My boss retired.

When I graduated with a master’s degree in creative writing, I didn’t have a plan for how I would ever use it. Even after I took a job on the marketing team at a civil engineering consulting firm, I saw it as a way to earn a living during the day so I could write creatively after hours. I’m not built for the cubicle lifestyle, but when that first student loan payment was about to hit, I sucked it up. Never did I think that job could sustain me creatively for any length of time.

I prepared for my first suppression of creativity a couple of months into the job when Derek Berry and I decided we should change the firm’s quarterly magazine from a standard 8.5x11 format with text-heavy articles to a 10x10 that focused on high-quality photos with short captions. We pitched the idea to Laura Nick, who said, “If that’s what you want, pitch it to Dan.” I had mentally prepared to pitch the idea to my immediate boss/sister, but sitting in front of the firm’s president and CEO and explaining that we wanted to completely alter the magazine’s format made me a little nervous. I assumed Laura would shut us down before we got that far, but she trusted Derek and I to know our business and she gave us the opportunity to make the most of that. I appreciate that she did that for us, and I also appreciate that after we sat in the CEO’s office and pitched the idea to him, he said, “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

A year later, while our team prepared for Summit, our annual meeting (in Tulsa that year), during which we would present firm content to our entire staff of around 300 people, we brainstormed ideas for how we could best deliver that content. We laughed as the ideas became more and more ridiculous.

“What if we pay homage to when Dan and Jerry opened the Tulsa office by creating a video of Dan and Jerry flying in the company airplane and then they hit some turbulence that turns out to be a time warp that sends them back to 1993,” I offered somewhat sarcastically. “And then we pause the video and have young engineers dressed up as Dan and Jerry walk out from behind the screens and we have this short stage skit set in 1993. At the end, they walk back behind the screens and we go back to video of modern-day Dan and Jerry to end it?”

Dan walked into the conference room in the middle of my explanation. Keep in mind that no one on our team had any actual videography experience. Still, Dan said, “Sounds good. Let’s do it.”

That video set the tone for how we have since communicated with Garver employees about Summit. No longer could we deliver information by simply putting a camera on a tripod and having someone read from a teleprompter. We pushed engineers to get out of their comfort zones and become actors in short films. We hired Bryan Stafford who has legit credits on IMDB.com as a cinematographer, and I have written more video scripts than I can count, which not only sustains my creativity, it strengthens it. And I’m not going to claim that the creative work my team does is the reason our firm is consistently recognized as the best firm in the industry to work for, but while we may not create the company culture, we do hold a necessary mirror up to it so our employees can see what’s there.

I have developed content for seven Summits now. Each year, putting the show on becomes more of a demanding monster and I thought this year—when we brought 700 people to Little Rock—might actually cause me to die from exhaustion, but I survived it. My team survived it after putting in back-to back-to-back 15-hour days/weeks. And the feedback I’ve gotten from Garver employees since Thursday night confirms that it was the best one yet. The only way we could make it so was because Dan always gave us the autonomy and the resources to be good at our jobs. And he did that because he understood that the investment he made in our creative abilities paid off for our firm in a lot of ways that cannot be quantified. If I’ve learned anything from working at this firm for six years, it’s that engineers like things to be quantifiable. Stepping outside of that scope takes courage from a leader.

Each night since Summit, the event has haunted my dreams—almost like I’ve survived a trauma. I replay sections of an alternate version of the show in my head—things that could’ve gone wrong. I am watching it all from backstage as audio fails or the video we play is not the final version or, worst of all, people in the audience simply become bored and walk off. This morning, I woke up at 1:30 in a panic, but not because I replayed possible missteps in an alternate version—it was the actual version of the section of the show in which Dan walks in front of the board of directors and we acknowledge his retirement.

In celebration of the firm’s 100th year, we sent 100 schools across our footprint a STEM kit and some funds to supplement that kit so that they could make a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction contraption as a way to learn about engineering principles. The bulk of the corporate messaging I’ve written in my cubicle over the past year has referenced the chain reaction of events Neal Garver set in motion when he founded the company a century ago, so writing about Garver now, in the middle of the night, three days after Summit, I can’t help but feel the need to work it into this messaging I write for myself now. I can’t help but think about my own role in this 100-year-old Rube Goldberg machine that has taught me so much. That has allowed me to grow as a writer and creator and communicator. That has given me a chance to work so closely with the only sibling I have. That introduced me to my wife, for goodness sake. That allows me to manage the most capable Communications Team the A/E/C industry has ever seen. That has given me a career that challenges me and sustains my family.

In this chain reaction of events, I’m especially grateful for the young engineer Garver hired four days before I was born, who rose to the top and is now leaving behind a legacy of employee empowerment and opportunity and trust. Thank you, Dan Williams.