Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Pause Nobody Trained For
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Pause Nobody Trained For. Here we go. Imagine it's 2 14 in the morning when the pager goes off. Of course, pagers may be a thing of the past these days, but still. You get my drift. An engineering manager rolls over, grabs his phone, and sees the alert before he's even fully awake. The checkout service is down and it's been down for six minutes. Before he's out of bed, a second notification lands on top of the first. The CEO has already found the outage dashboard and dropped one line into the incident channel. What's happening and why didn't we catch this sooner? He can feel his thumbs up moving before his brain has caught up. Type something, type anything, make the red dot go away. There's a line that names exactly what's happening in that half second before he types. It's widely credited to Victor Frankl, who said, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. Frankel was a psychiatrist in Vienna before the Second World War. He survived four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and lost his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife in them. Out of that came a school of therapy he called logotherapy. Built on the idea that people can endure almost anything if they can find meaning in it. He wrote a short book about it, entitled Man's Search for Meaning, in nine days in 1946. The book does not dwell on what was done to him. It dwells on a narrower, stranger freedom he found even there. Nobody could fully control what he made of what was happening to him. That control was the last thing left and it was still his. Now bring that back to the incident channel at 214 in the morning. Nobody's comparing a bad outage to a concentration camp, of course. But the shape underneath is the one that Frankel was pointing at. Something happens. There's a jolt. And then before any decision gets made, there is a space, whether anyone notices it or not. Here's where this often gets misread. People hear there's a space between stimulus and response, and picture something calm. Take a breath, count to ten. Stay composed while the room burns. That's a relaxation technique wearing Frankel's name. He was not describing a way to feel less rattled. He was describing a fact about how choice actually works, whether you are rattled or perfectly calm. The space exists whether you use it or not. Many people just let it slam shut before they notice it opened. The sharper version of this is a habit, not a mood. Notice the exact moment an alert, a comment, or a hard question lands. Feel the pull toward the first reply that comes to mind. Then ask one plain question before sending anything. What does this moment actually need from me right now? Not what does it feel like it needs? That question is the whole space. It rarely takes longer than a few seconds. What it requires is remembering in the moment that the seconds are there to use. Now here's where a tool changes the picture and where it flatly does not. An AI tool can be watching that same dashboard. And can spot the anomaly, draft a status update, and list three likely root causes before the boss's coffee finishes brewing. It has no stimulus to react to, no story it is tempted to tell about what the outage means for its own reputation. That speed is genuinely useful. But deciding what that update should say to the CEO is still the manager's call to make. It might mean reassuring a nervous room. It might mean admitting plainly that the team does not know yet. Either way, That choice is built entirely inside the space Frankel described. Shrink that space to zero and you get a fast answer. Hold it open four seconds longer and you get the right one. No tool can hold it open on his behalf because holding it open is not a task to hand off. It is the job. So try this this week. Pick one moment where you usually respond on reflex, whether it's a sharp email, the interrupting comment in a meeting. The urge to defend yourself the second someone questions a decision. Before you respond, name the space, even just in your head. Ask what the moment actually calls for. Then answer from that, not from the jolt. So back to the incident channel. The outage still needs fixing. The CEO still deserves a real answer, not a stalling one. What's different is what happens in the four seconds before the manager starts typing. He's not reacting to a red dot on a dashboard anymore. He is choosing what a leader says when someone breaks in the middle of the night or something breaks in the middle of the night. That choice looks small from the outside, but it was the only part of the whole situation that was ever actually his to make.