Managing Chaos in the Room

Why Consultants Need Process Leadership More Than Perfect Answers

Anyone leading a team of people is inevitably going to end up in a situation where they are having to manage some kind of chaos and a lot of heated emotion in the room. And when I'm working with consultants, for instance, they are expected to be the experts in the room. They are working with clients and their projects, and when things like this happen—where the client doesn't really understand the technical parts of the project—that’s exactly why they’ve hired the firm to do it. They just don’t know what they don’t know.

But it’s not just a knowledge gap. Projects generate anxiety when stakeholders lack visibility. Ambiguity evokes emotional reactivity. People escalate when they feel out of control. So the room can get derailed and chaotic very quickly. You end up managing a lot of emotion, and you’re also managing the technical or operational questions clients don’t understand. That combination is predictable, and it’s part of the job.

What I tell people is this: your first task is to get the team contained and organized. One of the fastest ways to do that is to ask a simple, directive question: “Tell me the three most critical issues we need to resolve or talk about today.”

You are containing the conversation by narrowing the frame. And you’re organizing the room by getting them to think about problems in a different way. Instead of rapid-firing concerns and overwhelming you as a group, you’re forcing prioritization and reducing cognitive overload to shif them out of emotional reactivity and into executive functioning. In other words, you’re guiding them from venting to shared problem definition. That's a structured cognitive reset.

This is also where emotional containment comes in. Consultants often become the regulatory function for the room, the emotional buffer between reality and client anxiety. Most teams don’t have the insider information about how a project is actually managed, so their frustration or ambiguity naturally spills out. By structuring how information enters the room, you’re not just calming them, you’re also putting yourself back in a position of control. You feel more centered and confident because you’ve taken control of the frame and the room.

And importantly: you don’t always have to have all of the answers in the moment. Consultants rarely do. What you need is process leadership—the ability to guide thinking, contain emotion, and structure the next step. We manage the chaos; we manage the questions; we manage the emotions in the room.

Of course, we also need to know how to get the answers to the questions and how to respond to requests for information we don’t yet have. Most consultants are prepared for that. And if you aren’t, it’s simply: “I’m gathering this information, and I’m going to consult with my team on this. I’ll get back to you by tomorrow afternoon with an update, and I’ll follow up in writing so you have everything clearly laid out.”

Set a timeline.
Specify the format of the follow-up.
Confirm next steps.

That’s how you close the loop with authority.