A Wicked Mess: A Guide To Leading Through Chaos

In this episode of No Jerks Allowed: Real Talk on Leadership, Stephanie Licata talks with leadership advisor and organizational designer Chelsea Lewis about how leaders can navigate “wicked messes,” complex challenges with no clear definition, easy answer, or clean finish line.

Together, they explore why traditional top-down leadership often falls short in chaos, how capable leaders can become the unofficial 911 department, and why real communication requires more than email. This conversation offers practical insight for leaders trying to create clarity, stability, and trust when the path forward is anything but simple.

Host: Stephanie Licata, M.A. A.C.C. | Learning & Leadership Consultant 

Contact: stephanie@stephanielicata.com

Schedule a Call with Stephanie

LinkedIn | Website 

Guest: Chelsea Lewis, PMP | Founder & Principal Advisor at Loomrise Advisory

LinkedIn | Schedule a Call With Chelsea

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

So, welcome to No Jerks Allowed. Today's episode is called A Wicked Mess: A Guide to Leading Through Chaos. So, today's episode is really about what happens when leaders really are facing super complex challenges. These challenges could be external, things that are happening in the outside world. They could be internal, maybe an internal organizational challenge, and there's just no clear solution. What does effective leadership look like? What support does that organization need? And so those problems sometimes just seem so overwhelming and so just unbearable. And so we're going to define what a wicked mess is. How should effective leaders handle it? How do we make sure that the wrong leaders aren't in charge to communicate how we navigate this wicked mess? And what leadership behaviors and organizational support are really necessary to navigate some of that uncertainty. So I have invited a very special guest, leadership advisor and organizational designer Chelsea Lewis to join me on the podcast today. So, Chelsea, will you join me? Welcome to the hello, Stephanie. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I'm so glad you're here. And you and I also connected in Troop HR. And you may hear many of my podcast listeners may hear me mention Troop HR a lot. It's a wonderful community of HR leaders, some internal, some external. And some of us are leading, partnering with HR leaders to help them navigate wicked messes. So, Chelsea, uh tell us a little bit about you. Tell everyone what you do, who you serve, and then your sort of version of how you define what a wicked mess is.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Yeah, thank you. So, hi everyone. My name is Chelsea Lewis. I am a leadership advisor and organizational designer, and I help startups and mid-sized companies navigate complex challenges. I have advised Fortune 50 and Private 50 organizations, and I'm happy to be here.

unknown 2:15

Yes. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

So uh so tell us. So, what is that wicked mess? You kind of brought this topic to me. So tell us a little bit about what how do you define a wicked?

SPEAKER_00 2:25

Yeah, so it's really interesting because the concept of a wicked problem actually comes from urban planning, which is there's a lot of overlap between urban planning and org design, but that's probably for a different podcast. Okay. A wicked problem is one that has no clear definition, no correct answer, and no finish line. And so it requires a completely different leadership mindset than traditional leadership training has prepared folks for, right? So these aren't problems that leaders can solve individually. It requires collective action from the leaders within the organization. And I want to take a moment for all the leaders who are listening. It is really messy out there. It is not your fault that things are super crazy. A wicked mess is not the result of one individual decision that one individual leader makes. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

And so what are the signs? Like, how would a leader know, or how would a group of a leadership team know, hey, we have a wicked mess on our hands? What are some of the telltale signs?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Yeah, so some of the signs, there's four telltale signs. Nobody agrees what the problem actually is. And I think this is a characteristic of a wicked problem. So you can't even agree in the leadership room what the problem actually is. And another sign is that leaders struggle to take accountability of decisions because they don't necessarily have the confidence to own them. Because if you can't specifically name the problem, it is uncomfortable to take ownership of a particular decision. So it's kind of a a passing of decisions, and decisions struggle to be made. And the most capable people go quiet. And this is a really important one. So when you have the most capable people in your organization go quiet and stop providing feedback, it's not an indication that there is harmony within the organization. It's that folks are starting to feel like their input doesn't matter. And so that's really important. And then the the fourth one that I just want to highlight is every possible solution likely creates a new problem. And so I think that that's really important. There's this connection between, okay, well, if I solve for culture, for example, how does that impact AI tech adoption?

SPEAKER_02 5:01

And so what are senior teams often miss if they're not facing the reality? Like what are it sounds like no matter what they do, like they're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't, no matter what direction they head in, they're hit, they're face, they're hitting a wall. So what are they missing? What do they need to stop and do?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Yeah. So a a couple of things to think about here. And it's really focused on closing the gap of delay. So there really is a cost of delaying action and delaying decision making. So a wicked mess, like we're talking about, it can't necessarily be solved in a single solution, but it can be tamed. I want leaders to walk away feeling optimistic that through collective action, it can be tamed and it can be managed. But I think that that cost of delay and silence within the organization really erodes trust fast. And so it's important for leaders to understand that their credibility does not erode when they don't have all of the answers. And it's important to show up with that type of vulnerability. And the last thing that I'll say about that is messaging alone cannot stabilize the org. And Stephanie, I know you relate to this in terms of how communication flows within an organization, but messaging alone cannot stabilize an organization. And I find that a lot of leaders lean very heavily on emails and communication to do the heavy lifting where conversations really should be had. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

So this will probably come out in many of my podcasts. So many of my episodes. So I will I'll just insert it here. Especially if you're in a wicked mess. But even if you're not in a wicked mess, I will say this. I am not quoting anybody else. I'm quoting myself. Email is for notification, not communication. So I said this once spontaneously in the middle of a training. I did not read it anywhere. I did not, it's not from a meme. Somebody will probably meme it from somewhere and claim it was theirs, but I said it. Email is for documentation after the fact or preparation before the fact. So it's here's the agenda for the meeting. Here's the documentation of our conversation. Here's the slide deck for your review. It is not for project management, it is not for conflict management, it is not for conversation, uh, it is not for any of those things. It is especially not for navigating change, navigating a wicked mess. It's not for any of those things, especially if it is impacting a large group of people. Now, you may, those people that are out there that are in large organizations, they may say, well, we can't possibly get everybody together. It's 2026. You can get everybody on an actual call. It's possible. And you can record it for anybody that can't be there. And it is much more powerful to communicate things, even live virtually, yeah, than to send an email because you can control the narrative a little bit more when everybody's present. And I get that maybe it's if it's 80% of people, that's fine. There 20% may not be there, but you need to be able to have as many people hearing the message at the same time than getting emails boop, boop, boop, all over all different time zones, all of those things.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

And to be able to have a container for that. So I can't even stress it enough. The overuse of email is one of the biggest cancers of organizations and not just email, electronic communication, because I want to add in there, Microsoft Teams is also not acceptable. Slack is not acceptable. Those are not conversations, even though you think it is because it's instantaneous. It's not communication. Commune is to come together, and electronic communication does not bring people together. So that yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Plus, plus a hundred for dealing with a wicked mess of not using email as the sole source to communicate complex, large-scale information. Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Especially if and you may say, Oh, we can't get all those people, they're gonna have all these questions. Yes, they may have questions, and you need to be really prepared to answer them.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it might be helpful for folks listening if we give a specific example. Sure. To make it a little bit more to make it a little bit more tangible. So this is what I've seen at a lot of organizations over the past couple of years. And some folks might relate to this. So organizations in this hypothetical had a return to office mandate in order to improve culture and to commune. But a lot of their top talent probably created a remote-oriented life. So top talent starts to leave or look for opportunity outside of the organization. In order to close that productivity gap, organizations are fast tracking AI and fast tracking that technology in order to increase productivity with that particular headcount. But the folks who are remaining are distrustful potentially of kind of this fast tracking of AI. And the big question of is AI gonna replace my job? That fear is very, very real and it is impacting a lot of AI initiatives. So the very thing that was supposed to improve culture, the return to office, could be the very thing that's actually eroding trust and impacting negatively the culture within the organization. So is it culture? Is it tech adoption? Is it part of trust within the organization? Is it leadership capability? Which one do you fix? And then add on all the socioeconomic, right? Add on all of those layers that leaderships are or leaders are dealing with today.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

Yeah. And we know all the research, by the way, about productivity. It does not have anything to do with being in the office. You can slack off in the office as much as you can slack off anywhere else. I get I've been working from home since 2013, and I will tell you, I have never worked harder in my entire life. When I was working in offices, is when it was so easy for me to get distracted. Now, different personality types have, you know, different situations, but it is it's been proven over and over and over again. Being in the office has nothing to do with being productive. But yes, it's all it's plus one. Okay. So now I know you talked about some of the capable people being quiet, but we do know that it also is a trauma response. If you listen to a previous episode, we talked about the trauma-informed workplace. A trauma response is people pleasing and fixing. And so people who have this trauma response during a wicked mess will tend to be your most capable people who are going to come in and try to solve the wicked mess. So when we were speaking and preparing for this episode, I mentioned something else that I also didn't take from somewhere else. Like sometimes people actually say things themselves. The curse of the capable. The curse of the capable. I didn't read this somewhere. I actually just said it. The curse of the capable. Uh, and the curse of the capable actually came from something my father said to me once. So I was having a rough time one after something had it was a bad breakup. Okay, people. It was a long time ago. And I had looked, this is I was young, and I was like calling work. And my dad said, I said, Dad, you know, I'm only at 50%, you know, and my dad was like, Are you serious? He's like, 50% of Stephanie Lakata is still 100%. Yes. More than somebody else's 100%, right? So I was like, oh God, I'm like cursed with being more capable. Get cursed with being capable. And so uh, what is in this in the case of a wicked mess? How could the curse of the capable show up where someone becomes the sort of default container for everyone else's chaos?

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

I love the language around curse of the capable. I feel like it it gives shape to something that we've all experienced within our respective organizations over our careers. And it is so true. But tactically, how it shows up is oftentimes the very capable leader, the always fine leader, is the one who is putting out fires across functions when those decisions should be resting with function leaders. But they are the people who get things done within their organization. They are the people who have the relationship capital and maybe they've been there for a while and they know how to navigate their organization. And so it's interesting because the always find leader is usually the person who gets the fewest resources because they look okay. They look okay. They don't look like they're struggling. And I think that that, you know, all of that internal struggle is typically what we see with a leader who is cursed with capability.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

So what boundaries, let's get try to help people, because I'm sure there's a lot of capable people listening right now. What boundaries or practices can really help capable leaders stop becoming the unofficial 911 department for their organization?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, I'll talk about a very practical, practical tip that I've used in org design to help leaders in this case. And it's to create shared working agreements with other functions. And I know that is very tactical, but I have observed that this works. And so don't wait. If you are a part of the C-suite wonderful, if you're reporting to the C-suite wonderful middle middle managers, you can do this with the people that you work most closely with. And over time, it's kind of this constant negotiation of what is in scope and out of scope for your team. You can create a cadence where you regularly revisit the shared agreement with those respective functions that you work with the most, right? So you really are designing your operating model that keeps your team well and healthy and meeting deadlines as well as other functions within the organization.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

So this might look like having some collaborative meetings with some of these function leaders and say what can we agree to? What are some norms we're going to agree to as at least for the near term?

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Yes. Yep, for the near term. And you can decide on the cadence to revisit that with the other leaders within your organization. Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Like let's try this for 90 days, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:34

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

And I think just so I understand, especially if you're in this kind of mess, it sounds like making sort of these short-term goals helps because you have to continually reevaluate how things are going. Absolutely. Not just for the capable, but for all leaders, right? What let's if we could name like maybe two or three key leadership behaviors that actually really are help and effective in navigating wicked messes, what really works when we don't have total control? Because like you said in the beginning, these kinds of situations, whether they're internal or external, or not. And just I'll give an example. I was recently helped, I was recently working on a project where it was a labor strike. And I was working with a firm who was supporting an organization who had a number of employees go on strike. And I was working with that organization to prepare the leaders who hadn't gone on strike for the people that were coming back, and then helping those people come back and reintegrate. And that was an extremely highly emotionally charged situation, right? And you had to exhibit certain leadership behaviors to really navigate that in that way, right? So, what are some of those leadership behaviors that actually help in that kind of situation?

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Yeah, that's a great question. I like to think of the four C's. So context first, name that it's a wicked mess. Again, it doesn't impact your authority. It creates trust within your organization. So say that it's complex out loud to your team and across your organization. And the second one here is candor over comfort. And so that kind of builds upon the first one here, but making sure that you say what you know, say what you don't know, and what you're doing about it and how you're going to arrive to the decisions that you need to make through the wicked mess. Again, not to fundamentally solve every part of the mess, but to tame it and manage it and make it possible for your organization to still move forward despite some of the chaos. And the third one is containment. So control what you can. And this is something we we were chatting about too. You can still control the decisions that you make within your team. You can still control your near-term priorities, right? So even in a wicked mess, ground in what is stable. There are still things that are stable. What are the priorities for that week, for that month, for that quarter?

SPEAKER_02 18:09

And so how do you then also invite, because you don't want to do a lot of like closed door back room kind of stuff. It sounds like you need to be communicating a lot. You need to, you know, kind of have this sort of like you said, be, you know, guess candor. You need to involve sort of some some also some feedback. How do you invite dissent without inviting people to critically think in a way that doesn't create conflict?

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

It's a really good question.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

It's a really, really good question. So the uh the last piece was really focused on cadence. So commit to a cadence, even if you don't have all of the information. Like updates and things like that. Exactly. I love the question around dissent because I think that this is really important around wicked messes. They require conflicting views so that you can have the whole picture. So some things when thinking about inviting dissent into your organization is make it structural, not personal. And an example of that is when you are discussing an idea with colleagues, oftentimes leaders will ask the question, does anyone disagree? A better question would be what could go wrong? What is the strongest argument against this idea? Right. So it separates the exactly separates the person from the idea so that that individual feels more comfortable. Okay, I have a really good idea about how this could potentially go wrong. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:41

Like let's test this out. Test my thinking. Testing. I want to test my thinking. And so I'm not attached to this. So you're showing I'm not attached to this. You could actually say that. I've often said that in my letters. I'm not attached to this idea. What do you think? What do you, what is your, what could go, like I said, what could go wrong? It's a pre-mortem. We often do postmortems, we don't do pre-mortems. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

More pre-mortems. That is a big takeaway from this episode. More pre-mortems. They I have applied them with a lot of my clients, and they they are great for so many reasons, including building early trust with your team that dissent is not only okay, but invited when there are risks. And to further answer your question, the leaders who are most successful in navigating through a wicked mess tend to strengthen their lateral relationships and not just vertical ones. And we're kind of touching onto another question, but because what happens when leaders are in silos is they just have that local view of the problem where if they look across other functions may be experiencing the same and they may be able to get more information to help their team and navigate those networks more. Navigate those networks more, yes. And also when organizations try or sorry, when leaders try to solve this in silos, what ends up happening is they'll implement a solution that might impact another team downstream and create more of a mess for that team. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

Yeah. So you don't, yeah, you don't want to do anything. I understand. So let me just ask because sometimes leaders, either in an individual team or a senior level, senior level, they'll say, Oh, we don't want to say too much. We don't want people to panic. What how do how does a team how does do leaders help teams face reality without creating panic? Because one of the things that I don't enjoy, and we see this a lot. I see this a lot with school leadership, where school leadership will tell us things, like district leadership will tell us things very last minute. Yeah. It's like you are impacting so many people when you tell us. Things last minute. You are impacting working parents, kids, like so many people. And it is just, it creates so much mess. And it's like if you actually just sat back, just like thought about the impact of your communications and your changes, you would have much more, you know, much more cooperation, right? So how do how does the leaders really avoid panic but still communicate responsibly and help people face the reality of certain situations?

SPEAKER_00 22:28

Yes. I don't know if the leaders listening are gonna like this answer, but invite people into the problem. And that does require vulnerability. So it's the concept of go slow to go fast. You need to acquire as much information as possible. And in order to do that, you need to invite people into the problem who are going to be impacted, right? I think there's there's a lot of organizations that will roll out a re-org email and you read it, and you're like, did they talk to anybody? Did they talk to anybody, you know, before they sent this email?

SPEAKER_02 23:08

And of course they likely did, but I say that about almost half the communication. Sometimes I'm like, do people not know that Chat PPT exists? Because I sometimes, I sometimes, even before I send anything to a family member, I was like, I'm writing this to a potential narcissist. Could you make this softer?

unknown 23:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

I'm just like, it's like unbelievable, right? I'm like, do people not really like they're not just even leveraging the free versions of this stuff?

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Exactly. Exactly. We've all had that experience. We've all had that experience. So I think, and this is something we talked about earlier, but is to name the uncertainty, which maybe is very obvious, is an obvious action, but there's something disarming about we understand that we don't have all of the answers. Here are the decisions that are in our backlog that we still don't have answers to. And here's what we're doing to get to those answers by when. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

And so, and this is where we get to needing outside support. So, as I shared, you know, the project that I was working on just recently, where I was part of an external firm who was supporting this organization with this labor strike, they said, We need help. We can't do this on our own. And they realized that they needed a nutrition third party to help them navigate this pretty wicked mess. What should an organization provide as a baseline when leaders are navigating wicked messes in terms of training and development? Um, what what support could they provide from an external perspective? Because it's also very hard to expect an internal sometimes initiative because they're in the mess. So it uh and it was it would have been impossible for these people to try to navigate it without external people who were not in the middle of it seeing it, right? So, what should what could be provided as a baseline?

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Yeah. So from an external perspective, I would of course recommend coaching. It allows leaders to see a problem from multiple points of view, which is essential for navigating it and taming a wicked mess. And I would also invite the organization to look at their middle manager leader training program because a lot of the corporate leadership models out there are still based on top-down leadership and transactional leadership. And that does not work in solved navigating a wicked mess, right? It really needs to be collaborative. And it it is interesting because middle managers are often the most squeezed in a wicked mess because they're in a really interesting and difficult position of having accountability but limited authority to make decisions. So they they often get squeezed and need the most support through a wicked mess.

SPEAKER_02 26:05

And how can that coaching or training really change the game in navigating these complex problems and environments? How can it empower these leaders at every level and and potentially the teams of these leaders to navigate these issues or at least mitigate some of the stress and the challenges?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Yeah. I think the biggest shift is around mindset that I think is very important. And it is this shift from the traditional perspective that leaders need to have the right answers. And there is one right answer. That is not the case in many of the situations that leaders are facing today. So beyond tangible and tactical skills around decision making and how to potentially structure your team to support a wicked mask, how to prioritize, the number one call out really is that leadership philosophy around not necessarily needing to have one right answer because it doesn't exist in a lot of situations that we're navigating today.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

So let's talk a little bit about internal communications. I already kind of jumped on and shared my email philosophy. So what is, I'm not saying never email, right? Again, email could be we're having this meeting, we're having this all hand meeting at this time. We're having several. If you're a large matrix organization, we're having several gatherings, register for the one that works for you here. I understand people are different time zones. I understand you have international organizations. You don't have to have long meetings either. You could have 30-minute quick announcements, 30-minute updates for people. You could record them, you could have several instances. You know, it's not that everybody has to, you know, be at the same time, right? Be there at the same time. When we know that email is not the proper place to introduce new ideas, new changes, new systems, new processes. If you don't want to have everybody, the entire company, fine, have a certain group of leaders and empower them to then message to their teams. That's fine. What communication pattern really have you seen be effective to help instead of mass emails to the whole company or a video from this? Nobody wants a video from the CEO. Stop, stop the insanity. If anybody remembers Susan Powder, I know me with my Gen X strawberry shortcake cup here.

SPEAKER_00 28:24

Incredible.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

Stop the insanity, just stop.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

But that's the shift. That is exactly the shift, and that's exactly why training is so important and coaching for executives because that stoic CEO is it's so departed from what is actually going on in organization. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

Yes, yes, yes. So what what what what other communication patterns work better? What have you seen?

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Yeah, yeah. I have seen, and we're going back to a classic. Again, this this might not be the revolutionary take that that folks are looking for, but I have seen cascading communications work really well in organizations that plan it appropriately. Like meeting with levels of leaders. Meeting with levels of leaders. And I still think it has utility in a wicked mess. Where organizations typically go wrong in the cascade is that middle managers are taking on the brunt of communicating difficult information without actually having that foundation of information from the C-suite. So I have seen that middle managers are kind of fumbling through, you know, giving an update with very little information from the C-suite. So all of that to say, as long as you your middle managers have all of the information that they need in order to communicate properly to the rest of their respective teams, cascading can be successful. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 29:55

Yeah. And and the in-person presence really helps. Like when I was working on this project, I think one of the most thing that really impressed me was, you know, the senior HR leader really hands-on in person was there to be with people. And that really impressed me. Um and his team was there and they brought in people personally and they were present during these in-person trainings. He was there answering questions, like taking, you know, you really have to be present, right? And that um that was really impressive to me. And I think that people respond to that when they feel like a person is there.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Yes, to answer their questions. I I totally agree. I totally agree.

SPEAKER_02 30:37

And this person had 200 people he was talking to, like it wasn't like live in person, not virtual, right? So this was really impressive to me. This was a true leader, and this was a very, you know, high-stakes situation that he was in. It was a wicked mess. And he was a true leadership, you know, true like compassion and non-reactive, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

So yeah. And I I would recommend that if it's possible for your organization to have an in-person gathering to give an update about a wicked mess or to share potentially difficult news. I think that in-person connection you're describing, Stephanie, is so important. But the reality is that a lot of organizations are fully remote and dispersed and need to be really intentional about that QA space. Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

So if there's a leader listening, no matter what level they are, they might be middle manager, they might be SVP, they might be in the C-suite. What's one move? And they're in the middle of a wicked mess, whether it's again internal, external, short staffed, you know, merger, you know, they're dealing with a something external that's impacting their industry and they're, you know, there's some kind of chaos happening. What's one move a leader who's listening can make this week to create stability inside?

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Yes. I would love to offer two. So map the mess. I think that is my big takeaway is to map the mess because there are a lot of leaders where all of these problems are probably floating around in your brain. Get it out of their head. Get it out of your head, write it down, have we can talk very tactically, have a session with your team next week where you sit down and you say, things are really uncertain right now. We're dealing with many, probably multiple wicked messes. Let's map out and brain dump all of the problems and risks that we are potentially seeing, right? That'll give a clearer picture. And it might give a localized picture. So I would recommend sharing that with the other functional leaders that you work most closely with. Let's compare our notes. Let's compare our notes. So I would recommend this exercise across different functions. And then the second one is set one boundary if you are a leader who's cursed with capability. And you probably already know what that boundary needs to be based on your own working style. So I would offer that boundary that kind of keeps slipping for you within your organization. Put it back up and let people know.

SPEAKER_02 33:16

So capable are curse of the capable are people pleasers. You know, think about what you want to stop doing. It could be it just want to float some out there. It could be you're gonna put close your laptop at a certain time. It could be you're just gonna not work on the weekends. A couple of things. Let's just speak globally. What is one thing organizations could stop doing right now if they're in the middle of a wicked mess? This is something they could stop doing right now. It's a good question. Besides not using email to convince this is gonna be a cheeky one.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

So, but I I love No Jerks Allowed. I think it's a very honest podcast. Stop pretending like it has one solution.

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Mmm, that's good. There's one answer. There's not, I always say there's not one answer under a rock hidden somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Exactly. And there's no perfect answer, there's no correct answer. Work collaboratively with your leadership team and you will you'll get through it.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

And you know, there's a I'm a very practical person. I always say I'm an optimist realist. My glass is half full, it's half full with wine. But uh, and I'm not a big like, like I I believe and I I I support the people who believe in all like the manifesting, right? I just am a very I'm like a doer. But there is a when I was reading about some manifesting, they would say, if you don't have one of the books I read said, if you don't have something yet, like if it's a relationship or whatever, you say, I'm in the process of finding my perfect relationship. You don't say, Oh, I haven't met anybody yet. You say, I'm in the process of finding my perfect relationship. So that is something that you could say, look, we're in the process of navigating this. We're in the process of navigating many different solutions that will ultimately patchwork together to get us where we need to go. We're in the process. Like we are, we're in the mess. We're in the process.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

In the mess.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

Don't say we're gonna solve this, we're gonna find the solution, we're gonna magically do this. Like we're in the process of navigating this. That's where we are. Exactly. Right? So love it. There you go. So, Chelsea, tell us where everybody can find you. I will be putting Chelsea's LinkedIn uh profile, your website, anybody, anything else you want to tell us about where people can find you or anything that you're up to that you want to share about.

SPEAKER_00 35:26

Yeah, thank you. You can find me on LinkedIn. So, Chelsea Lewis, we will link to it. Thank you, Stephanie. My coaching and advisory practice is called Loom Rise Advisory Services. And I've been really enjoying coaching executive leaders who are navigating wicked messes. So hope hoping to do more of that.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

Well, we will link to your website as well. So if you are a leader that has a wicked mess, please contact Chelsea. She will navigate you out of it, help you navigate yourself out of it, but not with one solution, with many. Well, Chelsea, thank you so much for stopping by. No jerks allowed today. Uh, we really appreciate you uh coming by and sharing your perspective, your wisdom. Uh, I will see you in Troop HR and uh thanks so much. Have a great rest of your day. Bye, everybody.