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“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
INTERVIEW VIII PT. 1
“The Tension of an Unknown ‘Why?’”
Steve Rice
Thought Leader & Futurist, The Office of Possibilities
Higher Ed Professional, Northwestern Michigan College
Founder, Humanitas Project
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
If you have the good fortune to speak with someone who strikes a chord of humanity within you, listen closely. People like this are rarities; those who make you believe in intrinsically good humans.
Steve Rice is very rare indeed. He has a layered history that coheres itself to human connection where it is urgently needed—in higher education and entrepreneurship. He believes in people’s innate gifts and that everyone has ideas to be shared.
I knew he would be generous with his time during this interview, and I have immense gratitude for what became an organic and purpose-affirming conversation between two people who understand that life happens at the intersection of unease and action.
We discussed concepts in both abstracts and absolutes as new thoughts revealed themselves, supporting the purpose of this series.
It became clear that there are ways to make life idyllic in our communities in the shadow of a contentious world, and there are people like Steve who still care deeply.
INTERVIEWER:
“From what I know, you are a free-thinker with an expansive range of knowledge and a background deeply rooted in education. I’m curious to learn what guided your move to Traverse City. Additionally, what led you to your role at NMC and all the multi-faceted things you're doing now?”
STEVE:
“We moved here 20 years ago, but my wife spent her summers in Traverse City when her family would come up from Cincinnati, so it was a nostalgic place for her. We were living in Illinois and would take trips up North, and I'd never been here before—I’m from Philadelphia, so it was very different from what I was familiar with. We’d come here to visit her family who had a long-standing history here through her great-grandfather, who was a circuit preacher from Canada and had started a Methodist Church [in Traverse City]. He bought a cottage in 1960 on Old Mission Peninsula, where my wife spent her summers growing up.
[Steve pauses in a moment of sentimentality, recalling the meaningful connections to what ultimately brought him to Traverse City.]
There’s just so much paradox in all of this, because when we would leave the peninsula [to go back to Cincinnati] and she would be crying—it was a deeply-rooted emotional connection that we had to this area so we thought, ‘What is it about Traverse City?’ We started to dream about moving here and what that would be like.
I always dreamed about being a writer—in my mind, I already had my set-up, you know? We’d drive through Old Mission and I’d point out a house and I’d say, ‘There’s the writing room over there.’
My background is ostensibly in business, but it’s overall a weird background, I'm a mutt. I started in more corporate settings after college, then went into teaching [at the collegiate level]—even while working towards a business degree, I still always wanted to teach. I then went into ministry but ultimately found myself wandering back into teaching.
When we moved here, I was in ministry, which never fit me well.
The backstory is that I went to a local church and while I was there I asked [the congregation] a question, a sort of deeper-meaning type of question, and the next thing I knew the pastor called me and asked if I wanted to start a church, and I plainly said, ‘No.’
I was in a church situation already, and explained that I wasn’t good at growing and organizing things, but, ‘I’m good with growing people.’ So that just didn't pan out.
I was finishing a Master's Degree in Spiritual Formation at Wheaton College, and after some time, the pastor called me once again, and same as last time, I told him I wasn’t interested. But this time it was for a different position—in Christian education.
The education component sparked interest, and our move to Traverse City. I ended up taking the position he offered me in church ministry, and within a year I got fired—here for only a year, then fired.
[Steve laughs gregariously and shakes his head.]
I was told that I had competing visions and that mine were divisive. So I was hired like this, and fired like that—it was that fast, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I had taught before and had a background in business—my safety degree, my safety net, and I could always lean back on that.
But education, that’s really what brought me to Traverse City, because the first person I ever stopped and chatted with when I came here was a student from [Northwestern Michigan College] I was walking on a bridge [along Boardman River] in the fall and I saw the salmon doing their annual salmon run—I had never seen anything like that before, it’s an incredible thing. The guy fishing in the water who I was chatting with ended up being a student at NMC.
It’s a full-circle kind of moment, everything about me is education. All the movies I love are in that theme: Dead Poets Society, Emperor's Club, and Good Will Hunting, but I'm always on the side of the rebel like I’m Robin Williams. I just have always had a love for education, so when an opportunity to teach came up I jumped on it, and it put me back into education and gave me security for my family, it put me back in a campus setting.
Traverse City to me has this draw, meaning I think the magic to this area is found in the word traverse, which I interpret as a traverse between heaven and earth, like a go-between. God is close here, and the veil is thin if you have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart that wants or longs, it’s easy to see.
This is a place where God is a terrible thief because his fingerprints are everywhere.
I think people are drawn to this area because, in the sense of the spiritual realm, there’s a banner that says, ‘Humans Flourish Here.’ It wants that to happen, and it’s welcoming us to be part of it.
But that’s going to require a lot of change—I think people are coming here and yet they don't know why they're staying, but they're feeling drawn to be here.
I feel like I'm stewarding that invitation. I sense a uniqueness about this geographical region—it's very earthy, and there's almost like a sense of righteousness, which by definition means: setting things the way they're supposed to be. I use that word in that definition, not righteousness as in high and mighty, but if you can define righteousness that way it needs to be defined, there's a righteousness and a rightness about this region that the unspoken language of the soul hears but has a hard time speaking it back. That’s the draw.”
INTERVIEWER:
“I’m with you—especially being able to relate to your wife crying every time she would leave the peninsula because whenever I would come up here from wherever I was living in the world—I would drag my heels and I would stall for time. A few years ago I was here visiting a friend and on the day I left to go back to work I ended up calling in and getting an extra day. I went to Glen Arbor, where I went to boarding school at The Leelanau School, and hiked Sleeping Bear Dunes then called M22 Inn and said, ‘Please tell me you have a vacancy for just one night I'm just not ready to leave yet,’ and they had one room left.
I think that’s when the wheels were set in motion before I was fully cognizant. That town specifically has held a prominent place in my heart since I graduated and I knew that someday I wanted to get back up here and I didn't know why…I’m still not 100% sure why. I moved up a year ago and knew that I was going to reevaluate my choice one year in, because I honestly thought it was going to be a sort of sabbatical, and I was going to move back to a larger urban area.
I decided to stay for now and there’s no end date in sight, I just feel like I'm supposed to do something important here.”
STEVE:
“There’s something along the lines of, can we grant each other the permission to live here in the tension of an unknown why? I know there's a why that's pulling me but I don't know the ultimate why.
There’s still part of it I can't see. Part has been revealed and there's this other part that's yet to be revealed. Living in the tension of those two, is the question of whether can we grant each other permission and love the community of those who are brave enough to do so.
[Will Kitchen] has been such a gift to me…”
[Steve pauses again to reflect in the way that thoughtful and caring humans do when thinking about something or someone that changed them.]
INTERVIEWER:
“That guy I tell ya, he’s one-of-a-kind, I love him so much.”
STEVE:
“He's been a real gift, I mean talk about granting permission and love for the community. And, I’m just thinking out loud here: is it possible that all of us who feel called to be here, all share the same why and yet on another level, we have an individual, unique why?
Such that there's a reason for you to be here that requires you.
It’s like the difference between a cream donut, which is filled in and complete, and a glazed donut which has a hole in the middle of it. Think of it this way, when you're doing what you're created to do, we are W-H-O-L-E versus when you're not [living in alignment] we have a H-O-L-E, something’s missing and we’re not fulfilled.
I see that as a common essence, but we have unique expressions—how you show up in the world is unique, yet if our essence isn’t common, we can't help each other.
I can't go to a frog and get help on living life, but I can go to another human and there’s a sense of common and unique traits. That’s the why that we share and the why that’s mysterious and unfolding and deepening as we begin to know the greater why, with the anchor of our shared human experience.”
INTERVIEWER:
“My dad always said, ‘Do what only you can do,’ one of his many great one-liners. He’s always been an innovator, and very encouraging of people who think differently. I’m grateful I was never really forced or pressured to go into one direct path, though even when I was, I didn’t exactly listen anyways—I’ve always been a ride-or-die rebel for sure.”
STEVE:
“That’s very much in the vein of loving each other through the tension right?”
INTERVIEWER:
“100 percent. My parents were and still are champions of my individuality, and whenever people were confused about my choices or identity and ask something like, ‘Why is Cameron doing this degree now or why is Cameron in that job?’—they would simply say, ‘Don’t worry about Cameron, he always figures it out.’ A lot of people get uncomfortable when they can’t put you in a box, but I really feel it’s because people don’t like when you’re truly free if they haven’t allowed themselves that existence. It requires a specific brand of bravery, fearlessness, and resilience over a sustained period that very few can handle. You have it or you don’t. And that’s okay if you don’t, but let’s each other live. I have never fully understood why people want to keep others from their potential or true selves.
Traverse City does seem to have that live-and-let-live mentality, people look out for each other for the most part, and there's a sense of community. I think part of the common why are the natural beauty in the landscape—the energy of Lake Michigan creates the opportunity for a lot of healing that people like myself are seeking.”
STEVE:
“It's a great place to heal, no doubt about it.”
INTERVIEWER:
“By that extension, it’s ideal as a space to reinvent yourself and sort of start over. Being introduced to OOPs [The Office of Possibilities], I mean, what a cool gateway into the community that has been for me. When I went there for the first time, I was very unsure if I should go since I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to bring to the table. My dad said just talk about what you have been doing and what your goals and dreams are, and reassured me that this wasn’t a stuffy uptight group of people.
If I remember correctly, the first people I met and spoke to were you and Will, and the first thing Will said to me was, ‘Do you have a why and an idea?’ I said, ‘I think so.’ And he smiled and said, ‘Good enough, you’re in!’
To be new in town with a group of people who earnestly wanted to help in whatever way they were able to with no agenda was so refreshing to me.
From my perspective, OOPs is a human machine to bounce ideas around and connect to each other. No one’s going to do the work for you, but they will share knowledge and connections to make your path easier and purposeful.
I've always enjoyed being a person who connects other people together—I think that's part of my purpose— to see connections that other people can't see, and help facilitate new things, so I was very drawn in.
I’ve heard other perspectives from interviewing [Al Everett] and [Will Kitchen] about the formation of OOPs, and I'd love to hear your angle on how you became involved as one of the founders, and what your personal mission for the collective is.”
STEVE:
“I went to an event called, ”Design Thinking for Social Change,” that was hosted and organized by Brittany VanderBeek and Nick Beadleston, set up as an interactive workshop kind of deal. I sat down right next to Will, and also at the table were Tex Chriqui, and Josh Hart. At the time, none of us knew each other, and Will introduced himself as an ‘Entrepreneur-in-Residence’ at Winona State University living in Traverse City, in typical Will fashion, which now is easy to see in hindsight, and he said, ‘Let’s meet! Let’s keep this going.’ We used to meet [at NMC] every week and just fill whiteboards with our dreams and ideas—I talked to him about education and how it could change, how we’ve got to make it more human.
One day the president [of the college] walked in and he said, ‘We’ve got to get what's going on in here, out of here,’ and outlined what he was looking for to make this something [that could be offered on a larger scale].
So we came back to him with The Office of Possibilities.
The original intention behind OOPs was to create a space where we could explore the disruption of ourselves in higher education so that someone else doesn't do it to us. It was paradoxical thinking, right?
We got permission to do it and started putting a leadership team together. We went to Tex, Josh, Brittany, Nick, and then Al, who I met here [at NMC], we all formed together as the original core group and started meeting regularly and within two weeks Nick came in and asked if we would be cool with having office hours at [Commonplace, now called Grove Community Incubator] 8th Street, and of course we were all for it, we’re ‘OOPs’ers!’ If you’ve got ideas, we’re all ears, we’re all yes.
You made a great distinction because OOPs is a place where you’re going to get a yes if you’re brave enough to speak your own voice—that’s all you have to do is be brave and share your ideas. When we started meeting at 8th Street, none of us knew what was going to happen, but it just exploded—it made Will so happy, like a proud grandpa, to see that kind of community forming and people openly sharing their ideas. The magic of those meetings was, that we’re talking to people about their imagination, we’re not asking them to be part of something that we’re proposing, it’s just an environment that we’ve provided to help people take that next step. That’s what is so mysterious and unique about 8th Street—we had no rules, we didn’t have a business plan, we just showed up and it continued to grow. It’s very germinal, very organic, very grassroots. We treasure the imagination and the ideas of people—we help them take their next steps, and everyone is welcome.
OOPs essentially became an entrepreneurial startup community, but when people hear the word entrepreneurship they think of business, it’s a cultural norm. When I hear entrepreneurship, I think of human.
I believe if you have ideas and you're stewarding those ideas, you're an entrepreneur.
So it took off on 8th Street, and you know firsthand, because you've been there, you've experienced the whole thing.
It continues to grow; It’s dynamic and life-giving.
At the college, it’s been a great blessing, and we’ve had projects come back to serve our mission there. Al Everett is a perfect example: 3D printing came to the college through Al’s ideas, and his heart—his ‘Thrive’ project came to fruition out of OOPs, and while we helped flesh it out, we don’t own it. It could have happened with or without OOPs, but he was able to share his idea with us and we helped him to put the pieces together.
My heart has always wanted to have a larger part in driving the future of the college. We've always used the language since the inception that we wanted to be, ‘Separate from, but in service to’ NMC. The reason we wanted to be separate stems from the year Will and I spent doing research. OOPs has been public for two years now as of October 2024, but the year prior, Will and I spent reading books, researching material, and learning how to form this new world of ours.
The DNA of OOPs was born out of a five-fold strand of: Design Thinking, Disruptive Innovation, Lean Startup, Exponential Organizational Theory (ExO), and Futures Thinking. It was the research we did which makes OOPs unique and distinct.
So now when someone comes to share their idea, we're thinking, ‘Okay that’s Disruptive Innovation, this is Designed Thinking,’ and so on. We pass it through those filters, and we respond based on our established principles.
In application to the college, OOPs could be the environment to which the college says, ‘If you've got crazy ideas in the space of higher education, we want to honor that.’ That's what it could look like.
We’ve struggled ever since the inception, because people say, ‘Yes, separate from, but in service to,’ yet when it comes time to actually implement ideas, we're navigating through ingrained systems.
This is not a harsh criticism of the college. Rather, this is just a testimony to raw reality. Organizations have built-in systems that are immune to change.
A great example of the way things can be is Google. Now there is a story worth learning and living. They set up a proxy entity, GoogleX, separate but in service to, with the mission to steward innovation.
Astro Teller is one of my heroes. I want to be an Astro Teller in the space of transformational innovation in higher education. I would love to lead a, ‘GoogleX moonshot factory for transformational innovation in higher education.’ That would be juicy!”
INTERVIEWER:
“Where do you think the resistance to change stems from in any given industry or institution? I feel like the culture is changing, whether willingly or by demand, because people are reevaluating their choices, and assessing the time and effort they contribute to better serve their purpose.
Looking at traditional higher education as an example, why do you think the institution is facing a reckoning, and are those current modalities still working?”
STEVE:
“Because it has worked in the past—but is it still working? That's a great question. We have a model that was established in the 19th century, so it's an industrial revolution model, it's a factory assembly line model. Now that we're in the 21st century, you have a 19th-century model in the 21st-century world, and that model doesn't know how to update itself, it's not sure what to do.
So we're in that space of tension again.
I think many institutions don't have visionary leadership. If they do, do they have the systems to allow for exploration?
I'll give you a perfect example: I mentioned GoogleX and Astro Teller earlier? Google X, is the space where they share and allow the exploration of really speculative ideas. Astro shared that he doesn’t care how crazy your idea may be. What he cares about is how inexpensively it can be explored.
In today's world, where everything is changing and changing at an ever-increasing speed, setting up an XLab like Google X is not a luxury, rather it is going to become a necessity.
We need something like ‘OOPs X’ as a type of ‘Moonshot Factory for Transformational Innovation’ in higher education, where we play with the new and the different—we explore and learn our way forward and branch out. Then when it's appropriate, how do we bring those findings back to the mothership?
It’s a Google X model of OOPs, and we see and experience it at 8th Street in this way.
If you come in as an entrepreneur and the first question we ask you is to give us a business plan, it’s not going to go well. We miss the connection between humanity, being human, and entrepreneurship. We honor that connection when we listen to your ideas and simply help you to take the next steps.
What if we did that in education? You come in with your idea and we say, ‘How can we put together a group of students and pilot that as fast as possible?’ We currently do not have this kind of system in place. Again, we are talking about 21st-century realities being forced into a 19th-century model.
So the lessons that we've learned from 8th Street are just simply to meet people where they are with their ideas, help them to move into action as fast as possible, and then learn our way forward together.
We are interested in learning from success stories just like Google and Apple. By the way, 99% of what they're doing over there, they know is not going to work, but they do it anyway because they want to figure out as fast as possible how they can prove that it's not going to work.
I love the paradoxical tension in that. So appropriate for the times we are living in.”
INTERVIEWER:
“I’ve always been a big fan and an avid user of that method of thinking.”
STEVE:
“Yeah, let’s fast-track the proof that this is not going to work and exhaust all possibilities. If you can work in that kind of framework, you're in, we're in.
Then, when you give up on your project and you know it's not going to happen, at a Google X meeting for example, you announce that you're giving up, and they give you a standing ovation and a large bonus. How cool is that?”
INTERVIEWER:
“Wouldn't it be nice if more companies and life in general worked that way? Why can't we just adopt that model and apply it everywhere? It leaves so much more room to be human.”
STEVE:
“Yeah, Google principles! Just like we've already observed as transferable principles from 8th Street. But, existing models have to change, and I know that there's a lot of factors that go into that change.”
INTERVIEWER:
“I'm sure there are many people who share your feelings.”
STEVE:
“Yes, and there are people that don't want change, they don't like it, they don't want to be part of it. But you find those that do, and you hone in on what their unique human gifts are, and say, ‘We’re going to make this happen and we’re going to do it together.’
That’s a human revolution.”
END OF PART 1
INTERMISSION
C. Thompson for Third Chapter Curious, LLC
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