've seen in the world today at the feet of injustice. He said, absolutely, somebody needs to get engaged in this. This work needs to, you know, essentially, this work needs to um expand and proliferate so that there can be protection for these precious children as well as other individuals who are susceptible to violence and lack the protection that the rule of law affords, which most of us that's invisible protection that we don't even realize is is there uh taking place for us day in and day out.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Powerful one thing is uh as as you're talking, um strikes me that it's relatively easy to be affected by the stories of injustice, and even easy to say, what can I do to get involved? I want to be involved. It's another thing to be confronted with the reality right before you of injustice. Um and acting because it's easy to do that from afar. Our compassion wells up, and maybe I want to give some money, but to take the step to actually confronting it and meeting with the people who are suffering these injustices, that can be that's a different level in a sense. And not not that everyone's called to be at that level, but but it's it's the reality. It's it's messy and it's challenging and it can be demoralizing. I guess I'm wondering what took you from um you know that compassion to actually getting involved in the messiness of working with people who'd suffered injustice.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

I think there's always been something in my wiring that has been a bit of a tripwire uh when I see some form of injustice that I cannot not intervene, I cannot not act. No, a lot of times that takes the place of uh manifests as zeal without knowledge, where I just rush in, you know, as a little kid on the playground seeing my neighbor picked on. Uh, and I was a little kid myself. I was uh I didn't uh my growth spurt came after I needed it. You know, I played high school football as captain, all this sort of stuff, but I was the scrawniest kid. When you see people who are being exploited, being abused, being oppressed, and you have not all of the tools, but you have a voice, you have the eyes to see it, a voice to say something about it, and hands to to throw down to help build some sort of system of protection. I think you gotta figure it out. It's just fundamental to our humanity to stand with somebody else when they're suffering. And I think everyone has that in them. Um, but I think what happens is we think we have to figure it all out. We think that we have to have all of the resources. I have to be the, you know, have a very special set of skills and be Liam Neeson or something. Well, no, you can just be, I could just be Jamie and raise my voice, but rally other people to the cause who actually are smarter than me, actually have different skills, that have networks of influence and power, and just do my little bit to to trigger something, my little bit to spark something. Together we can weave uh a sort of a blanket of protection that can be wrapped around people who deserve to have their rights defended and their dignity uplifted.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah. That's great. That's great. Yeah, there's something essential at our core that when when when those types of situations provoke this passion or emotional response um and we we tamp it down or we stifle it because what can I do? I'm just so-and-so from so-and-so. But explore it, live in it, and find a way, find an outlet to do whatever it is you can. Some small piece that um is really connecting with with who we are as people. And so um I guess that's my encouragement for anybody that's you know hearing this and and has can can resonate with whatever situation that has something this injustice or some other thing that connected with with something fundamental in you that you may not have responded to. It's never too late. You have a role to play, you can do something, and just an encouragement to to follow that wherever it leads, because it is something that you know that that is put in us so that we can stand up for those who are uh advocate-less or that don't have someone to protect them. Um we need we need people to do that.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Yeah, and and Lane, I would say don't wait until you're ready, don't wait until you're equipped, don't wait until you're qualified. Always seek to become qualified. There was a story of a gentleman in in Jim Collins' book, Good Degreat, where this guy was just put in place when the CEO was taken out of commission. He was just put in place as a caretaker, maybe interim for a few months. Um, 25 years later, he was still in the CEO chair, knocking, like shooting out the lights, because he was accomplishing incredible things. And they interviewed him and asked, well, what is the secret for your outsized success? And he said, I've never stopped trying to become qualified for my position. And when it comes to the issues of injustice or poverty alleviation, uh, international development, humanitarian response, peacemaking, I think that nobody comes out of the womb equipped for these things. Nobody uh very often we don't go through the academic pathways that prepare us for this. Um, you know, it might be adjacent to it, and we need to learn how do we pivot and re-engineer our skills. But for me, I wasn't a lawyer. Um, I wasn't a social worker, I wasn't a police officer. Um, you know, I was a recovering youth pastor. What am I gonna do about injustice and corruption? And I found myself in front of parliamentarians, senators, briefing them on human trafficking, uh, talking about ways to prioritize budgetary allocations to some of the most vulnerable places on the planet uh to fashion out a response, uh, advising and advocating around legislative change that was required. Um, but I did it as somebody standing within or alongside the systems where people were suffering.

SPEAKER_02 18:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

And later, along the way, um, you know, I probably was halfway through my 12 years with international justice mission before I um actually became a little bit qualified. I went and did a master's in international human rights law uh at Oxford, and that was eye-opening for me, but it just really gave me the language around things that my heart already knew. Yeah, yet it gave me access to influence at another register, at another level, and I think that's really what the game is. If you're wanting to develop your skills um so that you could be a better use, whatsoever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Take advantage of every opportunity in that, get coaches, get take courses, uh, learn from uh others around you, read all of the books that you can find, devour the podcasts or or the YouTube videos on these subjects. But this should not stop you. My articulation of this long ago was one does not have to fully understand an injustice before beginning to take a stand against it.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Thank you, Jamie. That's that's great. Um rich stuff. I I want to shift a little bit to the topic of leadership under pressure. When you're working on issues like human trafficking, modern-day slavery, systemic injustice, the obviously the stakes are extraordinarily high. How does a leader make wise decisions when the moral weight of the work is so heavy?

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah, that's a very deep question. I think it depends on the particular circumstance and context. But to me, it's about a process of discernment. So for me, I tend to be I'm a quick start in some of the you know um uh tools that analyze how you approach things. Um, I want to just jump into the fray, but I realize that sometimes we need to pause and reflect and take stock of the situation and analyze it. And so I think that there's um a data gathering space that you need to get gather all of the inputs, the whether it's the data uh that you then need to distill into analytics, but those things people talk about um data-driven decision making, I think that's a miss. I think it needs to be data informed, but then you map that over to what has my experience taught me? What have all of these other lived experiences uh indicated for me? What in the human condition do I know to be true about myself and others? And trying to forge together in the midst of this, what might the most critical path to a solution be? Not the full solution, but the first iteration of it, that we could do right now with the resources at hand. And in all of this, we encounter friction. I've been devising uh a decision friction instrument uh that helps us look at the various forces that will um slow our velocity, that will uh help us try to overcome. Well, how do we prioritize this versus something else? Looking at authority, who owns this decision? Uh how do we map this to the places of power that can actually authorize the Decision required. All of these sorts of things come into play. But I think for a leader, it basically distills down to two things. What is the moral imperative at stake here? And what is the prudent judgment about what am I or what are we positioned to do next about this situation? Get after that one right next step, and that will lead you to the other. You may get it wrong, then you learn, you adapt, you know, adapt, improvise, overcome. Uh, as I believe it's the Marine Corps would talk about. But if you wait, if you sit back until you've got it all perfect, the window will close and people may even perish. We've got to act decisively enough in the decision window available, not wait for perfection, but have a bias for action coupled with the humility for learning.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

That's great. And it it but that's that's the that's the challenge, I think, for leaders is is whether because of past experiences, the way they they were uh raised or what have you, that hesitancy to make decisions with imperfect information. But I think you've said it well that hesitating until you get better information is itself a decision that could have consequences. And so part of it I from my perspective is a a leader learning to trust their judgment to make a call based on imperfect information, based on past experience, based on the best uh insight that you're getting from others. Um because there are times that do call for uh a decision. And and delaying that, like you've said, could have uh significant operational or human costs. I want to shift a little bit to um many leaders, particularly in the nonprofit world, and we've got some local nonprofits here in Lubbock that we do work with on leader development, team dynamics, team growth. But many struggle with the tension between mission, passion and operational discipline. How have you navigated that tension in your nonprofit leadership roles?

SPEAKER_00 24:43

Uh not particularly well in seasons. Uh I've uh bumped into the operational uh capacity, operational disciplines side of things because I am passion first, I am mission first. I'm always urging that we we go for it, that we get after trying to solve things and we do this. The solutions are out there, and it's usually within the hands of those who are most proximate to the need, people suffering themselves. And if we would only break through our inertia to stand with them, to listen to them, to to join shoulders shoulder to shoulder with them, arm in arm, then we'll find the solutions. But I have found that the larger an organization or an institution becomes, uh, the more uh you want to scale things, you do need to have operational disciplines. And so that passion, uh, that zeal needs to add to it knowledge, it needs to add to it wisdom, it needs to add to it uh operating um efficiencies. And I think that the rub is that we can become so sophisticated that we become over-engineered, we get layer upon layer. So a funding cycle happens where you realize there's a crisis, and so we're gonna apply for a certain type of crisis funding. The crisis funding comes in, and then the crisis is is is alleviated. Um, but that funding cycle, um, that some of the reporting mechanisms, some of those things may stay in place and be layered on top of what was there before. And so you get this sort of organizational creep, this infrastructure, this pure, bureaucratic layering that can actually be like um like barnacles building up on a hull. And nobody really sees it's there, but but but it slows the ship. Um and so I think we need to have the discipline as well to re-examine, to interrogate um our institutions, our organizations, our marketing mechanisms to say, are they future ready and fit for purpose? Because what's what was good enough to get us from where we were to where we are today will not be the same thing to get us from here to the needs of tomorrow.

unknown 27:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:09

I see it when it comes to funding mechanisms, that sometimes we have organizations, um, their administration, their architecture, um, their delivery systems all are geared around one type of funding mechanism that worked very well in a particular season. But when that funding starts to diminish, instead of innovating and finding new ways, the there is a, well, we just need more of this type of support. So we'll dump more and more money into something that's going to get diminishing returns. And even when there's an attempt to pivot to something new, the cost-benefit analysis is it's always harder and more costly to pilot something new than to just do more of the same old, same old. And so it takes real leadership, conviction, and courage to marry that missional passion with the operational discipline to interrogate the system to say, but is this going to be sufficient for the needs at hand? Is this going to generate not only what's needed for the now, but for the next? And it's incumbent upon us as leaders to operate in both of those domains, but always to have the operations serve the mission. Because it's very easy to lose the plot and say, but this is our operations, but this is how we do it. This is what we're known for, this is what we're good at. And so we need to do more and more of the same and then not realize, but wait a second, that whole mechanism was built around a situation and a season where uh children were less migratory, like transit transient. Um, and so you could find them in one location, they were closer to a capital city, and you could get to them and access them and resource them and educate them, and teachers were nearby and uh infrastructure was there. And that's a very effective, efficient operating model. But what happens when people start becoming displaced because of conflict, because of climate, uh, you know, agricultural uh crises that that mean there's the crops aren't gonna grow there? Or what happens when in China I, you know, went through these communities where they're like ghost towns because it's the grandparents raising the children, because all of the parents are off in the industrial city cities, um, you know, and so now you've got grandparents who have never, and maybe even were never taught literacy. They're trying to equip their child, their grandchild, uh, who everything is digital, um, for a world that they never inhabited themselves. How do we begin to serve the needs of today when the structures and the systems that we've devised were perfected for a different era? That is the dynamic of organizational discipline, of refining and adapting and saying, are we truly future ready and fit for purpose? And if we're not, what are the disciplines required to get from here to where we must go? Let's be clear-eyed, let's be honest about it, not nostalgic, not dismissive of the past or the legacy. There's a lot to pay attention to, a lot of enrichment to come from that. But based on some of those principles, what did the founders do that pioneered something? It was an innovation then, now is ossification. What would innovation now look like that would be true to the spirit of the founder, but would be adapted to the situation of this moment, this crying hour today?

SPEAKER_01 30:55

As I I'm new to higher ed, been this in this role for coming up on nine months. But as I talk with folks across the Texas Tech system, the issue that you're raising comes up where higher ed is sh has been shifting first with COVID and the forced changes of of virtual uh distance learning, that type of thing, and now with um artificial intelligence, AI and its ubiquity in in higher education among students and faculty and staff, that type of thing. And the systems in place, the structure in place, not adapting well to that. And so that's the question is how do we how do we adapt for the new reality? And it it uh it takes time because it's a bureaucracy, just like any other. And and um I like what you've said about the mission must drive the structure and the organization, and that that can be difficult, but it's fundamental if the mission is going to be fulfilled in a changing environment, the structure has to change.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

And Lane, what you're what you're describing is is um I think we need to understand that organizations are actually living organisms, and they're almost semi-sentient beings that uh have this survival instinct that is going to try to perpetuate themselves and replicate according to what was successful, what got them to where they are. And that instinct for self-preservation and institutional um perpetuation can rest with administrators, can rest with academic practitioners, faculty, can rest with me in my organization. I got it to a certain point and I want to keep it there and live the good old days. But if we freeze in those places, we're gonna fail to deliver the value that's needed today and tomorrow. We're going to actually be disrupted by somebody else. It's already, you know, it's already happening. But if we actually say honestly, forthrightly, this is happening, what can we do to contribute to the solution? Because I guarantee you, if you would unlock the resources that go to sort of shoring up the status quo and unlock 30% of that and allocate it to whatever's next and new and innovative, but you have to have what I call decision tenacity. You have to have enough grit. I've been involved in a lot of innovative uh initiatives, public-private partnerships, new funding modalities, uh, new ways of going about old problems. And what tends to happen is people, if you get buy-in to attempt a pilot, if you get buy-in to try new modality, you often will only get enough to get through about 18 months worth until it really starts to hurt. The returns don't seem to be there, it's premature, and it gets shut down. If you have decision tenacity, they say, no, we understand that this is going to be a five to 10 or 15 year reengineering. But if we don't do this, the consequences are catastrophic, maybe even existential. But if we get it right, we're going to unlock something that will be generational. Having the discipline to continue to invest in the status quo enough to keep the lights on, to keep things humming, with an eye to reallocate enough for the next value curve, that's going to keep you from becoming obsolete. The crazy thing is, an organization that's so locked into perpetuating its existence and its ways of doing will actually most jeopardize its continuation of existence because it will be non-adaptive to new threats, emerging opportunities. But the one the future belongs to the creatively maladjusted, those who are willing to say something needs to change. And we together are have the seeds at least of this transformation. So let's get after that as well.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

Yeah, that's great. See Blockbuster for an example, Blockbuster video.

SPEAKER_00 36:00

Yeah, Netflix. I mean, absolutely. And what I love about Netflix is they say, you know, don't become wed to your um solution because it's going to change time and time again. Otherwise, you're just going to fall into the same trap of landing on, well, we're going to mail DVDs. Well, that was Netflix. That was their big innovation. But if they didn't continue to innovate, they would have been wiped out. But they said, become married to the problem.

unknown 36:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Meaning, how do we solve the pain points? How do we, if we're in education, how do we equip this generation for the challenges coming at them? How do we use the tools that exist now and build the tools that we will need for what's next? If we think we have the wherewithal to do that and get after solving those problems rather than pushing our proposed solution, it will give our organizations the agility and the flexibility to uh stretch for the future that's ahead and absorb the shocks that come in the now.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

That's great. It's it's a primary issue that the universities are dealing with, the colleges within the universities teams are are wrestling with is how to adapt to a new reality, certainly with AI. Every conference I go to, at least half the breakout sessions are focused on how to use, how to harness, how to adapt to artificial intelligence. Um, but it is something that can't be ignored. You know, these these big changes for uh for a university, an organization, a nonprofit, in order to maintain its relevance, it needs to be able to adapt. And leaders need to be able to learn to adapt. Like you've said, to uh continue to operate, keep the lights on, team happy, team functioning, while one eye looking on what do we need to prepare for the future is uh it's an ongoing challenge. So thank you for your insight there.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Lane, if I may, just to carry it forward a little, uh just a touch farther, especially as it relates to AI for an example. I think that um this adaptive capacity is key. I look at um an analog or a parallel between when one, when a leader, you're involved in leadership development, when a leader goes from being the subject matter expert to then being a team leader or a manager who then has to become a generalist, and it's not about their individual contributions per se, it's about unlocking and unleashing the contributions of the team. Those who don't make that switch will become micromanagers, they'll be interfering with their team, they'll undermine their team's energies and efforts. But those who understand, oh, this is the assignment, they begin to flip and use everything that they've learned as a floor, as a production base for everyone else's contributions rather than a showcase floor for their own. But I look for me with AI. I used to be um, you know, I at different points I had um was overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars of programmatic impact annually, um, teams of of you know, 100 or more directly and um involved with upwards of 35,000 people globally. Um in those situations, I had you know, six to eight directors each, experts in their field that I could learn from and leverage almost like a master's level education for me, and their expertise on humanitarian interventions or uh disaster response or long-term development or strategic operation uh and operational matters. Um, now I currently sit essentially as a solo practitioner, uh, needing to produce in a way that keeps up with large institutions. So I have to leverage AI. But the way that I leverage AI is I begin to relinquish certain pieces that I used to do. I used to handcraft every piece of copy that I would write. And now I'm more of an architect where I engage with AI to say, here's the vision, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. I want to break it down in these different ways. This is how the ecosystem, this is my thought process. I feed in all of my um, you know, intellectual property, all of my ideas, the way that I think, I train it and teach it. And no, this isn't right. No, you're missing this. No, here's the theory behind this. No, this is more what I'm talking about. No, here's the soul of this. I make sure that every jot and tittle that is published bears my imprint and is conforming with my vision, but I become more of an architect than a bricklayer. And I think that, you know, time will tell what the right approaches are. But I think that there's no responsible disengagement from leveraging technology in whatever era we're in. Um, but we need to go from living romantically in a system we no longer inhabit, but keep the soul and keep the human contribution uh front and center. Because if my work doesn't resonate, if it doesn't speak with that, the the scent of the spaces wherein I've walked, then I've failed. Um, because fundamentally I need to collapse the distance, the world that we uh inhabit and the worlds in need that uh that are out there that we collide with and hopefully can learn to walk collegially alongside. So that's a bit of my uh my approach. And I think that institutions have the opportunity to adapt and scale, but they need to make sure how do we keep this serving the human and keep the soul intact, those who will be able to match that up, leverage AI as a power tool rather than abdicating to it as a solution in and of itself.

SPEAKER_01 42:36

That's the that's the rub, that's the trick, that's the temptation, I think, for anybody using AI is to go from using it as a tool to just letting it accomplish the task that we need to be accomplishing to removing the human in the loop, as the military might say. Um I'm gonna the the Text-Stech system is uh known for its values-based culture. And each of the universities within the system has identified their core values that get that guide them. The teams and and colleges within the universities uh often have done that as well. And so it's it's a big emphasis here, and it it really defines um how we operate. For you, do you have a personal value that has been hardest to live up to in leadership?

SPEAKER_00 43:33

That's a great question. I think it was C.S. Lewis that talked about courage is the is um every virtue at its point of testing.

SPEAKER_02 43:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:42

So I would say every value and every virtue comes under test. And um, each one of them, if we're honest, we um falter, we fail, we stumble, we mess it up. It's more about having a posture of learning and humility to say, okay, how can I improve? Upon this? How can I become open to correction and feedback loops that will tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear? And the higher you go up in leadership, the fewer people will speak that truth to power, unless you're intentional about creating that space of safety, because you know it's for your own good, for the institution's good, um, and it will broker and build the trust that's required to sustain itself. I don't know if this gets it that exactly, but for me, it's how can I continue to honor the individual, the human, um, the flesh and blood person that I'm working with, when I see systems at scale that need to be addressed with velocity. Uh, so sometimes I am in such a rush to respond to human catastrophe that I will trip over people in my way, not meaning to trample upon them. But if I find myself not being able to clearly articulate the reason why something needs to happen or convince somebody to relinquish something for the sake of something better, there comes a point where I think I um compromise the patience required, and just I'm like, you know what, we gotta move. I don't have time to pause here because people are waiting. And that has gotten me into trouble at times. Um, sometimes it shows up where people feel like, well, Jamie's not listening, he doesn't care. And he doesn't care what I have to say, he doesn't care to see it the way that I see it. And I think what's really happened sometimes is yes, sometimes I'm just so enamored with the wisdom, the insight, the counsel that I have. My way is the best way that I fight for it, not realizing that, oh my goodness, if I shut up and listen to this person in front of me, they've got something game-changing. You know, I at times I could be the person who hears the Beatles first. It's like, eh, they're okay. They're mid and pass on this amazing opportunity. Because we're always we've got our own song playing in our head.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

So it's finding that place of pausing, but also it's because I see I'm very I have a high clock speed and I I am more visionary in my leadership, and I have I'm solution-oriented, I'm opportunity-oriented. And um, sometimes I can see people raising challenges, obstacles, impediments as if they're trying to bog down the system. And I know if I stay there too long, the sun will set and I won't have gotten to the fray. But what I realize now more and more is but if I don't listen to them, I may not take them along. Or I may end up doing what happened one time. My wife and I were skiing. Um, we won a free trip to Banff, uh, the Canadian Rockies, beautiful place to go. Um, because my daughter's ski, uh, she's an expert, uh, ski, downhill skier. She runs laps around me. But she won this free trip and we got to go on it. Um, and uh I decided let's go off piece, let's go into you know the tree stand over here and uh just a little more adventure, right? And so we did that for a while. It was fun, but then at one point I was booking it, and my wife said, Wait, I'm like, come on, this is awesome! Look, she's like, wait, I'm like, what? Crept up a little few more feet and looked over the edge. It was like a cliff, and underneath there was all of these outcroppings of rocks. I would have just been bashed to smithereens. So be true to your wiring if you're a race car, but also pay attention to the dashboard indicators that are telling you warning, warning, warning, or you might blow out your engine or you might crash. That's the tension that I have to wrestle with day in and day out, Lane.

SPEAKER_01 48:24

Yeah, sure. That's great. Good visual there. Well, we're getting close to the end of our time here. I wanted to ask if you had any other parting wisdom or insight to share with our listeners before we close.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

Yeah, a few things, maybe. Um, first is you're put on this planet for a purpose, and you might feel like a screw up. You might feel like um nobody sees what you have to offer, nobody sees the solution that you maybe have been uh busting hammer and tong to try and forge, or maybe you were with it, you were doing great things, and somehow you did go off piste and you didn't heed the warning signs and you crashed. If you're still drawing a breath, there's a purpose for you on this planet, and the gifts that you have have been entrusted to nobody else. The genetic encoding of your particular DNA strands is uh not one in a billion. It's uh I would say essentially infinite. There will never be another soul on the planet who sees the world quite as you do, and who has quite the gift and the contribution to make that you do. So find a cause that matters, find something that you care about, and figure out what is it that could be my contribution. You know, we referenced it earlier, but Martin Luther King Jr. um talked about something along the lines of the future of the world belongs to the creatively maladjusted. Those who see the world as it is, but know that it's not as it could be. And they just give a damn enough to do something about it. Never stop trying to become qualified for whatever it is that you're involved with. But don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get after what you can do here and now, and then take your next shot, and then your next shot, and then your next shot. And the inspiration that comes to me every day, Lane, is through my son, my 21-year-old son, who has started multiple businesses. He is um, he had rough years as a teenager, uh, kind of went off the rails, and he has come back with a vengeance. He is getting after it day after day after day. And one of the things he he shared on his uh Instagram the other day was um uh, you know, he's down in the Dominican, he's he's you know, kind of doing some of this lifestyle uh stuff, but he's got a pool table and he talks about, you know, you could line up your shot and analyze it this way and this way and this way and this way before you ever break the balls and and then take your next shot. He said, You overanalyze before you've taken your first shot and some no balls. I'm in a situation where I've can be on my third and my fourth and my fifth shot and learn from what I got wrong and start beginning to stack things up. Uh so take your shot, it won't be perfect. Learn from it, have the humility, surround yourself with amazing people who will tell you the truth and whose gifts are even brighter than yours. But together you can uh create a movement that might take out something relating to human trafficking, that might solve something around water or sanitation or hygiene. You might solve something with your engineering mind, or you might be a human dynamics leader that can create institutions that draw out the brightest and the best from people amongst us. Whatever it is, set your hand to it, get after it, keep being a learner, have that growth mindset, and uh you will impact the lives of many along the way.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Thank you, Jamie. Uh, really great stuff. Thank you for joining me. It's been great to hear about your leadership journey and get practical takeaways we can all incorporate in leading our teams. Listeners, I encourage you to check out his uh Waypoints blog. You can find through LinkedIn, Jamie McIntosh, J-A-M-I-E Macintosh. To those listening, thank you for joining me on the Leadership Fast Lane. If today's conversation sparked a moment of reflection or a lane change in how you think about leadership, take a minute to share this episode with someone you lead or learn from. Join me next time when I will be joined by Clay Cash, Regent on the Board of Regents at Texas Tech University System. You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, keep leading with purpose, integrity, and clarity, especially when it's hard.