That is not how it works. I learned that the hard way in 2020, when the Olympics got postponed for the first time in history.
The Day the Plan Disappeared
I was the team captain of USA BMX heading into the Tokyo Olympics. My teammates and I had spent four years building toward one single date on the calendar. Every training block, every travel schedule, every taper was reverse engineered from that date.
Then COVID hit, and the IOC postponed the Games by a full year. That had never happened before. Not during World War I. Not during World War II. Not ever.
Our target vanished overnight. No new date for months. No idea when we could travel to compete. No idea when facilities would even reopen. This is what leading during uncertainty actually looks like. It is not a metaphor. It is waking up with no plan and still needing to show up for your team.
What My Coaches Did Right
My coaches and performance team had to lead a group of athletes through something none of us had a playbook for. A few things stood out about how they handled it, and I still use these lessons when I talk to teams about change management leadership.
They controlled what could still be controlled. We could not control the new Olympic date. We could control our sleep, our training load, our nutrition, and our recovery. Our staff shifted the entire team’s focus from the uncontrollable variable to the ones we still owned.
They shortened the horizon. Instead of talking about “getting to Tokyo,” the conversation became “getting through this week.” Then the next week. Long term goals felt impossible to hold onto in a moment with no fixed end date, so our leadership broke the transition into pieces small enough to actually manage.
They over communicated. Silence breeds anxiety on a team. Our staff gave us updates even when the update was “nothing has changed yet.” That consistency mattered more than having good news.
What I Had to Do as Captain
Coaches lead the system. Captains lead the room. I could not control the schedule, but I could control how my teammates experienced the uncertainty day to day.
I checked in with people individually, not just as a group. Some teammates were angry. Some were relieved to have more time. Some were quietly panicking about an extra year of injury risk or financial strain. A team is not one mood, it is many moods happening at once, and leading a team through transition means you have to meet each person where they actually are, not where you assume they are.
I also had to keep showing up at full effort, even on the days I did not feel like it. Nobody was watching my motivation level closer than the athletes I was supposed to be leading. If I coasted, that gave everyone else permission to coast too.
The Momentum Trap
Here is the part people get wrong about leading through change. They think the goal is to keep everything moving at the same pace it was before the disruption hit. That is the wrong target.
The real goal is to keep people moving at all. Momentum during a crisis does not look like the momentum you had before the crisis. It looks smaller, slower, and less certain. A leader who demands pre-disruption output during a disruption is going to burn people out or lose their trust.
We did not train the same way in 2020 that we trained in 2019. We could not. What we did was keep training. We adjusted the target without abandoning the work. That distinction saved our team.
How This Applies Off the Track
I bring this story into rooms far outside of sports now, because the pattern repeats everywhere. A reorg happens. A merger changes reporting lines overnight. A budget gets cut mid quarter. A key leader leaves without warning. The specifics change, the emotional experience does not.
If you are leading a team through change right now, a few things carried over directly from that Olympic delay:
Name the loss before you name the plan. My coaches did not pretend the postponement was fine. They acknowledged it was a real disruption to something we had worked years for, and then they moved us toward what came next. Skipping the acknowledgment and jumping straight to “here is the new plan” tends to make people feel unseen.
Give people a next step they can complete this week. Not this quarter. This week. Uncertainty is more tolerable when there is something concrete to do inside it.
Watch your most consistent people closely. The ones who never seem to need attention are often absorbing the most stress silently. That was true on my team, and I see it constantly in corporate teams too.
Final Word
We did not know when the Tokyo Games would happen. We did not know what the world would look like when they did. What we knew was how we were going to show up that day, and the day after that.
That is what leading through change actually is. Not having the answers. Having a way to keep moving without them.
If you want me to bring this story and the leadership lessons inside it to your team or organization, you can find more about my keynote programs at connorfields.com.
– Connor Fields
