Episode 89

Take Five, Leave Five: What Oil & Gas Teaches About Surviving Chaos

What can the oil and gas industry teach the rest of us about staying sharp when pressure is high, stakes are real, and chaos is part of the job?

This conversation looks past the headlines and into the habits that help businesses stay steady under real strain. Maartje van Krieken draws lessons from oil and gas that reach far beyond one sector, especially when it comes to decision-making, risk, and the discipline required when the margin for error is small. What shifts when teams pressure-test decisions before they act? What becomes possible when people work from a shared process instead of reacting from their own corner?

The episode keeps returning to a central idea: resilience comes from preparation. Maartje makes a strong case for front-end planning, clear change management, and cross-functional alignment as the kind of practices that help companies stay grounded when conditions change fast. She also names the habits that get in the way, from bureaucracy and siloed thinking to technical expertise that loses touch with commercial reality.

What lingers is the tension between structure and flexibility. The strongest organizations are not rigid, but they are ready. They know how to think ahead, adapt under pressure, and stay open to ideas from outside their own world. For leaders facing complexity, this episode offers a sharp perspective on what helps a business stay clear-headed when the stakes rise.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Oil and Gas Lessons for Business Resilience

05:49 Pre-Mortem Planning and Risk Management

12:11 Resourcefulness in High-Stakes Operations

18:11 Big Company Challenges and Bureaucratic Drag

20:55 Technical Excellence vs. Commercial Reality

24:09 Innovation Blind Spots and Not Invented Here Thinking

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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About the Podcast

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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.