Leadership in a crisis nobody's playbook covers — what happens when the map runs out.
Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed and crude above $100 a barrel — this episode covers what's happening inside the people running organizations through it. The financial briefings tell you what's happening to the system. I want to talk about the moment leaders reach for their map and find it doesn't cover where they are.
Through the story of a composite leader I call Isabel — a CFO navigating this crisis in real time — I explore what it actually looks like to lead from genuine orientation rather than performed certainty. The difference between managing a situation and actually meeting it. And why the most practical thing in the room right now might be the one nobody's briefing you on.
In this episode:
- Why working harder on the map is producing more noise, not more clarity
- What paralysis actually is — and why it's information, not weakness
- The 6 am practice that changed how Isabel showed up in the boardroom
- The 48-hour decision that changed the outcome
- What the unthinkable becoming real means for the next decade of leadership
⏱ CHAPTERS
00:00 — Introduction 01:30 — What the briefings aren't covering 04:00 — The moment leaders reach for the map 06:30 — Why working harder on the map stops working 09:00 — What paralysis actually is 12:00 — Meet Isabel 15:30 — Before — how she used to lead 19:00 — This week — leading differently 24:00 — The board call 27:30 — The Stefan moment 30:00 — The 48-hour decision 33:00 — What actually changed 36:00 — What this crisis is really revealing 38:30 — The question worth sitting with
🔗 CONNECT WITH DAVE
Website: daveschoof.com
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00:00:02
Hi, it's just me this week.
00:00:05
I wanna talk about something that's happening right now, it's real time.
00:00:10
This is March 19th, 2026.
00:00:17
And this isn't in the financial briefings that I'm gonna talk about, but you've definitely
read this.
00:00:22
So by now you know of what's going on in the world, the Strait of Hormuz, Operation Epic
Fury, crude above $100 a barrel, the down, down nearly 2 points in two weeks, the
00:00:41
IEAA, IEA.
00:00:43
is calling it the largest supply disruption in the history of global oil market.
00:00:51
And the former chief of oil markets said something last week that I haven't set aside yet
in my mind.
00:00:57
And that is we've never been in this situation before.
00:01:01
Not one of them comes close, never.
00:01:05
Not 1979, not the Gulf War, not Ukraine, not one.
00:01:13
Now there are people covering this and especially the financial architecture of this
crisis brilliantly.
00:01:19
So I'm not gonna go into that.
00:01:21
That's not my scope.
00:01:22
But what I wanna talk about is what's happening inside the rooms where the decisions are
being made because that story often doesn't come out.
00:01:34
I want to zoom in on that because it's relevant to the pivot.
00:01:38
Here's what I keep hearing from my client systems, leaders across Europe and the US this
week.
00:01:44
They pick up a phone, they read the headline, they immediately reach for their plan, their
map, their guidance system.
00:01:52
And the map doesn't cover where they are.
00:01:55
That's the moment I want to focus in on.
00:01:58
That's the moment I want to sit with because what happens next?
00:02:02
tells you everything about the kind of leader someone actually is.
00:02:07
I want to zero in on a pattern here.
00:02:09
Most leaders have one instinct when the map runs out, the plan's not working.
00:02:16
What do they do?
00:02:16
They work harder on it.
00:02:18
They come up with more scenarios.
00:02:20
They bring in more advisors, push for more data, push the analysis until clarity emerges.
00:02:28
And here's what I'm watching in real time, this move.
00:02:31
which has always worked before that's producing something unexpected, not clarity, more
noise, more problems.
00:02:41
So more conflicting opinion, the experts at war, and underneath it all, this cognitive
weight that has absolutely nowhere to go.
00:02:52
And I wanna name that weight because it's not a weakness, it's information.
00:02:59
paralysis that I'm seeing, it's not a failure of intelligence.
00:03:03
It's not a failure of courage.
00:03:05
It's a collision between the kind of situation they're in and the kind of tools they have.
00:03:12
It's what happens when you're holding a map and when someone asks you where you are in the
wide open ocean.
00:03:20
The instinct is to grab that, grip that map, grab that map even harder, right?
00:03:25
or to find a better map, or to call to someone who has a map.
00:03:29
The last thing that the instinct says, that last automatic response, is to put the map
down, to learn to navigate by feel, by the stars, by the current.
00:03:44
But that's the actual move.
00:03:47
I want to tell you about a leader, but before I do, I want to be perfectly clear with you.
00:03:52
I'm bringing a composite, both for confidentiality reasons and it works better, I find.
00:03:58
I'm sharing from several clients that are navigating the crisis right now.
00:04:04
The learning is key.
00:04:06
The details are illustrative, I think.
00:04:08
But the interior moves are real.
00:04:11
This is not a composite.
00:04:13
Those are real.
00:04:14
And I've watched this happen multiple times over my career.
00:04:19
And in these past weeks, with the meta crisis really heating up and accelerating, I've
definitely seen it across multiple people.
00:04:29
So let me call her Isabel.
00:04:32
She's a CFO, mid-sized European industrial group, 14 years at the company.
00:04:38
The person the CEO calls first when something breaks.
00:04:42
Couple of years back, she came to me, not because she was failing, she was succeeding by
every metric that mattered.
00:04:50
She came because something had quietly stopped working and she couldn't quite name it.
00:04:55
She said to me, I keep solving problems, but I feel like I'm solving the wrong ones.
00:05:02
That was the key sentence.
00:05:03
That was the doorway.
00:05:06
Before our work together, whenever a crisis hit, Isabel led the way she'd been trained.
00:05:12
She gathered the data, she ran the scenarios, she assembled the right people and she drove
towards a decision with a disciplined urgency that made her exceptional.
00:05:23
And it worked.
00:05:24
In the sense that decisions got made, actions got taken, the company kept moving.
00:05:30
But something in the quality of those decisions was starting to nag at her, it was
starting to bother her.
00:05:37
She noticed she was managing the anxiety in the room.
00:05:40
by projecting a certainty she didn't fully feel.
00:05:45
Some confuse that for gravitas, by the way.
00:05:49
And she noticed her best instincts, that felt sense that something wasn't adding up, were
getting overridden by the pressure to decide, they were being suboptimized.
00:06:00
And the pressure to decide, to move, to act.
00:06:04
that was driving it.
00:06:05
So somewhere underneath all of that, there was a quiet signal saying, wait.
00:06:13
And something there didn't fit for her.
00:06:17
So she was struggling with this feeling.
00:06:19
And yeah, something was off.
00:06:21
um When she did get that tremor, that little gut niggle of wait or something's off,
00:06:32
She'd never really learned to trust that signal.
00:06:34
She'd never actually before that had even learned to hear it clearly above the noise.
00:06:41
Now come to the present.
00:06:43
Now picture Isabel in the morning of March 1st, 2026.
00:06:47
Hormones closed, crude spiking.
00:06:50
Her board wants answers she doesn't have and they want it now.
00:06:54
Here's what's different.
00:06:56
Six o'clock in the morning, before all the calls begin, Isabel makes coffee.
00:07:02
She sits, she opens a journal, and she writes one question at the top of the page.
00:07:08
What is this situation actually asking of me?
00:07:12
Not what my role requires, but what does this moment require?
00:07:18
She writes for 20 minutes, just free flow, not analysis, not struggling to find answers.
00:07:27
What she's actually worried about that isn't in the numbers, what her gut is saying
underneath the noise, that's what was coming out.
00:07:35
Fast forward to the board call at nine o'clock.
00:07:38
The Dow has lost 2 points in two weeks.
00:07:42
Iran's supreme leader has declared the straight closure will continue as a quote tool to
pressure the enemy, close quote.
00:07:51
The board wants a position, they want it now.
00:07:53
The pressure in the room is enormous.
00:07:55
The old Isabelle would have delivered one, confident, crisp, slightly more certain than
she really felt.
00:08:04
But this time, Isabelle says something different.
00:08:07
She says, I wanna give you my honest read.
00:08:10
Here's what I know, here's what I don't know, and here's what I think the distinction
matters right now.
00:08:18
Silence for a while.
00:08:21
She said, you could count it.
00:08:23
Then the chairman, 40 years in the business says, that's the most useful thing I've heard
all week.
00:08:28
And the whole room exhales all at once.
00:08:31
And for the first time in the call, people start saying what they actually think.
00:08:37
Now halfway through that call, Isabelle noticed.
00:08:42
the head of procurement had gone unusually quiet and stayed quiet, not disengaged.
00:08:47
It clear he was chewing on something, processing something.
00:08:51
So she stopped the conversation.
00:08:52
She said, Stefan, you've gone quiet.
00:08:55
What are you sitting with?
00:08:56
And what comes out is he shares a shipping contract renewal coming due in six weeks with a
carrier whose entire Gulf routing, path, has been
00:09:11
So routing, pause, the entire golf routing is now compromised and nobody had flagged that.
00:09:23
That then becomes the first concrete priority of the meeting.
00:09:26
Now the old Isabelle would have kept driving towards a strategic picture.
00:09:31
This Isabelle reads the room as a data source.
00:09:37
So by the end of that Monday, pressure to hedge aggressively, lock in energy contracts,
execute a currency position, move fast, Isabel actually comes out and says, I want to wait
00:09:50
48 hours.
00:09:52
Not because I'm uncertain about her exposure, I'm not, because the situation is still
developing in ways that could affect how we hedge, not just whether we do, but how.
00:10:03
Somebody pushes back, she holds the line.
00:10:06
The urgency we're all feeling right now is real, but I want to make sure it's the
situation driving our timing, not our discomfort with not knowing.
00:10:15
So they wait.
00:10:18
On Wednesday, reports emerged that Oman's bypass ports have been struck by drones.
00:10:24
Fuel storage damaged.
00:10:26
One of the hedging strategies that they were considering would have been significantly
more expensive.
00:10:31
Those 48 hours had mattered.
00:10:34
Isabel didn't become less decisive.
00:10:37
Let's be clear.
00:10:38
She still runs the scenarios.
00:10:39
She still runs or still reads the briefings.
00:10:43
What changed is the quality of the attention she brings before and beneath
00:10:48
all of that.
00:10:50
She has a relationship now with her own interior as a source of signal, not just noise to
be managed.
00:10:58
How many of us confuse that, right?
00:11:01
Like we get this interior, this inner disruption, turmoil, queasiness, and we just think
it's a distraction, something we have to manage when it's actual intelligence.
00:11:16
So that source signal, and her team feels it.
00:11:20
In fact, one of her directors said, I don't know what it is, but I actually feel like I
can say what I think in these calls now.
00:11:28
Now that's not a communication technique.
00:11:30
That's what happens when a leader stops performing certainty and becomes genuinely present
of the situation instead of managing it from behind a role.
00:11:43
So what is all of this really about?
00:11:46
Look, the hormones cry pause.
00:11:52
Look, the Hormoz crisis will resolve.
00:11:59
The Hormuz crisis will resolve one way or another.
00:12:03
What won't resolve is the kind of world that produced it.
00:12:08
You know, the IEA used to run war game scenarios, simulating major disruptions of
catastrophes to the oil supply.
00:12:19
What I'm reading is they never seriously considered the straight closing because it was
unthinkable.
00:12:26
It was unimaginable.
00:12:30
That's worth sitting with.
00:12:32
The unthinkable is no longer theoretical.
00:12:35
The leaders who navigate what's coming, not just this crisis, but the next ones, the meta
crisis, the world that's in this in-between stage where old systems are breaking down,
00:12:47
what's known is no longer reliable.
00:12:51
The crises we haven't even named yet.
00:12:56
They won't be the ones with the best models, those leaders that make this.
00:13:00
Pause.
00:13:06
The leaders who will be able to navigate what's coming, not just this crisis, the next
ones and the ones after that, permanent feeling pause.
00:13:19
The leaders who navigate what's coming, not just this crisis, but the next ones, the ones
we haven't even named yet.
00:13:29
Those leaders aren't gonna be the ones with the best models.
00:13:32
The models are gonna keep getting surprised.
00:13:36
They're gonna be the ones who have done enough interior work, who genuinely stay present
when the ground shifts.
00:13:42
They don't lose that.
00:13:44
And they listen.
00:13:46
They listen to their interior.
00:13:49
I'll leave you with the question I've been sitting with all week.
00:13:52
Not a rhetorical one, a real one.
00:13:54
When this week got hard, what did you actually reach for?
00:14:01
And was it actually the most useful thing available to you?
00:14:04
Pause.
00:14:09
I'll leave you with the question I've been sitting with all week, not a rhetorical one, a
real one.
00:14:15
Things have been getting hard.
00:14:16
And when this week got hard, what did you actually reach for?
00:14:21
Was it the map, the plan?
00:14:24
And whatever you reach for, was it truly the most useful thing available to you?
00:14:30
That's the navigation worth developing.
00:14:35
I'm Dave Shouf.
00:14:37
This is The Pivot.
00:14:38
Thanks for being here.
00:14:40
Go well.