AuthentiCity FM | Real Stories. Bold Ideas. Better Communities.

AuthentiCity FM, Episode 40: Time, Horizons, and a Midlife Crisis

We are calling this one our midlife crisis episode, and not just because we hit episode forty. Phil is off recharging with his family, so it is just the two of us wrestling with something we have circled for a long time, the role that time itself plays in how we lead. We start with a simple distinction that changes how you see everything else, the difference between an event and a pattern. A pothole, a council comment, an inbox, these are events, and most of them do not deserve the urgency we give them. The harder work lives further out, in the structural horizon of one to seven years, and further still, in the civilizational shifts most organizations never think to name. We use a growing hospital, a fleet of self driving cars, and a piece of rope stretched across a road to ask whether our tools for seeing the future are still built for the world we are actually living in. We talk about the quiet risk of leading competently in the wrong direction, what our interns need from us that is different from what we needed twenty years ago, and why the institutions we trust most are sometimes the last to notice they have become the dinosaur. We get into workforce loyalty, the strategic plan nobody wants to own, the idea of the manager as chief meaning officer, and a line from Corri's writing that captures the whole thing, the noise does not disappear, but you stop being governed by it. By the end we land somewhere honest about what this summer's work on discernment is really trying to build, the capacity to notice what is coming before it becomes an event we are forced to react to. Phil, we missed you. Come back soon. 00:00 Midlife Crisis and Leadership Reflection 03:02 Understanding Temporal Literacy 05:35 Events vs. Patterns in Leadership 08:39 Navigating Technology and Time Horizons 11:42 The Impact of Institutional Growth 14:32 Curiosity and Technological Adaptation 17:17 The Role of GIS in Local Government 20:12 Innovating with AI in Local Government 23:06 The Future of Workforce Education 26:04 Leading in a Technological Revolution 36:31 Navigating Uncertainty in Community Action 37:47 Workforce Evolution and Future Skills 43:07 The Role of Technology in Government 47:50 Rethinking Governance and Strategic Planning 55:20 Engaging the Next Generation of Leaders 01:04:28 Embracing Change and Future Perspectives

AuthentiCity FM, Episode 39: Curiosity, Urgency, and the Long View

There is something that happens when the familiar becomes invisible. You stop seeing it clearly, stop questioning it, stop asking whether it is actually working. For local government practitioners, that invisibility is one of the quieter threats to good judgment, and it sits at the heart of this episode. The hosts use an unlikely lens to open the conversation: World Cup tourists posting unfiltered reactions to American life. Europeans genuinely delighted by Costco, the cereal aisle, the scale of everything. Watching outsiders encounter the ordinary with wonder is funny and also instructive. Curiosity requires a kind of distance from familiarity. And in the work of city management, that distance is hard to maintain when urgency keeps pulling you back to the immediate. Urgency is the episode's central antagonist. Not crisis, but urgency. The chronic pressure to respond fast, decide fast, move fast, in an environment where speed became the shorthand for competence. The hosts examine what gets lost when urgency displaces deliberation, how it distorts the relationship between facts and values, and why the skill of sitting with tension rather than resolving it too quickly may be one of the most underdeveloped capacities in the profession. The long view is where the episode lands. A storm in Springfield, Illinois brought down the last surviving witness tree from Abraham Lincoln's property, a living thing that had stood since before 1865. It becomes an unexpected frame for the question underneath everything else in this episode: what does it mean to make decisions on behalf of people who are not yet born, in communities that will still be there long after you have moved on? With the 250th anniversary of the American founding approaching, the hosts sit with the weight of that question without pretending to resolve it. Discernment, they keep returning to, is not neutrality. It is not delay. It is the practiced capacity to see clearly when everything around you is moving fast. 00:00 Introduction to Authenticity and Curiosity 00:53 Exploring Multiple Truths and Perspectives 04:14 Cultural Experiences and American Perceptions 09:13 The Importance of Fresh Perspectives 16:58 Understanding Discernment in Decision Making 27:39 Facilitation and Changing Minds 31:07 The Power of Face-to-Face Conversations 33:53 Engagement in the Workplace 37:34 Meeting People Where They Are 39:47 Cultivating Respect and Vulnerability 41:07 Untethering Urgency from Efficiency 45:39 Long-Term Decision Making and Horizons 52:30 The Legacy of Our Decisions

AuthentiCity FM, Episode 38: Discernment, Intuition, and Competing Truths

#AuthentiCityFM #LocalGovernment #Leadership #PublicService #Discernment #CityManagementThis episode opens a summer series built around a question that has been sitting with the hosts for weeks. How do we develop discernment in a world where multiple truths are operating simultaneously? Rather than treating this as an abstract puzzle, the conversation grounds it in the everyday experience of local government, where people's lived experiences shape what they believe is true, and where those individual truths increasingly harden into group truths that resist data, resist logic, and resist careful analysis. A recurring thread throughout the episode is the tension between values and information. Using a framework built around liberty, equality, community, and prosperity, the hosts work through how a single issue, like a proposed data center, can pit those values against each other so completely that no amount of fact-finding will move people toward agreement. The lesson that emerges is less about winning arguments and more about learning to say I see it differently, a phrase borrowed from an unexpected umpire encounter that becomes a model for respectful disagreement. That same tension shows up in how practitioners experience their own professional identities, particularly online. The conversation turns to the difference between influence and influencer, and what it means to share honest perspective without performing for an audience or chasing engagement. Underneath all of it sits intuition, the gut feeling that something is right or wrong long before it can be explained. Both hosts share moments when trusting that instinct mattered more than any spreadsheet could, while also wrestling with how that instinct fits inside a profession built on data and process. By the end, two working definitions of discernment emerge, one broad and one shaped specifically for local government leadership, both of which will anchor the series ahead. Listeners are left with a question worth carrying into their own work and their own lives. Think of a time you were certain you were right, and later discovered you weren't. What changed? 00:00 Introduction to Discernment and Truth 02:14 Exploring Multiple Truths 05:10 Data Interpretation and Public Perception 08:03 The Role of Social Media in Shaping Truths 10:15 Community Engagement and Individual Perspectives 14:19 The Challenge of Groupthink 15:08 Data Centers and Public Values 18:02 Economic Development and Community Impact 21:40 Navigating Public Hearings and Community Values 24:05 The Importance of Perspective Taking 28:53 Evolving Systems and Structures in Governance 31:30 Communication Challenges in Modern Governance 35:09 Finding Innovative Solutions for Community Engagement 43:26 The Gift of Time and Reflection 45:23 The Power of Saying No 50:16 Influence and Responsibility in Leadership 57:41 Navigating Authenticity in Professional Spaces 01:10:48 The Role of Intuition in Decision Making

AuthentiCity FM, Episode 37: Origins, Ordinary, and Everything That Embiggens

A year in, the hosts of AuthentiCity FM do what any self-respecting Gen X podcast should eventually do. They pull a clip show. Framed around Mike's encyclopedic knowledge of early Simpsons episodes and sprung on Corri and Phil with zero warning, Episode 37 is the one where the curtain comes back a little. What started as a joke that wasn't really a joke — three local government professionals who thought it might be fun to push record and see if anyone cared — has become something none of them fully anticipated when they ordered their equipment and scheduled a demo recording that almost didn't happen. The episode opens with two pieces of news the hosts hadn't shared together publicly before. Phil is on the ballot for the ICMA Region C board seat, a candidacy that traces directly back to a nudge from two people who saw something in him before he was ready to see it himself. And Corri has written a book called Ordinary, built from the word lesson in its two spellings, and from a season of extraordinary disruption that pushed her back toward the small moments where real life actually happens. The conversation moves from celebration into something heavier and more honest. Mike reflects on the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a state representative and friend, and what it means to run an emergency response while the human grief waits its turn. Phil traces the toll of a profession that expects its best people to absorb the worst things and still show up the next morning. Corri connects the compound weight of it all to why peer groups, friendships, and the network you build before you need it are not optional infrastructure for this work. The episode closes with Phil turning the tables on his co-hosts, offering two stories about the specific moments he knew they were the real thing. And Corri closes it out with the simplest possible invitation. Don't be afraid of the yes. 00:00 Introduction to the Episode's Theme 03:14 The Simpsons Influence and Personal Stories 05:39 Phil's Campaign Journey and Community Engagement 08:45 Corri’s Book and Personal Reflections 11:39 Reflections on the Podcast's First Year 14:58 Technology and Podcasting Insights 17:38 Guest Reflections and Impactful Conversations 20:40 Personal Stories and Community Service 23:44 The Importance of Support Systems 39:17 Building Connections and Vulnerability 40:12 The Weight of Professional Trauma 47:09 Navigating Grief and Community Challenges 49:08 The Importance of Peer Support 50:37 The Value of Safe Spaces 52:14 Behind the Scenes of Podcasting 57:02 Looking Ahead: Future Episodes and Live Shows 01:08:52 The Power of Caring and Compassion ******* Ordinary: Harnessing the Power of Or in Everyday Moments (https://a.co/d/09XkxRlp [https://a.co/d/09XkxRlp]), also available on Kindle Unlimited Explore Seeing Across Time (https://v3xc.substack.com/ [https://v3xc.substack.com/])

AuthentiCity FM Episode 36: Legacy, Longevity, and the Lessons You Keep with Scott Neal

Some careers accumulate experience. A few accumulate wisdom. Scott Neal has been a city manager every day of his professional life since June 1st, 1988, and this conversation is a rare window into what nearly four decades in the chair actually looks like, not the polished version, but the honest one. The episode opens with Scott's unlikely origin story, a biblical epiphany in an urban politics class that redirected a 20-year-old economics student toward a profession he would never leave. From Norris, Tennessee to Mount Pleasant, Iowa to the Twin Cities metro, his career arc spans the full range of what local government can be, and he brings that breadth to every question the hosts put to him. The heart of the conversation is mentorship as infrastructure. Scott watched a keynote about gender imbalance in city management and decided that raising awareness was just a polished way of complaining. His response was to build something, a fellowship program that has now placed people in city manager and assistant manager chairs across the Twin Cities. The people who came through his program in their mid-twenties are now in their late thirties and paying it forward themselves. That is what a coaching tree looks like when it actually takes root. The episode doesn't stay in comfortable territory. Scott shares the story of an ICMA ethics censure, told with a candor that is genuinely rare in any professional context. What emerged from that experience wasn't bitterness. It was a reckoning with what it means to build real relationships in a profession that can be extraordinarily lonely, and a commitment to do it differently. His mother's line lands quietly and stays: if you want a friend, you gotta be a friend. The hosts add their own failure stories, and the cumulative effect is something the profession doesn't often make room for. The work is hard, people are meaner than they used to be, and the young professionals coming up behind us give us the best reason to keep going anyway. 00:00 Introduction to Authenticity FM and Guest Scott Neal 02:45 Scott Neal's Journey to City Management 07:32 Advice for Aspiring City Managers 11:15 The Importance of Mentorship in City Management 17:30 Creating a Legacy of Mentorship 21:14 The Challenge of Attracting New Talent 26:13 Reflections on 45 Years in Local Government 31:50 Scott Neal's Personal Life and Interests 37:03 Fun Questions and Closing Thoughts 39:39 Navigating Failures in Public Service 43:10 The Importance of Relationships in Leadership 51:10 Ethics and Accountability in Local Government 55:42 Building a Supportive Network 01:00:42 Pride in Mentorship and Legacy 01:03:01 The Role of Peer Groups in Professional Growth 01:11:42 Optimism for the Future of Local Government