Main Image: The British Red Cross / YouTube

By John Portch

The Grenfell Tower fire is an example of an emergency that caused the British Red Cross to change its approach to providing humanitarian support.

In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire at the residential tower in the North Kensington area of west London killed 72 residents, injured a further 70, and left many more homeless and bereaved.

In the aftermath, the British Red Cross worked to support the survivors but as Chris Davies, their Head of Emergency Planning & Response, said, “one of the challenges we had is there were an awful lot of people in the community who didn’t trust us and didn’t necessarily want the Red Cross in the room”.

Davies, a former infantry officer in the British Army who joined the British Red Cross in 2022, was speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. He explained during his presentation that this mistrust was born of their lack of local understanding.

Three months after the fire, in September 2017, the organisation’s then CEO, Mike Adamson, wrote: ‘it took us too long to reach out to the real grassroots groups and that cost us in terms of trust through the process. We are still trying to address this.’

While noting his pride in some elements of their response, Adamson acknowledged that ‘there is a real lesson here about how we engage with a community that we do not know. We need to add people with different skills to our response and recovery teams. We also need to explore the extent to which our scale and brand give us convening power to help bring organisations together and respond dynamically to need.’

It was a chastening experience, but one that has not been repeated as the organisation adapted. “In the past, there has always been a sense of organisations like ours knowing what’s best and that’s wrong. We don’t,” said Davies onstage. “That humility is really important.”

Chris Davies, the Head of Emergency Planning and Response at the British Red Cross, onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Here, we explore how the British Red Cross, as part of a wider international movement that is more than 160 years old, adapts as the character of crisis response changes.

Spot the need for change

“The mission is critical in our world,” said Davies, “but the mission is only as good as the individual’s understanding.”

He shared the British Red Cross’ mission with the room:

Their mission is simple but powerful; their vision and values provide scope for interpretation. Combined, they enable the organisation’s leaders to spot the need for change when something is off and then do something about it, as happened in the aftermath of the Grenfell response.

“The nature of humanitarian work is unchanging,” said Davies, specifically referencing the core human need for connection and support. “However, the character of that work is constantly shifting.”

That character had been misunderstood at Grenfell, but they fared better when severe flooding hit the town of Brechin in eastern Scotland in October 2023.

“The team I deployed were a local team who had to self‑mobilise and respond alongside the local authority,” said Davies. “We had essentially taken it to that point of how you build the mission into teams so they can respond and have the right response. I didn’t need to phone them up and tell them to do that; they operated independently with the right resources at the right time because they had already won the trust of that community in Brechin because they were from that community and they knew there was a high risk of flood.”

Adopt a ‘when, not if’ mindset

In Britain, climate change is currently the biggest humanitarian threat. “One in four homes by 2050 will be impacted by climate change, according to the UK government,” said Davies. “Are we ready for that? No. We’re not as an organisation, but also as a country, we’re not ready for that scale and impact is coming down the road due to climate change.”

That work is already underway, with the British Red Cross, as an auxiliary to government (“we’re not an NGO”), trying to build its readiness through community connections, by liaising with the relevant authorities, and using technology such as AI where suitable (e.g. a flood monitoring app is in the pipeline).

On top of this, crises and disasters grow ever more complex, which necessitates sending junior leaders into the fray ever earlier.

It is not a decision taken lightly given the gravity of the work and the blend of paid staff and volunteers. It can be a tricky dynamic to manage and there often isn’t time for adequate training. “We are putting immense expectations on them because of the changing environment; the world in which we operate.” It’s a challenge they haven’t yet nailed.

A key leadership skill in that regard is the ability to sustain a ‘when not if’ mindset. Davies illustrated this with a slide:

Trust is critical to mobilising people in complex environments

Davies described the UK as “one of the most complex environments in the world”. To make his point, he spoke of Britain’s “increasingly polarised society” and high poverty rates, which help explain why “trust in the UK Government is the lowest it’s been for decades.” He quoted the British Office of National Statistics, which put the figure at less than 25% of respondents in late 2025.

This has implications for institutions of all hues. “An organisation like ours, which is a large institution, your brand is globally recognised, you also have to work hard to earn that trust.”

They understand that adaptation requires leaders to let their people in the field act, adjust and learn in real time from the people whom they are supporting.

To help illustrate that point, Davies presented the British Red Cross’ ‘Trust Model’:

Essentially, as the graph above aims to explain, they treat complexity as a given and trust (built on dignity, choice, safety and connection) as a requisite that enables the kind of decentralised decision-making and coherent action witnessed in Brechin.

“Ultimately a model like this puts the dignity and choice of those communities at the centre and ensures that we’re supporting them in the way that they need as those demands evolve over time.”

What to read next

Adaptability: ‘Change Is Everywhere and Leaders Must Respond All the Time. It’s No Small Ask’

By John Portch

Back-to-Back Masters winner Rory McIlroy shared his preparation strategy in the aftermath of his second triumph at Augusta National.

“I joked last week that this place feels like my home course,” he said. “I haven’t played anywhere else in the last two or three weeks really. I felt prepared in that way. I felt prepared that wherever I hit it on the golf course, I sort of know what to do. I know where to miss. I’m pretty comfortable with all the shots around the greens.”

McIlroy, a six-time major winner, disregarded other PGA Tour events and even chose to ignore a back injury that had been hampering his performance. At one point he even carded a score of 29 on the front nine at Augusta.

“It’s a good blueprint,” he continued. “I’m not going to take three weeks off before every major, but to get to the major venues early, do your preparation, play. And not just play and look at things, but actually play. Go out there with one ball, shoot a score and try to do it that way.”

McIlroy’s successful strategy came not long after our Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy event at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where a range of guests, including Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and Lawn Tennis Association Performance Director Michael Bourne discussed how to build, stress-test and execute an effective performance strategy.

We know McIlroy wasn’t there because he was in Georgia, but he, much like yourselves, can check out the chief insights here.

And now on to other happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.

Quote of the month:

Personally, I don’t believe in skills coaches.

These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.

A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.

“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”

Read the full story here.

We also addressed some of the common tensions, challenges and opportunities in skill acquisition here.

Insight of the month:

British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information at hand.

As Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, they are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:

It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.

Reay-Kemp was one of six guests who brought the day’s proceedings to life.

Shock of the month:

We often hear informally of ‘bad’ environments, but we don’t necessarily expect them to be amongst those considered the very best.

Yet that was the experience of Alexander Campbell, the former principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet when he attended the Royal Ballet School in the early 2000s.

“I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.

He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.

“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.

When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”

His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’

Campbell, now the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, shared his full story here.

Good to know:

What’s the difference between a ‘change’ and a ‘transition’?

A ‘change’ is simply that, but a ‘transition’ refers to the human adaptation required in the face of change.

That is according to John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, who posed this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’

In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.

“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”

To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:

Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:

The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.

Finally…

Four common causes of tension between business and performance… and four opportunities for increased collaboration.

Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

We are living in the first era to have five generations in the workplace.

This fact sits at the centre of Rebecca Robins’ book Five Generations at Work: How we win together, for good in which she argues through detailed case studies of organisations as diverse as LMVH, Mars and Samsung that leaders can turn this generational mix into a competitive advantage.

“What a melting pot and crucible of knowledge, expertise, experience, skills and perspective we have in these five generations,” she said as she took to the stage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

The five generations discussed in Robins’ book are:

• Silents: age 80-97
• Boomers: age 61-79
• Generation X: age 45-60
• Millennials: age 29-46
• Generation Z: age 13-28

“What I find profoundly exciting is we are living through that history,” she continued. “It’s a transformative shift that is already having profound implications, ramifications and, crucially, untold opportunity for us all.”

If one extends Robins’ lens to sport, many teams and programmes are home to six generations, as members of Generation Alpha (generally anyone under the age of 16) fill talent pathways across the globe (although no one is seriously suggesting these children are workers).

What Robins can speak to, however, is the inter-generational tensions, most often between athlete and coach, that have long been part of sport.

Below, we use Robins’ presentation to pose four questions designed to encourage reflection in those working on talent development pathways in particular.

1. Do you interpret generational difference: through judgement or curiosity?

Young athletes aren’t the problem; and for Robins, generational difference is something to be embraced rather than corrected.

“Yes, there is difference, but difference doesn’t mean conflict. It doesn’t mean negativity. It doesn’t mean stereotype,” she said while lamenting perceptions of younger people as sullen, easily distracted or lacking resilience.

“We would all hope through our lives that we have been young and old, right? It’s something that bonds and blinds us. This is why I get so impassioned when we get into this divisive stereotype discourse.”

Robins’ solution lies in “how we’re fostering curiosity in each other, across generations, and valuing each other – who we are – and valuing that difference.”

A team adopting this approach, she argued, is moving from a “multi-generational” approach (the default) to something more “inter-generational” (where there’s genuine collaboration between generations).

2. If your young athletes and staff members are disengaged, what is your environment doing… or failing to do?

When someone disengages, Robins believes it is often the environment that is responsible, not the individual. “The first question shouldn’t be about them, it should be about what we’ve created,” she said.

“There’s a ‘say-do’ gap. Collaboration looks great on the walls and in the annual report, but what are we doing on the day‑to‑day?”

In a comment that will have piqued the interest of the academy coaches in the room, she pondered whether collaboration might sometimes be confused for mere silent compliance. “Effective collaboration isn’t easy, which means we have to have safe spaces for polarised thought.” Translated to an academy context, coaches need their young athletes to feel able to speak up.

Consider: if your young athletes are disengaged, perhaps the problem isn’t their motivation or attitude, but your system design.

3. Which elements of your system are designed with young athletes and staff and which are designed for them?

“How are we setting the conditions for young people to collaborate effectively?” asked Robins before quickly answering her own question. “We’re not: we’re set up for failure.”

She is an advocate for co-creation, as the input of those on the “front line” is essential to the sustainability of any high-performance programme.

Robins’ research was clear. “Organisations who seek to co‑create much more of what they’re doing are succeeding,” she said. “How do we look at policies and programmes for that expanding demographic of five generations if we’re not seeking opinion across our organisation?”

It follows that young pathway athletes must have a say in shaping those environments. “It has to be about raising the stories from the shop floor” because “fundamentally, great brands, great organisations are created and sustained with great people; and that will still be true as long as people are running down running tracks or playing on football pitches.”

Robins posed the audience questions of her own: “How does collaboration show up? How do we foster and nurture that in the day-to-day?”

4. What are the environmental signals that truly matter to your young athletes and people?

Much like anyone else, young athletes, coaches and performance practitioners, Robins argued, benefit from clarity and consistency, particularly in sport’s complex performance environments. Yes, there is a temptation to introduce new initiatives (which may be well-intentioned), but she preached restraint.

“This is about doing fewer things but doing them well,” she said. “To be deeply intentional about doing fewer things well – investing in them and sustaining them – is mission critical.”

Robins argued there is no alternative. “You don’t need more resources [to do this]; this should be a throughline through your business. If this isn’t hardwired to your strategy, you don’t have a strategy.”

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How the Royal Academy of Dance Is Meeting the Challenge of Teaching the Next Generation

By John Portch

In November 2024, Dr Brett Robinson became the first southern hemisphere Chair of World Rugby, the international governing body of rugby union.

Robinson, a former Wallabies international-turned-sports scientist and C-suite executive, beat France’s Abdelatif Benazzi by 27 votes to 25 in the second round of the election held by World Rugby’s Executive Council.

His narrow majority meant he succeeded Sir Bill Beaumont without a honeymoon period. Yet his achievements thus far, chiefly the implementation of World Rugby’s Impact Beyond 25 programme and building consensus around new laws of the game, have been commendable.

“I’m really proud of where we’ve got to as a game because, when I came into the role, we were fractured and divided,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in Brisbane in February.

There were factions within the World Rugby Council that could be divided into England and the Celtic nations on one side with the French and Latin nations on the other. Robinson, as an Australian, said he was “coming into a gunfight between the Celts, the English and the French.”

For all that, in September 2025, the 17th World Rugby General Assembly had endorsed Impact Beyond 25, its five-to-seven-year strategy for developing and promoting the world game heading into the men’s Rugby World Cup in 2027 and Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2029 (both to be hosted in Australia) with the 2028 Olympic Games in LA sandwiched in between.

So what changed? Below, we explore Robinson’s approach to calming rugby’s internal strife.

Brett Robinson (centre) onstage at Leaders Meet: Australia with Rugby Australia’s Director of High Performance Peter Horne and Leaders’ Managing Director Laura McQueen. (Photo: Albert Perez / The Leaders Performance Institute.)

Firstly, he didn’t shy away from the problem

As Robinson explained, “some countries were incredibly frustrated; they wanted to revolt and blow everything up.” Others were about “organisationally working with the change and not being too destructive”.

Almost half of the 52 members of the World Rugby Council voted for Benazzi as Chair. Robinson, who will serve a four-year term, did not shy away from that fact. “We’ve got differences of opinion, we’ve got some challenges, and there’ll be some people that were disappointed after the election,” he said in the aftermath.

In December 2025, he expanded on his thoughts as a guest on the Rugby Unity Podcast. “The system upon which World Rugby is built has been in place for 30 years,” he said. “We have systems that simply don’t work and prevent us from reacting with the necessary speed.” It is worth remembering that he made those observations after Impact Beyond 25 had been launched.

Onstage in Brisbane, he further outlined an enduring sticking point: that France and England account for approximately 70% of the revenue generated in rugby union. This had led to political as well as economic tensions across the different factions; and the question was how World Rugby could engage and incentivise the other unions to align in pursuit of a more equitable distribution.

He ensured World Rugby’s new strategy was a collective endeavour

The Impact Beyond 25 strategy was unanimously ratified just days before the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final, which saw a crowd of 82,957 watch England beat Canada 33-13 at Twickenham.

The timing could not have been better. England 2025 was the most well-attended Women’s World Cup ever. World Rugby’s unions gave their blessing to a global impact plan that, in the international governing body’s own words, ‘is built around three core themes of profile and participation, careers and gender equity, and capability and expertise with the mission of inspiring more women and girls to get into rugby on and off the field of play.’

Most importantly, it bore the fingerprints of all those involved in its creation.

“It’s really important that, in my role, I bring the game together and we agree on what shared success looks like and we pursue it together,” Robinson told Rugby Unity.

He expanded on those comments in Brisbane. “We’ve built a collective plan where we’re all engaged, we’re all incentivised, and we’re all a part of that journey,” he said, adding that the plan includes taking All Blacks and Wallabies Test matches to the United States. Such moves “will help build the fandom that ultimately will drive the commercial outcomes and [increase rugby union’s] market share”.

He accounted for local complexity

“We are not going to do everything from Dublin,” he told the Brisbane audience, name-checking World Rugby’s base and then pointing to the man sat beside him onstage, his former World Rugby colleague Peter Horne, who now serves as Director of High Performance at Rugby Australia.

“What we do is only as good as what he [Horne] can deliver and vice versa.”

In some places, such as Australia and England, Robinson said, “we have an Anglo-Saxon way of governing; we’ve got strong boundaries around the role of the chair, the board, the CEO, the executive. In other parts of the world, they have very different ideas of the president or the chair being an executive authority.”

He cited the example of Argentine Gus Pichot, the former Vice-Chair of World Rugby. “He’s not the chair and he’s not on the board of the Argentine Rugby Union, but he is making every decision coming out of it; and so I have to work with that, acknowledging that I need to keep his chair informed and his CEO informed; but if Gus doesn’t agree with it, it doesn’t happen. And I could say, ‘well, that’s just a crazy way of governing’, but I can’t change it, so I have to work with it. The French are the same; Florian Grill is their president. He’s not the CEO, but he operates as an executive chair.”

On that last note, Robinson said: “I spent a lot of time before Christmas with the French in Paris. I’m going back there in a couple of weeks’ time.” These meetings have proven invaluable. “You have to work really hard to genuinely display that you’re listening and supporting, and they don’t necessarily say ‘yes, yes, yes’, but actually they can see the ‘why’.”

World Rugby is now reaping the rewards of his efforts. “Having the French and the Argentinians now with us, and rebuilding the relationship with the Celts and the English, was probably the biggest challenge that I faced; and now we’re there, we need to push on and deliver.”

He won’t rest on his laurels

“You’ve got to be systematic; from my experience, if you go randomly into anything like this, you are more likely to fail than not,” said Robinson. “You have to set up a proper process.”

He listed the necessary personal qualities of a chairperson: trustworthiness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. He balanced these against an ability to act and make tough decisions. All are essential in a world where alignment is predicated on retaining the trust of the individuals involved in the process.

Robinson then explained that the executive board of World Rugby had just undergone a review. He said: “I’ve been running a process over Christmas where we have a 360 on our behaviours; I’m getting a 360 on me. We’re having a discussion about board effectiveness; how that relates to the implementation of our strategy. We have some blind spots and weaknesses on our board, and we have succession plans that are coming. So those things are really important because it all rots from the head.”

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Why Change Only Sticks when you Lead your People Through the Transition

By John Portch

“There are no sides”

So said RC Buford, the CEO of the San Antonio Spurs, when recently asked how the NBA team reconciles the commercial and basketball branches of their organisation.

“We’re all on one side,” he added for emphasis.

It is true of the Spurs, where in addition to serving as Spurs CEO, Buford also serves as President of the team’s parent company Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

“There are basketball units that are part of a team and there are business units that are part of a team; and if they’re not working together, neither is going to work.”

It is true of the NBA and the wider sporting world beyond as denser competition schedules, rising commercial pressure and increased performance expectations dissolve the boundaries between business and performance.

Not that all teams have got a handle on this (the Spurs themselves say they have some way to go), which is why the Leaders Performance Institute recently hosted a virtual roundtable for members to identify the common tensions in this area, the biggest opportunities, and the initiatives that have promoted greater alignment and collaboration.

The member comments below have all been lifted from the Slido interactive questionnaire that accompanied the virtual discussion.

Four common sources for the tensions that exist between business and performance

1. The perception of competing agendas

The idea persists that commercial success and performance success are not only mutually exclusive, but actively competing.

‘Is this taking them away from the day job?’ – it’s a common question posed by coaches when their athletes are engaged in commercially focused activities.

The same contributor spoke of the battle for use of facility space by highlighting the ever-present dichotomy of ‘commercial vs performance’.

Another attendee pointed to ‘incentive misalignment’ while another cited a common concern: ‘Do I or my programme get that money or is it going elsewhere in the organisation?’

2. Limited exposure to other units

Business and performance units too often work in silos.

‘They do not understand each other or do not prioritise time to understand each other,’ wrote one attendee, capturing the experience of most practitioners and coaches at the virtual table. ‘Sometimes there may be a lack of understanding of each other’s priorities or needs,’ added another.

Nor does it help that ‘people are often changing organisations and working at larger scale or stakes than previously experienced’.

3. The idea that people don’t necessarily resist alignment, they simply don’t understand what it entails

Since ‘there’s a lack of communication or understanding on what the priority really is’,  as one member suggested, it is not surprising that there is a ‘lack of awareness of opportunities to engage or collaborate’.

Inevitably, ‘sometimes one interest is given precedent over the other’ and, on a daily basis, stakeholders are left asking ‘what’s for external and what’s for internal?’ when it comes to business practices.

4. Individual roles that become ambiguous at cross-department level

There is too often a ‘lack of clarity on individuals’ roles with regards to performance or the organisation’ and that aforementioned tension between external and internal interests has given rise to the perception that ‘business is outward‑facing and performance inward‑facing’.

Four opportunities for increased collaboration

1. Be ahead of the game

Collaboration tends to be an afterthought; and this inertia comes at a cost, as one attendee noted:

‘Some of our best work [in both business and performance] is done with paying clients and externals vs doing it for ourselves – that’s wrong and needs to shift.’

‘Involve performance earlier in the process,’ wrote one member; ‘build shared metrics so both sides are measuring success the same way,’ added another.

2. Find ways to better leverage your team’s efforts

Units are invariably working for the collective good, but this is not always recognised or celebrated collectively.

‘There needs to be better capture of the actual activity that’s going on to use in multiple ways,’ said one member with both commercial and performance interests in mind.

Such a collective approach ‘would also help impact awareness, understanding and people being able to use comms and talk about it more effectively.’

3. Promote decision clarity (and discourage ‘heroes’)

It is best for all if stakeholders can ‘clarify decision rights’, as there tends to be one person who is best-placed to make a judgement in each of a team’s units.

This need not undermine efforts at cross-collaboration. As one member noted, stakeholders must ‘focus on the “80%” and providing consistent delivery’.

Nor should people over-extend themselves to plug gaps. ‘Hero behaviour during tentpole moments creates panic,’ wrote another member.

4. Understand that relationships come first

‘Take time to build the relationships and trust first,’ wrote one attendee. This can help create a ‘greater sense of community beyond the organisation,’ added another.

One member suggested that teams ask themselves: ‘How can our communication be clear and consistent?’

Three approaches that have worked:

1. The creation of cross-functional teams

The table noted the value in having:

• ‘Embedded individuals and the pairing of roles across functions’
• ‘Performance folk always visible in operational and business stand‑up meetings’
• ‘Cross‑department working groups, communities of practice and think tanks’

2. Shared ownership and accountability

One member wrote that commercial and performance operations can flourish ‘when everyone sees the value of what’s being done’.

There should be ‘joint ownership of outcomes and metrics between both sides’.

3. A continuous effort to maintain alignment

No one has fully cracked this and it is incumbent on all to make an effort.

A member recommended ‘genuine and honest perspective-taking of other departments’ before adding that we need to ‘be careful of biases and assumptions’.

Another suggested using ‘tools like SWOT to help people understand what to protect, address, leverage and manage’.

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Business or Basketball? Here’s Why the San Antonio Spurs See Little Distinction

By John Portch

“What does good change leadership look like?”

John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, poses this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’

To set up the conversation, he looked at the twin elements that enable sustained change (people taking ownership of the change and the idea of change itself as a habit) before identifying some of the common sources of resistance.

“There are times where we will resist change, we’ll engage less quickly in it, even when we have to; or we waste energy in how we’re responding to change,” said Bull. “But we also have to understand resistance from others and what that requires of us as leaders.”

People, he explained, resist change for two primary reasons: loss (what they perceive they are losing) and uncertainty or ambiguity. It is not enough for a leader to merely sell the change.

He continued: “If we’re just pushing change and we haven’t understood what people perceive they’re losing, then we run the danger of increasing the resistance rather than decreasing it. By understanding where the resistance is coming from and being able to address that, we’re in a much better position to be able to lead it.”

A ‘change’ or a ‘transition’?

In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.

He illustrated this distinction between ‘change’ and ‘transition’ with a slide:

“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”

To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:

These are an adaptation of the ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ model of German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin, who drew attention to the emotional and behavioural elements of change. Modern scholars, including William Bridges (whom Bull also namechecks), place an emphasis on the personal dynamic.

Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:

The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.

With the behavioural elements of transition established, Bull then set out what neuroscience tell us about human resistance to change, with reference to the SCARF model.

This framework, devised by neuroscientist David Rock, sets out five domains that influence human social behaviour and motivation. ‘SCARF’ stands for ‘Status-Certainty-Autonomy-Relatedness (Relationships)-Fairness’. Bull explained each in turn:

Depending on their circumstances, people can either feel threatened or rewarded in each of these domains.

“I’m not constantly thinking about the SCARF model,” said Bull. “I use it when I get a response from a client that surprises me; then I’ll go back to the SCARF model and go ‘what might I be missing?’ But it’s also a really good model when you’re thinking about how to frame and communicate the change. Because each of these can give a negative hit, but you can also think about ‘how do I promote this change? How do I sell this change in a way that it highlights how it might increase status? How might it increase autonomy?’

He then returned to the three phases of transition and set out the possible traps to be avoided for both individuals and leaders:

Bull emphasised that these traps reflect predictable human responses when transition is not adroitly led rather than poor intent or capability; and, if anything, leaders often respond with the wrong behaviour at the wrong stage.

He then pivoted towards organisational psychology, specifically the idea of change-curves.

People can respond both positively and negatively to change and these reactions can be plotted on a ‘change curve’. First, he showed the virtual table an example of a negative response to change:

Bull explained the line of trajectory through his own negative experience of discovering that a restaurant in Bath had stopped serving his favourite pizza.

• Initial disbelief/minimising: “My first response was I thought the waiter was wrong. I genuinely just thought the waiter was new and didn’t know.”
• Frustration once the reality hit: “At some point, it dawns on me that the waiter is not wrong and I’m wrong. I do not feel anger but I do have some frustration.”
• Getting mentally stuck on what’s been lost: “What my mind keeps going back to is what I want.”
• Gradual adjustment and acceptance: “I grow up a little bit. I try something on the menu and it’s good.”

He added: “I just want to make the point: you don’t move linearly through each stage. I think of it more as water sloshing through a container. You will be partly in stage one, partly in stage two. So even though I’m intellectually trying to figure out what am I going to have on the menu, I’m still partly in frustration.”

Bull then shares an example of a positive change curve:

He noted that positive change:

• Still involves transition: he gives examples of a promotion, getting married or having children.
• Still includes disillusionment: a new job may come with unexpected pressure, increased responsibility or moments of self-doubt.
• Is usually quicker and shallower: the emotional low point is less deep and people regain confidence and stability more quickly than with negative change.

Next, Bull summarised what people need from their leaders at each phase of transition:

To wrap up his presentation, Bull suggested the ‘Four Ps’ model as a communications tool for members to use in their teams when leading change. It can help hold the process together and ease the psychological demands of transition:

He said: “This isn’t new content, but it’s a new way of presenting it; it tends to be one of the things people remember six months, 12 months later.”

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Rec Revolution: Does Transformational Leadership Theory Explain Bath Rugby’s Resurgence?

By John Portch

“In high-performance organisations, we rarely lose because we lack expertise – we lose when that expertise isn’t effectively integrated.”

With these words Dr Robin Thorpe, who has worked across multiple elite high-performance environments, kicked off his recent virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members. The theme of the day was how teams and organisations can overcome silos born of structural issues with fresh skills and a new mindset.

“We tend to think of the human factors first,” Thorpe tells the Leaders Performance Institute off the back of his presentation, “but once you start to analyse the situation more deeply and begin to reflect, there are likely to be structural factors within an organisation.”

“Across my roles,” he continues, “the most effective environments weren’t necessarily those with the most expertise, but those where systems were deliberately designed to integrate that expertise.”

In rare high-performance environments where excellence is paired with humility, collaboration emerges naturally, as individuals are both confident in their expertise and open to the perspectives of others. This reflects principles from social psychology where low ego threat and high psychological safety enable collective intelligence to outperform individual capability.

So a leader in sport may encounter defensive or withdrawing behaviours, but their roots are often linked to underlying structural factors.

Below, aided by Thorpe’s reflections from a career spanning nearly two decades in both European and North American sport, we run through three of the most common structural factors behind the formation of silos and some of the steps that organisations can take before they become damaging.

1. Specialisation and silos

Outcome:

In the late 2000s, as Thorpe explains, there was an acceleration across the world of sport in the emergence of different performance departments, from sports science and physiotherapy to medical and psychology. In numerous settings, “it led to dichotomy-type frameworks, such as ‘performance and training’, ‘medical and rehab’ or ‘injured and non-injured’. These were structural in nature and encouraged departments to each add their own KPIs, language and processes.” It ultimately led to misaligned and fragmented outcomes, which were often in competition.

Insight:

Specialisation improves expertise but also increases the need for deliberate integration. Therefore, it is important to be clear on the shared outcomes/priorities. How do you ‘nest’ short‑term priorities within longer‑term objectives ? Thorpe says: “We have to be clear on our objective and purpose. What are we here to do? For example, are we here to improve athlete education around certain topics? Is there a more psychological outcome? Is there a technical skill priority? And it doesn’t mean that these priorities are isolated, it just means that maybe a certain member of the team takes more of a lead in ensuring that everything fits together and the greater team work toward a shared outcome.” When done well, this doesn’t just improve collaboration, it directly enhances decision-making quality and performance outcomes.

In practice, this requires leaders to actively design how disciplines connect, rather than assuming collaboration will occur naturally.

This can lead to a much more nuanced (but outcome-focused) approach. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example: if a high-performance team is looking to stimulate quad hypertrophy in an athlete, it will certainly involve the S&C specialist and dietitian, but if the athlete is experiencing challenges with their eating behaviours, there will be opportunity for the psychologist or a mental performance/health specialist to integrate, considering the success of the outcome is heavily influenced by increasing certain nutrient intake. Shared outcomes enable that interdisciplinary conversation. “It can influence outcomes in ways not immediately apparent when viewing the performance challenge in isolation.”

Review your setbacks. “It’s really important to regularly review situations where outcomes weren’t aligned or why an outcome wasn’t achieved or there might have been a communication issue.” The first port of call should not be the human at the foundational layer.

Repeat your purpose. It sounds simple but it is critical to be “very deliberate and very repetitive in a positive, coaching way in reminding staff how to architect collaboration. Consistently discussing purpose, priorities and outcomes for athlete results, whether informally or sometimes more formally in team meetings, can be effective”.

Provide open spaces. “I think we should start to really think about facility architecture and ensuring that we’re creating and positively manipulating traffic footfall and healthy collisions within a space to help reduce silo-forming.” Thorpe admits the best-designed building won’t solve every performance issue, “but it can play a role in minimising some of the downstream effects”

2. Authority-centred structures

Outcome:

Expertise is present but true influence depends on the hierarchy.

Thorpe recalls an experience from earlier in his career. “It was a highly coach-led, centralised structure,” he says. “We could put in place strong systems and processes, but ultimately, they needed to align with the direction and philosophy of the key stakeholder. This is not unique to that environment. In these settings, ensuring that all perspectives are heard and integrated can be challenging, and individuals or departments may naturally gravitate towards protecting their areas of expertise.”

Insight:

Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions. Teams should consider establishing…

Clear decision-making rights. Thorpe suggests that a high-performance team creates a mechanism that integrates interdisciplinary input before it reaches the coach or key stakeholders. He speaks of the “decision-making engine” that operates beneath leadership level.

He says: “Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”

When this is happening 24/7, “More information feeds into this decision-making engine,” he continues, using the example of a health and performance leader reporting on an athlete. “It allows them to communicate clearly, concisely and with confidence to key stakeholders.” These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.

The role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.

3. Misaligned incentives

Outcome:

Departments optimise locally rather than collectively.

This often creates more problems. “Increasing volumes of data, when not clearly aligned to purpose, can unintentionally contribute to siloed thinking.” says Thorpe, adding that it can lead to opinion-selected data points that increases the risk of emotions trumping objectivity.

The highest-performing environments align incentives in a way that balances risk, performance, and availability, rather than allowing one metric to dominate.

It reminds him of Charles Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. The renowned English economist may not have had sports science in mind when he uttered those words, but they resonated with the virtual roundtable when Thorpe shared them.

When incentives are misaligned, collaboration becomes negotiation. The solution lies in…

Shared KPIs. This is linked to the shared outcomes discussed above. Thorpe cites a hypothetical example of a medical team delivering on player availability. He says: “If the team availability percentage is the North Star then it risks bringing about a more conservative approach to solely keeping players available.”

It raises both a moral quandary and a performance issue. “Performance departments tend to want to push players and to maximise human performance. In doing so, you acknowledge that there may be some potential collateral damage and injuries along the way. Medical teams often use player availability as a key indicator of success, while performance teams focus on driving adaptation and physical development, highlighting the importance of aligning these perspectives around shared outcomes specific to the collective objectives of the team or players.”

Intentional system design. It comes back to the ‘decision-making engine’ and clear decision-making rights. “It creates a shared language using correct, up-to-date, appropriate objectivity. Using appropriate data collection measures often reduces the influence of opinions and subjective inputs.”

Ultimately, organisations that address these structural barriers see improvements not just in collaboration, but in decision speed, clarity, and performance outcomes.

As high-performance environments continue to evolve, the challenge is not removing silos, but designing systems that integrate expertise to consistently deliver performance.

To wrap up proceedings, Thorpe posed four questions that practitioners can ask themselves:

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Breaking Silos: Why the Answer Lies in Creating a Sense of Shared Ownership in Performance

By John Portch

Nico O’Reilly’s remarkable season at Manchester City went up a level with his winning goals in last month’s Carabao Cup final at Wembley.

The City defender-midfielder’s brace capped a perfect birthday weekend (he turned 21 on the eve of the final) and secured his club the first silverware of the English season, with a domestic treble still to play for.

Post-match, O’Reilly was asked if City’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal was a significant blow to the team with whom they continue to vie for the Premier League and FA Cup.

“100 percent. It is a blow for them and we need to build on it and get some momentum from this win now,” he said having received his first (but almost certainly not last) winner’s medal in City colours.

“As soon as the international break is over we need to kick on and fight hard. We have a game in hand in the Premier League, we have to play them at our place, we are still in the FA Cup. Liverpool is a tough tie [in the FA Cup quarter-finals] and we know that so we need to do everything we can to keep going.”

O’Reilly’s rise since breaking into the Manchester City team in 2024 represents another triumph for the club’s exceptional academy. His bullishness displays the drive and determination required to thrive in the elite game.

It calls to mind a late-March virtual roundtable hosted by Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler, who has worked on talent pathways in both English football and cricket.

When discussing the tensions that exist on talent pathways (Brunnschweiler highlighted five), he spoke of the need to develop well-rounded individuals and those with the ruthlessness required to succeed.

“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways,” he said, “and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”

It was just one of a series of talking points during a month where performance environments, strategies and alignment were top of the agenda. Read on for a complete round-up.

Quote of the month:

The athlete is undoubtedly a stakeholder with agency in their own development, but as one practitioner working in the British sports system observed during a virtual roundtable focused on performance environments, the athlete’s ever-growing involvement raises some questions:

“We’ve definitely found that when you give that space to the athletes, they then can take it a little bit too far. Sometimes they complain about everything. ‘We want to fix this, we want to fix that’. It’s not super constructive… how do we create those boundaries and expectations on what that looks like; and how can we keep it productive to the goals of the environment and what we want to do?”

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full report here.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Insight of the month:

Former New Zealand All Blacks General Manager Darren Shand delivered a presentation where he explained how the team brought the concept of alignment to life in their weekly work.

He said:

“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.

“As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.

“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”

Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.

(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Good to know:

Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions.

That is according to Leaders Performance Adviser Dr Robin Thorpe, who led a virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the question of silos.

Thorpe argues that teams should consider establishing clear decision-making rights, as the role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.

“Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”

These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.

(Photo by Patrick Khachfe/Getty Images)

From the archives:

The Brisbane Lions have won back to back AFL premierships, but that wasn’t the environment Senior Coach Chris Fagan encountered in his first days on the job in 2017.

“I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there.”

He told the story of the team’s transformation on his watch at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full story here.

(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

What’s coming up for members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

In 2019, the San Antonio Spurs’ General Manager, RC Buford, transitioned to a dual role as CEO of the team and President of its parent company, Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

Six years on, he is uniquely placed to discuss the continuing convergence of performance and business in a world of denser competition schedules, rising commercial pressures and heightened performance expectations.

What is his view having seen it from both sides?

“There are no sides,” Buford tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams. “We’re all on one side.” He speaks with a conviction that it could never be any other way.

“There are basketball units that are part of a team and there are business units that are part of a team; and if they’re not working together, neither is going to work,” he continues.

“It’s a dynamic that we’ve seen come closer together over the years,” says Phil Cullen, the Spurs’ Senior Director of Organizational Development & Basketball Operations, who joins Buford on the call.

The conversation takes place just weeks after Forbes valued the Spurs franchise at $4.4 billion, which is a 14% increase in just 12 months. According to the Forbes report, the franchise’s revenue in 2025 was $401 million and their operating income was $151 million.

While these figures are healthy for a US mid-market franchise, Cullen and his colleagues are perennially aware of the NBA’s debt-capacity rules, which influence investment in basketball operations.

“That debt capacity could impact how you build your roster,” he says before going on to outline how the Spurs’ basketball units can also support their business efforts. “We try to get ahead of things as much as we can.”

They try to capture media requests in the pre-season, which, as Cullen explains, allows the team to focus on their basketball when it matters most. Any other outcome is unthinkable for Buford.

He says: “We’re all one team and it becomes siloed when we differentiate ourselves.”

An aligned overall strategy is a necessity. “For us to be successful, we have to be focused on championship teams, impact in the community, and financial strength,” Buford adds. Each unit at the Spurs will have its own key initiatives, which he calls “big bets”. “We’ve all got to entertain those big bets to find success in our units”.

We spend the next 30 minutes with Buford and Cullen discussing what gives these big bets their greatest chance of success.

One team, one strategy

Of his transition to Spurs CEO, Buford says that while he doesn’t claim to know much about business, “I hope I know a thing or two about building teams”.

“I oversee business and basketball – I don’t oversee just one – and I try to be a resource to the people, the experts in those fields,” he says.

These experts sit in cross-functional teams. “You build collaborative teams that have impact and influence on the operation of the organisation.” When partnership deals are negotiated, for example, the partnership team includes representatives from the brand, impact and basketball units. “Through all the partnerships we’re building, the goal is to include each of these areas in a way that they can all be successful.”

Cullen illustrates the point further by offering the example of technology partners, which are needed by both basketball and business units. He says: “A lot of our conversations have been more inclusive of saying, ‘how can we maximise this opportunity with this partner?’ And part of that is the onboarding piece with those partners. It comes from creating these cross-functional teams to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to have a voice into how to maximise these partnerships.”

“But that doesn’t mean everybody in the whole place has to use a partner,” adds Buford. “It doesn’t mean everybody’s required to use it if it doesn’t fit the form or fashion that people need to do their work.”

Put the right people in place

In 2023, the Spurs hired Kaleb Thornhill as VP of Player Development & Organizational Growth.

“He also sits on the partnership team,” says Cullen of Thornhill, who is tasked with supporting player development away from the court. His role is about “understanding their interests; understanding how they want to show up in the community; the things they want to get behind. That was a strategic hire within the last five years that is probably different than most teams.”

Collectively, the Spurs will facilitate media requests during suitable periods and work with the players to deliver on their community-focused efforts such as visiting schools, community hubs and other public spaces.

Player partnerships are another focus, particularly with a playing cohort that invests time and money in their personal brand in a manner that was an anathema to Spurs players of an earlier generation such as Tim Duncan, who resolutely guarded his privacy.

“I can’t speak to others, but in our group there are people branding themselves differently than they did in the past; and they may want more engagement; but it’s not keeping them from any kind of partner relationship, it’s protecting their time,” says Buford. “You have to have a voice that understands what their time is and they must be engaged in the strategy behind the recruitment of partners.”

Cultivate relationships

The Spurs’ Victory Capital Performance Centre (also known as ‘The Rock at La Cantera’) opened its doors in 2023 as the Spurs’ new practice facility and new home of the team’s basketball operations. (Cullen is also heavily involved in Project Marvel, which will see the Spurs move to a new arena in downtown San Antonio in 2032.)

At The Rock at La Cantera, one of the chief architectural considerations, as Cullen explains, was to design an environment that promoted professional relationships.

“The communication piece has to be built on connection and the casual conversations, casual collisions, that we have throughout our workday, whether it’s at our training facility or down at the arena,” he says.

“It’s really important that you develop that sense of relationship, that others can bounce ideas off you and there’s a good, shared understanding of the starting point.”

While the business and basketball ops units work in different locations (“you don’t want everybody in everybody’s business,” says Buford), all units will come together at various times for strategic planning.

“A lot of sessions happen in August and September for the next season, but our sponsorship renewals are actually happening now,” Cullen adds. “We’ve been brought in on the front office to speak in engagements to get ahead and be included in these conversations and some of those pitches.”

The reasons are obvious. “Get the people in partnerships to understand that just because somebody will pay to be a part of an organisation, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for player health,” says Buford. “Just because we can sell an energy drink or sell something doesn’t mean we’re going to do it. So it’s getting them to understand by communicating that.”

“Our organisation has put a lot of resources around our players, their wellbeing and their sense of belonging,” says Cullen. “But we’re also being super careful with the people we’re putting around our players as well.”

As the conversation draws to a close, both Buford and Cullen underline the fact that the Spurs have not solved the conundrum of cross-functional alignment.

Nevertheless, they clearly have a lesson or two to deliver of their own. The Leaders Performance Institute asks Buford what leaders seeking to bring together performance and business operations should be asking themselves.

His reply is instant: “How can I be helpful for you to accomplish what you want? Because, ultimately, if you do well, we’ll all do well.”

What to read next

People in Sport Often Roll their Eyes at the Word ‘Strategy’, but I’ve Found that Planning Provides Direction, Connection and Continuity in a Pressured and Volatile World

By John Portch

“Does wine make you smarter?”

Adam Kucharski posed this question to bemused members at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“Fortunately, we’ve got some data we can draw on here,” he added while presenting a graph illustrating the results of a study that showed a positive correlation between the amount Cambridge colleges spend on wine and their students’ exam results.

“Now, I suspect a lot of you are thinking ‘hang on, just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one thing is causing the other’; and you’d be quite right. But it doesn’t mean this data is useless, because if one can understand the consistent relationships between things, we can make predictions.” In this case, if they can spend more on wine they can also likely spend more supporting their students.

“If the college has a higher wine spend, it’s plausible that they will have higher exam results, not because one thing causes the other, but because you’ve understood that relationship to make a prediction.”

However, there are limits to just relying on prediction when making decisions. In sports science, for example, an injury risk model cannot tell a coach what to change in training. “‘You want to know ‘why is it happening?’ and ‘what can I do about it?’”

Adam Kucharski speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Over the course of half an hour, Kucharski, a Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, explored the craft of decision-making as influenced by information availability and behaviour.

“How certain is enough?” he asked. “How do we weigh the different ways that we could be wrong or weigh up the potential to get more information? Then, crucially, how do we think about the communication of that? And in terms of the ambiguity around uncertainty, being able to evaluate our judgements and ultimately get those ideas and innovations into the hands of the people who can make best use of them.”

He encouraged people in sport to consider a range of factors.

Perfect clarity is rare

Hindsight is 20:20, which leads to what Kucharski calls the “fundamental problem of cause and effect”. He said: “You only get to see one version of reality. You take an action, you see the outcome, you don’t get to rewind reality, not take that action, and then see what happens next. You never get to observe the counterfactual.”

Injuries offer a good opportunity to understand cause and effect in sport. With this in mind, Kucharski cited a 2020 study by economist Ian Gregory-Smith on the connection between labour and productivity and how this relationship is impacted by the ‘exogenous shock’ of injuries [because they occur unpredictably and allow causal inference].

“Starting quarterbacks are paid ten times what the backup is,” Kucharski continued, “but if the star quarterback is injured and the backup is used, the team is not ten times less likely to win.” The actual figure is closer to 30% less likely, but that could still be the difference between a losing season and a lucrative playoff run.

NFL teams understand this. “What they found is it’s pretty well balanced in terms of the additional money they pay their star quarterbacks versus the financial loss they estimate if that quarterback isn’t playing. So it seems, at least in this analysis, a reasonably efficient market.”

Some risks are worth taking, some are not

The NFL study is instructive but, as Kucharski said, “we don’t always get the luxury of treating everything with that level of detail.” At some point someone must make a decision with incomplete information.

He told the story of William Sealy Gosset, an English statistician who was hired by Guinness in 1899 as the brewery sought to make their brewing more consistent. Gosset’s job was to help improve crop selection, yield consistency, quality control and the stability of fermentation processes through statistical analysis.

He developed methods that enabled brewers to draw reliable conclusions from small amounts of data. They needed a way to tell whether differences in quality, crop yield or fermentation were real or just random noise, even when they only had a handful of samples with which to work.

“Gosset was a pragmatist,” said Kucharski. “He didn’t like the idea that we needed to demand high certainty for everything.” Unlike some of his contemporary statisticians, Gosset believed that context was key.

Kucharski agreed. He said: “It depends on the situation that we’re dealing with, it depends on the impact of the decision. How much might we lose if we’re wrong? It also depends on how hard it is going to be to go out and collect new evidence. Some datasets are easier to get than others.”

It should not be a “one-size-fits-all” threshold. “You’ve got to be careful that you don’t just end up wanting more and more evidence that’s fairly inconsequential to decisions; there’s a risk you end up over-analysing.” On the other hand, “if there’s a large cost to being wrong and it’s easy to collect evidence, then you should demand that certainty.”

Leaders in sport, Kucharski explained, are likely to face high-impact decisions where it’s hard to gather additional evidence and build higher confidence. “In those situations, as well as making use of your judgement, the evidence you have available, you also need to be careful where you set the threshold for action.”

Inaction is also a decision

Set your bar for action high and you’ll avoid bad ideas, but you may also miss out on something groundbreaking.

“There’s a temptation amongst leaders to want more certainty,” said Kucharski, “but that in itself is making a decision. If you never make a decision unless you’re 100% confident, you won’t take risks or make progress; and that requires us to think more deeply about what we mean by being ‘wrong’. What are the different ways we could be wrong and how do we balance them?”

To illustrate his point, Kucharski referred to Albert Einstein’s irritation whenever his papers were peer-reviewed following his emigration to the United States. This was in stark contrast to his experience in his native Germany where, to cite one example, Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory who also served as Permanent Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, promoted Einstein’s early research on relativity through the academy’s journals, always without recourse to peer review.

“Planck’s philosophy was it’s better to set the bar low and get ideas at the price of making some mistakes than set it too high and miss out on both,” added Kucharski.

A leader must assess the trade-offs and decide which metrics define success.

‘Weasel words’ help no-one

Sherman Kent co-founded the CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE) in 1950. A year later, as Kucharski told the audience, the office published a report entitled ‘Probability of an Invasion of Yugoslavia in 1951’. It concluded that there was a “serious possibility” of a Soviet invasion that year.

Kent later asked the different analysts involved what numerical probability they had in mind when they agreed to that phrasing. Their answers ranged from 1:4 to 4:1.

“He got quite frustrated with this,” said Kucharski, “he said ‘in intelligence, like in a lot of crisis and decision-making environments, you don’t get certainty and clear facts; you often have to use judgement’. He noted that people hate being pinned down to judgements; and they use ‘weasel words’.” These are intentionally ambiguous or misleading turns of phrase.

Kucharski admitted he had been guilty of using weasel words himself in the past. “The value in pinning people down to a judgement is it allows you to evaluate their judgement, particularly under uncertainty.”

Your network is critical when selling decisions

Kucharski argued that it is critical for leaders to balance the interaction between evidence, people and methods of communication.

“It’s not just about models,” he said. “It’s about how they interact with people; those end users.”

Leaders should look to create a “network effect”. “If you get the flu, you probably got it from one specific person; but ideas and the adoption of innovations don’t work like that. There’s a lot more need for social reinforcement.”

It helps to build credibility (“if you hear about something independently from lots of people, it gives you increased confidence about it”) and social legitimacy (“you might believe something is true, but if other people aren’t acting like it’s true, you might be less likely to act”).

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