The Leadership Catch-22: Why Complexity Trips Us Up (and How to Beat It)
A funny thing happens when we face complexity: instead of leaning into it with curiosity, our nervous system often sounds the alarm.
Fight, flee, freeze anything but engage.
It’s as if our brain mistakes a messy spreadsheet or an uncertain future for a tiger in the bushes. The more complex a challenge feels, the more our body pushes us toward reactivity, narrowing our thinking just when we need it to expand.
Jennifer Garvey Berger has spent years exploring this paradox. We know that oversimplifying, seeking control, or clinging to certainty won’t help in a complex world, yet our biology nudges us in precisely that direction when the stakes feel high. The trick? Learning to work with our nervous system rather than against it. In this essay, she explores how the ability to shift from a reactive, cortisol-fueled state to a more open, creative, and collaborative one is not just useful but essential for leadership today. And let’s face it we’ve all learned by now that cortisol is the villain in every modern health story. Stress, burnout, even stubborn weight gain? Cortisol’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene.
It turns out this isn’t exactly a new idea. Long before neuroscience gave us words like “sympathetic nervous system” and “parasympathetic activation,” humans had already figured out ways to reset themselves to move from fear and rigidity to connection and creativity. Across cultures and centuries, people have turned to movement, breath, stillness, and gratitude as tools for grounding themselves in uncertainty. We dance, we walk, we pause, we play all to remind our nervous system that not everything unknown is a threat. And it works.
So, what’s your go-to practice for shifting from stress to clarity? A long walk? A deep breath? Loud music in the car? Drop your thoughts in the comments I promise to read every one. And if this idea of navigating complexity speaks to you, Jennifer’s full essay is worth your time.
