"Good leadership is asking questions and getting input from other people — not directing and having all the answers." — Cathleen Cooke, Human Synergistics

People leaders came to this live in-person exchange with a real problem: how do you keep distributed, hybrid, and co-located teams cohesive when disruption doesn't slow down? Communication silos are real. Misalignment is real. And psychological safety — still too often treated as a cultural nice-to-have — turns out to be a hard execution variable when stakes are high and answers aren't obvious.

Facilitators Cathleen Cooke and Michael Kern of Human Synergistics put that to the test. Not through slides. Through a survival simulation.

Leaders in the conversation

Cathleen Cooke and Michael Kern, Human Synergistics — facilitators and debrief leads. Human Synergistics has been developing team diagnostics and culture tools since 1972.

Angie — live observer tracking psychological safety behaviors and communication patterns in real time.

Plus six people leaders who ran the simulation as an intact team, bringing their own expertise, assumptions, and communication habits into a pressure-tested decision environment.

What the simulation put on the table

Scenario: a tsunami is 18 minutes out. Your group has a list of items — car keys, walking shoes, a flashlight, life jackets, rope, sea kayaks, an extension ladder, mattresses. Rank them. Survive.

Rules:

• Each person ranked independently first
• Then the group reached consensus — no voting, no role-playing, no phones
• A live observer tracked the behavioral dynamics throughout

Simple rules. Complicated dynamics.

Constructive vs. Defensive Responses

The group got the most critical item — car keys — right. But they had nearly talked themselves out of it. One participant identified evacuation early, then self-corrected when the group drifted. The debrief cut straight to it:

"We were kind, but not strategic." — Participant voice

The group showed real interpersonal care — checking in, making space, avoiding steamrolling. But they never collectively named the core question: evacuate or shelter? Without that shared frame, good intentions produced drift.

Cathleen mapped this to Human Synergistics' behavioral model:

• Constructive styles — achievement-oriented, affiliative, self-actualizing
• Aggressive-defensive — shutting down alternatives, "I've got this"
• Passive-defensive — warm, agreeable, and quietly misaligned

Both defensive patterns kill team performance. One is just louder about it.

The Distributed Trust Gap

A participant asked the sharpest question of the debrief: Does this work the same way on my actual team — where I have expertise, strong opinions, and a senior manager in the room?

Cathleen's answer was direct. The simulation puts everyone on equal footing precisely because real teams rarely are. When hierarchy enters, leaders stop asking and start directing. People with the most relevant expertise go quiet.

"Leaders sometimes don't have all the answers — and you don't want them to." — Cathleen Cooke

Michael Kern added the measurement layer: Human Synergistics' Group Styles Inventory lets teams score their process — not just their decision — and track improvement over time. One participant's knowledge about sea kayak dimensions shifted a key ranking. That expertise only surfaced because someone asked.

Simulating to Build the Edge

A Harvard-trained CEO ran this simulation in his MBA program, called Human Synergistics years later, and said:

"I did not realize how aggressive I was. I was constantly shooting down people's ideas." — Cathleen Cooke, recounting a client.

His team had died in the simulation. The debrief changed how he led.

The AI adoption parallel is direct:

"The use of AI evolves from the individual to small teams, to cross-functional teams, to the entire organization." — Cathleen Cooke, citing Krishna at IBM

Teams without constructive decision-making habits stall at the small-team stage. The simulation is the preparation.

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What to try next

1. Run a low-stakes decision exercise before a high-stakes one. Give your team an ambiguous problem, a time constraint, and a scoring mechanism. Debrief the process, not the answer — look for whose ideas got dropped and whether the group outperformed its best individual.
2. Embed an observer in your next consequential meeting. Ask them to track who spoke, who was redirected, and what assumptions traveled as facts.
3. Ask "who here knows something specific about this?" before moving to consensus. The habit of asking before deciding is the cheapest leadership upgrade available.