Two ships.

Two sister designs.

Two massive impacts.

One survived. One didn’t.

That is how Ryan Garney, creative operations leader and Triple Crown Award recipient from Toastmasters International, opened his TEDxBeverlyGrove 2026 talk, “Mental Bulkheads: Why the Olympic Survived and the Titanic Didn’t, and What That Teaches Us About Leading Through Crisis,” delivered at the Marilyn Monroe Theatre on March 14, 2026, under the theme “Reimagining the Possible.”

Most people know the Titanic. Far fewer know the Olympic, her sister ship, which survived a devastating collision and returned to harbor. Garney used that contrast not as a history lesson, but as a leadership lesson.

The difference was not simply the impact.

It was containment.

Garney used the story of the two ships to explore why people and teams often collapse under pressure, not because they lack intelligence, strength, or preparation, but because emotional and cognitive overload is allowed to flood every part of the system at once.

“The difference between survival and collapse isn’t strength or preparation. It’s whether the damage stays contained. We can’t stop life from hitting us like an iceberg, but we can stop it from consuming us.”
— Ryan Garney at TEDxBeverlyGrove 2026

The talk draws on Garney’s own experience navigating his father’s decline and death while simultaneously building an animation studio at a major entertainment company. In that season, he realized that what he had called compartmentalization was often something else entirely.

Suppression.

That distinction became the emotional center of the talk.

Garney argues that real compartmentalization is not avoidance. It is not denial. It is the ability to decide what must be handled now, what must be processed later, and what must be shared rather than silently carried.

For leaders, creators, caregivers, and anyone trying to function under pressure, the talk offers a practical way to think about crisis before crisis takes over. It asks a question most people are rarely taught to ask in the moment:

Where does this pain belong right now?

Garney also connects the framework to neuroscience, including the power of naming emotion without immediately trying to solve it. In doing so, he gives the audience a way to move from emotional flooding to deliberate response.

The Olympic, Garney noted in closing, went on to serve for decades after its collision. She became known as Old Reliable.

Not because she was never hit. Because she knew which doors to close.

Ryan Garney’s talk will be released online in the coming months as part of the TEDxBeverlyGrove 2026 speaker series.

‍