This week, we were generously hosted by Matt Westrup, CTO, Adrian Pilkington, COO,  and the senior leadership team at Hearst Networks EMEA for a Behind the Brand visit – the opportunity to step inside another organisation to learn from their experiences – joined by 25 leaders from our Wavelength Connect 2025 programme.

Hearing the story of an organisation that has operated and thrived in a sector that has seen massive disruption was so inspiring and gave us lots of food for thought around leadership, embedding values, making tough decisions, focusing on the core and most importantly how to build not only leadership resilience but organisational sustainability.

We’ve pulled together some thoughts to build on this theme of developing leadership resilience and delved deeper providing you with a framework to help structure your thinking around resilience.

“When markets convulse and playbooks fall apart, what separates those who freeze from those who forge forward?”

When the ground shifts—whether through a sudden regulatory upheaval, geopolitical conflict, economic volatility, or AI-driven market disruption—leaders face both mental and organisational disorientation: what worked yesterday may be dangerous today. In these moments, resilience is not just about grit or perseverance. It’s about understanding context, adapting your thinking, and responding with agility. And for that, we’re using the Cynefin framework as a useful tool to help make sense of the situation.

The Cynefin Framework

Making Sense of Chaos: the Cynefin Framework

Developed by Dave Snowden, the Cynefin framework helps leaders make sense of the world by categorising situations into five domains:

• Clear (Obvious): Cause and effect are known and predictable. Leaders can apply best practices.
• Complicated: Cause and effect are discoverable with analysis. This will require specific expertise.
• Complex: Cause and effect can only be understood in hindsight. Patterns emerge through experimentation.
• Chaotic: No clear cause and effect. Immediate action is required to restore order. Leaders must consider what can be made clear, draw on core strengths, capabilities and understanding to help you do this.
• Disorder: When it’s unclear which domain you’re in, this can lead to confusion and missteps.

Misdiagnosing the domain you’re operating in is one of the most common—and dangerous—mistakes. Applying best practices (Clear) to a Complex problem, for example, can result in false certainty and systemic failure.

The Brain on Disruption: the Neuroscience Lens

The Cynefin framework doesn’t just map contexts; it can be used to help us map our brain’s reaction to them. Understanding reactions can help navigate and resolve so that we might re-establish clarity.

• Clear & Complicated: The prefrontal cortex, responsible for logic and reasoning, thrives. We’re in control, confident, and effective.
• Complex: The brain begins to crave certainty that doesn’t exist. The limbic system becomes active, often triggering anxiety, frustration, or overconfidence.
• Chaotic: The amygdala fires—our survival brain kicks in. We may experience panic, freeze, or aggressive overreaction.
• Disorder: Without clear signals, the brain struggles to frame reality. We fall into biases, cling to outdated mental models, or avoid decision-making altogether.

True resilience means knowing how to regulate these responses, recognise the traps, and adapt the organisational and personal toolkit accordingly.

How to Navigate Each Domain with Resilience

Clear (Obvious)

• Organisational Response: Standardise. Automate. Use playbooks.
• Leadership Mindset: Ensure clarity of roles and responsibilities. Reinforce routines.
• Resilience Tactic: Don’t waste discretionary energy here. Maintain the status. Optimise, and redirect focus toward more demanding areas.

Complicated

• Organisational Response: Analyse thoroughly. Bring in expert opinions. Optimise systems.
• Leadership Mindset: Be curious. Avoid rushing. Use structured problem-solving.
• Resilience Tactic: Block time for deep work. Protect against analysis paralysis by setting decision thresholds.

Complex

• Organisational Response: Run safe-to-fail experiments. Encourage diverse input. Seek the dissenting voices and engage them. Look for patterns.
• Leadership Mindset: Embrace uncertainty. Support psychological safety.
• Resilience Tactic: Shift from control to curiosity. Train teams to iterate, not perfect. Practice emotional regulation to manage ambiguity.

Chaotic

• Organisational Response: Take rapid, stabilising action. Establish order, refocus and clarity. Create temporary structure that eases the brain’s response to chaos.
• Leadership Mindset: Be decisive. Communicate clearly and often.
• Resilience Tactic: Prepare in advance with scenario planning and crisis rehearsals. Build decision-making protocols for extreme contexts.

Disorder

• Organisational Response: Surface multiple perspectives. Triangulate the situation drawing on available data. Move toward clarity.
• Leadership Mindset: Slow down to frame the problem accurately. Encourage diverse voices. Explore options.
• Resilience Tactic: Watch for cognitive biases. Use frameworks and shared language to reduce confusion.

Building Everyday Resilience in a Disrupted World

You can’t always choose your context—but you can train your brain and your teams to respond more wisely. Here are five core habits that build adaptive capacity:

1. Mindfulness Practices: Reduce reactivity and improve emotional regulation.
2. Scenario Thinking: Anticipate and mentally rehearse responses to different types of disruption.
3. Team Diversity: Foster multiple viewpoints to better detect complexity early.
4. Decentralised Decision-Making: Increase organisational agility in chaotic or complex environments.
5. Learning Loops: Regularly review what worked and what didn’t. Conduct pre-mortems to anticipate potential situations. Adapt processes in real time.

Final Thought

The most resilient leaders aren’t those who cling to certainty or push through with sheer force. They are the map-readers of ambiguity—they develop the skills to be able to sense the terrain, frame the context, and guide others with calm clarity.

In a world that won’t stop shifting, resilience isn’t purely about endurance—it’s understanding the dynamics, exploring your response options and it’s about elegant adaptation.