Garry Watanabe

Principal Trainer & Sport Lead, Third Factor

Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, once described the evolution of organizational change in a visceral way that has stayed with me. He said change used to feel like crossing a river. You stepped off solid ground, navigated the current, and eventually reached stable ground on the other side.

Today, it feels more like crossing an ocean. The waves come from every direction. Just as you get past one, another wallops you. Then another. Forget about the shoreline. There’s none in sight.

That image captures what leaders are experiencing now. We are not managing one big disruption, then going back to normal. We are operating inside a permanent state of flux. We’re managing today’s business while trying to build tomorrow’s amid unprecedented economic, technological and societal changes.

Over three decades of working in high-performance environments, I have learned that while we cannot control the waves, we can control how we respond to them. Three practices can make a meaningful difference.

01. Start With Mindset. Then Respond.

Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed something deeply human about surprise. When unexpected events occur, people tend to believe the lesson is that they now know what to do in similar circumstances in the future. We assume the mistake was a lack of information or insight.

But this is the wrong conclusion. The real lesson is that the future is inherently surprising. No matter how prepared we are, some events will catch us off guard.

That realization changes everything. When leaders shift from asking, “How did we miss this?” to saying, “Of course something unexpected happened,” they build resilience in their teams. They create space for response instead of reaction.

“Over three decades of working in high-performance environments, I have learned that while we cannot control the waves, we can control how we respond to them.”

Jocko Willink, a former U.S. Navy SEAL commander, trains his teams to respond to setbacks with a single word: “Good.” If a mission is delayed, good — there is more time to prepare. If resources are reduced, good — it forces simplification. “Good” is not meant to dismiss difficulty. It is meant to redirect energy toward action.

Serial entrepreneur Brad Jacobs learned a similar lesson in his twenties. When he once presented his mentor, Ludwig Jesselson, with a long list of business problems, Jesselson responded bluntly: “If you want to succeed in business, you must get used to problems. That is what business is all about: solving problems.” Jacobs would later say that this advice shaped every leadership team he built.

Still, mindset alone is not enough. Letting go of an outcome people were deeply invested in is not a purely intellectual act. It is emotional. Frustration, disappointment and fear surface quickly when plans unravel.

That is why elite performers rely on ritual.

Defensive backs in the NFL sometimes use a mental “20-second clock” to feel the impact of a play and then release it. NHL star Connor McDavid, after a difficult shift, removes his helmet, runs his fingers through his hair once, and resets. Performance psychologist Jim Loehr found that elite tennis players use the 25 seconds between points to perform deliberate physical and mental routines that lower their heart rates and restore focus.

In business, the ritual will look different. But leaders who help their teams develop a deliberate reset — a clear transition from what just happened to what happens next — build resilience into their culture.

02. Prevent Isolation

When people struggle with change, they rarely announce it. More often, they withdraw.

They stop asking questions. They avoid drawing attention to what they do not yet understand. They tell themselves they will figure it out before asking for help.

Competent adults do not like feeling incompetent. When change triggers that feeling, the instinct is to work harder in private rather than admit their struggles in public.

Yet isolation slows learning. People move up learning curves faster when they receive feedback, hear about best practices and learn what to avoid. Progress accelerates when difficulties are shared.

A leader’s role, then, is not to rescue but to interrupt the silence.

When someone says, “I haven’t really started yet — there’s so much to learn,” the instinct may be to give them a pep talk. A better move is to ask, “Where could you start?”

That question helps identify a small, manageable step the individual could take. By breaking the overwhelming into bite-sized bits, something important will start to happen. Progress will become visible, and confidence will follow.

And confidence changes how people experience change itself.

03. Create A Culture Of Feedback

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle depicts one of the most remarkable examples of rapid team problem solving under pressure.

On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 suffered a catastrophic loss of hydraulic control over Iowa. The odds of that failure were estimated at one in a billion. There was no checklist for it. No training scenario had prepared the crew.

The plane’s pilot, Captain Al Haynes, did something critical in that moment. He did not attempt to solve the problem on his own. First, he accepted help from an off-duty flight instructor who was a passenger. Then he asked his crew, “Does anyone have any ideas?”

What followed was a real-time exchange of up to 60 pieces of information a minute among the crew – what was working, what was not, what they needed next – solving problem after problem to fly their dying aircraft to an airfield where they had a chance. Together, they crash-landed the aircraft in Sioux City. Of the plane’s 285 passengers, 185 survived. The accident could have been far worse if not for the crew’s actions.

Later, experienced test pilots attempted to replicate the landing in simulators. None succeeded. The difference in the landing was not skill alone. It was communication. The crew members who survived weren’t more skilled than the test pilots. They had better information because they asked for it, shared it quickly with one another and integrated it into their operations.

“The challenges organizations face are too complex and too fast-moving for any one person to solve alone.”

For leaders today, the lesson is clear. The familiar phrase, “Do not bring me problems; bring me solutions,” is largely obsolete. The challenges organizations face are too complex and too fast-moving for any one person to solve alone.

The capability you need is already inside your team, your colleagues, your organization. As a leader, it’s your job to unlock it. Build a team where giving and receiving feedback is simply part of how work gets done – where people are comfortable bringing problems forward, knowing the group will help solve them.

There’s only one certainty

We can be certain of one thing: the waves are not stopping. The shore will not always be close. Sometime over the next several months, something none of us anticipated will test our well-laid plans again.

The question is not whether uncertainty will appear. It is whether we treat it as a temporary interruption or as the environment itself.

Leadership in this era isn’t about having a better crystal ball. It’s about building habits that hold when predictions fail – the habit of coaching your team to reset quickly; helping your people to reach out instead of retreating; and building a culture where feedback and open idea exchange are the norm, not the exception.

These practices do not eliminate uncertainty. But they change how we move through it. And sometimes that’s enough to keep us moving forward in turbulent seas.