You know the feeling. Your inbox is a crime scene. The meeting meant to resolve things made everything worse. Two senior people who should be working together have chosen sides, and somehow you’re caught in the middle. The timeline is impossible, the stakes are real, and the usual process has stopped working.
This is what I call a shit storm. Shit storms include high-stakes, high-emotion, high-visibility organizational situations that can’t be managed through routine problem-solving. These are the moments that define careers and test judgment. They’re also, in my experience working with leaders across government, healthcare, nonprofits, and education, profoundly common. Most mid-career professionals encounter at least a few in a decade. Few feel equipped for them.
The challenge isn’t intelligence or effort. It’s that shit storms operate by different rules than ordinary organizational challenges. Standard tools like project plans, structured conversations, and escalation protocols still matter, but they behave unpredictably under these conditions. What you need is a different operating framework.
The five rules below won’t make the storm disappear. But they help you stay functional, strategic, and relational inside it. These rules will help you get through to the other side.
Rule 1: If You Make a Plan, Expect It to Change
Planning still matters in a shit storm. The mistake is treating the plan as final, rather than the first draft of your thinking.
Complex, emotionally charged situations evolve faster than plans can anticipate. New information surfaces. Key players change their positions. What looked like a two-week problem becomes a three-month ordeal. If you’ve committed rigidly to a specific sequence of steps, every deviation from that plan will feel like failure. Further, you’ll risk spending precious energy trying to defend a map that no longer matches the terrain.
The more useful mindset is what organizational theorists call adaptive planning: treat each decision as a careful and wise experiment. For example, hold your strategy lightly and build in deliberate moments to reassess. In practice, this might mean shortening your planning horizon. Instead of a six-week roadmap, commit to a two-week plan you actively revisit. It means asking at regular intervals, ‘Given what we know now, is this still the right approach?’ And it means communicating uncertainty honestly to stakeholders rather than projecting false confidence.
The leaders who navigate shit storms most effectively are the ones who can revise plans quickly without losing direction.
Rule 2: People Will Be Unreliable, But You Can’t Go It Alone, so Find Your Allies
One of the most disorienting features of organizational shit storms is that people you’ve counted on become unpredictable. Colleagues go quiet. Commitments get walked back. Someone who seemed solidly in your corner suddenly withdraws. High-stress, high-visibility situations activate self-protective behaviour in most people. Understanding this makes others’ actions less surprising.
The temptation is to retreat into self-reliance: if you can’t count on anyone else, do it yourself. This is a trap. Shit storms are too complex, too multi-fronted, and too draining for solo navigation. What you need instead is a more deliberate approach to building and maintaining your network of allies.
Allies in this context are not cheerleaders or yes-people. They are people who will tell you the truth when you need it and who are willing to show up even when the situation is uncomfortable. In complex organizational conflicts, this often means cultivating relationships with people above you, lateral to you, and sometimes outside your immediate organizational structure entirely.
Identify your allies early, before you need them urgently. And reciprocate: the relationships that sustain you through a shit storm are ones you’ve invested in before the storm hits.
Rule 3: If You Poke the Bear, You Might Get Kicked Out of the Room. Be Strategic
Most mid-career professionals got to where they are partly by being direct, raising issues, and naming what others won’t. These are genuinely valuable leadership qualities. In a shit storm, they can also get you removed from the conversation entirely.
High-stakes organizational conflicts involve people with positional power, fragile egos, and significant institutional interests. Confronting a bear (i.e., whoever holds the most power in your specific situation) without strategic preparation often yields predictable results: defensiveness, retaliation, or simple exclusion. You may be right. You may be the only person willing to say what needs to be said. And you may find yourself saying it from outside the room where decisions are being made.
Being strategic means asking yourself: What outcome am I trying to achieve? What is the most effective path to that outcome given the people and dynamics involved? Am I raising this because it serves the outcome, or because I’m frustrated and need to say it?
Sometimes the most productive move is to say the uncomfortable thing directly and absorb the consequences. For example, there are situations where naming the problem matters more than staying at the table. But this should be a conscious choice, not a reactive one. Know what you’re trading and why. Influence in a shit storm often comes from your continued presence and credibility; protecting that access is part of the work.
Rule 4: Everything You Learned Will Be Tested, And You Will End Up Learning More
Shit storms are, among other things, accelerated learning environments. The same dynamics that make them stressful (unpredictability, relational complexity, high stakes) also make them extraordinarily developmental. Your conflict resolution frameworks will be tested by people who didn’t read the same books you did. Your communication skills will be tested when emotions are running high and goodwill is running low. Your values will be tested when the path of least resistance leads somewhere you’d rather not go.
The question isn’t ‘How do I get through this?’ but ‘What am I learning that will make me more effective the next time something like this happens?’ Leaders who develop genuine conflict competence don’t do so in training or workshops alone; they do so through difficult experiences they actively reflect on.
Build in time for reflection, even when, and especially when, you feel like you can’t spare it. Keep notes. Debrief with a trusted colleague or coach after significant interactions. Ask yourself regularly: What am I doing that’s working? What am I doing that’s creating friction? What do I wish I’d handled differently? The organizational crisis will eventually be resolved. The learning you take from it is profound.
Rule 5: Shit Storms Are Draining, Pace Yourself Like an Ultra-Marathon Runner
This rule may be the most underestimated of the five. Leaders who handle intense situations well are often high-energy people who take pride in their stamina. They push through. They run on adrenaline. And then, somewhere along the path of sustained organizational crisis, they hit a wall. After hitting the wall, the decisions they make in that depleted state are often the ones they later regret most.
The ultra-marathon analogy is precise for a reason. A hundred-mile race cannot be run at sprint pace because the demands of the full distance require a fundamentally different energy strategy. Shit storms are organizational ultra-marathons. They require sustained emotional regulation, continuous sense-making, constant relational management, and often, significant moral clarity under pressure. None of these is compatible with running on empty.
Pacing looks different for different people, but the core principles remain consistent: protect at least one recovery practice each day (sleep, physical movement, a genuine break from the situation). Triage ruthlessly; not every email, meeting, or request deserves your full energy. Establish a clear boundary between when you’re ‘on’ and when you’re recovering. And watch for the specific signs that you’re depleting: reactive decision-making, relationship shortcuts, cynicism, or the sense that nothing you do matters.
Sustainable performance in complex, high-stakes situations is not a nice-to-have. It’s a strategic requirement. You cannot think clearly, relate well, or make sound judgments at the end of your rope. Protecting your capacity is part of the work.
What the Five Rules Have in Common
Here’s what these five rules have in common: they require you to hold two things simultaneously. First, you need to manage the immediate demands of the situation. At the same time, you need a longer view of what you’re trying to accomplish and who you’re trying to be.
Shit storms, for all their dysfunction and difficulty, are also where organizational leaders develop the capacities that matter most: adaptability, relational intelligence, strategic judgment, and resilience under pressure. The professionals who emerge from these experiences most effectively are the ones who stayed engaged, kept learning, and didn’t lose themselves in the process.
If you’re in the middle of something like this right now, I hope these rules offer a useful orientation point. And if you’re looking for more structured support (coaching or organizational tools to navigate conflict more effectively), that’s exactly the work we do at Productive Conflict LLC.
You don’t have to navigate the storm alone.
