Every leader eventually meets the moment when the plan fails and the people counting on them need answers no one has yet. For this audience, that moment might look like a flagship project going sideways – a scope gap no one budgeted for, partial, contradictory information rippling from the project team, the schedule is blown and trades are threatening delay claims – with stakeholders across ownership, the project team, lenders and the insurers demanding answers that cannot wait for perfect information.
Jennifer Ewbank, former CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation and a Chief of Station abroad on September 11, 2001, teaches the disciplines that hold a team together when certainty is gone, through stories from a world almost no one in the room will have seen: the ambassador’s office where she watched the second plane hit, the rooms where the hardest decisions of a decade were made on imperfect information, and the ten-year hunt that ended in Abbottabad with a president deciding to launch with only fifty percent confidence. The room practices every discipline shared and leaves with three: deciding without certainty, communicating clearly under pressure, and rebuilding trust through demonstrated action. Each is supported by current crisis-leadership research, and each matters now more than ever, because projects have grown more complex while information arrives faster, and less reliably, than at any point in the audience’s careers. The session delivers the one thing no slide can: the felt experience of deciding under pressure, discovering you were wrong, and recovering well.
