By John Portch

“We’re spending a wonderful amount of time today thinking about cultivating the human, figuring out what it takes to build that capability and execute under pressure,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership specialist was speaking just moments before she introduced Seth Meyers to the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City.

Meyers, a comedian, broadcaster and producer, instantly built on the theme, with his tales of watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis produce sketches that died a death during read-through sessions (and all too often live onstage) at Saturday Night Live.

“Watching them succeed is something you can do,” he said, “but watching them fail at the table was the real education.”

Meyers made clear his admiration for the writers and producers of SNL who, as he said, “have seen and heard more sketches than anyone in the history of the world”. “It was a reminder of how hard comedy was,” he added. “To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”

Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it.

And it was not just Meyers’ musings. Across both days, we heard from leaders in high-performance environments as diverse as the US Air Force, Juilliard School and the Brooklyn Nets, who lent us their home for two days. Together they delivered insights on how leaders can cultivate environments in which people fail cheaply, learn quickly and perform sustainably.

Below is a selection of five insights that paint a picture of proceedings.

1. You have to cultivate people, not merely manage performance

The Brooklyn Nets have been on an exciting trajectory since the arrival of Sean Marks as General Manager in 2016. His tenure began with a question: “What are we going to stand for?” Marks believed that the Nets needed an identity that meant more than mere wins or losses and he landed upon ‘Brooklyn grit’ – a system of behaviours that extended beyond one, single individual. “It’s really important that you take the responsibility to drive a culture that everybody can observe,” he said.

Marks and the Nets have continually hired the best people, regardless of their professional background. A quick roll call of their staff would reveal people with experience in fields as diverse as soccer, baseball, finance and, of course, basketball. Each is given the platform to perform. He said:

If you give people the opportunity, you empower them to speak up, you empower them that they do have a voice, they’re motivated far more than a group that isn’t empowered to have a voice.

Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks in coversation with host Holly Ransom. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

2. The best leaders listen

Across both days, listening emerged as an important performance tool. Whether building an NBA franchise, leading a writers’ room or cultivating future performers, the speakers repeatedly stressed that leaders who genuinely listen create environments where trust, challenge and innovation can flourish.

Marks for one said:

I want a diverse train of thought [and] if I’m going to hang my hat on hiring the very, very best, shame on me if I don’t listen to them.

Similarly, Seth Meyers’ beliefs have been shaped by his time in improvisational comedy as well as his time as a talk show host. He said:

One of the first rules with improvising is you have to be a listener. You can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when you’re talking… and don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to.

Seth Meyers on a different New York stage. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

3. Safe experimentation helps to breed resilience

So what actually happened when a sketch died during SNL read-throughs? What would Meyers do? What if the sketch actually died onstage?

“You have to shake it off,” he said. “You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it with you to your next week’s effort.”

As one of the longest-serving head writers in SNL history, Meyers was responsible for managing exceptionally talented people operating under intense deadlines and, if writers carried every disappointment into the next week, their performance would deteriorate. The key was to try ambitious ideas, accept that many would fail, then learn quickly and move on.

Meyers was echoed by Evan Yionoulis, the Director of the Juilliard’s Drama Division. “If we’re worried about fear, we have to foster an environment where you can be brave,” she said. She tells her students:

‘I believe in you, I brought you into the school. You’re going to graduate, and I’m going to take you all the way there, and I’m going to be patient… I’m not judging you, good or bad’. I’m going ‘what’s the next step to take it further? What’s the next step to take it deeper?’

Evan Yianoulis of the Juilliard School. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

4. Replace blame with curiosity

Dr Wendy Walsh is the Chief Learning Officer for the US Air Force, a role in which she oversees education for approximately 700,000 personnel. Her work goes beyond training to the creation of conditions that enable learning across a sprawling, complex system. She argues that high-performance environments are “complex adaptive systems made up of continuously changing people, relationships and influences. She argued that learning starts from observation:

It’s the most important thing that we do is to be present with each other… I might not agree with you, but it’s a requirement for me to understand a different person’s perspective, because that will reveal more possibilities.

Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer of the US Air Force. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

Walsh was joined onstage by Andrea Tullos, who explained why the US Air Force pivoted from focusing on factors such as strength, endurance and swimming ability in recruitment. Ultimately, they were alarmed by the numbers of recruits dropping out. They shifted the focus to factors such as resilience, learning agility, tolerance for discomfort and motivation. Tullos said:

We need to know who they are before we understand what they can do… [and] it’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better.

Andrea Tullos, former lieutenant general in the US Air Force and Founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

5. It’s not about medals but building the conditions that make medals possible

Team USA finished second in both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic medals table (behind Norway) and Paralympics medals table (behind China). The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee wants to be No 1 in both tables in 2030, which means creating the conditions that make future medals possible.

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance, told the audience of her organisation’s continuing efforts towards meeting their target. She said:

We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games [Milano Cortina]. We needed to spend time building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance… We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline… [we asked also ourselves] How are we keeping athletes in sport and then the opportunities to bring new athletes into Olympic sport?

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

What to read next

Want to Be an Adaptive Leader? You’d Better Prepare

By John Portch

There are some scenes that no-one wants to imagine, but that did not stop Dr Stephen Rashford, a trauma specialist, painting a gruesome picture of a casualty at a road traffic accident.

“Sometimes a motorcyclist with an open-faced helmet will use their face as a brake when they hit the road, and they will tear their face to smithereens,” he told the audience at February’s Leaders Meet: Australia with a tone that suggested it was an all-too-common occurrence.

“And so you’re looking at this person thinking ‘how am I going to anaesthetise them? How am I going to place that tube down into their lungs?’”

So what is the answer in a moment like that?

“We teach our people to rely on your training, rely on the data; because the data tells us we can perform. In our most adverse situation, we want them to take a breath, redistribute that blood to the prefrontal cortex and make critical decisions – not primitive ones.”

In setting the scene for his work as Medical Director at the Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), Rashford recounted the tale of airline captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, who landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009 when bird strikes took out the aircraft’s engines.

“All Sully’s experience over 40 years of flying before that had deposited information in his brain; and when he needed it most, he withdrew from that bank of information,” said Rashford. “And we do exactly the same. If you haven’t seen someone with 95% burns before, you will have been at an audit where we’ve looked at it in detail. And so when you’re confronted with your first major burn at that level, it won’t be a surprise to you.”

Whether it’s a paramedic attempting a difficult tracheostomy at a roadside accident or a pilot attempting an emergency landing on water, there is an element of individuals responding, or adapting, to conditions of uncertainty. As Rashford says:

“We never know what’s going to come down the line.”

How successfully they manage those calls is due in part to leaders, such as Rashford, empowering their people to solve problems on the fly.

“As a leader, you need courage to back your people at the front line.”

Here are four ways Rashford empowers others to solve problems when certainty is unavailable.

1. He gets people to back themselves

Rashford himself said it:

“I’m always telling our teams to back themselves. When you’ve got a really complex decision to make, and you’ve got to make a decision on care, you’ve got to back yourself.”

Much like Sully, they are specialists with the tools to do what is required.

“Generally, your instincts are correct and you’ll make the right decision.”

His role is not to make every decision. It is to create an environment in which others can make them confidently.

“It may not always work,” he added with reference to failures in the field, “but you need to be the person who’s there for them the next day or the next week when other people are looking at it. And you need to wear it because that’s your job.”

2. He promotes continuous improvement

This is not unique to trauma medicine by any stretch, but it is still a major feature of QAS’s approach.

“We do detailed performance reviews, just like you do, and that’s really important,” Rashford told Leaders Performance Institute members. “We get people together, we watch the videos, we analyse the data.”

It is also a world of KPIs where “everything is measured down to the second”.

That said, it is always brought back to QAS’s purpose: ‘We will deliver timely, quality, and appropriate, patient focused ambulance services to the Queensland community’.

“We try to explain to our staff how that translates to the performance of the team or patient outcomes,” said Rashford.

“When you can do that, you get buy-in. It’s actually incredible – they want those KPIs, so it’s not just a box-ticking exercise. It actually means something.”

Rashford also recalled a former medical student who suffered a catastrophic spinal injury.

“The most important thing as part of his care before we got to hospital was someone touching him on the brow, reassuring him that he was going to be okay and he was safe,” he said.

“For all the fancy things we do, not to forget about the basics.”

And underperformance, when it comes, is viewed through a lens of empathy and support.

“Generally speaking, we want to analyse whether it’s something else going on outside work,” he added.

“We just talk to them and explain ‘we’re worried about the performance’ and ‘how can we improve it?’”

Invariably, the individual is already worried about their own performance and, as Rashford said, “we take them on that journey.”

3. He enables frontline decision-making

Rashford recognises that those on the frontline are best placed to make decisions.

“While we think the pyramid starts at the top, for us it actually starts as close to the patient as possible,” he said. “The team leader needs to stand back; ideally not get involved. It always runs better when you stand back.” Rashford is more of a coordinator than a controller.

4. QAS medics do not wait for ‘perfect’ conditions

While Rashford is an advocate for evidence and performance analysis, QAS team members must not be held captive by the data. In chaotic or complex environments, complete certainty is a pipe dream. Informed, justified confidence matters more.

“If you look at medicine, we’ve gone into evidence-based care, and it stifles innovation,” he said, citing the example of cervical collars (neck braces).

The medical industry favoured hard collars, but QAS noted that they too often led to secondary injuries in trauma victims. Using frontline experience and available evidence, they switched to soft collars and, Rashford argued, the result has been a better experience for patients.

“The numbers are really important,” he added, “but don’t let them rule your life.”

What to read next

‘Some Skills of Adaptive Leadership Are Obvious, But That Doesn’t Make them Easier to Learn’

By John Portch

Spain’s 2026 Fifa World Cup triumph was more than a decade in the making, and Head Coach Luis de la Fuente helped to build this generation of Spanish players.

Having joined the Spanish federation in 2013, he worked with many of the same players through the Under-19s, Under-21s, the Olympic Games, Euro 2024 and now a World Cup triumph, making him one of the rare international coaches to oversee an entire generation from adolescence to the sport’s biggest prize.

“When I was made seleccionador I said that if I had an advantage it was that I knew the players. That allowed us to ‘bet’ on the future,” he told the Guardian in 2024.

It is a model many sports organisations would love to replicate. Yet, as performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler observed during a recent Leaders Performance Institute roundtable: “I don’t think anyone’s solved this. That’s why we’re still talking about it; we’re still trying to work out how to do it most effectively.”

Spain would not claim to have cracked the code. Nevertheless, their success focuses attention on one of the most enduring questions in performance: how do organisations consistently develop talent capable of succeeding on the biggest stage?

That discussion was just one of the standout conversations among Leaders members in July.

We share some of the choicest cuts in this month’s Debrief.

Insight of the month:

When it comes to talent pathways, are we designing programmes around the needs of the athlete, or around the needs of the system?

Brunnschweiler wrapped up his presentation during the aforementioned roundtable with a reflection on his career working on elite talent pathways:

At the upper end of the talent pathway, the highest potential athletes can get the ‘worst’ programme.

An athlete may look as though they are receiving the best possible opportunity when they are training with senior professionals, yet if that exposure comes at the expense of match minutes, individualised development, physical preparation and psychological support, they may actually be receiving a worse developmental programme than peers lower down the pathway.

“They were being utilised more as a training mechanism for senior performers rather than a really high potential young player,” said Brunnschweiler, who worked with his colleagues to find a solution.

“One mechanism we did put in place was having a transition coach whose specific role was to go with that high potential player or group of players when they went into the senior training environment.”

Read the full roundtable report here.

Myth buster of the month:

Strategies don’t deliver outcomes – that’s the reality.

Michael Bourne, the Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association, admitted he loves a strategy. But as he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy in April, ideas count for little without coherent actions.

He continued: “I’ve talked about a strategy that was written in 2018. So the idea of that being accurate to what we have to do today, well, a realism needs to be brought to that. The critical factor in those clear and coherent actions is if you still believe in your basic principles, you’ve got to have rapid review cycles that can tell you what you need to do today against the mission and the vision that we’ve set ourselves.”

These reviews are tracked on a dashboard, which contains 56 metrics that enable the LTA to link their strategy to “the bigger picture, to what everybody’s doing.”

Last month, with Wimbledon underway, we returned to that session to explore Bourne’s role in delivering the LTA’s ten-year performance strategy.

Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

Good to know:

My work has taught me that you cannot overcome biases by simply trying to be more rational. The optimal path is to create processes that prevent us from succumbing to them.

Behavioural economist Dr Benjamin Kelly used the start of rugby union’s Nations Championship to run the rule over the biases that most commonly present themselves in the sport.

He advocates a structured intervention, as depicted below:

‘By understanding how these biases manifest, leaders can design and implement structured processes to counteract them,’ he wrote. ‘The journey to mastering the mental game is one of discipline and a commitment to process over outcome. The critical insight is not to eliminate bias, but to build systems that account for it. For any leader, in any field, that is the ultimate competitive advantage.’

Read the full article here.

Quote of the month:

Do the common things uncommonly well.

So said performance specialist Rachel Vickery at a roundtable on the topic of performance under pressure.

She argued that an ability to manage pressure is less to do with fancy tricks or even an attempted recreation of pressure moments in training, and more to do with reducing an athlete’s allostatic load – the accumulation of stressors and demands over time that push a person into a heightened state of physiological arousal.

“What they end up seeing in finals is not a sudden, unexpected failure of performance,” she said. “It was something that was actually built because of that accumulation in the system as a whole.”

The secret lies in increasing an athlete’s ‘buffer’ – the spare capacity between a person’s current arousal level and the point at which performance starts to deteriorate. When someone has plenty of buffer, the pressure can rise naturally, their arousal can increase, and they can still stay below their threshold.

Vickery argued that many organisations make a fundamental mistake by treating sleep, recovery, relationships and gratitude as wellbeing initiatives rather than as performance interventions that create buffer.

Read the full story here.

Best advice:

There’s this quote: every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else. You’ve just got to make sure you’ve got the energy and the headspace to provide the appropriate level of support that your performance team need.

Ian Costello became the General Manager of Munster Rugby in 2025 and, in assuming the role, took a strategic leadership position after two decades of coaching on the grass.

He admits it has been a steep learning curve, but with a shared vision he has allowed Munster’s domain experts to flourish while finding the space to spot performance trends and nip issues in the bud.

Read our interview with Costello here.

Ian Costello (centre) has been the General Manager of Munster Rugby since 2025.

What’s coming up for members

Why Succession Planning & Sustainability of Handovers is Critical

By John Portch

Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby, has loved being back on the grass this summer with the province’s women’s team.

“Matt Brown, the Head Coach, enjoyed putting me through a rigorous interview process,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute with a smile.

Costello’s appointment to his current post in 2025 came after more than two decades working as a coach in various capacities, including academy coach, defence coach and head coach. “This is the least I’ve been on the grass in the last 20 years,” he continues.

“I love many elements of this role. I love the complexity and how challenging it is, how all the different parts of the performance system are interconnected. It’s like having multiple plates spinning and making decisions on which plates to leave alone to keep spinning and which ones to take down and put under the microscope. Then deciding on any necessary interventions, putting the plate back on and keep it spinning.”

We would say that’s easier said than done, but it actually sounds pretty hard. Costello agrees. “There’s this quote: every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else. You’ve just got to make sure you’ve got the energy and the headspace to provide the appropriate level of support that your performance team need.”

Here, with Costello’s help, we pose five questions that all leaders should be able to answer.

1. Are you the lead expert or creating the conditions in which expertise flourishes?

“I don’t see my job as leading on the expertise,” says Costello. “I see it around leading on the system and trying to create the conditions where that expertise can flourish; where it’s aligned, where it’s connected, where it’s integrated.”

As a collective, Munster are working towards what he calls their ‘North Star’ (the shared objective of producing winning performances). It’s a phrase Costello enjoys using. “My role is to get the best people in the building, support and challenge appropriately, and create the best conditions for them and the team to succeed.”

He is not there to delve heavily into the coaching, sports science or medical decisions but to build and oversee a system that enables domain experts to succeed together. “How can we be greater than the sum of our interconnected parts?”

2. Do you keep the most important thing the most important thing?

That North Star is essential for Costello when ensuring that the domain experts on the team are all pulling in the same direction, even if they advocate for different courses of action.

“My job is to ensure that we have a shared understanding on what our purpose is and what our direction of travel is,” he says. “We’ve identified what’s the most important elements for performance. We align our energy, our resources, our focus towards that and protect that.”

The key questions are: “Do we provide a clear direction on what it takes to win? And do we keep the most important things the most important?”

3. Have you built enough trust that people will challenge you and each other?

Costello must “understand the demands and pressures of a person’s role, understand their personality and character, how they cope and the support they need” if he is to establish deep, meaningful connections and relationships with his colleagues.

“You want to reach the point where you’re comfortable having difficult conversations where tension is normal,” he says. He refers to it as “task conflict, not relationship conflict.”

“You know it’s all about what makes a team or individuals better, which gives you that necessary and healthy tension in a high-performance environment.”

Costello wants to be “visible and connected” to his team. He ensures he’s “asking good questions and trying to demonstrate a real interest in their role and how it contributes to the team’s performance.” He likens it to providing a soundboard. “They have to bounce things off you or, depending on the area, maybe I’ll provide some suggestions”.

It is, he says, “an iterative process that takes place over time and is based on developing relationships and trust”. To be fully accountable to that process, Costello needs to be “close enough to understand the detail, the context and the situation, but far enough back to see the patterns and the trends” so that he can “understand the important signals versus if they’re just noise”.

4. Do your decision-making processes reduce bias and improve judgement, or simply amplify the loudest voice?

“Everyone’s opinion and input is valued and none of us are smarter than all of us,” says Costello, who emphasises robust processes and strong frameworks when it comes to decision making.

Yet a decision-making framework can only be as good as the information provided, which is why psychological safety is critical.

“You want to build a culture or environment where people have the safety to speak up, offer their opinion, and it’s genuinely welcomed,” he continues.

Again, everyone has to be “really sure on what that North Star is so that if people have certain biases they’re brought to the surface with really good conversations”.

That is not to say that there isn’t a decision-making hierarchy. “You have to have real clarity over who owns a decision because if there’s six or seven people involved, not everyone’s input carries the same weight; it depends on what decision needs to be made and the risk-reward associated with that decision, which will depend on a range of factors.”

5. Are your people connected, aligned and integrated?

Costello wants to avoid silos at all costs. “My role isn’t around specific expertise. It’s around how we connect, align and integrate that expertise.”

He sees this idea reflected in the work of Richard Young, whose writing on performance systems has influenced his thinking.

“Richard Young talks about robust and resilient systems,” says Costello, taking up the theme, “and a robust system is where all the parts are strong independently; and while that’s good, if they’re robust and resilient, it means they’re strong independently and their interconnectedness is strong too.”

At Munster, Costello emphasises the importance of integrated working practice. “We encourage individual departments to be excellent, but stress that the quality of integrated work between departments can potentially have the biggest impact on elements of team performance,” he says.

He highlights the club’s cross-departmental collaborative projects, which bring together specialists around shared performance objectives. “An excellent example of this at Munster is how the medical team and the athletic performance team collaborated around changes to the systems around injury prevention. This had a significant impact on player availability for the season; a factor considered to have a strong correlation with success in high-performance sport.”

What to read next

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

By John Portch

While competition rarely creates an execution problem, it can certainly reveal one.

High-performance specialist Rachel Vickery made this very point at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable in early 2026 when she discussed the science behind a missed free throw in basketball or a simple putt on the eighteenth green in golf.

“Typically, the cause has less to do with what’s happening in the arena and a lot more to do with what’s happening everywhere else,” said Vickery, who helps teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

She explained that pressure is a daily accumulation that adds to a person’s allostatic load, which is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold. Vickery refers to this space as their “buffer”.

“We know from the environments that we work in that pressure is actually the constant,” she continued, “but it’s the physiological stress response that is often the variable.”

The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).

Crucially, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”

At Leaders Meet: Australia in February, we invited three champion performers to the stage with a view to interrogating how they found their A games under pressure.

The trio in question were Olympic BMX gold medallist Saya Sakakibara; Ellyse Perry, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest female cricket players of all time (she is also a former Australian soccer international); and two-time Olympic track cycling champion (and Paris 2024 Australian Olympic Chef de Mission) Anna Meares.

(Left to right) Moderator Fabio Serpiello with Anna Meares, Ellyse Perry and Saya Sakakibara onstage at Leaders Meet: Australia (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).

Below, they tackle the topic from a systemic and cultural perspective.

1. Preparation that frees up mental space

Saya Sakakibara crashed out of her BMX semi-final at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but the experience set her on the path to gold at Paris 2024.

“Tokyo was my first time racing at an Olympic level,” she said. “I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I think in hindsight I was very underprepared and I was out of touch with my race routine.”

This realisation would make all the difference in Paris where she interpreted the track conditions better than her opponents. In preparation, Sakakibara visited the Vélodrome de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines two months before the Games to learn the “ins and outs” of the track, as she put it.

“I also took my GoPro and put it on my head and I did a race run, like a full lap, so I could take that video with me and went home and used it as a tool to really visualise the race,” she continued. She also filmed her walk up the hill to the track. “I was able to rehearse the things I’m saying as I’m walking up the hill. There was a telegraph pole halfway up to the start hill; and I was like, ‘every time I look at that telegraph pole, I’m going to tell myself to smile and I’m so grateful to be here’. I rehearsed that over and over.”

Her preparation enabled her to stay present. “Usually if you don’t have a system in place or if you haven’t rehearsed something, you go into panic mode and you act on emotion and not logic. So having those little things like smiling at the telegraph poll or making sure I’m saying like, ‘just fucking go’ or whatever it was.”

Saya Sakakibara (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).

2. Consistent leadership

The trust Sakakibara could place in her process helped her in more vulnerable moments too. “I still struggle with self-belief,” she told the audience. “I really don’t think all high performers have this unshakable belief that they’re going to win all the time.”

Consistency in leadership – vision, purpose, goals – is just as critical, as Ellyse Perry explained. “I think the way that that’s done with clarity and hopefully with some calmness over a long period of time is what really makes a difference,” she said.

It is something that has benefited Perry and Australia, who won the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup at Lord’s last weekend (5 July) for the seventh time in ten editions. The tournament was very much in Perry’s sights when she spoke in Brisbane; and Australia’s renewal is something Head Coach Shelley Nitschke has discussed on the Leaders stage in the recent past.

“People know what they get, they’re not guessing today how you’re going to respond to something, what the outcome is going to be.”

Ellyse Perry (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).

3. Safe learning environments

Anna Meares, who overcame the challenge of home favourite Victoria Pendleton in the sprint cycling event at the 2012 London Olympics, spoke of using less prestigious competitions to hone her performance in the build-up to those Games.

“I needed to understand Vicky better in order to make myself competitive in that environment with her and feel capable of surviving,” said Meares, who then described her work with her coach. “We went through a very long and tedious process of breaking down old habits, old skillsets; doing everything wrong deliberately and then going through a very frustrating process of learning new skillsets; starting to put myself in environments where I could trust those skillsets.

“I remember we went to a World Cup competition and my coach would not let me race not confident in the front, not confident in the back; but these were where he gave me the scope to make the wrong decision under pressure.”

It takes away any fixation on the process. “What that then does is it teaches you that this was not the right decision to make in that situation. Next time I’m there, I’m going to make a different decision. It slowly starts to change the pathway that you can create, but also the trust in making that up.”

Anna Meares (Photo: Albert Perez / Leaders Performance Institute).

4. Repetition and mastery

“When I was at the top of the start hill in Paris, I felt the most ready I’ve ever been,” said Sakakibara.

Meares then reflected on her own experience and went some way to explaining why efforts such as hers or Sakakibara’s look so ‘easy’ from the outside.

“Your intuition or your autopilot comes from the work that you have done,” said Meares. The best systems and environments reduce panic, uncertainty and cognitive overload so that people can read the situation, trust their preparation and make better decisions.

“The mental preparation is just as important in order to get out of your own way, in order for the intuition to lead the way.”

In other words, the best systems or processes enable better judgement in the heat of the moment. “I rehearsed all those things so when it came to crunch time, it was just like, ‘yeah, I know what to do’.”

What to read next

Pressure Doesn’t Make you Better – it Reveals what’s Already There

By John Portch

Could Mirra Andreeva become only the fourth woman to win Roland Garros and Wimbledon back to back?

There is every chance that the Russian’s Wimbledon campaign has ended by the time you read this, but her emphatic victory on the clay in Paris last month underlined the 19-year-old’s continued rise and, whatever happens in SW19 over the coming fortnight, promising future.

“Of course the feeling [of winning a grand slam] is unbelievable,” Andreeva told the press conference after her first round defeat of Magda Linette. “But on the other side, you expect more from yourself, feel more pressure. People expect you to do well. Next time I will try to block out those thoughts, because I was thinking about that a little bit. But a win is a win, even though I was complaining a lot.”

The topic of sustained success was just one on the Leaders Performance Institute agenda in June where, as ever, members convened for a series of roundtable discussions that culminated in our Sport Performance Summit in New York.

The takeaways are coming soon. In the meantime, here is your usual debrief.

Insight of the month:

If you were trying to win sailing’s America’s Cup, your first move would not necessarily be to discard the world’s best racing yacht designer. Yet that is exactly what Peter Blake, the founder of Emirates Team New Zealand, did back in the 1990s, as John Bull told us.

“[Blake’s] founding principle was we want to combine insights from sailors and the designers,” said Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, when presenting at a virtual roundtable that explored the facets of organisations that have been successful over a long period of time.

This approach did not sit well with Team New Zealand’s designer, Bruce Farr.

Bull continued:

Farr decided he didn’t want to listen to sailors messing with his design and, very courageously, Blake said, ‘well, that’s fine. Then you’re not the designer for our campaign’; given that Farr was the best designer in the world, that was pretty courageous.

That was in the early 1990s; Team New Zealand has since gone on to win the America’s cup five times, including the last three editions.

What Blake sought – which Farr seemingly failed to appreciate – was a disruptive edge. To use an old line from GB Sailing, he asked ‘what will make the boat go faster?’

Bull explained that long-term success depends on preserving what works while embracing challenge and evolution.

Read more here.

Quote of the month:

One of the things that I see is that I think that often the concepts that are associated with skill acquisition get stated with too much certainty; that there is really clear, solid evidence that everybody should do a certain something. That worries me because I just don’t think that there is the strength of evidence to support some of the statements that are made.

So said a coach development specialist working in the British system at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable on the topic of skill acquisition.

It is a conundrum that no one claims to have solved in its entirety, but members did set out their challenges and opportunities over the course of two sessions in April and June, respectively.

You can read the report of both sessions here and here.

Good to know:

We return to New Zealand for the second time in this debrief; this time to the All Blacks, specifically their former General Manager Darren Shand.

He asked Leaders members at a Virtual Roundtable in early June:

Are we trying to win the next match or are we trying to build an environment that keeps winning for the next decade?

Shand, who led a session that explored the balance of performance outcomes and performance growth, is in no doubt that championship teams (his New Zealand won back-to-back Rugby World Cups in 2011 and 2015) combine both.

His work is guided by four principles:

1. Winning is never enough

“I often hear the myth that you have to lose to learn, but I don’t agree with that,” he said, adding that the All Blacks would ask themselves: ‘are we still learning or just winning?’. Your environment should incentivise learning because “growth will actually protect your future performance”.

2. Clarity drives alignment

Shand posed a question: “What are you currently not saying clearly because it creates pressure or accountability?” In his experience, “most teams under-communicate ambition because they fear the discomfort, tension and challenge”. This cannot become an excuse. “If there’s ambiguity, it destroys execution in the end.”

3. The more pressure increases, the more simplicity matters

When the pressure mounts, complexity can harm performance. Learning and growth come from simple structures and consistent reflection. The key for the All Blacks was everyone to become what Shand called a “doer” – someone that can make decisions based on available information. “We took this notion of being ‘productively paranoid’ so that by meeting little and often we’d connect, we’d continue our growth, and we could help each other grow too,” he said.

4. Sustainable success requires both outcomes and growth

“We’ve got to have that outcome discipline,” said Shand, “but we’ve got to couple it with a growth mindset.” He added: “The best teams don’t choose between outcomes and growth – they create systems where growth drives outcomes.”

Read more here.

Best advice:

When it comes to performance teams, there is a dual risk of being too independent and overly integrated.

The balance, as ever, is somewhere in the middle. The performance directors at  the roundtable suggested five solutions, which we illustrate below in the form of direct, anonymised quotes:

1. Introduce decision-making frameworks

It’s been really impactful having really clear three-step, four-step decision making frameworks to help move groups from that really consensus-driven, high-support, low-challenge environments towards more of that facilitative optimal environment.

2. Adopt systems thinking

With a systems focus where you’re planning properly, some of the tension points become non-factors… if someone wants to raise their hand and say, ‘hey, maybe we look at this system’, I think that’s a productive way to approach it; and if nine out of ten people say, ‘well, you’re missing this point’, maybe the complexity is resolved to some extent.

3. Clear ownership and leadership

We look across problem-solving type, problem-solving approach and decision-making approach; and that dictates in a lot of cases whether we need to have an expert just making a unilateral decision or we need a group to discuss things.

4. Selected, purposeful collaboration

We’ll get to certain points where there are bigger picture discussions or the leadership or certain individuals need to collaborate on this part of this project or this certain segment of the season. As long as it’s spelled out ahead of time and those individuals are aware, it’s been much more successful for us and for me particularly.

5. Continuous monitoring

We have gone to a place that has been sticky for a lot of our staff around what’s mission critical for helping to try and find that sweet spot of integration, collaboration and accountability. All of these words that we’re talking about keep coming back to what’s mission critical and being a bit more intentional with the who, the why, the what and the ‘so what?’ of meetings and the people in the room.

Finally:

Dr Áine MacNamara of Dublin City University explains why  successful transitions depend on a young athlete’s psychological characteristics of developing excellence; and Paul Downes PhD, the GM of Basketball New Zealand, wraps up his miniseries looking at the performance and leadership challenges posed to a new programme on the world stage.

Coming up

The Sport Performance Summit London

By Paul Downes PhD

The National teams of Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) assemble periodically across a calendar year for qualification windows or pinnacle events as set out in the FIBA schedule.

In senior 5×5 teams, athletes are commonly not selected from within domestic systems given the time of year for FIBA competitions. Instead, they are selected whilst under contract within professional (and semi-professional) environments across various global leagues. Athletes for FIBA 5×5 age-grade tournaments (Under-15 to Under-19) are typically selected from performances across school, Association and National camp assembly periods.

Supporting the selected athletes are coaches and management that also are operate in decentralised, time‑limited contexts. No role holders are employed full-time and, as such, are operating without the contractual levers that traditional high‑performance (HP) models assume. Across the 5×5 HP pathways, BBNZ runs six age‑group national teams (male and female), plus select teams that provide ‘best vs best’ exposure to support development (on and off court) and prepare for FIBA tournaments.

Within this reality, management team members are asked to balance a number of competing demands. Examples include: short‑term competitiveness versus long‑term system sustainability, respect for professional autonomy versus national‑team standards, and redefining ‘success’ in an international sport increasingly dominated by wealthy, highly resourced nations. These challenges, among others, sit outside of being simply tactical or financial rather the most complex challenges that present are systemic and relational. Therefore, a crucial leadership question what presents itself to the BBNZ HP team is no longer whether leadership is required, but instead what kind of leadership actually works when authority is limited and commitment is discretionary.

The purpose of this article is to apply the research pertaining to Leadership Climate and Followership to the context of the 5×5 National Teams of BBNZ and demonstrate the opportunities that the constraints presented offer HP leaders for generating elevated levels of engagement and commitment to the HP strategy.

What is Leadership Climate and why does it matter?

The National teams of BBNZ can be considered to have compromised formal authority outside of assembled periods due the nature of management composition and contractual status. Without the ability for HP leaders to rely on extrinsic levers such as significant salaries, full-time contracts and formal hierarchies there could be supposed to be high risk regarding team culture and operational effectiveness. Powerful research from Goleman into Leadership Climate (1, 2) supports organisations such as BBNZ to succeed and maximise the opportunities that come from such constrained circumstances.

Goleman (1, 2) describes Leadership Climate as the emotional tone of the working environment created by leaders’ behaviours, which in turn shapes motivation, engagement, wellbeing, and performance outcomes. When HP leaders cannot rely on extrinsic motivation levers or formal hierarchy the notion of Leadership Climate becomes the primary lever for sustaining commitment and discretionary effort.

Unpacking climate further

To make Leadership Climate assessable and actionable, JCA Global (3) developed the Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI) as a behavioural measure of how it feels to be led within a given system. The LCI translates leadership behaviour into four distinct climate quadrants made up of twelve observable scales:

Green climates: the Inspiring and Including quadrants represent green climates – those that build clarity, trust, energy, and commitment through behaviours such as visioning, encouragement, collaboration, reliability, and appreciation.

Red climates: by contrast, the Controlling and Withdrawing quadrants represent red climates which, while sometimes effective in short‑term crises, erode trust and engagement when used habitually through behaviours such as micromanagement, aggression, avoidance, or rigidity.

In decentralised, tour‑assembled environments like BBNZ’s National teams, this framework provides a practical lens for understanding why some campaigns generate ownership, voice, and discretionary effort, while others default to compliance, silence, or disengagement under pressure. In these teams leadership climate can be considered to be the felt experience of being led by the HP team. This spans the experience one has at the recruitment stage, their subsequent onboarding, the connections leading into a camp/tour, tours themselves and the review period after each assembly. They are the conditions created by leaders’ behaviours during both stable and complex, high-pressure context and govern whether people think, speak up, and commit fully, or retreat into compliance and self‑protection.

Defining and contextualising Followership

Contemporary leadership research is explicit that leadership is not delivered one way from leaders to followers but is instead co‑produced through the active judgement, engagement, and agency of followers within relational and contextual systems (4,  5, 6). Within this literature, ‘Followership’ is defined as the behaviours, decisions, and choices individuals make in how they support, challenge, and contribute to collective goals – not simply their positional role or willingness to comply. It is an active function requiring judgement, commitment, and moral courage.

Kelley’s foundational work (6, 7) was pivotal in reframing organisational performance as being driven disproportionately by effective followers. These being followers who think independently and engage actively rather than by compliance‑based execution alone. This reframing shifts attention away from what leaders do to people, and toward the conditions leaders create with others.

Figure 1. Kelley’s Followership Model (1988)

Figure 1 and Table 1 provide a summary of the five types of followers and what these mean in the context of BBNZ’s HP management teams. For Kelley, the ideal follower was a critical thinking contributor, termed the ‘exemplary follower’. Kelley argues that most leaders prefer ‘conformist followers’ because they are easy to control. ‘Alienated followers’ are critical but do not contribute; and ‘passive followers’ have little to no value other than bring present. A critical thinking follower who is alienated is far more likely to be a negative team member.

Table 1. A summary of Kelley’s five followership types

A clear understanding of Followership theory and the interaction of critical thinking with active contribution is valuable for organisations like BBNZ, where management teams operate in periodic, decentralised, and contractor‑heavy environments. Once national teams assemble for FIBA events, organisational charts flatten quickly, formal authority as a national sporting organisation (NSO) reduces, and the HP system functions largely through trust, clarity, and discretionary effort. In these contexts, the quality of followership becomes visible in what people do when conditions are uncertain, pressured, or imperfectly resourced.

In tour‑assembled environments, followership quality is a strong determinant of whether standards are sustained, problems are surfaced early, and judgement is exercised when it matters most. Kelley’s insight remains deliberately uncomfortable. Leaders often gravitate toward conformists because they feel easier to manage, yet doing so suppresses the independent thinking and ownership that complex, time‑bound campaigns depend upon.

How Leadership Climate and Followship exist across BBNZ’s national teams

An example of system logic is provided in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A system logic view of BBNZ HP Strategy spanning the NSO’s Strategic Statement of Intent (SSI) to HP Strategy (HP Plan 2028+) into HP Team Plan that support HP team member’s individual plans that inform how HP constructs and operationalises Campaign Plans and Roles and Responsibilities across various National teams.

In this example, clarity is treated as a primary leadership behaviour. Through making purpose, expectations, roles, and decision rights explicit HP leaders are able to reduce anxiety and guesswork in management teams and create the conditions for Inspiring and Including climates. These favourable climates elevate the quality of followership the HP system produces. Across the HP team’s ways of working there is a deliberate emphasis on a clear, shared purpose, psychological safety, empowerment with accountability, and inclusion.

These act as necessary prerequisites for ‘exemplary followership’ which are characterised by independent thinking and active engagement. Examples of how this is achieved are engaging in collaborative approaches to define ‘What It Takes To Win’ (WITTW), clarifying campaign roles early in a cycle, and making HP expectations visible through Team Charters to allow management and athletes to exercise judgement rather than wait for instruction. When management are recruited and onboarding takes place there is a priority to build early senses of belonging and clarify the conditions for constructive candour and continuous learning. With reference to Leadership Climate terminology, such conditions actively strengthen Visioning, Trusted, Collaborative, and Encouraging behaviours while reducing the likelihood that pressure induces Controlling or Withdrawing patterns.

In the realities of global FIBA tournaments existing in dynamic, uncertain, complex conditions the benefits of positive team climates and exemplary followship are experienced. By making purpose, boundaries, and expectations explicit before and during campaigns, BBNZ increases the probability that touring parties will act as capable followers. Ones who can think ahead, raise issues early, hold standards without being policed, and sustaining discretionary effort under fatigue. The latter is imperative with international travel and compressed recovery windows between competition. In this sense, the HP frameworks developed and communicated are not just management tools, they are deliberate climate interventions that enables leadership and followership to be co‑produced in conditions where formal control is neither realistic nor effective.

At age‑grade level, clarity is what allows people to coach and support with judgement rather than hesitation. When purpose, roles, and decision‑making boundaries are clear early in the cycle, staff don’t wait for permission—they act in the best interests of the athletes. That creates trust, encourages honest challenge, and allows learning to happen quickly. In high‑pressure tournaments, those conditions matter because we need people thinking and contributing together, not just executing instructions.

Mel Bennett (Head Coach of U15-U17 Women and Assistant Coach of 2Degrees Tall Ferns)

From a medical and recovery perspective, clarity changes everything. When roles, decision rights, and expectations are explicit, I don’t have to guess whether to escalate an issue or wait—and neither do the players. It allows us to act early, manage load properly, and hold standards without friction. In the middle of a FIBA campaign, that clarity creates trust, reduces stress, and lets everyone contribute their judgement rather than just follow instructions.

Mikayla Rosieur (2degrees Tall Ferns and U17 Men’s Physiotherapist)

To help better illustrate the interactions of Leadership Climate, the types of climate conditions and Followership, Table 2 maps the JCA Climate Types to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Table 2. The JCA Climate Types mapped to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Recently the BBNZ HP team has constructed Team Charters as an initiative to elevate leadership climate and followership by replacing hierarchy with shared clarity. These charters make purpose, expectations, and behavioural norms explicit so that independent thinking, early voice, and accountable contribution become safe and expected, even under pressure. Through the removal of ambiguity (the primary trigger for anxiety, silence, and defensive followership) the Charters serve to stabilise the emotional climate whilst actively strengthening Inspiring (Visioning, Stretching) and Including (Trusted, Collaborative, Appreciative) climates by ensuring people know what matters, how decisions will be made, and how they are expected to contribute.

Concluding remarks

In decentralised, time‑limited national‑team environments, the decisive leadership task is not to demand compliance but to design the conditions for exemplary followership. That begins with making the why unmistakable for all parties. There needs to be a clear purpose, realistic success markers, and alignment surrounding how each role contributes. These conditions enable the setting of mutual expectations about standards, decision rights, and escalation pathways to hold teams steady under pressure. There is a requirement to create permission for feedback and insights by rewarding early problem‑raising, building trust through reliable follow‑through and predictable communication. HP leaders need to recognise the contributions that sustain standards, energy, and learning throughout campaigns. Create conditions, not compliance because international performance is built on the effort you cannot mandate.

References

1. Goleman, D. (2000). “Leadership That Gets Results.” Harvard Business Review, March–April.
2. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
3. JCA Global. (2016). Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI): Survey Group Sample Report. JCA Global Ltd. Available at: https://www.jcaglobal.com/pdf/sample/JCA-LCI-Survey-Group-Sample-Report.pdf
4. Uhl‑Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–676.
5. Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.007
6. Kelley, R. E. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142–148.
7. Kelley, R.  (1992). The Power of Followership. New York: Doubleday.

By John Portch

Back in 2011, Peter Keen, then the Performance Director at UK Sport, said he was kept awake at night pondering the sustainability of success.

He even compared some high-performance environments to a cult.

“Pete didn’t mean that as a negative thing, but he felt there was a cult of personality around figures such as the coach or the GM,” said John Bull, to whom Keen was speaking at the time. “His concern was when they leave; what would happen to performance?”

Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, recently led a virtual roundtable session for Leaders Performance Institute members that explored the facets of organisations that have sustained their success over a long period.

“Pete challenged us,” added Bull. “He said, ‘it would be great if someone did a piece of research helping us to understand, if you look at sustained environments, what are they doing differently? And what can we learn from that if we want to make a system more sustainable?’”

There are both environmental and leadership dimensions and, as Bull would go on to explain, it is something at which all leaders can work.

“How do you become very good at being a sustained leader within your own organisation? How good are you at balancing adding value for today versus adding value for tomorrow?”

He then posed another question to encourage the table to think about the topic:

If you had to place a single bet on the organisation that will be the most consistently successful over the next 50 years – in any domain you choose – what characteristics would you look for?

In response, the table proposed three characteristics:

• Robust and adaptable systems
• High-support, high-challenge environments
• Enduring culture and purpose beyond individuals

With the scene set, Bull turned to a research project titled ‘Radically Traditional’, which was led by Alex Hill, the author of the 2023 book Centennials: the 12 habits of great, enduring organisations. Hill led the project on behalf of UK Sport and the Centre for High Performance.

In 2018, Hill wrote of the project for the Leaders Performance Institute:

Why do some teams sustain success, whilst others stumble and fall? What sets them apart? And how can we learn from them? Well, our findings suggest it’s by becoming Radically Traditional. With a stable core – purpose, stewardship, openness – and a disruptive edge – experts, nervousness, accidents.

Back at the roundtable, Bull attempted to illustrate this idea:

He then explained each element in turn.

The stable core

• Purpose: this should be clear, compelling and attractive. “To what extent is the purpose in our environment acting as a magnet for talent and resource?”
• People: the reliance on long-term stewards, knowledge retention and continuity of expertise. “This is about identifying the valuable experts within your organisation, those whom you can’t afford to lose; and there’s a big focus on managing handovers.”
• Practices: the systematic capture and preservation of successful practices. “To what extent are we codifying what works in the organisation so we can pass that down?”

The disruptive edge

• Disruptive expertise: the deliberate introduction of external challenge and fresh thinking to avoid inertia. “To what extent are we giving space to disruptive experts in the environment?
• Confident discontent: a restless ambition despite success. “Take time to analyse and understand what’s changing in the environment and what might need to change.”
• Create bumps: engineered collisions between people and ideas to spark innovation. “This is about tackling silos and making sure the hierarchy doesn’t get in the way of the sharing of ideas.”

When it comes to finding a disruptive edge, Bull cited two leaders who proved their credentials.

Firstly, Peter Blake, the founder of Emirates Team New Zealand, the perennially successful America’s Cup sailing team.

“His founding principle was we want to combine insights from sailors and the designers,” said Bull, adding that this did not sit well with the team’s designer, Bruce Farr.

“Farr decided he didn’t want to listen to sailors messing with his design and, very courageously, Blake said, ‘well, that’s fine. Then you’re not the designer for our campaign’; given that Farr was the best designer in the world, that was pretty courageous.”

That was in the early 1990s; Team New Zealand has since gone on to win the America’s cup five times, including the last three editions.

Bull’s second example is Gene Kranz, who served as one of NASA’s Flight Controllers during the Apollo Lunar missions of the 1960s and early 1970s. Kranz made sure that his team at the Manned Space Center in Houston regularly ate meals together.

The bonds formed during those mealtimes were likely critical to the Apollo missions, especially during the successful effort to bring home the stricken crew of Apollo 13 after an explosion occurred on their spacecraft 200,000 miles (320,000 km) from Earth.

There is, as Bull explained, power in breaking bread with your peers and colleagues. “Without a doubt, the best problem-solving discussions I ever heard were when the senior team were around a table eating lunch,” he said. “And if you go back to if I were betting on an organisation, one of the things I’d do is walk into the café and I’d want to see if mobiles are out or if people are engaged in conversation and how mixed the tables are across function.”

A member from a military background told the table that he has tried something similar with his team. He said such interactions can generate “something that solves some problems that you as a leader didn’t necessarily foresee”.

He added: “that’s a major organisational decision to be comfortable with maybe a little bit less productivity with a purpose that that is an investment in future productivity based on relationships.”

As the session wound to a close, Bull steered the conversation towards four transitions to which we need to pay attention (and the risks to avoid):

1. Big success: the risk of complacency

“It can be really hard to avoid,” said Bull. However, in environments of sustained success, he has noticed “leaders are slightly paranoid when they get success; and that’s what drives them to go further.”

2. Big failure: the risk of overreaction

“The danger is that we throw the baby out with the bathwater; that we throw out some of the good as well as some of the things that we don’t need to change,” said Bull. “But there’s something about going ‘not all tradition is worth keeping’.”

3. Change in key people: the risk of losing knowledge

“One of the key things is managing handovers,” said Bull. “I think it is also looking to recruit for curiosity and humility. Sure, you want people to bring in some disruption and change, but you also want them to spend some time figuring out what has worked and not change everything.” He returned to Keen’s observation about cultish environments. “How do we make them not cults but a repeatable formula that can pass from generation to generation?”

4. Significant external change: the risk of slow or inadequate adaptation

“What’s interesting in the sustained organisations is they are often not the first to come out with a new innovation, but they are the first to start thinking about it and innovating,” said Bull, who observed that they can be conservative by nature, which does not quell their desire to test and learn. “They’re big believers in evolution rather than revolution in that sense.”

If you have any further questions around how to sustain success with your team, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]

What to read next

The Brisbane Lions Blueprint for Sustained Performance

By John Portch

Tom Crick, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media & Sport [DCMS], is confident that AI will not wipe out all white-collar jobs.

“You’ll hear things like ‘AI will replace teachers’ or ‘AI will replace doctors’ – no they won’t,” he told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

It is more likely, he said, that “AI-enabled or AI-augmented teachers might replace teachers”; similarly, “AI-augmented doctors might be more effective from a diagnostic perspective.”

Crick believes the current discourse that paints AI as either “humanity’s destruction or its ultimate saviour” is “not very helpful for the broader conversation around technology utility and adoption”.

His words were delivered to a room full of coaches and practitioners from across the globe, all of whom have seen AI play an increasingly prominent role in their work; and, as far as Crick is concerned, sport’s leaders must simply get to grips with it.

“There’s no way you can be a leader and be digitally incompetent,” he said. That doesn’t mean one has to train as a computer scientist, but a working knowledge is essential. “I don’t understand how you would see the impacts and the challenges for your business if you just say ‘I’ll delegate that; that’s a CTO or CDO problem’.”

That said, Crick understands the anxiety around AI and tech, which he attributes to a “confidence and capability challenge”. “It can be quite exposing if you’re the senior leader in an organisation,” he continued. “You basically have to say ‘I know nothing about this stuff and it’s a massive gap in my knowledge and understanding.’ It takes humility to own that.”

Over the course of half an hour or so, Crick prompted the leaders in the room to reconsider their approach to AI.

Tom Crick onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval.

Don’t deal in blind trust – keep the human in the loop

“Lots of generative AI tools are just statistical probabilistic bullshit generators,” said Crick. “People anthropomorphise these tools far too much. [AI tools] don’t think and they don’t have an intrinsic understanding of things.”

In stating these limitations, he encouraged the audience to not just “automatically trust the system” and to look more closely at both the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.

“AI will not magically remove uncertainty, but it can reshape and augment what that might look like for you as a coach,” he added. An AI tool may help you churn through datasets at inhuman speed, but “we have to be grounded in the dangers of these tools as a shortcut to absolute certainty.”

It comes back to what Crick terms a person’s “critical AI literacy”. “We want to stay curious; we don’t want to be too complacent.”

As such, he promotes “AI with humans in the loop” because AI “augments human capability and does not replace it”; human agency, he argued, is “sacrosanct”.

Get the basics right before even thinking of scaling

Crick believes that organisations should think about the “skills, competencies, behaviours and dispositions” they’ll need in the coming years because if teams are unsure why they’re using AI, if there’s no strategy and no idea of when to invest, when to lead and when to follow, their efforts will be built on a “foundation of sand”.

It starts with the basics. “Think about good data disciplines and make sure the data is high quality,” he said. It is also a question of clarity and alignment, which he revealed is a perennial problem across the various departments of the British Government when it comes to AI.

Your structure will guide how effective your delivery is and will enable you to verify or validate datasets and practices. This is critical because AI is not a “magic black box” where you simply “crank the handle and out comes the answer”. In any case, Crick argued, such an approach would be “disempowering for coaches and people who work in sports performance.”

Design for trust and accountability

AI usage must be rooted in values that promote accuracy and trust. “Values are useful anchors and shouldn’t be seen as constraints,” said Crick, who explained that the DCMS, in defining its AI strategy, will “enshrine high level principles to provide assurance and confidence to everyone who works in the department.”

It comes down to “doing the right thing in the right way and how that comes through in legitimacy, trust, transparency, verifiability; and things such as explainability and understandability too.”

Therefore, when using AI in athlete-facing settings, coaches and practitioners should work in an open and transparent way. They should ask themselves “where’s the feedback loop? What’s the mechanism for co-design and co-creation of shared outcomes? This naturally leads back to the humans in the loop”.

Crick likens technological leadership to an art or craft, one that is particularly important when the going gets tough.

“What does that look like when you bounce human intuition around and the magic algorithm says ‘no’? [What do you do when] the algorithm says you should do x but the experienced coach says you should do y? How do you reconcile such elements, especially under pressure?”

Be curious

“I think you need to have a system and culture that rewards curiosity,” said Crick.

When teams test and learn they will fail often and he argued that leaders must accept that fact.

The key, he argued, is “to fail fast, adapt and refine very quickly”.

It comes back to the leader and those foundations. “How do you have the structure in place to recognise that?”

Crick wrapped up his session with a further series of questions to ponder:

What to read next

Moving at the Speed of your People: What The 3×3 Tall Blacks Teach us About Innovation and Change Management

By John Portch

When Chris Fagan took the reins as Senior Coach of the Brisbane Lions ahead of the 2017 season, he was nervous.

Not only was he walking into a foundering team (it is rare for a coach to inherit a winning environment) but he was keenly aware that his own modest playing career meant that he arrived with less coaching clout than some of his AFL peers.

“I felt like I had to work harder to earn the players’ respect,” Fagan told an audience at Leaders Meet: Australia in February.

For all that, he was no novice. The reputation he had built at Hawthorn (first as Head of Coaching and Development, then as General Manager of Football Operations) between 2008 and 2016 is what attracted the Lions in the first place.

Fagan, with typical self-awareness, understood the assignment. “I think the key is when the players realise that you’re just there to help them and make them better and that’s what you’re going to bring to work every day,” he continued.

“I think it makes it easier to coach them. They know that you’re on their side and you want them to be as good as they can be, both as athletes and people, which is what I tried to do in the early days. I think that works and resonates with young men.”

The first two seasons on Fagan’s watch were poor but from 2019 onwards they have made finals each year. In 2024, they won the Grand Final; in 2025, they won it again for good measure.

As such, few are better placed to answer one of sport’s most pressing questions: what is it that environments that sustain success do?

Fagan has ensured that four factors work in his favour.

1. Everyone understands their value and how they can contribute

Fagan recalled his arrival at the Gabba ahead of his first pre-season. “I wanted to develop a group that could almost coach themselves and lead themselves, but we were far from that when I first walked into the club,” he said.

His first move was to arrange an interview with every player. “I had three questions: what’s good about this footy club? What’s not so good? And if you were me and you were in my position, what would you do to make it better? I wanted to start that way because I wanted everyone to understand that for our club to get better, everyone had to play a role and that you would be listened to.”

It took him two months to sit down with everyone. “Some interviews went for two hours, some went on for 20 minutes,” he explained while looking at Lions co-captain Harris Andrews in the Leaders audience. “He can probably remember his interview,” Fagan said, addressing Andrews directly. “He probably didn’t say too much then. Mate, you’d be there for an hour now, wouldn’t you?”

That moment of levity between the coach and a veteran player demonstrated how successful Fagan’s efforts have been on that front.

He added: “The idea was to go ‘well, we’re all in this together, we’re going to build it together, and we’re going to find out what’s not working and we’re going to talk about what we can do to get better; and that’s the way I wanted to start because that’s the way I wanted to continue.”

Nine years later, the personnel have changed but, as Fagan said, “it’s still that club to this day.” Those interviews still happen and buy-in remains strong. “It’s a force. It’s not one person, such as the coach, doing the job. It’s a whole lot of people getting it done.”

2. Failure is framed as a learning opportunity

In reflecting on that first round of player interviews back in 2017, Fagan remembers being staggered by some of the responses.

“Some of the players said that it was better to be in rehab and not playing than to be playing, which I was astonished by,” he said. “It probably said something about the culture of the club and that it wasn’t necessarily a safe place to work at being the best version of yourself. So these were strange things to hear, but I knew that you could fix those things with a bit of work. It was just going to take a bit of time.”

Two elements were critical: Fagan needed to remove the fear and ensure that the team was learning from its failures (of which there were plenty in those first two years).

“I always like to think that we almost failed our way to the top,” he added, while emphasising the importance of a growth mindset. “We learned so many lessons along the way and, in the end, we were able to hold up some silverware because I think we treated failure in a really sensible way at our footy club, because it wasn’t easy in the early days.”

Fagan has joked in the past that his team in 2017 and 2018 were the “happiest bunch of losers” having won just five games in each campaign. Their fortunes were transformed from 2019 onwards when they won 16 games. “We went from being a team that couldn’t win to a team that could win home and away games; from being a team that couldn’t win finals to a team that can now win finals.”

3. Everyone is aligned from the boardroom to the locker room

Behind the scenes, Fagan quickly worked to build relationships with the Lions’ CEO Greg Swann and former Senior Coach Leigh Matthews, who joined the board upon his retirement.

“I arranged to have dinner with those two men and their wives once a week; and we’ve been doing that for nine years,” said Fagan. “It’s been invaluable because I’ve got two allies that work amongst the board; and people at higher level at the club that have always been able to tell my story and tell the story of the team to those who needed to know it. So I’ve always felt very safe in the entire time I’ve been at Brisbane because I took that approach.”

It was not necessarily something that would have occurred to Fagan earlier in his career. “I would have been just so into the team and working at that level that I wouldn’t have thought it was important to manage up, but it is incredibly important because those people can help you.”

4. External noise is dismissed in the face of facts

Fagan is noted for his calm pitch side demeanour. “Leigh Matthews always says to me in terms of coaching that the coach has to be the calmest person in the place even though you’re not,” he said.

It is part of Fagan’s efforts to manage the external noise around his team. “In this country, there’s a lot of experts out there who comment on the game and their favourite activity is trying to bring coaches down. Your job as a coach is to bulletproof your environment against that and always deal with the facts,” he continued.

“I think that’s always helped our players and our coaching group to stay on track when you lose a few games and it gets a little bit rocky, which it always will during a football season. You never know what’s around the corner, but you’ve just got to build your culture.”

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