The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)

Maartje van Krieken | The Chaos Games Consulting
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

Scaling a business isn’t just about strategy—it’s about navigating chaos, making fast but sound decisions, and keeping teams aligned under pressure. The Business Emergency Room helps leaders, founders, and decision-makers sharpen their decision-making mechanics, master people dynamics, and build resilience in uncertain markets. Host Maartje van Krieken shares battle-tested frameworks to eliminate bottlenecks, avoid analysis paralysis, and turn turbulence into traction. Tune in weekly for real-world insights to lead with confidence and thrive in turmoil. For leaders facing: High-stakes decisions, VUCA market conditions, crisis management, and rapid business growth pains.

  1. Invisible in the Storm: Why Silence Damages Businesses

    3d ago

    Invisible in the Storm: Why Silence Damages Businesses

    When a business hits turbulence, the instinct to go quiet on marketing is nearly universal, and nearly always the wrong call. Adrienne Wilkerson, co-founder and CEO of Inc. 5000-recognized Beacon Media and Marketing, has watched this pattern repeat across industries. Companies treat marketing as optional until they need it urgently, and by then the damage is already done. The problem is timing. Marketing builds momentum over months, sometimes six to twelve before a meaningful return appears. Go dark during a crisis and you don't just pause progress, you erase it. A strategic pullback might make sense. Disappearing rarely does. Adrienne also reframes a common diagnostic mistake: high client churn isn't always a service problem. If messaging attracts the wrong people from the start, no amount of great delivery fixes the math. And with AI reshaping how people search and discover businesses, the old benchmarks no longer tell the full story. The real question is whether your brand is showing up where trust is actually being built. That question gets urgent when a business is under pressure. If leadership has no presence on LinkedIn before a crisis hits, someone else is already writing the narrative. And audiences right now aren't looking for polished content. They want something real. A candid iPhone video from a CEO carries more weight than a carefully managed campaign, because people are increasingly skeptical of anything that looks too easy to generate. The through line across all of it is consistency. Not volume, just regularity. A leader who shows up briefly and reliably has something to stand on when things get hard. One who never showed up has nothing. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Why Businesses Go Quiet During a Crisis and What It Costs Them 02:01 Why Marketing Is the Last Thing You Should Cut 06:15 How to Spot a Marketing Problem Before It Becomes a Business Problem 14:52 Client Retention, Feedback Loops, and the Marketing You Are Probably Ignoring 20:01 Narrative Control and Leadership Visibility on Social Media Connect with Adrienne Wilkerson: Connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn Visit Beacon Media + Marketing's Website As Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon Media + Marketing, Adrienne Wilkerson is driven by a passion for developing people and fostering a culture where innovation thrives. Today, she is a visionary leader who guides her team to find opportunity in every challenge, pushing creative boundaries to deliver impactful results. This approach has established Beacon, founded in 2001, as a respected national agency, renowned for its work in the mental and behavioral health sectors, and has earned it a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies for three consecutive years. A respected voice in the business community, Adrienne’s influence extends through her roles as a sought-after speaker, author, and mentor. Her love for a challenge has earned her numerous awards, including Woman of the Year from the National Association of Professional Women, Marketing Visionary of the Year from the American Marketing Association of Alaska, and a place in the Top 40 Under 40 by the Alaska Journal of Commerce. She is also a passionate coach, not just for her own team, but for emerging leaders across multiple industries and active on numerous boards. Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    33 min
  2. How Businesses Slowly Corner Themselves

    May 27

    How Businesses Slowly Corner Themselves

    Business crises rarely arrive without warning. They build slowly, through small compromises and delayed decisions, until one day all the cracks line up. Maartje revisits two real business emergencies from a prior episode and goes deeper on what actually caused them. The Mississippi liquor distribution breakdown is the centerpiece: a privatized state-run warehouse where the gap between what new owners expected and what they actually inherited never got properly addressed. Temporary fixes became permanent. Frustrations compounded. And when a planned inventory exercise expanded to include a belt repair and a full IT system changeover in the same window, there was no go/no-go discipline in place to catch the overreach before it became a serious problem. Underneath the operational failures was a people problem that's easy to miss. After a transition or acquisition, communication is almost always more dysfunctional than it appears from the outside. Legacy staff protect their relevance. New leadership asks questions in language that doesn't translate to the operational reality on the ground. Information gets filtered before it reaches the people who need it. None of that is malicious. All of it is costly. Change isn't the problem. Stacking major initiatives before you understand what you're already working with is. Business continuity planning, done well, exposes dependencies and trains your team to respond before the pressure is real. The organizations that handle crises well aren't the ones with the thickest binders. They're the ones that have actually talked through what happens when things break. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Why Business Emergencies Build Slowly 02:12 Case Studies: CDK and Mississippi Liquor Distribution 06:04 People Dynamics After an Acquisition 14:08 Scope Creep and Operational Risk 20:01 Business Continuity Planning That Actually Works Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    29 min
  3. Execution Risk: Can Your Team Handle Complexity?

    May 20

    Execution Risk: Can Your Team Handle Complexity?

    The biggest execution risk in your business right now is probably a person, not a process. Logan Yonavjak, co-founder and CEO of the Readiness Engine, has built her work around a premise most organizations quietly resist: that leadership capacity is measurable, and that most businesses are making high-stakes people decisions without actually measuring it. The gap she keeps finding is not between good leaders and bad ones. It is between the complexity a role demands and the complexity a person can actually hold. Credentials, track records, and warm referrals tell you what someone has done. They tell you almost nothing about whether that person will stay functional when things get genuinely hard. Two qualities sit at the center of her diagnostic framework. Coachability, defined not as compliance but as the ability to hold your own identity flexibly enough to see yourself as one variable inside a larger system. And emotional resilience, which has less to do with toughness and more to do with whether someone has a real, practiced toolkit for managing stress before it starts driving their decisions. The statistic worth pausing on: nearly half of all promotional hires don't survive their first 18 months. If execution keeps breaking down at that rate, the problem is not strategy. As AI reshapes how teams operate and who is being asked to manage what, the underlying question becomes harder to avoid. Do the people in your organization actually have the capacity to lead at the level the work now demands? If your honest answer is that you have no idea, that is itself a signal worth taking seriously. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Why Execution Risk Is a People Problem 02:54 Measuring Leadership Capacity Beyond Credentials 08:55 The Vital Signs of Organizational Health 14:55 How to Tell Growth Chaos from Structural Dysfunction 23:57 Decision-Making Under Pressure 26:56 Is Your Team Ready for AI? Connect with Logan Yonavjak: Connect with Logan on LinkedIn Visit The Founder Readiness Engine website Logan Yonavjak is Co-Founder & CEO of the Founder Readiness Engine, a leadership intelligence company measuring the hidden drivers of execution risk inside growing organizations. She has helped move hundreds of millions of institutional capital across climate and natural capital strategies and now focuses on building the Readiness Engine™ - a platform that transforms leadership potential from subjective judgment into measurable, predictive insight. Logan speaks and writes at the intersection of capital, leadership, and long-term value creation. Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    31 min
  4. Operational Overload: A Concentration Risk in Disguise

    May 13

    Operational Overload: A Concentration Risk in Disguise

    Operational overload is the quiet liability that turns brilliant leaders into bottlenecks and growing companies into fragile ones. Maartje van Krieken sits down with Adam Spector, founder and CEO of Chore, for a sharp conversation about what happens when too much of a business depends on too few people. From the outside, it can look like commitment. Inside the company, it often shows up as delayed decisions, strained leaders, missed follow-through, and systems that only work because someone is constantly holding them together. Adam brings the perspective of a four-time founder, angel investor, and operations partner for smaller enterprises. He makes the case that founders and senior leaders often spend too much time on work that does not belong with them. Payroll, back-office systems, lead generation, reporting, compliance, and other operational tasks may feel manageable in small pieces. But what is the real cost when the person who should be shaping the future keeps getting pulled into operational friction? Maartje and Adam reframe delegation as a structural decision rather than a personal productivity trick. Leaders still need to define the outcome, set the standard, and understand what good looks like. But if every important detail has to pass through one person, the business has built dependency instead of capacity. So the question becomes: what work are you still holding because you are good at it, even though the business would be stronger if someone else owned it? Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Operational Overload and Decision Bottlenecks 02:22 Entrepreneurial Excellence and Founder Focus 09:51 Why Operations Hold Every Business Together 11:53 How Founder Bottlenecks Break Business Growth 18:16 Delegation, Outsourcing, and Lean Company Growth 28:44 Strategic Focus and Founder Performance 31:19 How Strong Operations Prevent Business Emergencies Connect with Adam Spector: Visit Chore's Website adam@hirechore.com Connect with Adam on LinkedIn Listen to the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast Adam is a 4x founder, angel investor in over 200 startups (including 14 unicorns), and the Founder & CEO of Chore, an operations partner that handles HR, finance, compliance, and equity for startups. He previously held leadership roles at Twitter, Symantec, and multiple venture-backed companies as COO and CRO. He also hosts the Entrepreneurial Excellence podcast and invests through the Autopilot Fund. Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    35 min
  5. This Can Happen to You: Real-Time Business Triage

    May 6

    This Can Happen to You: Real-Time Business Triage

    When systems fail, supply chains stall, or customers are left waiting for answers, leaders need more than a fix. They need triage. Maartje van Krieken uses the CDK Global cyber incident and Mississippi’s liquor distribution breakdown to show how business emergencies often come from fragile systems, hidden dependencies, and small cracks that were easier to miss before everything stopped. The core question becomes simple and urgent: what still works? From there, leaders have to separate recovery from continuity. One team may be restoring the system, but someone still has to protect the business in real time. Who needs an update? What can still move? Where is the bottleneck? Who has the authority to make the next call? Maartje also gets honest about why crisis response feels so hard from the inside. People are stressed, customers are angry, and teams can get stuck defending past decisions instead of making the next one. This conversation is a sharp reminder that waiting for the full picture can cost you time, trust, and options. The real work is to find the signal, create a decision rhythm, and stop the damage from spreading before disruption becomes rupture. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Business Emergency Triage in Real Time 02:52 CDK Global Cyber Incident Case Study 05:49 Business Continuity During a System Outage 09:07 Crisis Communication and Customer Trust 12:13 Supply Chain Breakdown in Mississippi 17:49 Structural Bottlenecks and Business Risk 21:05 How to Prevent Future Business Ruptures Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    23 min
  6. Flatlining at Exit: When Your Business Isn’t Sellable

    Apr 29

    Flatlining at Exit: When Your Business Isn’t Sellable

    A business can look strong from the inside and still raise red flags when a buyer takes a closer look. Laurie Barkman joins Maartje van Krieken to talk about what makes a business transferable, valuable, and ready for transition. Laurie is the founder of Business Transition Sherpa, author of The Business Transition Handbook, a certified exit planner, an M&A advisor, and a former $100M CEO who led a company through a successful acquisition by a Fortune 50 company. Many owners wait until burnout, age, health, partner pressure, or market stress forces the conversation. By then, the business may run well day to day but still be fragile as an asset. What happens when customer relationships live mostly in the owner’s head? What if contracts are informal, leadership depends on one person, or key partners have never talked honestly about the future? Laurie breaks down the three forms of readiness every owner needs to consider: personal, financial, and business. For leaders who are not ready to sell today, this conversation still matters. The same work that makes a business more attractive to a buyer often makes it easier to run right now through better systems, stronger contracts, less owner dependence, and more clarity around risk, value, and future options. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 Understanding Business Sellability vs. Business Success 02:59 Why Business Owners Pursue Exits, Mergers, and Acquisitions 06:04 Personal Readiness and the Emotional Side of Business Transitions 09:14 Financial Readiness: What Is Your Business Really Worth? 15:02 What Makes a Business Attractive to Buyers? Connect with Laurie Barkman: Visit Laurie's website Connect with Laurie on LinkedIn Successor Assessment The Business Transition Handbook Laurie Barkman is a nationally recognized growth strategist, speaker, and CEO who helps engineering, architecture, and design services firm owners scale their companies with clarity and confidence. She is the founder of The Business Transition Sherpa®, author of The Business Transition Handbook, and host of the award-winning Succession Stories podcast. A Certified Exit Planner, M&A Advisor, and former $100M CEO who led a company through a successful acquisition by a Fortune 50, Laurie brings real-world leadership and transition expertise to every engagement. Today, she empowers AEC industry owners in the built environment to build scalable, self-sustaining businesses that grow without depending on them, creating more time, freedom, and lasting value. Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    33 min
  7. Decide or Drift: A High-Stakes Decision Protocol

    Apr 22

    Decide or Drift: A High-Stakes Decision Protocol

    When the pressure is real, the most dangerous move is no move at all. High stakes decision making sits at the center of this conversation and Maartje van Krieken tackles a problem many leaders know too well. Teams rarely freeze because they lack smart people or good intentions. They freeze because the stakes feel so high that delay starts to look safer than action. This episode speaks directly to decision paralysis in business and shows why waiting for certainty can cost more than a hard call made in real time for any company under strain. Maartje shares a practical business decision framework for leaders who are facing decision-making under pressure. She strips away the fantasy of perfect data and gets honest about making decisions with incomplete information when cash flow, market shifts, supplier risk, or leadership choices are on the line. Her approach is simple enough to use in the real world and sharp enough to help teams cut through noise, narrow the true choice, and focus on the few unknowns that matter most. What gives this conversation weight is its focus on movement. The goal is not to chase a flawless answer. The goal is to reduce risk fast enough to act with clarity and adjust as new facts emerge. That makes this a powerful episode on crisis decision making for founders, operators, and executives who feel stuck in long loops of meetings and analysis. If high stakes decision making is slowing your team down, this episode offers a smarter way to move forward with confidence and far less second guessing. Episode Breakdown: 00:01 High Stakes Decision Making and Why Businesses Freeze 02:20 Decision Paralysis in Business and the Cost of Delay 04:45 Decision Triage and How to Define the Real Business Decision 09:25 How to Build the Right Team for High Pressure Decisions 14:07 Narrowing the Best Options in High Stakes Decision Making 16:58 De-Risking Big Decisions With Better Data and AI 21:37 Short Decision Cycles That Improve Decision-Making Under Pressure 23:57 Triggers, Reversibility, and Course Correction in Crisis Decision Making 26:50 Supplier Risk Example for Fast Business Decision Making 29:05 Why Fast Action Beats Waiting for a Perfect Decision Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    31 min
  8. AI Won’t Replace Leaders; But It Will Expose Them

    Apr 15

    AI Won’t Replace Leaders; But It Will Expose Them

    When AI takes over the busywork, emotional intelligence becomes the job. What happens when competence is no longer measured by how much you can produce on your own? In this conversation, Maartje van Krieken and Dr. Bushra Khan get to a harder truth: as AI handles more of the output, leadership gets exposed. The real test becomes how well you think under pressure, how clearly you communicate, and whether people trust you when the stakes are high. That is what gives this discussion its weight. It speaks to the moment many leaders hit when expertise stops carrying the whole role and influence starts to matter more. Knowing the answer is one thing. Getting people to move with you through uncertainty is something else. Bushra makes the case that emotional intelligence is not a nice extra for people managers. It shapes how resilient teams are built and how sound decisions get made when pressure rises. If AI can help with speed and polish, what remains for leaders to own? Presence, judgment, and the ability to make people feel steady enough to do their best work. Episode Breakdown: 00:00 AI and Leadership: The Question Leaders Should Be Asking 05:50 Leading Through Change and Uncertainty 11:59 Leadership Skills That Matter More in the Age of AI 15:00 Building Trust and Psychological Safety at Work 18:07 Why Emotional Intelligence Is a Strategic Leadership Skill 21:07 How Great Leaders Build Influence Under Pressure Connect with Dr. Bushra Khan: Connect with Dr. Bushra on LinkedIn Leading with BK Website Dr. Bushra Khan, CEO of Leading with BK, helps leaders turn expertise into influence through her LEAD Intelligence Framework and high-energy, evidence-based approach. A professor in the University of Ottawa’s MBA program, Dr. Khan is trusted by organizations like Google and the Department of National Defence. Her work focuses on human-centered leadership, proving that in an AI-driven world, emotionally intelligent leaders don’t get replaced, they get amplified. Connect with Maartje van Krieken: Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website Visit The Business Emergency Room website Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

    33 min
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Scaling a business isn’t just about strategy—it’s about navigating chaos, making fast but sound decisions, and keeping teams aligned under pressure. The Business Emergency Room helps leaders, founders, and decision-makers sharpen their decision-making mechanics, master people dynamics, and build resilience in uncertain markets. Host Maartje van Krieken shares battle-tested frameworks to eliminate bottlenecks, avoid analysis paralysis, and turn turbulence into traction. Tune in weekly for real-world insights to lead with confidence and thrive in turmoil. For leaders facing: High-stakes decisions, VUCA market conditions, crisis management, and rapid business growth pains.

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