In this episode of Leadership Singularity, host Virginie Glaenzer convenes a panel of three guests—John, Jonathan, and Patrick—to introduce their distinct professional backgrounds and perspectives on leadership, visualization, and the challenges of modern information speed. John describes his journey from fine‑art student to startup founder to creative facilitator, explaining how he uses live visual drawing to surface hidden assumptions and elevate conversations. Jonathan, a commercial‑culture researcher, explains his method of prompting interviewees to visualize past consumer experiences, noting that memory is reconstructed each night, making such visualizations both false and true, and highlighting the tension between data‑driven facts and perceived truth. Patrick, founder of Trident Strategies, shares his military‑family upbringing and work with the Washington‑DC defense‑contracting sector, emphasizing the rigidity he observed in leadership, the ego‑driven obstacles, and his mission to build a bridge between the rapid pace of data and the slower evolution of leadership practices. Virginie then outlines her own role as a digital strategist, sense‑maker, and storyteller focused on placing women in leadership, drawing on her experience in tech startups, marketing, and creative pursuits. The conversation sets the stage for future episodes by juxtaposing diverse experiences—visual facilitation, memory research, defense‑industry leadership, and gender‑focused digital strategy—while underscoring common themes of visualization, storytelling, and adapting leadership to a fast‑moving information environment.
Chapters
So let's begin as we always do. I'm really excited to listen and hear your experience, and what I'm going to ask you to do briefly is to— let's start by introducing yourself, by sharing what you do and your background. So we can have our listeners and viewers understand how our minds were very different. So why don't we begin with John?
Well, it's great to be here and thank you for inviting me on this journey. And absolutely, I, I'm the product of 3 very brutal life experiences. I think that's the best way to describe me. I did a fine art degree in Cambridge in England, which convinced me not to become a fine artist. I went, uh, I then went into a startup that became a big corporation, which convinced me never to be in big business. And then I decided to create my own creative business, which convinced me that to be creative, I'd need to leave the creative business. So these sort of brick walls that I hit based on my passion just taught me to be open, expecting anything, but I knew I'd have to learn. And so what did I learn? I learned that organizations can be very self-serving about the kinds of issues that they try and solve. So the management consultancies, the ad agencies, because I was successful in this business, I had command of large amounts of money. They would ask me only the questions that serve them to be able to deliver what they were going to deliver anyway. I'm being very general about that, but that was a big lesson for me. And right about the same time, I realized that I didn't know how to issue a brief, and we didn't know what we were doing as a business. So it struck me that not enough time was spent thinking, and so it, it put me to task thinking, how can we improve to, to get leadership and people generally to think more? And I discovered that by being visual, by literally drawing the conversation in front of them, a few things would happen. They'd either say, 'No, that's not what I meant,' but it is what I said, or, 'What you've drawn visually absolutely represents what we all say far more than the language that we were using.' And that struck me as really interesting. And so to cut a very long story short, that's what I do for a living. I kind of Turn up, challenge people to think differently using visualization, and get them to think much more seriously about what it is that they're saying, and try and get them to position what they meant to say whilst elevating them to a higher purpose. And I kind of— it's a very sort of rich answer to the question of what I do, but basically I turn up and draw on walls and color in for a living.
Well, you know, what, what else could you want to do? That's awesome. It looks awesome from the outside. Uh, please. Thank you. Um, Jonathan.
Oh, John, I really identify quite a bit, uh, with what you said in spirit though. Of course we didn't have the same career path. Um, visualization has been an idea that has been One of the fundamentals of my career, I've been working, doing research into commercial culture, usually for a lot of corporate clients, uh, for half a, well, a quarter of a century. I'm describing myself as old as I feel. I'm working on the half. So, you know, one of the methods that I use in interviewing is to get people to visualize. Their past, uh, consumer experiences. Um, but the thing is we don't have flashbulb memories. So these visualizations are always flawed. They're always wrong because actually every night when we go to sleep, we reshape our memories. We tweak them a little bit. So when I'm asking people to, go back to moments of their past and revisualize them in their minds. I'm asking them to tell me something that's not true. And so you could say that my career is based on getting people to tell me things that are not true and yet feel true. And I think that the last few years have really taught us that that's the world that we're all living in. And it's one of the flaws that's out there with reliance on data, which is factual and yet somehow not true.
Yeah.
Um, so, um, the thing is that there's insight in the mistakes that we make because those mistakes are not random. Uh, they are constructed according to our emotional framework. And that's the thing that drives us forward. And so what I do for my clients is to take that insight and then help them to find a way to tell a story that works with that. That sense of truth, um, whether or not the facts line up with it, because that's the world that we're actually living in. It's a tricky world. It's ambiguous, but that's where we are.
There's insight in the mistake that we make. That's, that's brilliant. Yeah. Well, welcome and thank you. Um, Patrick, tell us about your background.
Thank you, Virginie, for having me. I really appreciate it. Um, so I'm the founder of Trident Strategies. We're based out of Virginia and we serve, uh, the Washington DC, defense contracting community, primarily in business development, executive leadership, and tactical advisory. A little background about me, grew up in a military family, spent a little bit of time in the military, and then not surprisingly came back to Washington, DC to participate in that same military and government contracting support system. In doing that, I was exposed to every type of CEO and leader you could ever possibly imagine. You can presume that from my background, there's a lot of rigidity that I was exposed to. Fortunately, that creates for quite the creative explosion on the other side of that. So I'm compelled to find really creative strategies to get past the leadership problems that I witnessed and that were plaguing a lot of our companies, that were plaguing our industries. People getting in their own way through ego, people not communicating correctly. All the different leadership challenges that we face and addressed in this book were things that, you know, I feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to kind of put an input with, but they were all things I was exposed to. And largely, I think that having this conversation and trying to focus on fixing the problems in a new social media soaked leadership environment, we can hopefully make a change because I think everything's catching up to the speed of data. The speed of leadership hasn't, hasn't matched the speed of information. So we're trying to, we're trying to bring a, build a bridge with that. And that's kind of, that's kind of what I do in a nutshell. I help companies kind of build that bridge. And Virginie, can you tell us a little bit about your, your background?
Sure. Already we can see that there's 3 people completely from different backgrounds, which is makes it— this journey to me was really fantastic. So briefly, I'm a digital strategist. My colleague tells me that I'm a sense maker, not sure what it means, but— and I'm a storyteller at Acorn Oak. We're a cooperative community powered by women of experience who helps organizations with sales and marketing while being on a mission to place as many women as we can in leadership roles. In terms of background, I went to a French business school. I started my career in sales in the technology industry. I'm originally from Paris, France. I moved to San Francisco in the Bay Area in 1998, and I co-founded a couple of tech startups. Um, 17 years later, I moved to New York City. I became VP of marketing for a few organizations, and I found myself starting a third startup in the retail space. This time. When I'm not working, I paint a little bit, I write poetry a little bit, not well, but I enjoy it. And I'm definitely interested in new forms of organization structures. I'm also interested in philosophy, psychology, and mindfulness, which I try to educate myself and practice in my personal life and professional life.
