Beth,
Excellent insights. I think that noticing fear/anxiety in a system and then making choices about it is crucial in terms of leading in a situation.
Part of our Emotional Intelligence work is in noticing our own anxieties in a situation and then being able to make choices about what to do instead of either being frozen or angry.
I also like your observation about "old ideas," by which I think you mean "potential solutions that may or may not have been tried before." It raises the excellent question of what to do when the solutions that other people propose are ones that we believe will not work.