It’s Friday afternoon. Your inbox looks like a battleground, your calendar is a collage of back-to-back calls, and the strategic plan you built last quarter already feels outdated. You’ve spent the week reacting, extinguishing fires, and juggling unexpected demands you didn’t plan for. You’ve been busy, but not necessarily productive. You’ve managed the chaos, but you haven’t had space to lead through it.
This is the trap many leaders find themselves in today. Our attention is consumed by the urgent, leaving almost no cognitive room for the deep thinking, creativity, and strategic foresight that leadership requires. Working harder isn’t the answer. Neither is downloading yet another tool.
Under time pressure and limited mental bandwidth, leaders tend to fall back on fast, intuitive shortcuts that erode decision quality in complex situations. What leaders need is a simple operating system reset: a weekly practice that converts disruption into insight and momentum.
From Extinguishing Fires to Using Their Heat
In nature, fire isn’t only destructive; it’s regenerative. Giant sequoias, for example, rely on the heat of a forest fire to release their seeds. Flames clear the underbrush, enrich the soil, and make way for new growth.
High-performing leaders work the same way. Instead of viewing disruption as something to resist, they learn to harness its heat. They recognize that crises, customer surprises, shifting priorities, and unexpected wins all contain valuable signals about how the world is changing and where opportunity sits. Some fast-moving organizations have formalized reflection into their operating rhythms. For example, Spotify’s engineering teams have publicly described the use of agile retrospectives to turn surprises into learning.
Taking time for a short weekly reset can help leaders capture those signals. Set aside 18 minutes at the end of each week to pause, asking yourself three deceptively simple questions and sitting with each for six minutes.
1. What must I clear away?
Every ecosystem needs deadwood cleared before new things can grow. Your work is no different.
Look back at your week and ask yourself:
- What assumption I held on Monday was proven wrong by Friday?
- What meeting, process, or habit is creating drag instead of value?
- Which “zombie project” is still consuming time or budget despite having no strategic future?
The goal here is subtraction. Leaders tend to underestimate how much cognitive clutter weighs them down. Clearing it ruthlessly creates room for better decisions and more ambitious ideas.
2. What did this week’s disruption teach me?
Once the underbrush is cleared, you can see what nutrients remain. Disruption is information. Your job is to extract meaning from it.
This is benefit-finding: the discipline of intentionally looking for insight in unexpected places.
Consider:
- What surprising customer comment, employee concern, or performance issue taught me something important?
- Where did our team get an unexpected win, and what were the conditions that enabled it?
- What new skill, workaround, or capability emerged that might be worth formalizing?
This step shifts you from reacting to events to learning from them in real time. It builds future intelligence, the ability to read signals and adapt ahead of the curve.
3. What is one bold move I can take?
Reflection without movement creates stagnation. Regeneration requires action.
Choose one consequential decision, not a long list:
- What is the single conversation that will unlock progress next week?
- What experiment is worth running?
- What important decision have I been avoiding that I will now make?
Choosing just one forces focus. It ensures you enter Monday intentionally. It’s a shift from managing the week to shaping it.
Lead the Future, One Week at a Time
Taking a weekly reset isn’t a productivity hack; it’s a leadership discipline that helps you step above the noise and recalibrate your direction.
In an era defined by constant change, the leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who avoid disruption. They’re the ones who know how to convert it into insight, energy, and action. They learn to use disruptions to leap forward.
This discipline becomes even more important in a world shaped by accelerating AI adoption, geopolitical volatility, climate-driven shocks, and continual shifts in customer expectations, as highlighted in recent global risk assessments from the World Economic Forum. Leaders who thrive build regenerative capacity, the ability to clear noise, extract meaning, and act decisively through practices like the weekly reflection tool. Research on adaptive leadership consistently shows that learning-oriented organizations are better at turning change into innovation. This 18-minute ritual is how you start. By clearing space, extracting meaning, and choosing one bold move each week, you reclaim your agency in a world that constantly pulls you into reaction.
Disruption isn’t going away. But with the right rhythm, you can stop being managed by it and start using it as fuel for your next breakthrough.
