On Postpartum Encryption
“The most important thing we bring to these moments isn’t polish. It’s presence.”
April 2025
I was delivering the opening of a keynote on post-quantum encryption when I said it: postpartum encryption. The room laughed. I did too. What else could I do?
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a mistake like that. It’s not quite embarrassment. It’s not quite fear. It’s the sudden awareness that you’ve stepped out of the frame, that the smooth narrative you were trying to deliver now has a crack in it.
And then something shifted. I felt lighter. The polished lines I had rehearsed fell away, and what remained were the things I most needed to say.
A public mistake carries a strange kind of grace. It shifts your posture. I was no longer the speaker; I was the person speaking, and that difference, quiet as it is, changed everything.
This isn’t to say that I don’t prepare. I do. I care about clarity, about getting things right. But in that moment, facing a room of people who now knew I could say “postpartum encryption” with a straight face, I remembered that the most important thing we bring to these moments isn’t polish.
Talking about authenticity in leadership and communication has become a kind of performance in its own right, but authenticity doesn’t announce itself. It emerges in moments when control slips and something human gets through.
I’ve come to believe that precision, while essential, is only part of the craft. The other part, the harder, messier, more human part, is presence. That’s what I hope to offer when I stand to speak. Not the perfect sentence, but the honest one. The one that carries a little risk.
It’s the same approach I take when I develop research with analysts. Our best work doesn’t start with posture or polish; it starts with presence, with showing up, honestly, imperfectly, ready to ask questions, to do the work. We make progress not by staging certainty, but by circling complexity together, out loud, in drafts that don’t always behave.
And when we get it right, it’s because we allowed ourselves to work that way, out in the open, without flinching.