Chapter 11 The Anomaly
Control was Julian’s native language. It was the architecture of his mind, the operating system on which his entire life ran.
He understood the world through data, through patterns, through logical progressions that led to predictable, efficient outcomes.
Chaos was a rounding error, a bug in the code to be identified and eliminated.
Which was why, at six-seventeen in the morning, Julian was in his silent, sterile office, watching a recording of a man who was the human embodiment of a system crash.
On the large monitor that dominated the wall, Leo Hayes stood before a whiteboard, marker in hand, looking like a vibrant, technicolor glitch in Julian’s monochrome world.
Julian had the recording on a loop, focused on the two minutes and forty-three seconds where Leo had hijacked the Northwind project meeting.
He watched it with the intense focus of a bomb disposal expert studying an unidentifiable device, his pen hovering over a pristine notebook, waiting for a single, quantifiable piece of data to emerge from the whirlwind.
The idea itself, when stripped of Leo’s manic energy, was deceptively simple: market the feeling, not the product.
It wasn’t revolutionary. But the execution of the idea, the wild, nonsensical diagram of the “I-deserve-this” spiral, the bizarrely perfect analogy of the thermal socks—that was the anomaly.
It was illogical, unprofessional, and utterly underivable from any data set Julian had provided.
And yet, it worked. It worked so well that the client had approved the new direction in a single, gushing email, and the team was more energized than Julian had seen them in months.
Why?
The question was a splinter in his mind.
He paused the video on a frame of Leo, mid-gesture, his face alight with a kind of frantic, unvarnished passion.
Julian tried to deconstruct it. Was it the unexpectedness of the presentation?
The use of humor to disarm the client’s preconceived notions?
The relatability of the core emotional concept?
He mapped it out in his notebook, creating a flowchart of Leo’s chaotic presentation, trying to reverse-engineer the genius.
Step 1: Introduce relatable frustration.
Step 2: Present the product not as an object but as a form of self-care.
Step 3: Create a visual metaphor for impulsive joy.
It looked logical on paper, but it felt hollow.
It was like describing a kiss as ‘the mutual juxtaposition of labial tissue.’ The analysis missed the entire point.
He rewound the tape again, this time watching Leo’s audience.
He saw David from marketing, a man who lived and died by conversion rates, lean forward with the unadulterated delight of a child.
He saw Anya, his best UI designer, get a spark in her eye that he hadn’t seen since she’d first joined the company.
Leo wasn’t just presenting an idea; he was transmitting an emotion.
It was a form of communication Julian had always found inefficient, and yet, here was the undeniable proof of its power.
It was like trying to write a mathematical formula for a sunbeam.
The harder he tried to pin it down, the more its essential quality slipped through his fingers. It was infuriating.
The glass door to his office slid open with a soft hiss, and Sarah breezed in, holding two cups of coffee. She was the co-founder of the agency, the yin to his yang, the chaotic good to his lawful neutral.
“I knew I’d find you in here,” she said, her voice bright. She placed one of the cups on his desk. It was an oat milk latte with a whisper of cinnamon. She always remembered. “Analyzing the victory, or just admiring your new Golden Boy?”
Julian didn't look up from the screen. “I’m trying to understand the underlying methodology of Hayes’s approach so it can be replicated.”
Sarah laughed, a warm, genuine sound that always seemed out of place in the office’s quiet reverence.
“Oh, sweetie. You can’t replicate a firework.
You just have to be smart enough to stand back and enjoy the show.
” She perched on the edge of his desk, her bright red blazer a splash of defiance against the gray. “I have to say, Julian, I’m impressed.”
“The team rallied. The idea has potential,” Julian conceded, his tone clipped.
“I’m not talking about the team. I’m talking about you,” she said, poking his shoulder gently. “You let him cook. The old Julian would have shut that down in thirty seconds flat with a withering look and a perfectly reasonable, soul-crushing statistic.”
The praise landed like a tiny stone in his shoe—a small but persistent irritant. He hated the implication that his previous, highly effective methods were somehow flawed. “My methods are effective. They’ve built this agency.”
“They have,” she agreed easily. “They’ve made us reliable. Precise. Profitable. But they’ve never made us exciting. What Leo did in that room yesterday was exciting.” She leaned in, her voice lowering conspiratorially. “Admit it. You felt it too.”
“I felt a significant deviation from the planned agenda,” he said, the words tasting like a lie. He had felt something. A jolt. An uncomfortable flicker of admiration. “It was a calculated risk.”
“It was the opposite of calculated,” she corrected, her smile knowing. “It was a leap of faith. You saw a spark and instead of smothering it with a fire blanket of logic, you gave it oxygen. It’s a good look for you. Makes you seem… flexible.”
Flexible. The word made his teeth ache. He wasn’t flexible.
He was structured. He was precise. Flexibility was for yoga instructors and politicians.
He built systems that were robust and unyielding because that was how you achieved excellence.
Letting Leo Hayes run wild wasn't a strategy; it was an aberration.
“The numbers will determine if it was the correct decision,” he said stiffly.
“The numbers already look good,” Sarah countered, hopping off the desk. “Engagement on the preliminary mock-ups is through the roof. The client thinks we’re geniuses.” She paused at the door. “He’s good for us, Julian. And maybe,” she added with a wink, “he’s good for you, too.”
She left, and the silence she left behind felt heavier than before.
Good for him. As if he were a project that needed improving.
Annoyance prickled under his skin. He had built this agency on a foundation of unyielding standards.
He didn’t need some chaotic artist in a band t-shirt to teach him how to do his job.
Still searching for a logical anchor in this sea of newfound emotion, he closed the video file and pulled up Leo’s original application.
He just needed to find the data point he had missed, the key that would make Hayes make sense.
He scrolled through the CV again. B.A. in Visual Arts, summa cum laude.
That was impressive, if a bit soft. A string of freelance projects.
The portfolio was the thing that had caught his eye, specifically the passion project—the “Etherea” app concept.
It was that project that had aligned so perfectly with the Northwind problem.
His eyes scanned the list of technical proficiencies.
Advanced knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite, UX/UI wireframing, front-end coding…
It was a solid list. His gaze snagged on one line item: Certified Agile Project Management, Scrimshaw Institute, 2022.
Scrimshaw. He’d never heard of it. A small certification, probably.
But the year… 2022. He remembered a freelance project listed for the same year, a six-month intensive branding gig for a startup.
It would have been difficult, though not impossible, to complete both simultaneously.
A tiny flag, barely visible, went up in the back of his mind.
An inconsistency. A variable unaccounted for.
On impulse, he opened a new browser tab and typed "Scrimshaw Institute Project Management" into the search bar.
The results were… nothing. A few links to an art museum known for its scrimshaw collection.
A genealogical record for someone named Scrimshaw.
But no institute. No certification program.
He frowned. That was strange. He tried a few different search variations.
Nothing. It was as if the place didn't exist. He zoomed in on the PDF of the resume, looking for a link. There wasn’t one.
He made a mental note to ask Leo about it.
Probably an online-only program with poor SEO.
A typo, most likely. People made mistakes.
He had more important anomalies to deal with.
He leaned back in his chair, the minor puzzle of the CV dissolving as the larger one took its place. He swiveled his chair to face the main office, looking through the glass wall that separated his quiet sanctum from the rest of the floor.
The Northwind team was gathered around Leo’s desk.
Leo wasn’t sitting; he was perched on the edge, leaning forward, hands moving animatedly as he described something on his screen.
Anya was nodding eagerly, David was laughing, and two junior designers were watching Leo with the kind of rapt attention they usually reserved for viral TikToks.
There was an energy emanating from that small cluster of desks, a palpable buzz of collaborative joy.
It was messy. It was inefficient. People were talking over each other.
Someone was doodling on a sticky note instead of taking formal minutes.
By all of Julian’s metrics, it should have been an unproductive disaster.
But he could see the idea evolving in real time, growing stronger and more interesting with every chaotic interruption.
Julian recalled the last major project launch.
He had run it with military precision. Every meeting had an agenda.
Every deliverable was on time. They had produced excellent work, but the process had been a silent, sterile march to the finish line.
There had been no laughter. No excited interruptions.
Just the quiet, relentless hum of productivity.
Now, he watched as Anya, inspired by something Leo said, grabbed a marker and started sketching a new interface element right on the glass partition wall, something Julian normally would have forbidden.
But Leo didn't stop her; he encouraged her, adding a detail with his own marker, the two of them building on each other's ideas in a flurry of creative energy. Leo wasn’t just leading; he was conducting. He was drawing out the best notes from each person, weaving them together into a harmony Julian’s structured, top-down approach rarely achieved.
Julian watched them, his hands still. He didn’t get up. He didn’t rap on the glass. He didn’t send a curt Slack message about maintaining professional decorum.
He just watched. And as he watched the brilliant, impossible anomaly he had invited into his perfectly ordered world, a dangerous thought began to take root in the fertile ground of his frustration.
Maybe, it whispered, control isn’t the only path to perfection.