I found myself thinking about a thunderstorm moment early in my operations career. We were in crisis mode again. Well, actually—still. Everyone was just expected to “make it happen.” You know the drill, right? Scramble, fix, deliver, repeat.
I tried to be the calm in the storm. But underneath, I was exhausted and asking myself, Why does this have to feel so hard?
Somewhere in that midst of it all, a colleague I really respected said something that’s always stuck with me: A dark place can be either a burial or a planting.
When it feels like everything’s ending, something’s usually beginning too. And we each get to decide what we’re focusing on.
In this episode, you’ll hear how crisis-mode robs your energy and one 10‑minute habit that helps you get it back.
“Change” isn’t a phase for you. It’s a regular Tuesday.
The Reactive Trap Ops Execs Fall Into
And you’ve got agility in spades. But many ops leaders only call it up when they have to. That pace doesn’t leave you any space to practice. So ,when something unexpected hits, you’re stuck reacting instead of responding. And it’s not you—it’s the system.
I see you creating order from chaos daily. You’re fixing what’s breaking, lifting your team up. What a gift you provide every day. But that same wiring that makes you reliable and capable, can also keep you blind to what’s changing around you, and stuck reacting. It’s that little whisper: I’ll pivot when I’ve tried everything else.
What if you practiced on purpose? Like any muscle, agility grows through consistent reps.
One 10-Minute Habit to Build Real Agility
Try blocking just 10 minutes a day to look at your ops rhythm and ask yourself one question:
“Does what I’m doing still fit the new reality?”
Take status meetings for example. They’ve ‘worked’ forever, right? But demand has spiked, and remote work changed everything. Can you set up your team to prep ahead and push info to you? Maybe someone else can handle the recap. Or maybe you can even drop the meeting altogether for asynchronous option. I know someone who slashed more than 3 hours from his weekly calendar this way recently, and he said “Mondays feel human again!”
You don’t have to make huge changes. It’s just reps. Looking at one assumption or pattern per day. And if you miss a day? Don’t sweat it. Just pick it up again tomorrow.
If you build in flexibility while things are calm, you won’t have to scramble as much when it storms. You’re already ready for it. It’s harder for surprises to blindside you.
This can work about people, too. Years ago, I gave flowers to my newly promoted boss. Twenty minutes later, in a big team meeting—she mentioned that people who really know her give her plants.
That really stung. I mean—mostly I was just confused. I kept thinking, what did I miss? But it wasn’t about flowers or plants; it was my untested assumption that everyone enjoys flowers to celebrate big moments. Her world was different than mine.
From Burial to Planting: Reframing Change
And that’s part of agility, too. Not just how you handle things, and the ability to reframe them, but tuning into how what you’re doing lands with others.
I’ll leave you with this question: What’s one habit or routine that’s begging for you to ask, ‘Does this still fit?
And if that sense of always scrambling, never quite catching up, feels a little too familiar, episode 98 is for you. It’s about how ops execs move from busy and stuck to actually gaining traction again. You’ll find it at YourFutureRealized.com/98.
Remember, you can’t stop the chaos, but you can change the game — and hey, I’m always in your corner.