My understanding of leadership was built slowly, and not always through success.

I remember a moment in university — I’d gone out with a large group of new friends, and I was sitting across from a young woman I’d just met, having one of those typical ‘get-to-know-you’ conversations. There was a lull. She looked at me, and said: “You’re different. What is it? … Are your parents still together?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I’d grown up in a stable, loving home, and had never considered that this might be, in any context, unusual. In that moment I felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, like a minority. It was disorienting. And it was one of the most useful experiences I’ve ever had.

It was the moment I began to understand that my reasoning, my interpretations, and my assumptions about how the world works were not everyone’s. That the picture of the world I’d been given — which felt entirely natural and universal to me — was, in fact, specific. Shaped by privilege, I hadn’t noticed because I’d never had to.

As an able-bodied, able-minded man who rarely struggled to secure the resources needed, I have considerable access to power. That access is not the norm. And true leadership, I’ve come to believe, is not about accessing more of it — it’s about understanding that power is given, not taken, and given most freely where people believe it will be used in their service. The most effective leaders I’ve known listen intently: not just to what’s being said, but to what’s being left unsaid.

“Black and white are not familiar colours on the canvas of ethical dilemmas.”

This belief shapes how I approach every difficult conversation, every governance decision, every faculty evaluation, every moment where an institution has to choose between what’s easy and what’s right. I don’t always get it right. But I try to stay honest about the complexity, rather than reach for a resolution that’s more comfortable than it is true.

When I was a teenager, I stood on stages: in lead roles in musicals; spent four consecutive years in the BC Honour Choir; enjoyed a choir tour through Europe, singing in cathedrals and concert halls with people who’d given months of their lives to the preparation; and, sang bass for years as part of an a cappella quartet. Then, after I’d moved into teaching and administration, I had the privilege of directing full musical theatre productions for nearly a decade.

None of this was a detour from my professional path. It was the formation of it.

Performing arts at that level teaches things that no graduate program can: what it means to hold a vision across months of preparation, trusting that the unglamorous work will eventually matter. What it means to be genuinely wrong in rehearsal — in front of other people, repeatedly — and to treat that wrongness as information rather than embarrassment. What it means to be part of an ensemble where every person’s contribution is load-bearing, and where the quality of the whole depends on the willingness of each person to subordinate their individual performance to something larger.

The performance arts taught me a lot.

When I’m in a difficult faculty meeting, or preparing a keynote, or sitting with a colleague who is struggling through something — the performance instincts are still running: read the room, listen to what’s underneath what’s being said, stay present, and always be prepared so that the important moment can actually land.

My career has taken a path that’s genuinely hard to summarize on a single line.

I’ve been a secondary school teacher, a Vice Principal, a Director of IT, a network infrastructure consultant, a digital threat assessment trainer, a university professor, a faculty development director, a software developer, a provincial consortium president, and a keynote speaker — often several of these simultaneously. The honest explanation for how this happened is not that I had a plan.

It’s that I’ve always been drawn to the questions at the heart of any other question. I'm interested in solving novel or persistent issues, usually at the heart of people's lived experience and right where the tension between expectation and experience exists.

For example, what is actually required for a new faculty member to understand what’s expected of them, rather than discovering it through failure? Why do students’ creativity scores decline the further they progress through school — and is that really schooling’s fault (as Sir Ken Robinson famously surmised), or is something more complex at work? What might faculty evaluation look like if we designed it around growth instead of compliance? How can we model physician coverage across BC hospital sites quickly enough to use the data in a live program planning decision?

These are the kinds of questions that pull me into new roles, new contexts, and often into building software that can help. The Faculty Growth Plan Portal, the Hospital Density & Physician Coverage Analysis Tool, an AI-assisted grading consistency reviewer, the visual schedule system, multiple community WordPress plugins, etc. — none of these were planned. They emerged from problems that needed solving and a tolerance for doing the work myself when the alternatives just didn't fit.

I should say something directly about NYIT Vancouver, because it’s part of this story. In February 2026, I published an op-ed in the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade warning that federal study permit caps were causing permanent — not temporary — damage to BC’s post-secondary sector. I wrote that faculty layoffs, program suspensions, and institutional closures were not market corrections but the unwinding of capacity built over years in direct response to government policy signals that had reversed course. Shortly after that piece was submitted, NYIT Vancouver announced the closure of its campus. I saw it coming. I said so publicly. And now I’m taking what I built there — the programs, the faculty development infrastructure, the AI governance work, the DQAB relationships — and looking for an institution where that work can continue and grow. That’s not a setback looking for a soft landing. It’s a body of work looking for a worthy next chapter.

One of the wonderful things about being human is that life is a journey during which we never stop learning. We never stop experiencing the world, and — if we’re paying attention — never stop allowing those experiences to inform our thinking. I’ve tried to remain that kind of learner, even as the subject areas have shifted. I think it’s one of the most important qualities a leader in education can have.

On teaching universities

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’d like to invite you into it.

There’s a persistent and, I think, deeply unhelpful idea in Canadian higher education: that institutional prestige runs in one direction. That colleges aspire to become university colleges, university colleges aspire to become teaching universities, and teaching universities aspire to become research universities. That the goal often seems to be to become something other than what you are - a "bigger and better" sort of syndrome.

I don’t think this is necessarily helpful institutional positioning. Perhaps, rather than trying to be something we aren't, we need to lean into what we are, while working to improve excellence and curricular offerings. The paradigmatic shift may seem minor, but it is powerful.

Teaching-focused institutions should herald that fact, and reinforce that instructional excellence is not a secondary activity squeezed between grant applications. Where institutions invest in the scholarship and practice of teaching — in teaching quality, faculty development, creative program design, and authentic community roots — they produce a natural milieu of excellence that, as an organic consequence, breeds research.

The question I try to bring to every leadership role is: how do we become more fully ourselves? ...Acknowledge our collective unique strengths, and build on them... I’ve found that’s a much more generative question. And consistently, it’s the one that leads somewhere worth going.

On creativity, possibility, and the role of education

I wrote an article for Education Canada asking whether schools really kill creativity. I’d been sitting with Sir Ken Robinson’s famous argument that they do — the steeply declining line on his graph, the dramatic conclusion — and I found myself thinking about the polemical nature of Sir Ken's assertion.

What I believe is this: what we often mistake for a loss of creativity is actually the arrival of reason. And the arrival of reason is a gift, not a threat. As we grow, we develop the capacity to filter — to recognize that not every idea is worth pursuing, to discard possibilities that don’t hold up to scrutiny. That’s not creativity dying. That’s maturity.

The deeper problem — the one that is, I think, more legitimately laid at education’s door — is that too many students, somewhere along the way, stop believing in possibility. Possibility is the fuel. Reason is the engine. You need both. An institution that cultivates only one of them is only doing half the job.

Creativity empowered breeds revision. It’s fostered through a willingness to try, recognizing that an idea only dies when we accept our last failure as final. The role of the educator — and of the institution — is to keep possibility alive while helping people think more rigorously about what to do with it.

On technology

I’ve spent a long time at the intersection of education and technology. Long enough to have watched many confident institutional technology initiatives fail. Long enough to have watched genuinely transformative ones succeed. The difference, in my experience, almost never has to do with the technology itself.

It has to do with whether the people introducing it started with the right question. Not “what can this tool do?” but “what are we actually trying to accomplish — and does this help or hinder that?”

I’ve watched institutions adopt entire platforms because a vendor’s demo was compelling, and I’ve watched faculty resist genuinely useful tools because nobody took the time to explain why the tool existed in the first place. Both failures share the same root: the technology arrived before the thinking did.

This is especially true for AI right now. Generative AI is not going away. It is also not, by itself, an educational strategy. The institutions and educators who navigate this moment well will be the ones who started by asking what they believe about learning — and are now asking, seriously and without defensiveness, what changes and what doesn’t when AI enters the room.

One of the things I’ve learned is that "good" leadership involves the ongoing work of recognizing the polyphony of perspectives in any given context or issue. Whose voices are being centred, whose experiences are considered the 'default,' and how does my position in the world shape what I can and can’t easily see?

As a professional educator and as a leader, I believe it’s incumbent on those of us in positions of influence to consider and amplify the voices of those who have been marginalized by systems we benefit from and sometimes perpetuate. That means listening before acting. It means distinguishing 'consultation' from 'genuine collaboration.' 

The role of Indigenization in post-secondary education is not, in my opinion, merely a strategic initiative or a committee portfolio. It is a reckoning — with history that is ongoing, with real harms, and requiring institutional responsibility to acknowledge that history and serve Indigenous students. My experience with indigenization spans curriculum collaboration in BC’s K–12 sector, intercultural competency programming developed in partnership with the Institute of Indigenous Issues & Perspectives, and ongoing Indigenization committee work at NYIT Vancouver. I don’t claim to be an expert, but I do bring a commitment to listening deeply and to reconciliACTION (a deliberate word choice) implies movement rather than aspiration.  

Equity is a pillar of my leadership - period.

I live in Surrey, BC. Outside of work, I spend meaningful time cycling, hiking, and out on the water, sailing. I am the current Vice-Commodore of the Lower Mainland Yacht Cooperative, a community of people who bring to seamanship the same seriousness I try to bring to curriculum design. Sailing is often used as a metaphor in leadership, and it's obvious why: there’s something clarifying about a context where the consequences of poor planning are immediate, and the feedback loop is very short.

I stay connected to music and the performing arts, mostly now as a technical director and audience member rather than a performer. I am often found configuring sound and lighting systems, mixing live events, and teaching others how to run the show.

I’m still learning from my four sons how to see the world from novel perspectives — full of possibility and complexity. As they are all engaged in post-secondary learning, budding relationships with their partners, and dreams for their future, I am frequently reminding them that, despite the ever-present uncertainty of the future, circumstances don't make or break you; they reveal you. 

True to this mantra, life is a journey during which we never stop learning. That’s not a slogan for me. It’s the organizing principle of everything I do.