Episode 110

Early Symptoms: How Do You Know and How Do You Manage?

60% of employees sat on a concern this year because they had nowhere safe to take it, and by the time it reached leadership, it was already an emergency.

Maartje van Krieken has spent decades walking into organizations after things went wrong, and she keeps finding the same pattern. Someone always saw it first. The question is never whether the signal existed. The question is whether that person believed there was a safe place to bring it and whether anyone was listening.

This episode is her answer to that question, five practical tricks for any leader who wants to build a speak-up culture and catch problems while they're still small and cheap to fix. Some are structural, like an escalation system with a named, independent receiver and a guaranteed response window. Others are about creating real psychological safety at work, like carving out ten minutes at the end of a team meeting to name the subject nobody wants to touch, or asking new hires what surprised them about the business before they had time to stop noticing.

None of these require a massive overhaul. They need a simple feedback framework and the willingness to look at your own leadership blind spots. Do people two levels below you know where to take a serious concern? Do they believe it's safe to bring it up? And if the honest answer is no, what does that tell you about what you're not hearing right now?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Understanding Organizational Concerns

02:59 The Importance of Signal Detection

06:13 Implementing Effective Escalation Frameworks

09:05 Identifying Frustrations in Leadership

11:55 Facilitating Difficult Conversations

14:52 Utilizing Traffic Light Systems

20:50 Leveraging New Joiner Insights

26:55 Building a Resilient Organizational Culture

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

Connect with Maartje on LinkedIn

Visit The Chaos Games Consulting website

Visit The Business Emergency Room website

Subscribe to The Business Emergency Room on YouTube

Subscribe to Maartje’s Substack

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

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The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.