Disruption isn’t temporary anymore—it’s the landscape we’re leading in.

This quarter, we’re exploring what it means to metabolize change rather than simply withstand it: how leaders can build trust through uncertainty, create space for reflection amidst chaos, and signal their values through action instead of just telling stories that sound good. Because the difference between reactive and responsive leadership isn’t what you know—it’s how you show up.

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Webinar recap: Metabolizing Change with Coach-informed Strategies

Change isn’t something that simply happens to us. It must be metabolized by leaders so that they can respond in a thoughtful, creative, and empathetic manner for the organizations they lead. This is the difference between reacting defensively to and simply withstanding change versus embracing uncertainty as opportunity.

In our recent seminar on Metabolizing Change, leadership experts Krista Johnson, Jennifer Tankersley, and Jennifer Garvey Berger explored the ways in which leaders can “stay curious when anxiety demands certainty. 

One key strategy? Holding what Margaret Wheatley calls “islands of sanity amidst the chaos”—regulated containers where the nervous system can settle enough to process what’s actually happening rather than just react to it.

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Building connection to withstand uncertainty

It’s a topic Michael wrote about in his recent Forbes article, Islands Of Sanity: Leading Beyond Psychological Safety. Navigating chaos requires building trust through psychological safety—”not just protection from harm,” as Michael writes, “but connection strong enough to withstand uncertainty. 

That means getting away from that defensive posturing to build “islands of sanity” to keep people connected both to one another and to what matters. It’s here that true reflection, inquiry, and sensemaking happen: in a place where it’s okay not to have clear answers, just as long as we’ve all rolled up our sleeves and dug into it together through trust, generosity, and connection. 

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Taking space for space’s sake—and intentionally disrupting routines

Reflective space is also a theme for Pam McLean, Chief Knowledge Officer at the Hudson Institute. Her focus, however, is space without need for optimization or agenda. Writing in, “A Private Rebellion,” a recent post for her LinkedIn newsletter, The Bonus Round, Pam says, “When we release the tyranny of constant doing, we create space to seek wonder and see more.” 

Space can be found in ritual and routine: in a slow cup of coffee over Wordle; on a long walk with no real agenda. But too much brings staleness, lowering resiliency and even memory recall. As such, it’s important also to think of space as a time to mix things up and get those neurons firing again, even if it’s something as small as taking a new walking route or reading a book outside of your usual genre. 

“Life needs both pattern and disruption,” Pam writes. 

Are your routines serving your aliveness? Join Pam on April 6 – 11, 2026, in Baja, Mexico to examine this question and discover what matters to you most in this season of life for The Bonus Round workshop. 

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Mending the social contract

In order for an organization to function successfully, its members must believe that their colleagues and leaders are bound to one another by shared principles and mutual care.

As Michael writes in Love, Leadership, & Organizational Trust: Mending The Social Contract, the social contract is more, not less important in times of great disruption—and yet it’s the first thing to fall away when leaders push toward defensively-built organizations. In this article, Michael explores how leaders can rebuild organizational trust by consciously mending the social contract—and in so doing, find creativity and innovation in disruption. 

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Unschooling leadership

The moment a crisis hits, many leaders seem to forget what they’ve learned in development courses, reverting instead to their place of comfort: their technical expertise. 

In his article for Forbes, Unschooling Leadership: It’s Time To Stop Teaching Leaders, Michael argues for unschooling leaders to build true capacity. This means turning the focus to convening, grounding, modeling for, and stimulating teams to build their own solutions through community work—trusting in the collective intelligence of the team, rather than sinking into authoritarian control and performative competence.

The leader’s job? 

“Host the space,” Michael writes. “Draw out contributions…Create containers where dialogue, responsibility, and shared ownership surface naturally.”

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Showing your values through real action

Leaders work hard to perfect the narratives they tell both internal and externally. But research reveals that only 35% of employees experience positive transformation as a result of these efforts. As Michael posits in Leadership Signals And The Failure Of Storytelling, the problem isn’t how leaders are telling stories, it’s the fact that storytelling itself isn’t enough to capture the complexity today’s workplaces face, whether that’s technological disruption, or global workforces with diverse functions and disparate priorities. 

It’s actions rather than words that serve as “credible indicators of reality.” What gets measured? Who gets promoted and for what reasons? How are failures handled? Michael offers tips for going beyond the nice stories to actively signal these priorities to an organization.

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Disruption is the norm. Temporary leadership crises are now the standard mode of operating.

This quarter’s stories remind us: every change, every rebellion against comfort, and every signal we send is an opening to metabolize uncertainty—turning it into new growth for leaders, teams, and organizations.

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