Announcing In the Meantime

Happy October. This is a good month for candy.

This newsletter is mostly about a new business venture, along with a few other odds and ends.

In the Meantime

I’ve just launched a new partnership with Jerrold McGrath called In the Meantime. We offer services to support people in dealing with volatility. In practical terms, this means leadership development, strategy creation, and workshops. In terms of outcomes, we design experiences to strengthen relationships in organizations.

Our approach is focused on the mechanics of time well spent today in service of a life well-lived tomorrow. We think a lot about how to use time together to talk, think, decide, and act. We’re both experienced facilitators that bring this thinking to a range of different practices, and we’re both deep believers in the power of relationships to define and shift culture.

As we were working on getting our launch materials ready, an email from Jerrold informed me of the death of Wendell Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026.  I can’t remember how Berry’s work came into my life, but I know that it has been a touchpoint ever since. Berry was a farmer, a writer, an academic, and an environmental activist.  He had a firm and persistent conviction that it was critical to work in the local, to work in specifics. As he described in his essay: “Life is a Miracle – Against Modern Superstition” he felt it was necessary to be familiar with something in order to have reverence for it, and to protect it. This idea was shared in the context of the environment, and it extends neatly outwards to each other. We feel more responsible to be careful with each other when we are acquainted with each other. 

In early conversations with Jerrold, I noticed a version of this belief in his thinking and his practice. His work constantly focuses on encounters and experience. More about Jerrold, in his own words:

“Two convictions hold up the ground I make.  That nobody speaks from nowhere. Whatever you say, you say from a particular place and time, and you are answerable for it from there. There is no other ground available to you, and no alibi.

And that the ground keeps moving, which is why no account of a person or a situation is ever the last one. To declare a final word about someone is a small violence — a way of insisting they stand still on ground that will not. The writing is the other half of the same work. What the ground turns up, I think through here.”

So, as this is an introduction of sorts to Jerrold's work if it's new to you, let me recommend his newsletter, Made Ground. He’s also the author of an excellent book – In Praise of Disorder.  About the book:

“Algorithmic systems promise even greater stability and predictability but, in the process, drive out other ideas and beliefs in favour of the single-minded pursuit of growth and efficiency. What is lost in the process?

What if rather than fearing disorder, we embraced it?

This book is an invitation to celebrate disorder as a practice that helps us deal with what’s coming. Rather than redesigning the world to feel safer, we can create and preserve a culture that acknowledges disorder while cultivating local and small-scale moments that help us adapt to changing conditions.”

It’s exciting to get to take this thinking off the page and out into the world through this new business venture with Jerrold. I hope this short introduction is giving you a beginning sense of the shape of the work we're seeking to do at In the Meantime. I’ll be sure to share updates in future newsletters as we have them, we are planning a couple of in-person workshops for before the end of the year in Toronto, I've included the description for them below. If you’re interested do send us a note – hello [at] inthemeantime.work - we're currently sorting out location and logistics.

Finally, another book recommendation that ties some of this up well. As I finished my re-reading of Wendell Berry’s Life is Miracle, I moved into a biography of French philosopher Henri Bergson titled “Herald of a Restless World - How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People” by Emily Herring.   The transition between these two books was extremely fluid, and I can feel the overlap in themes about experience and memory and life. This work we’re getting into at In the Meantime is deeply rooted in the experiential, a belief that reality – how we act, what we do – is malleable, and that we’ve got more options to change these things, even in the face of volatility, than we may see at first look.

Bergson, like many philosophers of his time, thought deeply about language. And one of his concerns about language was how it did away with the specific, the particular, the local. As Herring writes of Bergson's thinking: "Excessive generalising, the use of ready-made concepts and ideas, is necessary but makes us lose sight of what is truly singular about the unique colouration of our own experience; it leads us to break contact with our profound self."

I know there is this desire to say exactly what we do as a new business venture, and to communicate exactly what the outcomes will be, but here we resist, within reason. The shape of the work and the encounters are easy to describe, but time spent together is less so. Our work at In the Meantime is about living well with uncertainty. A lot of what that requires is a renewed look at what it looks like to live well, period. This question is the crux of philosophy, and a major shaper of culture. It’s an exciting time to get to grapple with these questions with our clients, in specific places, with specific names and specific problems.

That’s all the news for today. In the November newsletter, I’ll share how my solo practice is evolving alongside this new partnership, and some of the lessons I’ve learned in my first year in business. One of those lessons is reflected in this new partnership and the type of practice I'd like to keep building out. Joining forces with Jerrold on this front offers a stronger base of experience and a complementary set of skills that we can bring to the work. Another lesson learned is that I really enjoy doing one-on-one advising, it has been profoundly rewarding and it's something I will retain as part of my solo practice. If you're interested in knowing what that looks like, please send me a note. I’ve also got an update next month on new work coming together at Digital Public about the use of AI in the context of medicine, law, and urban planning. 

More then, thanks as ever for reading.

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In the Meantime upcoming workshops

Beating the Bounds
Friday, November 27, 2026
1:30 to 5:00 p.m. Includes a copy of In Praise of Disorder.

Location TBD

Facilitators: Jerrold McGrath and Bianca Wylie

Most organizations are now between operating models, where the old way of working no longer holds and the new one is not settled, and the things they rely on are being moved without anyone announcing it. 

For centuries, beating the bounds has been a community’s answer to the same problem. Once a year, with no maps and no fences to appeal to, people walked the perimeter of what they held in common so that enough of them remembered where the line was. 

This half-day workshop in Toronto runs that procedure with sixteen people, on the boundaries of their own work, asking what is actually held in common, what has already moved, and what nobody has walked in years. Participants leave with a record of their own perimeter, shared perspectives, and a named next step. Hosted by Jerrold McGrath and Bianca Wylie and built from the practices in Jerrold McGrath's In Praise of Disorder, it offers no method for mastering volatility, only a way of acting well inside it.

AI Etiquette
Friday, December 4, 2026
4:00 p.m. 6:30 p.m.
Location: TBA
Cost: $50

In this 2 hour workshop, we’ll explore three cases of the use of generative AI in organizational settings. Participants will leave the workshop with a starting approach to developing norms around the use of generative AI that focus on strengthening relationships.

Etiquette is a way for organizations and individuals to develop lightweight protocols that support reciprocity and care for interpersonal relationships.

Two of the cases are common practice: the use of AI note-taking tools and the use of AI to generate communications and marketing copy. The third will be developed with participants to allow for some customization given organizational and participant context.

Participants do not need to bring any computers or materials to take part: the sessions will be organized around conversations and exercises to be done in pairs and small groups.

Participants will leave with a pamphlet and tear-sheets to help them continually develop their etiquette norms and protocols and be able to organize future conversations for similar purposes and outcomes.