What If the Boat Just Never Leaks?

It sounds pretty stressful to be in a leaky boat.

You have to figure out where the water is coming from, get the water out, find something to plug the hole, and somehow keep moving in the right direction.

You can survive that way.

Patch the hole. Bail out the water. Keep moving.

I feel like there are seasons when that is exactly what leadership feels like.

Something breaks, so you fix it. Someone leaves, so you replace them. Revenue dips, so you find the next opportunity.

But what if the boat just never leaks?

Or maybe more realistically, what if you build something stable enough that every change doesn’t immediately feel like water rushing in?

Monday was an employee’s last official day after about four months in our project management and sales role. My instinct wasn’t to immediately replace them.

Instead, someone already on our team who had been working with us hourly is stepping further into project management and moving into a full-time salaried position with health insurance.

That doesn’t feel like plugging a hole. It feels like making room for someone already on the team to grow — and trusting her read on when she was ready for it, even before I would have decided that on my own.

Then there’s The Nexus.

Our lease there expires December 31st, and I don’t yet know what renewal looks like. There are conversations still ahead of me before I’ll have real clarity, and a few other options I’m keeping an eye on in case I need them.

There are plenty of unknowns.

But The Nexus was never really the building.

It’s the people, the relationships, and the community that formed inside it.

Maybe that’s the larger lesson I’m seeing right now.

For a long time, I thought resilience meant getting really good at plugging holes.

But maybe it also means building a better boat — one sturdy enough to trust, even when you can’t see exactly what’s ahead.