Ian trained at the Bartlett and in Cardiff, landed in Edmonton in 2002, and in 2016 co-founded Next Architecture with Alan Partridge, carrying forward a legacy that traces back to 1938. Thirty-four years into his career, he leads a deliberately mid-sized firm that competes with companies ten times its size, and in this conversation he explains exactly how.

We get into the parts of running a firm they don’t teach in architecture school: cash flow, forecasting, the months where payroll keeps you up at night, and the planning tools that turn those months back into sleep. Ian walks through the renovation of the Edmonton law courts, where the building couldn’t close, so his team built the new envelope outside the existing one and worked four storeys above an operating courthouse. We talk about laser scanning heritage buildings, what point-cloud data reveals that the naked eye can’t, how his firm trained AI on twenty years of project sheets to answer RFPs, and where he thinks the technology stops and the architect begins.

We also dig into how he builds his team: a flat structure where the partners sit at the same desks as everyone else, hiring for technical grounding, and why staying mid-sized on purpose is a client-service decision, not a growth failure.

Topics include: firm succession, leading through cyclical markets, budgeting and value engineering with clients, energy performance in Edmonton’s climate, WELL certification, historic preservation, BIM and Revit, AI in architecture, and building a team built to last.

Connect with Ian and Next Architecture: [link]

McStay on What Matters: conversations with experienced leaders about how they actually navigate the hard calls: developing and coaching people, building teams, and leading for the long game. New episodes twice a month. More at seanmcstay.com.

Until next time, focus on what matters.

They get into why succession is really about making yourself replaceable, why your replacement should not be a copy of you, how a clear plan retains your best people instead of losing them, and the gap between intending to plan and actually doing it. Candid and practical, built for owners and leaders of small and mid-sized companies.

What you’ll learn:

• Why avoiding the succession conversation is what costs owners the most

• How planning your succession makes you more valuable, not less

• The three questions that reveal a real successor: do they get it, want it, and have the capacity

• Why a clear path forward, even without guarantees, is your best retention tool

• The difference between thinking about a plan and actually having one

Chapters:
00:00 Welcome, and Mike’s new book Succession
01:07 Who Mike Mack is and what X5 Management does
02:18 How X5 evolved from the original idea
05:25 When to make your first hire
07:59 Why slow and steady beats hiring to fix a problem
08:38 The discovery process: where are you in three years?
12:04 Succession: the gap between intention and action
15:26 Making yourself replaceable, and the ego problem
18:35 Why your replacement should not be another you
21:23 Succession as a retention strategy, and timing
25:31 Clarity over guarantees
28:35 How to start the conversation at your own company
33:27 “What if we train them and they leave?”
36:23 The one thing every owner should do next
38:57 Where to find Mike and the book

About Mike Mack:
Mike Mack is the founder and president of X5 Management in Edmonton, celebrating 20 years in 2026. X5 is in the people business: strategic planning, succession planning, leadership and team development, and executive coaching. Mike is the author of several books, most recently Succession.

Most people misunderstand sales as a profession.

They think it is about persuasion, pressure, charm, or a closing technique. Sometimes it is dressed up as process or reduced to activity metrics. Sometimes it is treated like a personality trait that only some people are born with.

The best salespeople I have worked with do something different. They help customers think more clearly. After more than two decades in sales leadership, I have come to know that the best salespeople are not the best talkers. They are the best at creating clarity.

I learned from some truly great salespeople early in my career and over time, the pattern for success in sales became clearer. I think of it as DICE, four moves that help a customer think clearly:

Disrupt. Innovate. Collaborate. Execute.

Not as a script or a rigid methodology but as a sequence of actions you take in service of the client, not to yourself or your company.

A good salesperson must disrupt the current pattern when they find the right opportunity to do so. Customers rarely change because someone tells them to. They change because they come to see something differently. That might be a risk they have normalized, a cost they are not measuring, a belief that is outdated, or a decision process that is protecting the status quo.

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I once sat across the table from an architect who had been using the same product for decades. It worked. It fit their budget. And it didn’t threaten their schedule. But it wasn’t creating the best outcome for the people living in the space. That was the disruption. Their previous product did its job. It just was not doing the job their client actually needed.

Once a good salesperson disrupts the current pattern it’s time to innovate. In this context, innovation does not mean showing off the newest product. Often the product features are well down the list of why someone buys. Innovate here means educating the customer and bringing them better information to give them a clearer model. Helping them understand the trade-offs in a way they could not see before. Listening and learning and confirming that you really do solve a problem they have or that their client has.

Once you get to that point the next step comes naturally. Collaborate. This is where weak salespeople can lose the thread. Weak salespeople pitch. Strong salespeople build. Strong salespeople work with the customer to find the path that creates the most value with the least risk. That is where trust starts to become real. You have disrupted the pattern, offered innovation through education and collaborated on the best possible option.

Now it’s time for the final step. Execute.

Ask for the sale. Define the next step. Move the decision forward.

This matters because many salespeople like the first three stages but avoid the fourth. They educate, build trust, have good conversations, and then hesitate when it is time to ask. But execution isn’t just part of the service, it’s the real value of what you are bringing to the table. If the customer’s problem is real, the value is clear, and the risk has been addressed, then asking for the sale is not pressure. It’s leadership.

The point of DICE is not to make sales more complicated.

It is to make it more honest.

Disrupt the pattern.
Innovate through education.
Collaborate around value and risk.
Execute with clarity.

A good sales process does not create pressure. It creates clarity. It helps the customer see the decision that was already waiting in front of them.

“Building trust is the goal, not working hard.”

That does not mean work ethic stops mattering. It means work ethic is not the final measure.

Hard work matters because it creates reliability. Reliability creates trust. Trust creates opportunity.

At senior levels, people are not just hiring effort. They are hiring judgment they can trust.

We discuss why one-size-fits-all talent strategies are failing, why people are increasingly loyal to learning and growth rather than companies, and why organizations will not be able to recruit their way out of the accelerating need for new skills.

Steve also shares lessons from LinkedIn’s rapid growth, his own transition after leaving the company, and why careers are built on trust more than hard work.

This conversation is about development, but not in the classroom sense. It is about how leaders create the conditions for people to keep growing while the world around them changes.

Not being clear on a subject can feel like being a “nice” person but in the end you’re just avoiding a tough conversation and slowing down the progress that could be made if you faced it head on.

Clear is kind. Have the tough conversation. Say the thing. Your relationships will be better for it.

A sales leader observes three weak conversations and says the team needs better training.

A manager has one difficult employee and starts redesigning their hiring profile.

A board hears from two frustrated customers and suddenly everyone is talking about a shift in the market.

This is how a lot of bad decisions begin. Not with stupidity or laziness or even a lack of information. They begin with a small amount of information that feels larger than it is. When we have no information, we usually know we are guessing. We are cautious and ask more questions. We leave room for uncertainty because the uncertainty is staring us in the face.

But when we have a little information, our mindset changes. The analytical part of our brain gets involved. It starts connecting dots, filling gaps, building a story, and defending the story before we have enough evidence to know whether the dots belong together in the first place.

That initial story can feel incredibly convincing. It feels like pattern recognition, and sometimes it is. But most of the time it’s a proven default habit of our brains to over index small sample sizes into large conclusions.

One customer says the price is too high. Maybe the price is too high or the value was not clear. Maybe the person you were talking to was never the buyer or the timing was wrong. Maybe this was the wrong customer. Or maybe they say price is the issue because that is the easiest thing to say.

One team member misses a deadline. Maybe they lack accountability or the expectation was unclear. Maybe they did not have the authority to get it done or they did not understand why it mattered. Maybe they are overwhelmed. Or maybe you avoided the conversation six weeks ago that would have prevented this moment.

The point is not that the first explanation is always wrong it is that the first explanation is usually incomplete and incomplete explanations are dangerous because they often contain just enough truth to survive.

Which is what makes them hard to challenge. A completely wrong idea usually collapses quickly under scrutiny whereas a partially true idea can run a company for months. It can shape hiring decisions, sales strategy, product direction, team structure, and leadership behaviour long before anyone realizes the original diagnosis was built on a sample size of almost nothing.

The problem is not the data point but rather what we do with it. A single data point should make you curious. It should not make you certain.

That said leaders are often under pressure to sound certain. The team wants confidence, investors want a story, and customers want conviction. The board wants a clean explanation. Nobody wants to hear, “I’m not sure yet, but I’m paying attention.”

So the leader turns a single or small group of signals into a narrative.

The market is price sensitive.

The team lacks urgency.

The candidate pool is weak.

Customers do not get it.

The timing is wrong.

So the question becomes: how do you know for sure?

Most bad decisions do not happen because leaders fail to think. They happen because leaders think too quickly around the wrong centre. They take the first believable explanation and start building around it. They start breaking down the first available wall between them and where they think they want to go.

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Once that happens, the explanation becomes sticky. People start gathering evidence to support it. They notice the next customer who complains about price and ignore the one who bought because the value was clear. They notice the next employee who misses a deadline and ignore the part where the system keeps producing for most employees.

The mind does this naturally. It wants coherence and for the discomfort to end. It wants a story it can hold. The mind is designed to be lazy.

Being a leader requires the discipline to stay with the unfinished thought a little longer, but not hiding behind it.

There is a version of “we need more data” that is just avoidance. Leaders use it when they are trying not to make a hard call and they keep researching because acting would make them measurable. They ask for one more report, one more meeting, one more round of input, when everyone in the room already knows enough to move.

That is not wisdom. That is hiding. The real skill is knowing the difference.

A weak signal deserves an appropriate amount of attention. A repeated pattern d

eserves a reasonable level of investigation. A real wall deserves decisive action.

That is where judgment lives. Not in being cautious all the time or in being bold all the time. In knowing what kind of reality you are dealing with. But you cannot do any of that with fog. Fog just keeps you circling. That is what small samples often create: fog with the confidence of fact.

The leader’s job is to slow the conversion from signal to story long enough to ask better questions, collect enough data, and to recognize that a few pieces of information can be just as dangerous as no information.

Many leaders say they want people to take ownership. Then they create environments where attempts at ownership end in punishment.

They ask for initiative but second-guess every decision. They ask for honesty but punish the first person who says the thing everyone else was thinking. They ask for innovation but build approval systems where any meaningful deviation requires permission from five people who are not close to the work.

Then they look around and wonder why the team has become passive.

The easy explanation is that people do not care enough. Sometimes that is true. More often, they have learned the system. They have learned that waiting is safer than acting. They have learned that the real meeting usually happens after the meeting, because the official room is too risky for the truth.

That is not a motivation problem. It is a trust problem.

Research continues to show that trust is not a soft cultural preference. People in high-trust organizations report more energy, higher engagement, better productivity, lower stress, less burnout, and stronger alignment with purpose than people in low-trust organizations. That is not culture work sitting off to the side of the business. That is the business.

But trust often gets treated like atmosphere. Something nice to have. Something leaders hope exists or assume exists. Something they talk about when engagement scores drop or too many people leave.

Trust is more practical than that. In a low-trust environment, people burn energy protecting themselves. They manage optics. They soften the email until the point disappears. They hold back the concern because they are not sure what will happen if they name it. They spend the meeting reading faces instead of solving the problem. None of that shows up as a line item, but it is expensive.

The work still happens, but it happens through friction. And that friction compounds. A concern does not get raised. A decision gets delayed. A customer issue becomes more expensive than it needed to be. Then the company adds another process, another dashboard, another accountability meeting, as if the issue was a lack of management machinery.

The issue was not process. It was trust.

Take information sharing. Uncertainty creates stress, and stress undermines the conditions that support trust and cooperation. When people do not know where the business is going, why decisions are being made, or what is actually true, they fill the gaps themselves. Usually with stories worse than reality.

People notice what is not being said. They notice when the explanation does not match the behaviour. If leadership does not define reality, people will still build one. It will just be less accurate.

This is also where most people misunderstand what hard work actually costs. There is a difference between challenge stress and chronic stress. A hard, clear, achievable goal can focus a team. It can bring people together and create energy. But vague pressure, moving targets, hidden information, and impossible expectations do something else entirely. They make people protect themselves.

People do not usually burn out because the work is hard. They burn out because the work is unclear, the rules keep changing, the truth is hard to access, and the people above them pretend not to see it. Hard work with trust is energizing. Hard work without trust is extraction.

The return on trust is that people stop spending so much of themselves managing the room. More of their judgment becomes available and more of their honesty becomes usable. Their creativity survives contact with the organization.

If you want people to think clearly, tell the truth, take ownership, and do hard things together, trust is not the reward you get after performance improves.

It is part of what makes performance possible.

A lot of that overhead is invisible, which is why leaders underestimate it. It does not show up cleanly on a P&L. It shows up in hesitation. In watered-down opinions. In the meeting after the meeting where people finally say what they actually think. In the extra mental effort required to manage how you are landing instead of simply doing the work. When someone is constantly translating themselves into the acceptable version of themselves, that translation has a cost. Energy spent managing perception is energy not spent on judgment, creativity, conflict, or execution.

This is not theoretical. Yoshino and Deloitte found that 61% of workers actively hide some aspect of themselves at work. Of those who were covering or hiding, 60 to 73% said it was detrimental to their sense of self. That is a remarkable number. People are not being excluded outright. They are being included on terms that require them to edit themselves to stay.

That distinction matters. Exclusion is easier to identify and easier to condemn. Conditional inclusion is much harder to name because on the surface everything looks fine. The person is in the room. They are employed. They are participating. The organization can tell itself it is open, fair, and modern. But if belonging depends on constant self-editing, the cost is being paid somewhere else.

Most organizations say they want innovation. Then they quietly reward the people who are best at reading the room and least likely to disturb it. They say they want challenge, but not too much. They say they want honesty but delivered in a way that never creates discomfort. They say they want diversity of thought, then build informal systems that reward sameness of presentation, sameness of tone, and sameness of risk tolerance.

That is where performance starts to look like professionalism.

The cost is groupthink, but even that word can sound too abstract. In practice it means slower learning. It means weaker decisions. It means talented people withholding their best observations because they have learned that accuracy without diplomacy is punished, and diplomacy without accuracy is rewarded. It means the loudest conformity signals get mistaken for leadership maturity.

And this is where the conversation often goes sideways. As soon as you challenge performative professionalism, people assume the alternative is chaos. Oversharing. Emotional mess. No standards. No decorum. No filters. That is not the argument.

Google’s Project Aristotle reached a conclusion many leaders still resist because it sounds softer than they want it to: psychological safety was the single most important factor across high-performing teams. Not talent. Not seniority. Not team composition. The teams that performed best were the ones where people felt safe enough to speak honestly, take interpersonal risk, and show up without spending half their energy managing the room. When safety practices were introduced, project completion improved materially. That is not sentiment. That is operating leverage.

The argument is not that every thought belongs in the room. The argument is that the gap between your real thinking and your expressed thinking should not be so wide that performance becomes your primary job.

Professionalism has value. Decorum has value. Self-regulation has value. But they stop being assets when they become disguises. The point of professionalism should be to help people work together effectively, not to force everyone into the same narrow performance of seriousness, polish, and emotional neutrality.

That requires more from leaders than slogans about authenticity. It requires them to stop rewarding the most socially legible version of competence. It requires them to make room for people who are direct, unusual, intense, awkward, or simply not polished in the company dialect. It requires them to distinguish between someone who is unprofessional and someone who is just not performing the expected script.

That is a harder distinction than most companies want to make.

Adler’s idea of separation of tasks is key here. How other people respond to the real you is their task. Your task is to show up fully and do your work well. Once you reverse that and make managing other people’s reactions your primary concern, you start bleeding energy in every direction. You become less honest, less useful, and usually less effective. The organization loses too, because it is now paying capable people to self-edit instead of contribute.

The cost of performance at work is not just personal. It is operational. The more energy people spend editing themselves to fit, the less they have left for judgment, creativity, courage, and truth. The less truth in the system, the worse the decisions. The worse the decisions, the more the organization starts mistaking control for competence.

Most companies think they are paying for professionalism.

Very often, they are paying for conformity.

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/@SeanMcStay

Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-donkersgoed/

So why don’t more people already look for Integrators? Because they are underpriced in most hiring processes due to the fact that their value shows up over 18 to 36 months, not in the first 90 days. Specialists produce faster. Integrators produce deeper. If the role is a three-month fix, hire a specialist. If the role is a three-year build, hire an Integrator. If the role plays in a kind learning environment with fixed rules, firm regulations and highly standardized processes then a specialist is the way to go. If the role is in a wicked learning environment where the rules are either highly flexible or don’t exist, regulations are less of a concern and processes are constantly shifting or in need of improvement, then an Integrator with a breadth of experience can be exactly what your business needs.

So how do you figure out if someone is an Integrator or just a candidate with a non-linear and unconnected career path? Ask them. Ask questions like: walk me through what the different parts of your career have in common. Not chronologically. Thematically. When discussing a success in a previous role ask what they brought from other areas of their background to make that success possible. If they can articulate a through-line that is specific, credible, and tied to the problems they solve, you are looking at an Integrator. If they give you a vague answer or list unrelated experiences, you are looking at someone whose career was varied without being cumulative. Different candidate, different hire. Not wrong, just not an Integrator.

Hire Integrators for roles that require judgment under ambiguity. If your senior leadership pipeline only rewards specialization, you will produce specialists. Which is great when you need a specialist. However, when the business needs an Integrator, you will have to hire from outside. In that situation be open to that hire. But to get ahead of that for an even better move, start looking within your own organization for opportunities to develop Integrators you already have. Look in different but related departments when you are doing internal hires. Encourage your staff to upskill and learn in multiple areas, not just their current specialty. Look for the people who are making connections between silos and helping things work better, not just the rock stars in a single discipline. Your team will end up better rounded and more adaptable. That is the competitive advantage specialization cannot give you.

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