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Quest 4: Understand the Landscape

Once the party is built, the next question is simple: How do the people in it relate to the change? That is Quest 4, and it is where stakeholder mapping becomes infinitely more useful than stakeholder counting. It is not enough to simply know who is involved. You need to know how each person is positioned in relation to the change, what they care about, how deeply they are affected, and what…

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Ontario Needs Graduates, Not Just Categories

A recent report on Ontario’s labour market projects that the province will need over one million university graduates over the next decade. The biggest surge in demand? STEM, followed closely by health sciences and finance. That headline sounds straightforward enough. But broad labour-market categories hide a much messier reality. STEM is not one single job market. It is hundreds of distinct…

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Beyond the Flames: The Leadership Test of Canada's New Fire Reality

Mention climate change and wildfires in the same sentence, and most people picture a single, apocalyptic future: a world simply going up in flames. But the reality unfolding across the globe is far more complex, and far more revealing. Climate change isn’t writing a simple narrative of “more fire everywhere.” It is writing two entirely different fire stories at the exact same time. Look at…

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Quest 3: Build the Party

Knowing your mission and reading the terrain are critical first steps, but even the clearest plan on the safest ground won’t move itself. Change doesn’t happen on paper—it moves through people. In Quest 1, we defined the mission to give our change shape. In Quest 2, we assessed the terrain to reveal hidden organizational risks and fatigue. Now, with the map drawn and the environment understood,…

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The Comfortable Middle May Be Doing More Good Than We Think

In my post “The Comfortable Middle?”, I wrote about the comfortable middle — that often-overlooked place where most of us live, work, and make decisions. I want to take that idea one step further: perhaps our middle orientation is not just comfortable but quietly delivering better outcomes for citizens. That may not be the kind of conclusion that shouts for attention. But it is the kind of…

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Quest 2: Assess the Terrain

Once the mission is clearly defined, the next step is to assess the environment it will encounter. That is Quest 2. In Quest 1, we gave the change its true shape. We defined what is shifting, what is staying the same, who is affected, and why the journey is necessary. That was the mission briefing. Now, we turn our attention to the terrain. Even a perfectly defined change can end up dead in the…

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A Practical Protein Buying Guide for Budget, Climate, and Better Habits

This guide helps you make smarter protein choices without turning grocery shopping into a research project. If you want to spend less, lower your environmental impact, and build better buying habits, it gives you a simple rule you can use right away. Why this helps you You do not need a perfect system to shop better. You just need a clear way to compare your options and choose the better one…

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Why food labeling matters more than ever

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much easier it would be for Canadians to support Canadian businesses if product labeling were always clear, consistent, and honest. In a moment when many people are actively trying to buy more Canadian, the label on a package should do more than decorate the shelf — it should tell the truth. That matters because many consumers have become increasingly…

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How Canada Can Prepare for Four Possible Russias

The Economist’s July 9, 2026, essay argues that post-war Russia could evolve into one of four destabilizing forms: a humiliated revanchist state, a dependent partner in China’s orbit, a fragmented nuclear risk, or a sealed fortress state. For Canada, the useful question is not which outcome will arrive, but how the country can build enough adaptive capacity to respond to any of them. Canada can…

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The Comfortable Middle?

Europe envies America’s capacity for innovation, speed, and ambition. America envies Europe’s social protections, public services, and relative sense of collective security. Canada sits in the middle, trying to preserve both dynamism and fairness, and discovering that the middle is not a place of peace so much as a place of permanent tension. That tension is not accidental. It reflects a deeper…

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When the Skies Open: Navigating Sudden Change on the Farm (and in Life)

They say if you don’t like the weather in Canada, just wait five minutes. But nobody warns you about what happens when five minutes of a downpour turns into a historic deluge. Yesterday, Ottawa was hit with a staggering 118mm of rain—officially marking it as the second-highest daily rainfall on record for the city. For most people, it meant a ruined commute, cancelled patio plans, and a mad dash…

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Quest 1: The Mission Briefing

Before you can manage change, you must define it. That sounds entirely obvious, but it is one of the most common places where organizational change efforts completely derail. Too often, leaders launch an initiative with a project name, a timeline, or a software solution, and assume that is enough. It is not. If the change itself is not clearly defined, every single step that follows is built on…

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The Limits of Change Management: What Cancer Taught Me

In organizational life, we tend to treat change as a solvable equation. Define the future state, map the gap, build a plan, and guide people through it. This is the foundation of most change management frameworks, from Prosci to APMG: clarity of outcome enables structured transition. But not all change works that way. Some of the most consequential changes we face—serious illness, personal…

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Respecting the Classics

The story can change, but the foundations still matter. That is the balance I want to maintain throughout this series. In the first two posts, we explored why change needs a better story and why the old script no longer fits the modern workforce. But challenging the script does not mean we should discard the models that got us here in the first place. The classics still matter because they…

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Why the Old Script No Longer Fits

For a long time, organizations have tried to manage change using language and structures that made sense in a different era. The problem is not that our foundational tools were wrong. The problem is that the context has completely shifted, and the old script no longer fits the people who are living through change today. Much of modern change practice was shaped in a world of slower information…

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The Flavor You Almost Threw Away

There is a quiet satisfaction in learning how to extract more from the ingredients you already have. Not more complexity, not more cost—but more depth, more intention, more flavor. This gluten-free spaghetti dish grew out of that mindset: simple components, treated with just enough care to reveal something deeper. At first glance, it is a familiar plate. Gluten-free spaghetti forms the base,…

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Where Ingredients Tell the Story: Mussels, Riesling, and Mustard

There is something quietly transformative about returning to the same place year after year. Over the past six seasons, our trips to Picton have evolved from simple getaways into something closer to a culinary pilgrimage—one where the landscape, the people, and the local producers shape not just what we eat, but how we think about food itself. This latest meal captures that evolution perfectly:…

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Alan Viau