Most people have felt the moment when a meeting shifts. A comment lands differently than expected, someone pauses longer than usual, or the conversation suddenly moves on.
Nothing obvious has gone wrong, but the dynamic in the room changes, and people begin responding to that shift rather than to the issue on the agenda.
Teams rarely fall out of alignment because they forget the plan. More often, they drift because people stop interpreting the plan, and each other, in the same way. Tone, silence, and urgency begin to carry meanings that weren’t intended, and those interpretations shape how the work moves forward.
Tammy Arseneau sees this pattern constantly.
As the founder of Cortical Consulting & Coaching, she is often the person executives call when a change management plan stalls. The instinct is often to look for something new.
“What if the missing link in leadership isn’t that other model or framework,” she asked at an event she hosted in Calgary last year. “What if it’s just about understanding ourselves better in those moments of stress?”
It’s a question that shifts the focus away from the plan itself and toward the human system responsible for carrying it out.
Under those conditions, people begin responding to their interpretation of events rather than the events themselves.
How strain changes perception
We like to believe we are objective observers of our workplace, because we think we see data and make rational choices.
But Dr. Sarah Hewitt disagrees.
Hewitt is a neuroscientist who has spent years studying how the brain processes information. She explains that the brain is not a camera that records reality. Instead, it makes a lot of guesses.
“Your brain kind of acts like a kind of predictive model,” she said at the event.
It takes in millions of data points and compares them to your past experiences to guess what will happen next. Most of the time, this works well. But when we face uncertainty, the brain struggles to find a match and that gap creates a stress response.
Research from psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously described this as the shift between “System 1” and “System 2” thinking. When we are calm, we can engage in slow, reflective thought. When under a higher cognitive load, the brain forces us into shortcuts.
But when we do that, we lose the ability to see the whole picture.
“You end up with a sort of tunnel vision,” said Hewitt, where decision-making moves away from reflection and toward more reactive responses.
This biological tunnel vision is dangerous for leaders. It means you are physically incapable of processing nuance. You stop asking questions. You stop verifying assumptions. You just react.
In a boardroom, this looks like a leader shutting down debate because they worry it’s creating too much conflict, or a manager interpreting a clarifying question as insubordination. The brain is trying to simplify the world to keep you safe.
But in a complex business environment, that simplification can create chaos.
Small signals and massive misreads
This reactivity happens in your brain, but it can spill out into the rest of the room, too.
Dr. Araba Chintoh is a psychiatrist and researcher who works with people navigating severe mental health challenges. She understands that our internal state leaks out in ways we can’t control.
We think we are masking our tension and projecting confidence, but our biology betrays us.
“That’s your hypothalamus going, your pituitary going, the hormones going, hitting to your kidney, adrenaline coming out, cortisol going out,” said Chintoh. “And your body just needs a moment to be like, ‘Where am I?’”
When a leader is in that state, the team often feels it. People are highly attuned to subtle signals in others, especially in situations that feel uncertain. When tension rises at the top, it tends to ripple outward.
Chintoh admits that even with all her training, she is subject to the same biological laws as everyone else.
“I walk into every room thinking I own it. But sometimes I don’t,” said Chintoh. “Sometimes I am under stress, sometimes I am fearful or scared or snappy.”
Those small signals (the snap, the fear, the hesitation) act as instructions to the team.
This dynamic is well documented in high-stakes environments. NASA studies on cockpit communication have shown that accidents often happen not because of technical failure, but because the crew stops communicating effectively under pressure. A co-pilot notices a problem but feels the captain’s tension and stays quiet. The captain is focused on a warning light and misses a verbal cue.
The signal gets lost and the interpretation drifts.
The stakes are different in the corporate world, but the mechanism is the same.
If a leader sends a short email because they are rushing to the airport, the team can read the brevity as anger. They spend the next three days building slide decks to defend their work against a threat that doesn’t even exist.
The work hasn’t changed, but the interpretation of the work may have shifted entirely.
How meaning fractures over time
The problem gets harder because no two people on a team react to that strain in the same way.
Dr. Leah Mayo is a neuroscientist who studies how different interventions affect the brain. She notes that context changes everything. You can give a brain a tool for plasticity, but the environment determines how that tool is used.
“That period of plasticity can respond to either positive or negative context,” said Mayo. “If you’re in a bad context, that can… shift those behaviours in that direction.”
Under high cognitive load, a team of 10 people will likely fracture into 10 different versions of reality. One person responds to the pressure by working harder. Another shuts down. A third becomes aggressive.
In research on organisational behaviour, the term “drift” refers to the gradual gap that can open between how work is supposed to get done and how it really plays out in practice. A recent organisational analysis describes drift as the ongoing difference between intended task execution and reality, a phenomenon that can accumulate and weaken shared understanding over time.
This is where misreads stop being momentary and start becoming structural.
Over weeks and months, those small variances can compound into a pattern where people are using the same words but no longer reading them the same way.
When leaders fail to catch this, they often double down, adding more meetings, demanding more reports, and trying to force a structure that might not be working.
Interrupting the misread
The solution requires leaders to stop managing the work for a moment and start paying attention to the nervous system of the team.
It starts with the basics. It sounds like advice you’ve heard a thousand times, but Hewitt points out that you can’t out-think a tired brain.
“I need to go work out and I need to take a nap,” said Hewitt. “It sounds like I’m a toddler sometimes, because those are the things that actually do help.”
Once the physiology is managed, leaders need to engage what Hewitt calls metacognitive strategies. It’s the ability to create a bit of distance between a reaction and a response.
“Taking a step back and being able to look at your situation with a little bit of distance… can be really helpful,” she said.
Leaders can build this into their team routines. When a meeting feels tense, a leader can stop and ask the room what they are hearing. I just shared that update and the room got quiet. What’s the story we’re telling ourselves about that news?
That moment of checking for alignment often reveals where understanding has already started to slip. It requires vulnerability and admitting that you might be misreading the signals. Mostly, it requires accepting that this is normal.
We tend to view miscommunication and tense reactions as dysfunction. We sometimes think a good team is one that never misreads a signal, but that’s just biologically impossible.
A good team catches the drift early. They know that when the pressure goes up, their radar gets jammed. They stop assuming they know what the silence means, and instead, they ask.
Clarity is a collective act
We are living in an era where timelines compress quickly, information arrives unevenly, and decisions carry visible consequences. And it’s not likely those conditions will be going away any time soon.
Research and recent leadership analysis have shown that instability is no longer a temporary condition to manage around, but the environment leaders need to operate in. If we wait for the world to calm down before we fix our communication, we’ll be waiting forever.
Cortical’s approach suggests that we need to build systems that function within that high-pressure reality. We need to build teams that can hold their shape even when the individual members are under a heavy load.
“We just wanted to lead a conversation that we think is really important,” said Arseneau. “And is the foundation for a lot of leadership and change work.”
The next time you see that raised eyebrow in a meeting, take a breath. Check your predictive model, i.e. your brain.
Are you seeing a threat? Or are you just seeing a human being who’s trying to figure it out, just like you are?
The answer to that question determines what happens next.
Final shots
- Your brain is a prediction machine. When it lacks data, it can invent a story to keep you safe. Under pressure, that story can often be negative.
- You can’t think your way out of a stress response. You have to regulate your body before you can regulate your team.
- Drift is inevitable. Teams will always misinterpret each other under strain. The goal is not to prevent it, but to catch it quickly.
- Check the narrative. High-performing leaders pause to verify their interpretation of a situation before they act on it.
Digital Journal is the official media partner of the Leadership at the Speed of Science summit.
