The name, the land, and the story it tells.

When I tell people the name of the practice, the first question is almost always how to say it.

Apipunsit. A-pee-PUN-sit. It is a Mi'kmaq word, and it means, roughly, to spend the winter — to pass through it. Not to escape winter, not to defeat it. To winter, the way a verb winters: as something you do, deliberately, until the season turns.

I want to tell you why I chose it, what it asks of me, and what it says about the work.

The place

I was born and raised on the island of Newfoundland — Ktaqmkuk, in Mi'kma'ki, the traditional territory of the Mi'kmaq people. If you have spent any time with people from that place, you already know something about how I work. Winter there is not a metaphor. It comes in sideways off the North Atlantic and decides things — whether the boats go out, whether the road is passable, whether you make it to where you said you'd be. You grow up with weather as a fact you plan around, not a mood you talk about. And that teaches you something that never leaves: I was born and bred in a space where telling the truth was the only option. You say the thing. You deal with what is actually happening, not what you wish were happening. And you do not leave anyone to face a hard season by themselves, because on that island, no one survives winter alone and everyone knows it.

The same place gave me the two other things people tend to notice first. One is humour. I am known for doing the hard thing with a smile on my face — for showing up in full even when what is happening feels impossible. That is not a performance of optimism, and it did not come from nowhere. It came from a place where laughter is not the opposite of seriousness but the way you carry it; where the hardest winters produced the best storytellers and the quickest wit, because that is what keeps a room — and a people — intact. The smile is not denial of the hard thing. It is how you stay standing in front of it.

The other is story. I come from a place where oral culture is rooted — where what mattered was carried in the telling, kitchen to kitchen, generation to generation. Story is how truth got kept there. Story holds the line. And I have carried that conviction into a sector that too often treats story as decoration for the metrics: I believe story matters as much as the numbers, because the numbers tell you what happened and the story tells you why it mattered — and no community ever rallied around a spreadsheet.

I have spent my whole career in rooms where telling the truth felt like the last thing anyone was permitted to do. The practice I have built is, in a real way, an attempt to bring where I come from into the sector I have given thirty years to — the candor, the humour that makes the candor survivable, and the conviction that the story is part of the record. The name needed to carry all of that. It needed to come from home.

What the name asks of me

And here I want to be careful, and honest, because the name is not only mine to use lightly.

Choosing a Mi'kmaq word for this practice is an act of homage, and also an act of reckoning: with where I come from, with what is documented and what is lost, and with what it means to carry a word from a language that colonization tried very hard to silence. I make no claim to the culture the word belongs to; I hold the responsibility of using it with attention rather than ease.

I have reached out to the Mi'kmaq community of Ktaqmkuk as part of doing this properly, and that relationship-building is ongoing. I would rather move at the speed of respect than the speed of a launch plan. If holding this name well means changing how I hold it, I will.

The practice itself works from the other edge of the country — the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ. A name from one nation's language, working on another nation's land, carried by a settler-born practitioner: none of that resolves into something tidy. I would rather name the untidiness than pretend it away. Truth-telling has to start with the name on the door.

The worldview

So why a word about winter, for a consulting practice?

Because winter is the season the sector refuses to talk about, and it is the season almost every organization I have ever worked with eventually enters. Revenue contracts. A leader leaves. A board stalls. A program that defined you stops working. The instinct — in a sector where admitting difficulty is treated as failure — is to deny the season has changed at all.

But here is what winter actually is, underground. The plant above the surface looks finished. Below it, the root system is doing the most important work of the year: pooling reserves, holding what matters beneath the frost line, deciding — quietly, invisibly — what will grow when the light comes back. Winter is not the end of the story. It is the season that decides what grows.

That is the worldview the name carries, and it is the conviction underneath everything in this practice: most organizations in a hard season are not broken. They are buried. The strategy, the people, the purpose — still there, under everything that has piled on top. The work is not to bolt on something new. It is to clear enough room to see what is already alive, and to make the brave choice possible to stand in.

You can see it in the smallest details of how this practice looks. The ground of everything is navy — deep winter, the long night. And on the wordmark, two small dots of colour come through it: one pink, for the bravery the season demands, and one green, for what grows because of it. First the nerve, then the growth. That is the order it always happens in.

To spend the winter, together

There is one more thing the word carries, and it is the part that matters most to me.

To spend the winter — in the place I come from, and in the language this word belongs to — was never a solitary act. On the island, you can still find root cellars dug into the hills: food put down into the dark earth in the fall so a family could draw on it in February. What mattered was buried on purpose, kept alive underground, brought up when it was needed. And around those cellars, a way of living — wood cut and stacked for a neighbour as much as for yourself, fires tended, doors checked after a storm. You wintered together, or you did not winter at all.

That is the entire argument of this practice, compressed into one word. The leaders I work with are not short on intelligence, or commitment, or even courage. What they are short on is company in the part of the work that takes nerve — someone to think with when the season closes in, someone who has wintered before.

Courage is not the absence of company. For most leaders, it is the result of it.