Episode Details

I teach leaders two things that are both true, and mutually contradictory.

One: know everything as soon as possible.

Two: unplug often.

Ruh-roh. How can you do both without losing your mind or your edge?

Leadership Imperative #1: Consume Relentlessly

Since the function of leadership is to navigate the unexpected, you have to be in the business of intelligence gathering all the time.

You have to be relentless in collecting feedback in as close to real time as possible. Both internal and external to your organization.

Internally: How’s the initiative going? Is the coding team at risk of mass resignations because of perceptions of unfairness? How are we training our next generation of managers?

Externally: What will the current war mean for our supply chains and energy costs? What advances in agentic AI might force us to rethink our user interface? What does that latest climate study suggest about the location of our current headquarters?

Leadership Imperative #2: Make Time to Digest

You have to limit your exposure to the endless scroll of news and information and opinion so that your brain and nervous system don’t start glitching from overwhelm.

Which means consciously unplugging from incoming data and letting your body return to (or at least move back in the direction of) present-based awareness.

That doesn't mean switching tabs from Slack to Insta. That’s still consuming. It means stepping away from screens entirely and letting your body and mind process what you’ve already taken in.

Consumption and Digestion Need Each Other

So which imperative wins?

I was on a Zoom call this morning with a friend in Abu Dhabi who’s watching war planes fly overhead, while missiles get shot down and bombs explode in the distance.

She told me that the UAE government shares information proactively, which makes it easier for her to step away from the news feed. She knows that if anything happens that she needs to do anything about, she’ll hear about it quickly.

Others in the current war zones who are deprived of credible, up-to-date information react with panic to every new development. They rush to stores whose aisles are empty and buy plane tickets without knowing if the airport is open.

The more in-the-know you are, the safer it feels to take a news break; to stop consuming and start digesting.

And the more you’ve digested what you’ve already consumed, the steadier you are when the next thing hits.

The Dance of Consumption and Digestion

Lissa Rankin, MD wrote this week about how we react when the news is relentlessly, systemically bad; when revelations about powerful people break trust on a societal scale.

One reaction is to learn everything we possibly can. To scroll and scroll and scroll as the algorithms dutifully feed more outrage to keep eyeballs glued.

Another reaction is to check out entirely. To choose ignorance and hope it leads to something tolerable.

Rankin reminds us that we must pendulate between healthy consumption and healthy digestion.

Consumption because we must know and understand the threat in order to deal with it.

Digestion because without it, what we’ve taken in becomes toxic, turning information into a vicious cycle of every-increasing urgency and panic.

And in the dance between the two, we find a way to hold that contradiction.

What Your Team Won't Tell an Overwhelmed Leader

But here's the thing most leaders miss: the hardest information to get isn't out there in the news cycle. It's inside your own organization.

Your Insta or YouTube feed doesn’t care what kind of mood you’re in — it just broadcasts what it’s gonna broadcast.

But the people who know