Before you can design connection at scale, you have to understand what happens when it’s lost in translation.

When you work in small regional shops customer experience is personal whether you want it to be or not. You might fix someone’s internet in the morning and see them at the grocery store that evening.

At that scale, loyalty is relational.
You don’t need a CRM to remind you who your neighbours kids are.

In national call centres, it becomes something else entirely... a strategy, a system, a thing you have to intentionally manufacture without making it feel manufactured.

Human Moments by Design

One thing that stuck with me was the “whispers” in our headsets. Before answering a call, we’d see a small prompt:

“Customer has been with us for seven years. Please thank them for their loyalty.”

At first it felt artificial. But then you’d hear the change in their voice when you acknowledged them. the shift to something softer. A simple, intentional thank you could build a bridge in five seconds flat.

It was manufactured, yes, but meaningfully so.
Because a customer’s experience isn’t about whether the gratitude is spontaneous.
It’s about whether they feel seen.

Choice and the Fragility of Loyalty

Working at national scale taught me something else: just because someone’s here today doesn’t mean they’ll be here tomorrow.

Customers without contracts weren’t “ours” in any real sense—they were choosing us every single day.

Scale can make you forget that choice still exists. It’s easy to start seeing customers as captured assets, pieces of machinery in the system.

They’re not.

They’re people with options, and every friction point is a chance for them to leave.

Keeping them isn’t about locking them in; it’s about giving them reasons to stay… reasons like feeling valued, remembered, and recognized as more than an account number.

Scale changes everything except human nature.
The larger a system grows, the easier it is to mistake control for connection.

Same People, Different Contexts

Here’s the real kicker: The people you serve in B2C and the ones you support in B2B are the same humans.

Maybe they’re buying routers instead of phone plans. Maybe they’re managing a helpdesk instead of their personal phone bill.

Doesn’t matter.

They still want to feel important.
They still want things to be easier, not harder.
They still want to be seen, understood, and appreciated.

Blueprint for Scaled Humanity

The lessons I learned taking whispered prompts on a loyalty team and turning them into genuine moments of connection aren’t just relics from my call-centre days. They’re blueprints for any system that touches people:

If you want loyalty, design for humanity.
If you want adoption, design for meaning.
If you want scale, scale connection, not just infrastructure.

When the system breaks or the process fails... that’s when you find the real work.

Most of the breakthroughs I’ve seen, in work, in systems, in myself… didn’t happen because I had everything I needed.

They happened because I didn’t.

I need to talk more about bounded creativity, so I’ll just start with this. It isn’t about settling. It’s about sharpening. It’s about realizing that when the path narrows, the focus does too. That constraints aren’t walls… they’re launch points.

The limits you hate might be the friction that shapes you into something you never would have built otherwise.

I didn’t know I was practicing this back at Porchlight when I was optimizing my lateness against a stupid punch clock.

I didn’t know it at Execulink when I was building community through potlucks and holiday drives.

Nor did I realize it at Nordia while practicing systemic empathy within the only thing I could control… a spreadsheet.

I just knew that systems that pretended humans didn’t exist collapsed. And the ones that invited them, their messiness, their momentum, and their ingenuity inside the design… they lasted longer. They mattered more. To me at least. I think to others too.

Bounded creativity isn’t a compromise. It’s survival strategy. It’s how we turn broken blueprints into places where people can actually live.

So if you’re feeling boxed in right now… maybe it’s not a box?Maybe it’s a boundary line that’s daring you to redraw the map.

Constraints make you more creative. You just have to stop fighting them long enough to find out how.

Before you make a process change—are you thinking about everyone it might touch?

We’re human. We don’t know what we don’t know. Sometimes we think we do. Sometimes we get lucky. Most of the time, we don’t.

There’s this parable about the blind men and the elephant. Each one touches a different part: trunk, leg, tusk, side. One says it’s a snake. Another, a tree. Another, a wall. They’re all technically right—and completely wrong.

Strategy looks different when you think you're dealing with a wall vs. an elephant.

This is where so many process decisions go sideways. We optimize for speed. We’re told to avoid analysis paralysis, “just ship it.” But if we don’t take even a moment to ask why or what else might break, we’re just building a workaround for a workaround.

And you can be certain we’ll meet those blind spots again later—only with more pressure, less context, and bigger stakes.

This doesn’t mean we stall. It just means we build with intention.

We need to know what we know, define what we don’t, and decide which unknowns are worth leaving space for.

The scientific method can be a tool here—not for perfection, but for awareness. It helps us name the unknowns instead of pretending they don’t exist. It gives us permission to say, “I don’t know that yet—but I’ve put a branch here to come back to.”

This is the opposite of perfectionism.

This is about designing for resilience.

And suddenly, four teams are stuck in redundant meetings, interpreting the same data differently—because no one stopped to name the trunk, or the tusk, or the tail. And no one realized they were all holding the same damn elephant.

Creative Systems Thinking: Remixing What Already Exists

Some people love a blank canvas. For me, creativity has never been about unbridled imagination or starting from scratch.

I’m more like the DJ Shadow of process. Give me the pieces. A broken workflow. A forgotten workaround. A string of support tickets pointing to something deeper. I’ll dissect it, understand it, and remix it into something that works for the people it touches.

It’s not about chasing every rabbit hole—it’s about surveying the terrain. Not to solve everything now, but to make space for what we might need later.

I think about this a lot as an experiential builder. I walk the path. I touch the edges. I figure out where things break—but that doesn’t need to hold progress up. If we align the work properly, that discovery can happen while everything else moves forward.

This takes a beginner’s mindset. It means not assuming the structure is sacred just because we’ve inherited it. What if we carved the path more thoughtfully? What if that problem we’re all patching around... didn’t even need to exist?

We build with what we know—but we grow when we stretch just outside that boundary.

Solving for the System, Not the Symptom

Real systems thinking lives in that stretch zone. Not in guessing all the answers, but in surfacing better questions.

In noticing when the process is the problem.

In recognizing that every workaround we inherit came from someone solving a local pain without a global view.

In seeing not just the piece in front of us, but the whole elephant.

That’s where practical creativity shows up. Not just fixing problems. But reimagining the patterns that caused them.

Because remixing systems isn’t just a creative act—it’s a diagnostic one.

It lets us see what’s still working, what never did, and what might emerge when we stop solving symptoms and start seeing the whole.

That’s how we move faster—later, and save our future selves the headache. That’s how we build systems that work—because they were never designed in isolation. And that’s how creativity becomes not just a spark, but a strategy.

Before you can bridge new gaps, sometimes you have to lose the map you thought you were following.

I really didn’t want to post this one it seems. I’ve had it written, but I’ve been delaying over a month. It’s not profound enough... It’s not explaining enough... It makes me look shallow… But isn’t that everything I’m trying to move past? And honestly, this is a time I feel proud of, in hindsight. I should be accepting of all of it.

Full Circle Before Moving Forward

When I chose to work at Execulink, it wasn’t about convenience or location. It was something quieter. A thread tying back to the days I sat in front of a beige monitor, watching pixels load, feeling like I was touching the future.

Remember that 28.8k modem I mentioned? The one that made me the neighbourhood internet wizard back in grade seven?

There’s something I didn’t tell you about that provider — it was Golden Triangle.

The same Golden Triangle that eventually got absorbed into Execulink, where I’d just been let go.

My dad had always made sure we were on the cutting edge, or at least what passed for it at the time. He worked at NEC when I was little, brought home our first real computer, later sold golf simulators (in the nineties??) and satellite TV systems. (ok yeah… that checks out)

When Plans Break, Pivots Happen

Sometimes survival means letting go of the story you thought you were living.

Where I last left you, I was three months pregnant and freshly unemployed.

Not just unemployed — fired.

Fired for standing up to management at Execulink.

In the blink of an eye, or so it felt, the regional connections I’d built, the sense of belonging I was just starting to understand, the systems I thought I was growing into — all of it evaporated.

I picked up the phone and called Nordia — the company whose offer I'd turned down for Execulink just a few months earlier.

"Is the spot still open?"

They told me a training class was starting next week if I wanted it.

I said yes.

Not because it was what I thought was the right move for me,

but because I was down to a matter of days before my employment insurance qualification would be at risk for when I'd need to go on maternity leave.

Third-Party, First Principles

Nordia wasn’t Execulink. It wasn't neighbourly. It was a third-party call centre, contract-bound to Bell, built to scale service across the whole country — one disembodied voice at a time.

The customers I helped weren’t people I might run into at the grocery store anymore.

They were voices from provinces I'd never been to, names I'd forget as soon as the call ended.

I’ll be honest: at the time, I looked down on it a little.

It felt like a step down from the more technical, local small business world I had just left. I showed up there feeling overqualified, out of place, and embarrassed at the situation that brought me there.

The training was long and exhaustive. The turnover was frequent.

You can’t just open the doors and hope entry-level hires will figure it out.

You need rigorous training programs, systems that can teach total newcomers how to support complex products in a matter of weeks, scaffolding that helps them sell and overcome objections, safeguards that make people feel safe and supported enough to stay.

It was a different kind of complexity.

If anything, it’s more disciplined.

Because when you rely on structure to create success (not just exceptional individuals), the system has to work for everyone, not just the stars.

Instinct Runs Deeper Than Environment

When you're seeing how things play out at scale, it becomes a lot easier for an organization to understand the value of building bonding opportunities at work.

Larger corporations understand employee engagement is vital to counteract detachment.

There was a union. We had committees.

And there was always plenty of opportunities for you to step up in whatever way brought you a sense of purpose.

Then the missing piece fell into place when they asked for volunteers for the social committee. My hand went up right away.

We would do lunch activities, potlucks and dress-down events. They included us in strategies for incentivizing workers with call goal completions. We even rented a bus and put together a trip to the Niagara Falls casino one month.

To make it something more than an endless queue of strangers asking for signal resets and satellite realignments.

To make it be somewhere where I was known, appreciated, needed.

Creating Systems in the Spaces Between

It didn’t take long for me (on a team with a pod leader, a manager, and many different colleagues all trying to do the same jobs and keep track of the same outcomes) to see that connection gaps can exist in more than just social dynamics.

Agents needed visibility into their upgrades and downgrades, not just for their managers, but for themselves, for their ability to engage in goals and competitive spirit, see their efforts in front of them, and advocate for themselves in meetings with their pod leaders.

They needed a way to track their own numbers, measure their own growth, take ownership of something beyond the next call in the queue.

Team managers and pod leaders needed clean reports and quick snapshots of this data to see the state of their overall team's efforts, and who was excelling versus who needed a bit more support or coaching.

Nobody was connecting the two.

Each team had their own living spreadsheet with a tab for each rep — calculations and formulas were automated, and all the rep had to do was plug in their sales when they happened on their personal details sheet.

It would populate the overall metrics on the team overview.

It wasn’t that fancy by 2025 standards.

But in 2008, it gave agents a way to see their impact and managers a way to spot trends, without manual collection or waiting for reports from HQ to come down the chain.

More importantly, It gave me my first real taste of what operational empathy looks like at scale:

It was where I realized I was starting to carry a skill I’d spend the rest of my career sharpening: The ability to see the gap in the road ahead, already planning for how to fill it before others even noticed it was there

The Path Between

Sometimes, the most important insights don’t come wrapped in a bow.

They come quietly, in the in-between — when you're still adjusting to the new light, not sure who you are yet, but learning how to see differently anyway.

If Porchlight was where I learned how systems shape behaviour, and Execulink was where I learned how community grows between the cracks, then Nordia was where I learned how to hold both sides at once:

The beauty of neighbourly connection, and the power of scaled experience — if you have the right scaffolding to support it. That’s when I learned what customer experience feels like stretched across thousands of kilometres and hundreds of thousands of accounts.

And most importantly:

Thanks for reading the 3rd instalment of #TheThread in Clarity in Chaos! Stay tuned for the Rogers Reflection coming up next, (and hopefully a lot sooner :) )

Leave a comment

Most systems don’t break because someone made a mistake after launch. They break because the system was broken at the thinking stage.

The biggest mistake I see in user experience is people designing systems for idealized humans who don’t exist.

It reminds me of an old physics joke where a farmer asks some scientists for help improving milk production. They go off to investigate, then come back and say:

Cool... Except:

• Real cows aren’t spherical.

• Real environments aren’t vacuums.

The joke highlights a common pitfall: oversimplifying complex problems to fit neat models, at the expense of real-world applicability.

Similarly, when we design for user experience, there’s a tendency to create models based on idealized user behaviour — assuming users are always rational, consistent, and intuitively aware of every next step.

We even give these model users names, to make them feel more human.

But that human isn't real.

Real users are diverse, unpredictable, and operating inside sometimes chaotic, often layered environments, driven by their own personal abilities and constraints.

By designing systems for "spherical cows," we risk creating solutions that fail real humans — the ones who forget, guess, get frustrated, give up, or quietly build invisible workarounds no one maps.

Segmentation is Survival

You don’t just need to understand your users. You need to understand how they think differently from each other — and why.

Real segmentation means:

• Knowing not everyone processes information the same way.

• Seeing how shared needs, not surface labels, naturally group people.

• Planning for differences not enforcing sameness.

Invisible Labour Is Infrastructure

The real threat isn't the problems you know about. It's the ones hidden under the surface, where quiet excellence makes what's broken seem functional.

Many organizations survive today because someone you don’t see is:

• Fixing your data inputs by hand.

• Catching edge cases that shouldn't exist.

• Translating across broken team assumptions without credit.

Intrinsic Motivation is a System Output, Not a Personality Trait

If you want people to care, you have to show them that their growth matters.

You have to systemically build environments where:

• Mastery is normal.

• Investment is visible.

• Autonomy is respected.

People adopt and grow within systems when the system itself builds capacity, not just demands loyalty.

You want customer success? Build internal success first.

You want loyalty? Build a system that earns it.

You want adoption? Solve real human frictions.

Design for humans you actually have in their real environments, not for spherical cows in a vacuum.

I was one of the only kids in my grade with the internet at home. I was the "gopher of information" for many a school project. I was the one people asked when something broke or confused them. I loved it. Not just because it connected me to something bigger, but because I understood it. And like so many other awkward kids, that understanding became my currency.

Somewhere around grade seven, my mom brought home a book from some tech expo about the future of high-speed internet. I remember one image: the Mona Lisa, partially loaded on one half of a page, fully on the other. The caption showed how long it would take to render depending on your connection speed, compared to new, high speed internet. It stuck with me how silly it seemed to have that in print, as if to say it proved it. Still, it felt like a prophecy at the time. The idea you could be fast and always connected.

Where I Last Left Us

I was twenty. Working twelve-hour shifts at a small dial-up ISP three days a week.

Even several years after that promise of fast pictures and fast access, the internet still wasn’t quite so ambient yet. It was faster, but still a process. If you weren't lucky enough to have access to cable options, you dialed in. You hoped it worked. And if it didn’t, you disconnected (if you ever connected at all) and called someone like me.

My job was often less about troubleshooting, and more about translation. Most people weren’t just asking how to fix something—they were asking:

“Am I doing this wrong? Is this broken? Or am I just broken?”

It was the first time I realized how failure usually doesn’t look like sparks flying—it looks like quiet frustration. Like giving up, not because the system is broken, but because you don’t know if you’re doing it right.

So, that lens naturally came with me when I joined Execulink—a larger, more structured (but still local) ISP. I didn’t just feel like I was bringing troubleshooting experience with me. I believed I also brought an early understanding:

that how something works is never separate from who it’s supposed to work for.

But what I didn’t bring (and didn’t know I needed) was the understanding that not everybody will meet your logic with good faith.

Spoiler: I got fired. Just days after finding out I was pregnant.

Onto Execulink

Execulink was more than just a "graduation" from local dial-up to DSL.

They had regional office locations, equipment rentals, business clients, and techs literally climbing satellite towers. We weren’t just troubleshooting dial-up connection issues anymore. We were staging modems, bridging infrastructure, and coordinating dry loops and truck rolls with outside providers.

I learned a lot while there—not just technical skills like how to bridge a router or what the heck a dry loop was (a phone line, but just for your internet to talk to its internet friends), but about people.

I saw how community forms within teams, across offices, across towns. It was the kind of place where a friend’s cousin worked with you in provisioning. Where you ran into customers at the grocery store. Kinda like an MSP. (Not that I knew what that was yet.)

I joined the social committee. I drove to other offices to meet with committee team members (well, not me, I didn’t drive yet lol, but carpooled). We planned events, talked about morale, and built culture like it was part of the job. Because it was.

I learned how much culture lives in the little things—like when our teams competed to raise the most money so the company could match it, to buy holiday gifts for kids whose families already carried so much. These small, localized efforts meant fewer worries for the families, more smiles for the kids, and showed what people do when they're given the chance to care together.

People show up when they can unite around something fun and meaningful. How they bond through celebration of those achievements is a positive after effect.

Somewhere in there, I got my first piece of corporate swag. One of those classic, translucent blue mugs with the logo etched into the side. You’ve probably seen a hundred like it. I was weirdly proud of mine. Nearly two decades later, I still have it.

I still wonder what it would’ve been like to grow up inside a place like that—to become the kind of person who stayed. But I wasn’t meant to. Not there, anyway. Not then.

Sometimes it’s not the system that’s broken, it’s the people inside it misusing the levers.

Like I said, I got fired. It wasn't expected. But it sadly wasn't unexpected.

After confronting a manager for the behaviour of a team lead, he dismissed it. When I went above him to his boss, he told me that because I went over his head, he'd resurface something from weeks prior that we’d already agreed shouldn't have been an issue, and used it as justification to let me go there on the spot. And yeah, I had also just told him I was pregnant. So, you can do the math. (I heard neither the team lead nor that manager lasted there much longer after that, strangely.)

I don’t hold any of those actions against the company. There were too many good people for me to write it off. You can see it in the tenure of some of the previous (and even current) employees: 23 years. 19 years. 15. 11. People who started on support teams or sales teams and moved into project management, product, marketing, training, leadership. People who stayed there for decades. Because when it worked, it worked.

I just had the wrong person in charge of me at the wrong time. That happens all the time to better people than me, unfortunately.

Execulink is the first company on my LinkedIn profile for a reason.

It helped shape who I became. It carved out what I started to understand as my role: technical, community-engaged, process-aware. I started to realize I could exist in-between the interpersonal and the operational.

It wasn’t just about skills, but about how teams work. About how cross-office collaboration and shared goals can create belonging.

How different teams rely on each other.

How trust is earned, and belonging is built.

And how quickly both can be lost when power is misused.

Leave a comment

You don’t win long-term customers with executive buy-in alone.

The real test comes after the contract is signed—when the tool is dropped into a live environment and expected to be adopted without fuss or drama.

We're not just talking about power users here. We're talking about those who bridge the gap between strategy and reality. The ones who make things actually work.

The ones who flip the proverbial desk at the threat of their favourite tool getting taken away.

The Two Audiences You Can’t Ignore

Decision Makers open the door. Champions keep it open.

Executives think in outcomes: efficiency, risk, scalability. They care about vision. About leverage. But their altitude means they’re often removed from the friction of daily use.

Their job is to ask:

• Does this support our growth?

• What does success look like at scale?

• How does this simplify, not complicate?

Champions are different. These are your operations leads, your technical coordinators, your “I just pressed F12 and hacked a better way” resources. They’re not sold on dreams. They’re convinced by utility.

They ask:

• Will this solve the fire I’m putting out right now?

• Can I make this bend to our internal business logic?

• Will it make things better for my team, today?

The Truth Is You Need Both

And not just vaguely. You need to bridge them.

Too many solution providers talk at executives and around champions. Adoption thrives when you become the translator.

When trying to be that translator, positioning needs to reflect the needs and values of the other group, in language that can be understood within their world view.

With Executives:

• Consider how to show the downstream effects of smoother processes enabled by your solution.

• Quantify what champions already know: time saved, errors reduced, process clarity.

With Champions:

• Solve a pain point immediately. No gatekeeping information over a months-long ramp-up, or promises of a better future.

• Give them flexibility, autonomy, and resources to build with your product, not just use it.

And for both?

Be the internal champion and mediator for each group and help to make the value chain visible. Show how a small functional process tweak your product enables, and how that translates directly into better business metrics (and where).

Connect the micro with the macro.

Why Champions Are Your Secret Weapon

They’re not just users. They’re the internal glue—connecting systems, people, and outcomes.

These are passionate product advocates with a keen eye on the jobs they need to get done, and how their tool stack integrates to help them do it. Many started in or developed into roles that required them to notice what breaks and quietly fix it.

What makes them powerful:

• They are problem spotters who see the edge cases your onboarding guide missed.

• They are the context builders who know how tools interact, not just how they function alone.

• They are trusted voices among peers and within their organization. When they say something works, people listen.

But they won’t blindly champion something that creates more chaos than it cures.

Where Adoption Goes to Die

Ultimately, most adoption efforts fail because:

1. Silos Create Breakage

Executive priorities and frontline processes get treated like separate animals. But systems don’t work in silos. Champions can flag breaking changes—if they’re involved early.

2. Lack of Context for Techs

Software handed down without rationale or training feels like a punishment, not an upgrade. If champions don’t understand why it matters, they won’t make it matter.

3. Resistance Isn’t About Change

People don’t hate change. They hate when change brings confusion, double work, or brittle handoffs. Ease of transition matters just as much as long-term promise.

(I’ll dig deeper into what I'll refer to as "The Whole Elephant Problem" in a later post.)

A Better Engagement Strategy

Stay tuned for a future breakdown in #TheThread where I’ll share how we adapted the 5 Rings of Buyer Insight at Auvik to integrate technical champions into ongoing buying and success strategies.

Here’s a sneak peek:

• Interview Executives: Don’t just ask what they want—understand what they fear. Ask them to tell you the stories they tell in boardrooms and sales calls.

• Interview Champions: What slows them down? What did they duct-tape together last week? What are they quietly proud of fixing?

Then, design your product—and how you support those using it—at that intersection.

Yes, you'll have to write it down and call me back... I'm sorry... No, It's not easy for me either.... Don't worry, we'll get through it.

The schedule was novel, and often, so were the people & their problems, which I needed in my life (and had a lot of patience for). My shifts were 10am to 10pm, Monday to Wednesday.

For someone like me—momentum-based, easily derailed, needs time to spiral into things—This was a perfect burst of work energy. But, as allergic to cold starts as I was - that first shift back after 4 days off felt like being rebooted from BIOS

Every.

Damn.

Time.

And more often than not on that Monday morning, I'd be late.

I'm not talking like missed entire meetings late, but like, probably hit the snooze button a couple extra times, spoiled by all the sleeping in I've been doing the past several days, and now I'm rolling in 3 minutes past the hour late. Not crazy…

Still. Late.

And staring me straight in the face with its big angry countdown:

The digital “punch clock”. This thing was brutal. If you were even one minute late, it rounded up to a full fifteen.

So naturally, if I found myself getting there at 10:03 on Monday, I would just grab myself a bagel next door, and roll in at 10:14 instead.

That was the first click in my brain—one of the earliest professional signs that I was going to be a problem for poorly designed systems. But not in the way you'd think.

It wasn’t defiance. It was optimization. It was efficiency in the face of bad math.

It was the realization that when a system fails to meet people where they are, people will rewrite the system for themselves.

It made me wonder...

what if we encouraged people to achieve a goal to get to where they need to be, instead of punishing them for where they’re not?

But the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a better way to build work seemed so far out of my area of influence at the time, and I didn’t have the lived experience or the language for explaining systems thinking, human-centered design or neurodivergent workflows to any of my superiors.

I just knew that the punch clock was stupid and I just knew if I was going to be penalized for more time than I was late anyway, I should benefit from that time.

The process didn't incentivize punctuality. It incentivized passive resistance. It was dissonance embedded in a policy that measured my success.

Okay, yeah, I was still late.

But here’s the thing they didn’t consider: you don’t have to punish people to get results. There are better ways than “one minute late = 15-minute penalty” to get people to do what you actually need them to do.

Later, I’d see this same pattern in leadership, parenting, and process design:

Systems fail when they optimize for control instead of context.

Training staff takes time. Ramp-up takes time. Take that time your giving away, use it to reinforce habits that matter instead of burning it on compliance theater.

Work with the humans in your system. Build ways for them to re-engage instead of punishing them into disengagement. Most of the time, you don’t need to force people to comply. You just need to invite them to participate.

I’m telling this story, because it was the first time I started to realize:

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

"I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am."

— Charles Horton Cooley, by way of everyone who’s ever overthought a Slack message.

This is a quote I’ve wrestled with for two decades.

It surfaces in those moments when someone says or does something that makes me question how I’m coming across—not because I’m insecure, but because part of me really wants to know:

How am I being seen here? Am I aligning with the image I want to project?

It’s not vanity (or insanity). It’s just human nature. Sociologists like George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley explored this over a century ago. Mead called it “taking the role of the other,” while Cooley described it as the “looking-glass self”—the idea that we shape our identities by imagining how others see us and reflecting those perceptions back onto ourselves.

It's the sneaky psychological loop that gets triggered every time someone gives you a raised eyebrow or ambiguous feedback that makes you think…

I’ve navigated conflicting feedback about who I am and how I communicate for years. I've had managers say, “You’re not clear enough. Get to the point faster if you want to sit at the big boys’ table.” Meanwhile, others (at that same table) told me, “Your brain is fascinating; someone should study how it works.”

I can see how both might be true. Reconciling these reflections isn’t about choosing one or the other, but figuring out which parts feel true, which reflect others’ expectations, and how I can show up authentically while still growing in areas that need work.

But that’s easier said than done. And social media is a huge culprit in turning imagined judgments into performances that fragment us.

Think about the mirrors we check every day:

• LinkedIn says, “Show them you’ve got it together.”

• Instagram whispers, “Make it look effortless.”

• Reddit chimes in, “Thanks, I hate it.”

The silly part is that most of the pressure doesn’t even come from reality. Cooley said:

“The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment—the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.”

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown says showing up authentically doesn’t require perfection—it just requires courage.

What that means to me is that the best thing that any of us can bring to any space—online or offline—is the version of ourselves that’s whole. Which is how we ended up here—starting this project, this…whatever it turns out to be.

This space for me to introduce myself.

I’m Ashley. I'm a technical product and community advocate who hangs out in online chats, gets a little too obsessed with process automation best practices, writes way too many words for a viral post, and laughs at my own jokes.

I’ve spent the last two decades working across roles most people overlook—dispatch, admin, consultant, operator, strategist. I’ve sat in the middle of chaos, and made a career out of translating it into clarity.

Somewhere along the way, I realized a few things:

• The best systems are rooted in self-awareness, and are built by those who are more “process curious” than “process perfect”.

• Impact comes from knowing how to show up whole. (Especially when the reflections around you are fragmented.)

• I needed a place where the full picture could live. Not just the polished posts, or smart-sounding frameworks—but the messy thoughts, the honest questions, and the half-finished drafts of who we’re all trying to become.

• I don’t always fit in—but I will always figure it out.

One more thing

If you’ve ever wrestled with how you’re perceived, tried to align who you are with how you’re seen, or just wanted to show up fully without losing your edge—you’re not alone.

The point here isn’t to package this journey, but to share it, and perhaps help someone else feel a little more seen in the mirror.

Thanks for being here.

Ashe

Hi. I’m Ashley. I work where process meets people, and things break quietly.

Clarity in Chaos is my blog where I write about systems, identity, and the way they crash into each other (sometimes working out for the better).

This space is intentionally tangential (because so is my brain). Most of the work that matters isn’t clean or chronological. It’s nonlinear. I write to name those things, to track the invisible labour, and try to make sense of why we stick with broken processes just because they’re familiar.

My Tangents

Sometimes you’ll see me reflect on how I came to hold the beliefs I do, through the lens of my career. Sometimes I’ll rant about workarounds pretending to be processes. Sometimes I’ll write love letters to constraints. Always, I’m searching for the thread that makes it all make sense.

What this is:

• Essays and insights on real systems and the humans inside them

• Field notes and thoughts that are a work in progress

• Reflections from a nonlinear brain that’s always looking for the themes

What this isn’t:

• Productivity porn

• 5-step templates for “better leadership”

• Thought leadership with a foolproof plan to succeed

If you’re looking to explore, start here:

#TheThread

My career story, piece by piece. Not chronological. Not tidy. But true.

#Reflections

Deeper perspectives about identity, feedback, perception, authenticity, and what they reveal about how and where we show up.

#ProcessPrompts

What happens when I try to answer a systems question on a timer, out loud, before I know what I think.

#Soapbox

Unfiltered thoughts. Might be useful, might just be cathartic. Either way I felt like I needed to write it.

#SystemsAndSelf

Operational architecture, tooling, workflows—and the rabbit holes in between. Because process isn’t the point, but it always shows you where the pain is.