The Inheriting a Mess Episode: When the Building Is Already On Fire, What Do You Do?

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The Catalyst by Softchoice

A documentary-style podcast about how IT leaders tackle high-stakes transformations.

Each episode weaves together real voices, expert insights, and compelling narratives that reveal universal challenges and practical wisdom.

Season 7: "Small Teams, Big Dreams" explores the human stories behind IT transformations—from AI adoption experiments to burnout crises, from toxic job markets to infrastructure decisions that matter. These aren't polished case studies. These are authentic accounts from IT professionals navigating the same impossible gaps between expectations and resources that you face every day.

From Softchoice, a World Wide Technology company.

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The Catalyst by Softchoice

The Inheriting a Mess Episode: When the Building Is Already On Fire, What Do You Do?

May 13, 2026<br>Softchoice<br>Season 8<br>Episode 1

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Show Notes<br>Chapters<br>Transcript

Every IT leader has a “day one” story. The moment they opened the server closet, logged into the admin console, or reviewed the vendor contracts and realized the job they were hired for isn’t the job they actually have.<br>In this episode of The Catalyst, we follow Chris Schopf, an IT operations team lead who walked into a new job to find twelve-year-old servers, two unfinished infrastructure projects, and a team that had been poached by the outgoing manager. Then we hear from Leon Adato, a 37-year IT veteran who’s made a career of walking into other people’s messes, and Ned Bellavance, a former consultant who warns that not every mess is actually a mess. Some of it is “purposeful chaos” you just don’t understand yet.<br>What you’ll learn:<br>How to tell the difference between a real disaster and “purposeful chaos” with reasons you don’t understand yet<br>Why Chris convinced his CEO to stop all projects for two weeks — and how it saved the team<br>The three-word business framework that gets IT leaders budget,...