From the rink to the boardroom, Crystal Phillips takes on resilience at Calgary summit\” />

Crystal Phillips is the senior director at the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund. Photo courtesy of Crystal Phillips
Imagine being 19, one of the fastest speed skaters in the country, and training for the Olympics. Then, in a matter of days, you can’t walk. Doctors tell you the dream is over.

“I went from one of the top speed skaters in the country to not walking,” says Crystal Phillips. “They told me that I would probably never speed skate again.”

She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the news ended her Olympic bid and forced her to rethink everything she had built her identity around. With support from Calgary’s high-performance ecosystem, she relearned how to walk and skate, and five years later made it back to Olympic trials. She didn’t make the team, but it also marked the beginning of a very different journey.

“Through my health journey, a dream even bigger than the Olympics started to brew, which was to fill the gaps in the healthcare systems that I realized as a patient,” she says.

That shift set her on a path from athlete to charity founder to venture capital investor. 

Now, as senior director at the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund (OCIF), a $160-million initiative established by the City of Calgary to spur transformative economic development, Phillips is in the business of shaping how innovation moves from lab bench to market. What connects all those dots isn’t skating or science, but the way she has learned to lead under pressure.

Phillips will share her perspective at the Leadership at the Speed of Science Summit on Oct. 1 in Calgary, a leadership conference for senior executives and business leaders. 

The event, created and produced by Tammy Arseneau, founder of Cortical Consulting & Coaching, brings together astronauts, scientists, athletes, and business leaders to explore how stress shapes decision-making and performance in complex environments.

Learning to use the pause button

Phillips’ favourite leadership lesson came from a coach who compared sport to music. 

“He said, ‘What happens if you play all the notes at the same time?’” she explains. “I was like, noise? And he said, ‘So what makes the melody?’ It’s the space between the notes that makes the melody in music and it’s the space between your training programs that will create your performance in sport.’”

That idea stuck. As an athlete, overtraining triggered relapses. As a founder, endless work felt like a bottomless bucket. In both cases, the fix wasn’t grinding harder. It was protecting the space between. 

“It’s really about putting just as much effort in the space between as the actual work that needs to be done,” says Phillips.

For executives, that’s not a faded wellness poster hanging up in the boardroom. It’s strategy. The sprint matters, but endurance wins. 

“You might have some sprints along the way,” says Phillips. “But you’ve got to take a big endurance athlete perspective when looking at this.”

Arseneau says that lesson applies directly to business. 

“Often when change isn’t going well or the stakes are high, leaders push harder,” she says. “But people need space to adapt physically and emotionally to things that are changing. It’s not ‘pause and stop.’ It’s ‘don’t panic.’ It’s creating room to adjust instead of pressing until everything locks up.”

Building teams under pressure

Phillips’ ability to see people first showed up in unexpected ways. As an athlete, she built a reputation not just on the ice, but for throwing a really good party off the ice.

“I was also known back in the day to throw one of the best year-end parties for all of the winter athletes,” she says. “Because we had the same party season, and it was a very short window,  we wanted to make it worth it.”

That instinct to gather people and create belonging became her secret weapon when she launched the Branch Out Neurological Foundation. With no degree, no money, and no network, she started with what she knew, and that’s how to bring people together. It began as a bike tour capped with a party and turned into a movement with millions of dollars raised for neuroscience research across 12 Canadian universities.

That ability to see the people behind the plan became even clearer when Phillips moved into venture capital. She realised most early-stage bets weren’t about balance sheets at all. They were about people.

“The same characteristics that it takes to go to the Olympics or be an elite performer in sport are the same characteristics it takes to build something massive, from scratch,” she says. “You need that resilience, you need that passion, you need to be goal driven.”Photo courtesy of Crystal Phillips

She calls it founder empathy. Knowing what it feels like to start without money, without a network, and without a safety net. That lens helps her see what others miss. 

“Don’t let that blinder deter you from seeing all of the magic that this person has,” she says.

Today, she applies the same logic inside her own teams. Recently, she and her colleagues tore up the org chart and rebuilt it around strengths. 

“We asked ourselves, what are the things that we need to get done?” she recalls. “Who do we have on our team right now, and what strengths do they have? And then we did a bit of a skills matrix to understand, okay, what skills and strengths do we need to hire for, regardless of the title or the position on the hierarchy.”

The philosophy is simple, she says. Create a clear organizational hierarchy, then flatten the social one. Set clear performance goals, give people permission to stretch, and focus on guardrails rather than rigid structures so the team has the freedom to run.

Why leaders need this now

Phillips will carry this perspective into the Leadership at the Speed of Science Summit in Calgary this fall, connecting her story of resilience to the realities leaders face in business today.

Arseneau says the timing is no accident. 

“Complexity is increasing. The pace of change is incessant. Leaders are being asked to do more with less, and the pressure is not going away,” she says. 

Recent research backs her concern. Gartner reports just 48% of enterprise digital initiatives are meeting or surpassing their business objectives.

”Organizations build resilience by moving through cycles of challenge and recovery,” says Arseneau. “When leaders keep stacking changes without letting people regroup, the system weakens instead of strengthening. Providing clarity on priorities and staggering initiatives helps improve change success rates.”

For Phillips, the lesson is personal and practical. She learned early that endurance mindset beats sprinting (even if you’re a sprinter), whether in sport, health, or business. 

Her approach to leadership has been shaped by making space between the work, building teams around strengths, and refusing to ignore the human side of performance. Those habits are what allowed her to return to competition, launch a national foundation, and later step into venture capital.

“I think the one thing would be to do a holistic assessment of your life,” says Phillips. “Because whatever happens outside of work will affect work, and vice versa.”

That’s not a soft skill. That’s a high performance strategy. Phillips learned it the hard way. The rest of us might get to learn it in boardrooms instead of hospital rooms, but the lesson is the same.

Final shots

Leaders who treat performance as endurance, not just sprints, build resilience into their systems.

Strength-based teams, not rigid hierarchies, help organizations adapt faster.

The space between (rest, reflection, recovery) is where sustainable leadership takes shape.

Leadership at the Speed of Science invites executives, HR leaders, and change-makers to explore how insights into human performance can help leaders steer their organizations through complexity and achieve results when it matters most. 

Digital Journal is the official media partner for the Leadership at the Speed of Science summit. Tickets for the Oct. 1 event are available now.