4 Ways to Lead During a Crisis
Harness the wisdom of the room and guide your team to collaboration.
by Dan Dworkis M.D., Ph.D.
In a crisis, the knowledge and experience of the people in the room is always smarter than any one single person in it. This collective, networked intelligence—what we might call “the wisdom of the room”—is a critical resource for teams navigating high-stakes, complex, rapidly adapting problems.
However, the wisdom of the room is not something that teams can automatically use, especially during chaotic situations. Teams are often more productive and creative when they add cognitive diversity and include different skill sets, backgrounds, and perspectives, but those same qualities can create roadblocks when it comes to working together effectively. Misaligned understandings, different mental models, and competing agendas can prevent a team from orienting around and working together on a single goal.
So, as a leader that needs to operate in a crisis, how do you get your team to focus on the same problem? How do you effectively learn to harness the wisdom of the room? In this article, we explore four strategies you can use to help your team learn to “collaborate and operate” when it matters the most.
1. Set the Stage
When your team can anticipate a crisis they will need to face, you can set the stage for their success: assigning clear roles and setting expectations ahead of time allows team members to understand their individual responsibilities, the overall collective goal, and how their actions will be integrated into it.
In the emergency department where I work, if we get word of an incoming cardiac arrest case, we routinely set team expectations, solidify leadership, and identify initial actions before the patient arrives. The leader might say, for example, “Ok team, I’m leading. Dr. A, you’re on airway, and Nurse B, I’d like you to start two IV lines.” In this way, we help each individual understand their part in the larger whole and team members are clear on how they can add to the group’s collective performance from the very beginning.
Setting the stage is particularly crucial when the situation demands an atypical approach or deviates from standard operating procedures members on your team are used to using. If, for example, we know we have to decontaminate the patient before we start our normal care since they were exposed to a toxic chemical, we can highlight what’s different about this case and start generating ideas on what to do as a group before the patient arrives.
2. Ask Directly for Pushback
In hierarchical systems—whether in medicine, business, or the military—junior team members often hesitate to speak up. This dynamic can lead to critical oversights, especially if someone on the lower in the hierarchy or on the “fringes” of the group has a valuable but unpopular perspective.
To counteract this and harness all the wisdom of the room, leaders should invite dissent directly. Instead of asking, “Does everyone agree?” which tends to elicit perfunctory agreement or silence, high-performing leaders can ask, “What problems do you see here?” The negative framing of this question encourages team members to voice objections and share alternative perspectives without as much fear of overstepping.
When a team member does provide pushback, it’s critical for you to acknowledge their effort and their input—even if you don’t ultimately act on it. Rewarding their intention sets up a virtuous cycle that makes harnessing the wisdom of the room easier next time, while ignoring or punishing it does the opposite.
3. Call the Play
Emergencies are full of uncertainty and complexity, so high-performing teams focus on sharing mental models to focus thinking, adapt to changes, and overcome confusion. By naming out loud the mental model you’re using as the leader, you provide your team with guideposts for their thinking and actions.
For example, a team leader running an intensive care unit during a natural disaster might say, “Team, my hypothesis is that we will need to evacuate in the next six hours. Start operating like we’re going to need to move all the patients.” This statement galvanizes the team’s thinking around a shared mental model—in this case, the need to move the patients rather than ride out the storm. Armed with knowledge of the overall mission, team members can align their individual contributions toward the team goal, address gaps in the group’s plan before they become critical failures, and flag inconsistencies in the data that might favor other hypotheses.
Importantly, your ability to call a play for your team is only as good as the team’s playbook. Whenever possible, leaders should set up the plays your team might have to run before you’re in a crisis and get your team to rehearse them in both low- and high-pressure simulations.
4. Fix the Aperture
Effective decision-making requires dynamic focus, and as a leader, it’s your job to adjust the “aperture” of your team’s input based on the situation. Some decisions call for a broad focus, including brainstorming and considering every possible idea from multiple angles. Others demand a narrow focus, considering only immediate risks or obvious red flags.
The intensive care team from the previous example might use a wide aperture when they start brainstorming ideas for moving their critically ill patients, then narrow their aperture as their plan solidifies to facilitate pressure testing and look for crucial flaws. If a patient starts to decompensate at any point, the leader could change the aperture dynamically by saying something like, “Right now, I need only critical comments about this patient.”
Importantly, safety-related inputs should always be welcome, regardless of the decision-making aperture. By clearly defining what kind of input you need at a given moment, you help your team channel their energy effectively and prevent cognitive overload.
Collaboration Is a Skill That Needs Practice
Harnessing the wisdom of the room is not a strategy you can develop in the heat of the moment—it’s something you practice and refine over time. Teams should rehearse these techniques during low-stakes scenarios like simulations or mental walk-throughs and reflect on their use when debriefing critical events.
Collaborating during a crisis is challenging, but with these strategies, leaders can drastically increase the chances their team is working on the same problem and moving toward the same end goal, ultimately unlocking the immense potential of the collective intelligence that the room has to offer.