Here at Authentik, Canada’s foremost (and, candidly, only) leadership firm entirely dedicated to helping leaders thrive during disruptive times, our services are in demand to start 2025. Municipalities are wanting to polish up their responses to emergencies using our custom tabletop trainings; our workshop sessions last year on topics like manipulation management and conduct investigations were so well received we’re planning on offering a bunch more in the coming months, and of expertise on big disruptors like UAP and artificial intelligence has been sought out by clients ranging from frontline managers to the elected Representatives in governments in Canada and elsewhere. We’ve been busy - and for good reason as we covered last week! We are living in disruptive times, and there are some big ones on the horizon.
Not all disruptions are big ones, though. Some of them are pretty small. The thing is, disruptions all have the same broad strokes no matter how big they are. Whether it’s a flying saucer over a landmark, or a flat tire on the way to work, the depths of the impact might be different, but they rhyme: Your usual routine has been thrown off, you are in an unexpected situation, and you need to figure out your next steps to return to a steady state.
Cognitive Bandwidth and Why It Matters:
There are a lot of things you can do to help make disruption less impactful, and a lot of this centres around managing the “Cognitive Bandwidth” of yourself and your people. Essentially, you can only pay attention to a certain number of things at a given moment. When you are experiencing a disruption, a great deal of your cognitive bandwidth is going to be spent on things that previously didn’t take much thought at all - truly, how much cognitive bandwidth does your normal daily commute take? Probably not a lot, if it’s more or less the same every day.
But then you get a flat tire, and now you’ve got a lot on your mind. You’ve got to solve the immediate problem of the tire, but you’ve also got to adjust for the fact that you’ll be late for work. That might throw off other commitments that you will need to figure out, which may have longer term consequences on projects, relationships, or other aspects of your life, and all of these things are going to take up part of your cognitive bandwidth to figure out. And that’s just a flat tire - it’s hardly life or death.
If it’s a major disruption, you still need to use cognitive bandwidth you wouldn’t otherwise have to reach for, but often the consequences are far worse. For example, imagine being in the middle of a natural disaster where the water from your tap is no longer safe to drink due to contamination. Water is essential for your survival, and you will have a finite amount of time to solve this problem. If you haven’t already prepared ahead of time, it’s not going to be an easy solution, either.
This is where your leadership becomes critical. For leaders, cognitive bandwidth isn’t just about personal focus—it determines how effectively teams adapt to unexpected challenges. When disruption strikes, a leader’s ability to focus their team’s bandwidth (and their own) can make the difference between a successful return to steady state, or a disruption that proves permanent. Cognitive bandwidth isn’t just about effectiveness or efficiency - during a disruption, it’s more like a marathon than a sprint. If you don’t treat your cognitive bandwidth like the finite resource that it is, you will be burned out, and as we are fond of saying “You cannot sustainably keep other people warm by setting yourself on fire”.
The Power of Consistent, Values-based Leadership:
There are two main areas for leaders to focus on if you want to be prepared to navigate a major crisis or disruption. The first area is your day-to-day applied leadership and the manner in which you engage with your people, and that’s what Part 1 of this series is focusing on. As we’ve written elsewhere, leading from your values is an essential part of creating a resilient team. With the consistent application of the same core paradigms, the people around you are able to predict how you as a leader are likely to respond to a given situation, which is reinforced as you continue to lead consistently from your values.
Then disruption hits. Everyone’s sense of “normal” is thrown off, the stress hits, and people’s cognitive bandwidth is yanked away from what they planned on doing that day and instead has to focus on navigating the disruption. If you have made a habit of inconsistent leadership, this cognitive bandwidth is going to be going in a million different directions and each person will apply their own paradigm on the disruption. These paradigms will be different, and your job as a leader will become more of a mediator - trying to get your people back on the same page - rather than a leader helping everyone work together towards the solution.
But, if you have made a habit of consistently leading from your stated values, a different phenomenon will take hold. The cognitive bandwidth of your people will be focused. They won’t be trying to predict what your decisions will be based on their own panicked paradigm; they’ll be predicting your decisions based on a specific, limited, values-based paradigm. That means that instead of having each person think of the problem with a thousand different priorities, your people will look at the problem with a limited, specific set of priorities - those values that you bring to your leadership.
The benefits are obvious. If you have a group of people with a thousand different perspectives, and especially if those people are stressed or panicked, that’s a thousand potential conflicts between those people as they try to figure out what they should do next. But if you are a consistent values-based leader, and as a result your people have a shared set of priorities and values, it’s far more likely to result in “us against the problem” rather than “us against each other”.
The other benefit is that when values are clarified, so too is purpose; what it is you need to achieve as a team tends to be pretty clear when you are clear on that which matters most (which is what your values are). Remember that cognitive bandwidth piece? A group of people with the thousand different ideas to address different aspects of the disruption will be using up a ton of that bandwidth sorting and filtering through those ideas - this is essentially anxious ruminating, and a lot of us do it - and its’ really exhausting. On the other hand, with a shared set of values that define what’s most important, you clear out a lot of the noise, and the cognitive bandwidth is used more efficiently in a more focused manner.
Lessons from Real Life: A Case Study in Emergency Management
Let’s take an example from a training exercise we did for an emergency management team. Our scenarios are all crafted specifically for the people we are training, and in this case it was a simulated emergency that closed the place of business and caused a lockdown to happen, meaning no one could enter or leave the premises. Throughout the scenarios, we throw in curveballs that we call “injects” - additional details added to the scenario that are designed to mimic a real disruption, where information comes fast and the scenario dynamically changes. In this case, one of the injects was a concerned citizen looking for a relative that was calling and emailing executive leadership who were then forwarding this communication to the emergency response team.
A gap here was a shared understanding of that which is most important. In an emergency situation like this, clearly the most important thing was the health and safety of people. However, because that wasn’t explicitly articulated, it meant that the cognitive effort of the participants was not focused; as soon as the concern from the relative came up, the team started responding to it trying to figure out how to communicate to this person. Meanwhile, a significant (simulated) safety hazard was present, and getting worse, and people were at risk. Ultimately, the time and energy spent on the communication issue resulted in several deaths during the exercise.
On the other hand, if this team every single day was making decisions according to the exact same set of values, it would have been second nature during the exercise. The communication would have come in and the first question would have been - “How does this align with our core values and priorities?”.The answer would have been - it didn’t align, and since the relative in question was as safe as practical given the lockdown, the inject would have been deprioritized and the focus on the hazard would have been restored.
The other thing worth noting here is that at the end of the exercise, the debrief response was overwhelmingly consistent: everyone was exhausted. It was only a two hour session, but the chaos of the disruption in the absence of clear priorities meant that every single member of the team was trying to think about every possible thing; their brains were on overdrive with stress and tension trying to figure out what the right thing to do would be, and when members of the team had different priorities - say financial prudence versus life-safety risk mitigation - there was conflict.
Take Action: Prepare Now for the Next Disruptor
As a leader, the most important thing you can do to prepare your people for a major disruption or crisis is to show up and lead according to the same core values every single day long before the disruption. Then when disruption strikes, your people are ready to focus on your core priorities and get back to steady state.
The years ahead are going to have more disruptions, not less - and from major upsets to minor inconveniences, you can expect that disruption is absolutely going to affect you. Leading by the Disruption-resistant model we’re advocating for here is like planting a tree; the best time to do it was years ago. But the second best time is today.
Next week, we’ll start part 2 of this series, which focuses on another essential part of your leadership: your own health, safety, and wellbeing in a disruption. We’ll be covering how a few simple steps can set you up to thrive during disruption, and a thriving leader usually results in thriving teams! Tune in next week for more. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next Sunday.
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