Really looking forward to Monday morning and beginning my summer internship as a reporter with The Carillon in Steinbach. It’s gonna be an amazing immersion into the industry.
There won’t be much time for gardening this year. I’m thrilled to have accepted the position of News Editor at The Projector and onto the Editorial Board of Working Draft magazine. More monitor time! 😉👍
I’m so very honoured to have received the Shawna Forester Smith Award for 2036 in Creative Communications at RRC Polytech. Mind Blown!
https://t.co/ZJSCFmF0xG
Hello Friends and Fam;
I hope everyone enjoyed their Easter. I don’t usually do the “Like and Share” thing, but as many of you know I went back to school. I’m doing a course in analytics, so please slip over to your TikTok and look at northernlynx3.
Thank you!
When organizations - large or small - use me as a consultant, I forbid one thing immediately:
1. Do not call yourselves a “family.”
2. Do not call yourselves “friends.”
3. And don’t insult me with “team.”
Why?
Because the place you work is none of those things.
And the moment you allow that language, it migrates from vocabulary to psyche. You start assigning moral obligations that belong only to real relationships:
•Loyalty without limits
•Sacrifice without reciprocity
•Forgiveness without accountability
Oh and this wasn’t an accident by the way.
This framing was deliberately pushed in the mid-1970s by organizational psychologists tasked not just with increasing productivity, but with manufacturing affinity.
And affinity is far more powerful than authority. It bypasses reason, works emotionally, and is exquisitely easy to manipulate in social groups.
The idea was to supplant your family or your friends for a bunch of goobers, gomers, and grifters.
No memo required. No edict issued.
You comply because you feel you should. Compulsion via emotion, friends. (I will add here: exceptionally dangerous when used in many cohorts).
An organization is a living system - not just legally, but behaviorally. It metabolizes people. It will chew you up and spit you out. Founders included. Executives included. Everyone person is food for the machine.
That’s not cruelty, either. That’s just organizational design and normal operating behavior of an organization.
The organization does not care about your late nights, your loyalty, your sense of duty, or your “going above and beyond.” Its only concerns are throughput, continuity, and returns.
Organizations exist to serve shareholders. (Note that I didn’t say consumers - just shareholders).
And yes, contrary to popular mythology, not-for-profits are often worse, just with quieter, more sanctimonious shareholders demanding different kinds of returns: influence, virtue, optics, control.
Which brings me back to language.
Precision in language isn’t pedantry.
It’s self-defense. It’s vital. It’s agency.
Language doesn’t just communicate - it conditions and it curates. When you name things accurately, you preserve boundaries. And boundaries are the one thing no organization - no matter how powerful - can take from you unless you hand them over willingly.
Your job isn’t your family. Your coworkers aren’t your friends. Don’t allow them to supplant a vital component of core human functions just so you can make a couple more cents an hour.
And if they need you to believe otherwise to function? That tells you everything you need to know.
For 2026, let this be your first resolution: if that’s what you have come to know, then I leave you with this little four word admonition: