Disruption Is Guaranteed. Your Response Isn’t.

The Short Version

• Disruption is inevitable in commercial real estate, but leaders can improve outcomes by following a structured decisionmaking process rather than reacting quickly.
• Danielle Sprouls’ P.I.V.O.T. framework — pause, identify opportunities, vet options, outreach and test — is designed to help professionals respond more deliberately when markets or careers shift.
• The biggest risk during disruption isn’t the event itself but rather skipping steps in the decision process, especially the pause needed to assess options before acting.

A Framework for Making Better Decisions When Disruption Hits

Anyone in commercial real estate knows it: Disruption is inevitable. “The question isn’t whether you’re going to experience it,” Danielle Sprouls said during her keynote at ICSC@MONTEREY on March 24. “The question is: What are you going to do with it?”

Sprouls — a commercial title insurance executive who advised on more than $20 billion in transactions and then became a career coach, founding Unscripted Pivots Coaching in 2023 — developed a framework called The P.I.V.O.T. Advantage to navigate those inevitable and often destabilizing moments. P.I.V.O.T. stands for:

1. pause
2. identify opportunities
3. vet options
4. outreach to your network
5. test and tweak

The Experience That Shaped the P.I.V.O.T. Framework

The P.I.V.O.T. Advantage framework is grounded in personal experience, including the overnight unraveling of Sprouls’ career in 2008. She had just closed on the title for the sale of a majority stake of New York City’s Chrysler Building when the market went into free fall. Meanwhile, the owner of her company had been embezzling funds. “The FBI came in; he went out in handcuffs,” Sprouls said. “Overnight, the phones stopped ringing, the clients weren’t transacting, and my career literally evaporated. The company closed.”

Years later, it happened again. “In 2023, my company was acquired,” she said. “They told us we’d be fine. Before the ink was dry, they let us go. We had 24 hours’ notice.” She moved quickly to land somewhere new but skipped a critical step: pausing and evaluating before taking action. “I got a call within a day, and I jumped,” Sprouls said. “I didn’t pause, and it turned out to be a really bad decision for me.” Within months, she was out again. “They let me go,” she said. “That’s the professional way of saying: I got fired.”

5 Steps Leaders Can Use To Navigate Disruption

1. Pause Before You React

After years of high-stakes roles in commercial real estate, Sprouls stepped back to examine how leaders respond to disruption — and where those responses break down. The exercise became the foundation for the framework she now teaches clients. She advises them first to pause before taking any action. “When you take the pause, you give yourself just a little bit of breathing room to assess because the last thing that any of us want to do is start running in the wrong direction,” Sprouls said. “Acting fast feels like momentum, but ... it is just energy that's running on adrenaline instead of real data and validation.”

2. Identify Opportunities — Even When the Landscape Changes

The “I” in P.I.V.O.T., identify, comes after that reset, and this is when the focus shifts from reacting to reframing what’s possible. “Once the landscape changes, it’s all about: What are you going to do next?” Sprouls said, noting that finding those opportunities begins with asking better questions. “Every problem comes with a solution, but you need to look closely,” she said. “Once you look closely, you'll have a better idea of the direction you want to go.”

3. Vet Options Before You Commit

The vetting step requires discipline, especially when urgency starts to creep in. Evaluating every opportunity “gives you the advantage of clarity before commitment,” she said. That’s where people often get tripped up. “The biggest mistake on this step is when people start moving quickly because they feel like they’re getting closer to the solution.” They mistake momentum with real information, she said.

4. Use Your Network for Perspective — Not Just Transactions

When disruption hits — a deal falls apart, a tenant walks, a role suddenly shifts or disappears — many react quickly to replace what was lost. Sprouls argued that leaders instead should reach out to their networks with intention. “It’s not just about calling the people that you know about the next deal,” Sprouls said. “It’s about asking for perspective.” Rather than using their networks transactionally, she encourages leaders to pressure-test decisions with trusted peers, mentors and colleagues before making their next moves. “If you spend six minutes on the phone with the right person, that can save you six months of overthinking,” she added.

5. Test Small Moves Before Scaling Big Decisions

Finally, the process ends with testing and tweaking: taking action in small, measured steps. “If you don’t test, all you have is a plan,” Sprouls said. “It has to meet reality. You take a leap, but what we're really doing is gathering data.” She added: “Breakthroughs don’t come from grand strategies; they come from small moves.” Incremental steps help teams move forward even in uncertain market conditions.

The Hardest Part Isn’t the Framework — It’s the Follow-Through

While the framework itself may sound simple, Sprouls said the challenge is in execution — and in recognizing which step you are most likely to skip. Miss one, and the entire decisionmaking process breaks down.

“Disruption is guaranteed,” she said. “It is not going to send a calendar invite.” She noted: “What I'm encouraging you to do is consider this as a sequence of thinking, as a leader, so that you can make better decisions.”