Craig Latimer leans back with his feet up on the desk and his office door wide open.
“Closed doors as leaders is terrifying,” he says. “You go into your office, and you close your door for the day. It’s a cultural cue that everyone should stay away from me.”
“My door’s open,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone. The irony isn’t lost on him that the door was closed for our call. Normally, he laughs, it stays open. It’s a small gesture that signals something bigger about how he works.
For Latimer, co-founder of ventures ranging from fintech to clean tech, what matters is not the corner office but the energy in the room.
“People feed off energy,” he says.
Most of us have had at least one leader who preached an open door policy, but Latimer backs it up. And when it’s real, it changes the rhythm in the room. It works because, as he says, it’s about problems getting aired, decisions being made, and keeping the team moving. That rhythm became a habit.
Latimer shared his leadership approach with me ahead of the Leadership at the Speed of Science Summit on Oct. 1, where he will speak about leading through change and uncertainty. Latimer’s approach is one of several we’ve captured in conversations with leaders as Digital Journal prepares to cover the upcoming summit.
The summit is a business and leadership event, with neuroscience brought in to deepen the conversation about performance under pressure. That perspective makes it different, and it’s shaping the discussions we’ve been having with leaders ahead of the event.
The summit, created and produced by Tammy Arseneau, founder of Cortical Consulting & Coaching, brings together business leaders, astronauts, scientists, and athletes to examine how stress shapes decision-making and what leaders can learn from neuroscience about performance under pressure.
After speaking with Latimer, and last week with speed-skater-turned-investor Crystal Phillips, I reconnected with Arseneau. She’s held senior leadership roles, including as head of culture and talent at a major oil and gas company, and she’s curated speakers who offer different viewpoints and come from totally different backgrounds.
Arseneau has a way of connecting ideas that makes you want to lean in, and that made me curious to share what I’d heard in earlier interviews and hear how she’s shaping the agenda and what problems she hopes the summit will help business leaders solve.
At the heart of what Arseneau wants business leaders to experience at the summit is the idea that leadership is not about going it alone, but about creating the conditions for clarity when complexity and pressure are at their highest.
The fog of leadership
Latimer has launched multiple ventures since leaving oil and gas in the 1990s, from Halo Networks to ZayZoon to Portage Energy Group, where he is the CEO.
Each one required hard pivots and uncomfortable calls.
“You really haven’t been an entrepreneur until you put payroll on your line of credit,” he says. “Your people can never know how close you’re flying to the sun. The number one rule of business is you have to pay your people.”
For Latimer, pressure often shows up as what he calls “analysis paralysis,” the stall that happens when information feels incomplete.
“Analysis paralysis. Failure to make a decision. That’s when you know a business is starting to wobble,” he says. He believes leaders should act with 60-80% of the information they want. Chasing full certainty wastes time and sends a message of hesitation.
“I would say, of my decisions, a lot have been wrong,” he says. “At least I made them and we moved on.”
This approach reframes what effective leadership looks like.
Progress often comes from a series of imperfect calls that allow a team to adjust quickly. Stalled decision-making, on the other hand, creates a vacuum. Employees start to read hesitation as weakness, and culture begins to fray.
Latimer has seen companies falter not because the product was bad or the strategy was flawed, but because leaders froze.
He also connects decision-making speed to resilience. The faster a leader can adjust, the less damage a setback will cause.
“If you make the wrong decision ten times in a row, at least you made a decision,” he says. “You can recover from that. If you make no decision, your business will not advance.”
That kind of stall is exactly what the Leadership at the Speed of Science Summit is designed to explore.
In our conversation, Arseneau introduced me to her colleague Sue Van Aalst, a senior consultant with Cortical. I shared a few of Latimer’s takeaways, and together they unpacked the challenges and compared them with what they’ve seen in years of working with leaders.
Van Aalst notes that many leaders do not recognize when they are in a fog.
“They’re struggling to make decisions or get clarity, but they don’t name it,” she says. “That’s where practice and coaching matter.”
Arseneau says this reflects the purpose of the summit as much as her own experience, noting the summit is meant to give leaders clarity when the path forward isn’t obvious.
“Not because we have models, but because we’ve been there,” she says. “Through executive coaching, team alignment, and organizational effectiveness, we help them move with confidence.”
Flipping the stack
The turning point for Latimer came more than a decade ago.
For years, he ranked his priorities as job, family, self — in that order. And it worked until it didn’t.
“I was chewing glass every day,” he says. “Full panic attacks. Cortisol levels practically off the chart. I was primal for 15 years.”
A mentor challenged him to flip the order of his priorities. What if he stopped putting himself last and shifted to self, family, job?
He was burning out, running on fumes, and stuck in survival mode. Reversing the order felt uncomfortable at first, but it gave him space to breathe, take care of his health, and show up stronger at home and at work.
“If you don’t look after yourself, you can’t really responsibly look after your family,” he says. “And if you don’t look after your family, you can’t give the effort to the job that you should.”
The result was steadier leadership. He built routines around biomarkers, fitness, and even a meditation room in his office.
“I became a better dad, way better husband, and a way better leader, because I was actually in a spot where I was like, okay, I’ve looked after myself. I feel good about myself,” he says.
Arseneau says this kind of recalibration is central to the conversations she wants leaders to have at the summit.
“Everyone thinks they should just drive harder,” she says. “We help leaders see that when they’re in that fog, they don’t have to go through it alone. We bring clarity so they can lead their teams clearly.”
It can be hard to see from the inside, but easier to see from the outside.
When leaders grind themselves into the ground, the whole system wobbles. Bad calls pile up. Teams freeze because they don’t know which way is up. Energy drains out of the room. The opposite is just as true. When leaders steady themselves, everyone else finally gets to breathe.
Purpose makes leadership easier
Another through-line in Latimer’s companies is purpose.
Whether it’s ZayZoon’s push to reduce predatory payday loans or Portage Energy’s work to turn landfill waste into jet fuel, every venture pairs financial outcomes with social value.
“It’s a lot easier to be in a leadership position when you have real passion about what you’re doing,” Latimer says. “When you’re passionate about helping people, the process is a lot easier to get to that end goal, and people buy in. We’ve had people take a pay cut to come work with us because they believe in it.”
That buy-in, he argues, changes the dynamic of leadership. Instead of pushing people to do more, the challenge becomes holding them back.
“It’s way better to try to hold the horse back in the barn than it is to kick it out,” he says.
That focus on purpose, Van Aalst says, is something she has seen at the organizational level. She points to energy companies that moved beyond transactions with Indigenous communities to long-term equity partnerships.
“That journey of purpose requires exploration,” she says. “It takes time. It’s not something you just flip a switch on.”
For Latimer, tackling a complex problem only works if the mission matters. Purpose is what steadies leadership when conditions get volatile.
When people actually care about their work, you don’t need posters on the wall or pep talks to keep them moving. A sense of purpose allows teams to hold together better, the culture steadies, and results follow because the buy-in is real.
Recognizing limits
Latimer also knows where his style fits. He says he thrives in the early stage, when a company is still small enough to keep decisions flat and energy high.
“I think being very flat is very advantageous in early startup type businesses,” he says. “The 40th person is literally as important as the first person.”
As companies grow, they need more structure and process. Latimer is candid in that his strength is in guiding teams through the messy, unpredictable stage when every person counts, and when speed and clarity matter most.
“Over that, you start to need more layers of management,” he says. “I don’t know if that would be my superpower.”
Arseneau says clarity like that is rare. More often, she has seen executives cling to roles past the point where they are effective, which creates confusion for teams and slows down decision-making.
“A lot of executives struggle to admit they’re not the right person for every stage,” she says. “Our role is to help teams see where the gaps are and align around what’s really needed.”
Latimer is clear about where his skills pack the biggest punch.
“Everyone thinks they could be the man forever,” he says. “The reality is people have skill sets geared to certain situations.”
The leadership gap at the top and why it matters now
I booked 45 minutes with Latimer, expecting we’d be done in half an hour and I could give him time back. Instead, 56 minutes later, I was the one cutting us off, and I could have kept going for another hour.
We ended our conversation by looking at boards and how leaders show up for them.
Latimer argues that governance is where leadership struggles to keep pace with change. Too often, he says, boards are filled with executives who have never lived the realities of entrepreneurship.
“Many [board members] worked at big companies and always had a good paycheque, even when things went sideways,” he says. “They don’t understand how hard it is to start something from nothing. They romanticize it.”
He believes boards need more generational diversity and more voices who reflect the realities of today’s workforce. That includes women, new Canadians, and Indigenous leaders whose perspectives on sustainability could reshape corporate priorities. Without those perspectives, organizations risk missing what really drives resilience in today’s economy.
Latimer speaks to entrepreneurship, but I can’t help but think about how this gap reflects the broader challenge facing Canadian business.
Industries from energy to finance are navigating rapid change and rising uncertainty. Leaders are being asked to make decisions with incomplete information, hold cultures steady under strain, and sustain performance in systems that rarely stay stable.
The Leadership at the Speed of Science Summit in Calgary is part of a growing effort to address that gap. Rather than offering toolkits or checklists, it creates space for dialogue between science, performance, and lived leadership.
“We bring process and experience that helps leaders give the kind of clarity leaders need when the path forward isn’t obvious,” says Arseneau of her vision for the event and its impact.
“Whether it’s supporting executives in critical transitions, helping organizations manage change, or strengthening team performance, our focus is on helping leaders find their footing and move with confidence when complexity is at its peak.”
Latimer connects those themes back to his own journey. Early in his career, he measured success by money and speed. Today, the legacy he cares about is different.
“When I die, I hope they don’t talk about the businesses I was involved in,” he says. “I hope they talk about how many families we were part of.”
Final shots
- Leaders rarely get perfect information. Progress depends on making timely decisions in the fog.
- Culture and energy shape how organizations perform under stress.
- Boards and executives need more diverse perspectives if Canadian companies are going to adapt to the complexity ahead.
Digital Journal is the official media partner for the Leadership at the Speed of Science summit. Tickets for the Oct. 1 event are available now.
