In every live TV show I’ve ever hosted or produced, and later in VC and fintech comms, there’s one unwritten rule: someone has to stay calm long enough for everyone else to catch up.
This year, I was reminded of that lesson again in the most unglamorous setting possible: the ER on a Monday at 11 a.m., with my eight-year-old asking, “What if it’s broken? What if I can’t walk?”
A tibia fracture hides better than some corporate crises, but the leadership skill it demanded was the same one I use at work: Emotional triage.
The capacity to absorb shock without amplifying it.
To slow the moment before the facts arrive.
To narrate clearly when uncertainty wants to take the microphone.
As AI systems increasingly compress decision timelines across organizations, leaders are being tested not just on what they decide, but on how they help humans process change at machine speed, a gap McKinsey identifies as one of the biggest risks in large-scale AI adoption.
And if 2026 looks anything like the last twelve months, with AI changing workflows hourly and company-wide emails announcing restructuring before lunch, this may be the leadership differentiator that matters more than technical competence.
AI Will Automate Tasks. Leaders Will Still Need to Manage Spirals.
We often talk about AI in terms of efficiency, speed, automation and acceleration. What we talk about less is what happens to people emotionally when the world outruns their processing ability.
AI compresses operational time but humans still live on emotional time. This gap is widening as AI systems automate analysis, recommendations, and workflows faster than organizations can emotionally adapt. And in that gap, between what changes and how fast people can metabolize the change, leaders become translators of uncertainty.
In a year when entire industries are bracing for AI-driven restructuring, the leaders people trust most won’t be the ones fluent in every tool. They’ll be the ones who can take a collectively-held breath before the room reacts.
Not because they’re unbothered. But because they can metabolize shock without exporting it.
The Human Nervous System Wasn’t Designed for Constant Notifications
Uncertainty does something predictable to the human brain: it rushes to fill in the missing pieces, often with the darkest possible interpretation, a well-documented stress response under conditions of ambiguity.
AI tools don’t panic. Humans do. Humans don’t come with an “enter” button that snaps confidence into place on command.
This is why developing emotional triage becomes a professional skill. It interrupts the brain’s tendency to imagine worst-case scenarios, restores the gap between stimulus and response, and keeps people in problem-solving mode instead of imagination-doom mode.
Confidence doesn’t always precede action; often, action creates the confidence your mind can then follow. Just like I carried my son across a parking lot before either of us fully understood what the day would demand of us, leadership often requires movement before certainty.
You steady the room. You set the tone and confidence slowly catches up.
AI Doesn’t Care About Tone. Humans Do.
One of the biggest misconceptions about leadership is that calm is a personality trait. It’s not; it’s a communication discipline.
Emotional triage is emerging as a critical human capability in AI-enabled organizations, where leaders must translate algorithmic outputs into decisions people can actually absorb and act on. MIT Sloat describes this responsibility as choosing a “human path” for AI, where judgement, context and accountability remain firmly in human hands.
A leader practicing emotional triage asks entirely different questions: What is actually happening right now? What information is missing, and what can wait? How do I prevent a premature narrative from outrunning the facts? How do I keep the team anchored, not anxious?
These are signs AI can’t interpret because they require shared trust, embodied presence, and the micro-signals we transmit in crisis. Tone, trust, and context still belong to humans. Even the most advanced cognitive models can’t read a room the way a seasoned communicator does.
The Framework: Emotional Triage in Five Moves
This is the framework I use across live shows crises, startup pivots, wartime comms, and the 24/7 crash course of parenting:
- Slow the spiral.
Name the moment before the mind invents a worse one.
Pause. “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t.”
- Stabilize the narrative.
Uncertainty creates a vacuum. If leaders don’t fill it with clarity, worry will fill it with fiction.
A grounded sentence can be oxygen.
- Act proportionally.
No grand gestures.
Small, precise moves restore agency.
- Reframewithrealism.
Not optimism. Not denial.
Realism.
“This will be challenging, but we’ll go through it together.”
- Connect to past resilience.
Remind the team of a moment you’ve navigated before, how you pulled through, what worked, and what wisdom still applies.
Memory is one of the strongest antidotes to panic.
This is where resilience begins: not in the body, but in the frame.
Why This Matters More in 2026 Than It Did in 2020
AI will change more than workflows this year. It will change emotional baselines. We’re entering a world where information travels faster than emotional processing, decisions are made before teams fully understand them, automation outpaces adaptation and uncertainty becomes a workplace constant.
As organizations invest heavily in AI governance and model oversight, far less attention is paid to the human governance required when change arrives faster than certainty. AI will run faster, scale wider, and will detect patterns too complex for human cognition. But meaning, what the data implies, what’s ethical, what’s executable, still comes back to humans.
In that environment, the leader who can receive bad news without transmitting panic becomes disproportionately valuable.
They preserve clarity, maintain collaboration, and prevent talent drain. Leaders are now required to ensure psychological safety in the middle of volatility and keep the organization human in a machine-accelerated economy.
The Automated Future Can Only Be Regulated by Human Calm
I work in a sector where AI protects borders, financial systems, and people’s lives.
But even with cognitive AI scanning millions of transactions, a human analyst still has to decide what the data means.
A human has to make the ethical call.
A human has to interpret the pattern.
A human has to steady the room when regulation or geopolitics shift overnight.
Emotional triage is what keeps good decisions from collapsing under bad timing.
We’re Not Through Yet
My son hasn’t healed. We’re four weeks in. He has learned new skills, like getting to the bathroom alone, and hopping into the car but still needs help showering or simply managing a slippery floor.
Our risk landscape changed: A rainy day this month means staying home. Crutches don’t negotiate with wet tiles.
Transitions require new routines, open minds, and wider margins of patience. They require more communication, not less. Quick syncs. Frequent check-ins. Realistic expectations across global teams who might be experiencing a different cycle of uncertainty themselves.
Leadership is no different.
As he learns mobility on crutches, I’m learning mobility in ambiguity.
New patterns. Temporary constraints. Stronger inner dialogue. More deliberate communication.
This is the part no AI system can replicate: the human capacity to adjust, absorb, and advance, not in certainty, but in calm, deliberate motion.
