By John Portch

The United States won 37 medals at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and finished second in the medal table. By the time the nation competed at Pyeongchang in 2018, they had slipped to fourth.

“I do make sure to tell people they didn’t hire me in 2011,” joked Jen Bryant at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Brooklyn.

Bryant, who joined the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee in 2019, had just been promoted to Senior Director of Summer Olympic and Paralympic Sport. Until the 2026 Milano Cortina Games, she had served as the organisation’s High Performance Director of Winter Sports.

Onstage, she discussed Team USA’s resurgence. In Italy, they finished second in the medal table with 33 medals, including 12 golds. It was the first time they had won more than ten Winter Olympic golds in a single Games.

Jen Bryant onstage at Barclays Center at the 2026 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York. (Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein)

“Our goal is to be the best nation in the world again in 2030,” said Bryant, with the French Alps in mind, as she repeated the USOPC’s stated ambition since the reality check of Pyeongchang. Yet, as she admitted, there have been times when “it felt like we could not even spell ‘winter’.”

The US’s winter Olympic team has too often been “relying on too few athletes to win too many medals”, as Bryant put it while standing in front of an image of three-time Olympic skiing gold medallist Mikaela Shiffrin.

Bryant then explained the journey from being barely able to spell ‘winter’ to once again becoming a top three nation through three questions that guided the USOPC’s work.

1. Where can we realistically gain an advantage?

“Something needed to change in the way we thought about winter sport,” said Bryant.

The USOPC needed to understand where they could improve and where it was most exposed before committing its resources. They began by asking their eight national governing bodies for winter sports to identify what Bryant called the “obvious opportunities”. She continued: “Where in the programme did we see our greatest areas of opportunity for growth? And, candidly, where did we see our biggest risks from Beijing? Where have we got deeper pipelines? Where could we look at new events?”

2. What capabilities must exist if we want to achieve our goals?

“We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games,” said Bryant. Instead, the task was “building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance”.

Bryant previously worked at the British Bobsleigh & Skeleton Association in her native UK. “They typically say Team GB is really good at all the sports you have to sit down in,” she added. “What they really mean is they’ve got a really, really strong R&D programme.”

At the Milano Cortina Games, Team USA won one of the four bobsleigh gold medals on offer. Germany claimed the other three in a repeat of their dominance in Beijing in 2022. Germany holds an advantage through its long-established engineering and research programme in sliding sports. The USOPC is working to close that gap and Bryant said the US now has some of the best sleds in the world. She also referred to regulatory changes involving carbon and ski preparation as an R&D opportunity to be exploited.

Then there was the issue of talent transfer. “We have incredible talent in this country that may not have been correctly connected with the right sport opportunities,” said Bryant. “Can we find entry points into these sports?”

She pointed to bobsledder Kaysha Love, a former collegiate sprinter who transferred into the sport and went on to become a world champion. “We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline.”

Training time was another issue, with athletes lacking reps and exposure to Games-like conditions. “We identified a gap in the amount of time our athletes were able to spend on snow or on ice training, and that was something we needed to remedy,” said Bryant. They upped their quota of overseas training camps. There was no other choice. “We struggle with winter sport conditions year round for obvious reasons.”

3. What decisions will create the greatest gain closest to competition?

As the Games approached, Team USA concentrated on the details that might make a difference in competition.

“Spoiler alert: there’s not a lot we can do by the time we get to the Games,” said Bryant while explaining there were still areas where better preparation might help. She described a project in the luge programme that examined “steel composition, steel preparation, and how that interacts with ice.” That work helped the team understand the track conditions and adjust their equipment. There was a similar project with US Ski & Snowboard around ski and wax preparation.

The final element Bryant discussed was tailored support. As Milano Cortina was spread across six villages in three Italian regions, Team USA adapted their facilities and services to the needs of specific sports rather than applying a standardised approach. In Cortina, facilities were designed for the sliding disciplines; elsewhere, support reflected the needs of the sports based there.

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‘We’ve Lost Athletes Because of this’: When Support Descends into Surveillance

By John Portch

‘A brilliant strategy… can put you on the competitive map, but only solid execution can keep you there.’

So wrote Gary Neilson, Karla Martin and Elizabeth Powers in their 2008 Harvard Business Review essay ‘The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution’.

‘Execution is the result of thousands of decisions made every day,’ they wrote, and yet, as their research demonstrated, employees at three out of every five companies rated their organisation as weak at execution.

The essay resonated with Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sports Strategy at CQ University in Australia.

“Not many people mentioned the quality of the plan as an issue at all,” he said in reference to the essay at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “The two main issues were with information flow and decision rights.” Successful implementation, he argued, depends on how people make decisions under everyday pressures.

Over the course of an hour, Serpiello led a cohort of Leaders Performance Institute members in a conversation about what makes a plan work and, here, we select six non-negotiables that make a good strategy.

1. A common point of reference

A guiding set of principles can guard against turnover. One participant working in the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of repeated changes and acting appointments at director level disrupting her team’s work:

“We had no strategy and an ambiguous leadership piece for a year to 18 months… and there’s nothing to anchor you to from a strategic perspective.”

The eventual appointment of a new CEO brought greater stability and enabled the creation of a new strategy around which departments could align. She added:

“We’ve just built a new organisational strategic plan and ensured that we had alignment across departments, that we were empowered to be included. We included the whole organisation in developing that strategy.”

2. Make space for people to question a decision

Teams often mistake harmony for alignment and, when people are reluctant to speak up, problems are not always addressed. As a performance director with experience in Europe and North America put it:

“There needs to be respectful challenge within departments and between departments to progress and remain successful. There may be perceived aligned groups or departments, but really it’s evidence of a lack of challenge.”

Another participant from the Australian system concurred:

“Healthy alignment does not have to be singular and vanilla. People and departments can hold different views while remaining connected to a shared direction, values and culture.”

3. Get the right evidence to the right people in a timely manner

One performance director dismissed the notion of blanket transparency:

“Giving access to too many stakeholders or staff can slow decision-making. I also see an argument to protect certain information flows and access rights as well.”

There is, of course, a balance to be struck. Another performance specialist based in Australia said:

“There are those levels of what people can see and hear, but we also need to work out, ‘well, okay, how often do we have to repeat ourselves because we’re quite a big organisation and people change?’ So we have to go through that information flow more regularly than we think we need to. We’re running sport programmes for Olympic-based sports; and the information flow has to be immediate, consistent and ongoing because generally it’s small, more agile teams making decisions daily around performance and health.”

4. Establish decision-making rights

When a performance challenge arises, a team must understand who provides evidence, who advises and who makes the final decision. A flatter hierarchy is not the answer, as a performance director based in North America explained:

“At one organisation we had a very horizontal structure that this was widely communicated from the leadership – ‘everyone can be agile and make decisions’ – so, of course, it was chaos.”

Another spoke of her team’s efforts to swerve such incoherence:

“We do a workshop annually. Every year we look at what our strategy is for that year of the cycle. So it could be a world championship, it could be the pinnacle event of the Olympic Games; and what is our strategy and who is our team and who makes what decision when? It can change year on year.”

Sometimes it depends on the leader:

“We have 12 different sports and each one does it slightly differently depending on their makeup and the capacity, maturity and experience of the coach in supporting their performance team to make their own decisions.”

5. Decisions must support the work being done

Don’t be seduced by the quick measurement at the expense of the long term because you’ll only store up problems further down the line, as one participant noted from experience:

“I was in an environment where the executive team focused heavily on the number of athletes coming through the facility. The problem was that there wasn’t really a clear plan behind it and trust started to erode among the staff working closest to the athletes. What actually drove success – delivering a world-class service – wasn’t being recognised or measured in the same way. So it was a good example of how a strategy can look clear on paper but still struggle because of issues elsewhere in the system.”

6. Keep priorities visible and continually test your progress

Another risk is that strategic priorities disappear in the face of day-to-day demands. Serpiello shared his own experience of ineffective meetings:

“I find myself often in meetings where we said, ‘oh, actually we closed last meetings with a lot of action items’ and virtually none of those action items happened unless it was a very easy admin task.”

To prevent that happening, he suggested teams find regular touchpoints:

“How do we establish the right cadence of touchpoints with staff rather than having lengthy meetings? Do we need to have shorter touchpoints where we start with, ‘this is what you said you would do; this is what you’ve done; this is what I said that I was going to do; this is what I’ve done; have we achieved what we said we were going to achieve or didn’t we?’”

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Clarity and Alignment: Why your Plan Is Only as Good as the Decisions it Enables

By John Portch

“The real test for a leader is: how does your plan unfold when you’re not there?” said Darren Shand.

The performance specialist recently hosted a Leaders Virtual Roundtable on the topic of building clarity and alignment around a performance plan.

“I think as leaders we spend a lot of time and a lot of effort explaining where we’re going, but few spend enough time helping people understand why they matter and what their role is in the plan,” he continued.

Shand served as General Manager of the New Zealand All Blacks between 2004 and 2023. The team, he said, always had a plan, “but there was a real benefit in having something that everyone bought into in terms of getting that belief in what we were doing.”

Over the course of the session, he explained why the quality of the decisions people make depends more on their environment than any document that has been placed in their hands.

Clarity without belief is compliance

There is, as Shand explained, a difference between communicating a plan and creating belief in that plan.

He said: “If we’ve got clarity without belief, we’ve just got compliance. We’ve just got people doing what they think they need to do. But if we’ve got clarity with belief, we’ve got a much deeper commitment to whatever that plan is.”

The plan cannot belong solely to the coach or management. “The more we could create things together, the better we were,” he said of his time with the All Blacks. When the players were brought into the planning process, “it forced us as management to make the plan even simpler because we had to fit with their way of thinking and their way of being rather than ours.”

You need to see, hear and feel the plan

It helps that All Blacks know where they stand from day one. “We don’t own the jersey, we’re just guardians, and your job is to leave it in a better place,” said Shand of the team’s guiding principle.

Teammates hand debutants a personalised book detailing the history of the All Blacks’ jersey and previous teams. It also contains blank pages on which the player can write their own chapter in the team’s story.

The team’s five shared standards – driven, inspiring, grateful, fierce and courageous – “were lived in the language that was shared each week” and the plan emerged through the daily actions and behaviours of individuals.

On that point, Shand suggested a litmus test: “Can I watch your team for one day and know the plan? Without reading the plan, can I see it? Can I hear it? Can I feel it?”

In response, a participant who works at academy level in the Premier League described a common misconception: the idea that common terminology denotes alignment. “I think in our environment, because people say the same phrases and use the same terms, people think they’re aligned, yet their behaviours and actions are actually different,” he said.

Individual commitment is not enough either. “You would see pockets of people working really hard in their certain areas but avoiding contact,” said another attendee who works in the British Olympic system. “It’s something that we’re working through and trying to improve on.”

You cannot just assume understanding

Returning to his time at the All Blacks, Shand spoke of the importance of repetition as a means of both reducing “noise” around their plans and checking for understanding.

He said: “Every single meeting that the team had during a week, and we would only have two or three, the language that finished every meeting was, ‘Okay, players, you tell me what are the critical few things from this meeting? Not the important many, but what are the one or two critical few things that you’ve learned that you’re now going to take out into training or into that next meeting with that other group of players?’”

Rather than assuming the plan had landed, the coaches repeatedly checked what the players had understood. That process also helped to build trust. “Before you can demand accountability, you’ve got to have that closeness, that understanding of each other and how each other works,” Shand continued.

Accountability works both ways too. When All Blacks Head Coach Steve Hansen was late for a team meeting at the 2015 Rugby World Cup, a senior player challenged him in front of the group.

Pressure will reveal your true system

Too often, collaboration disappears in the face of pressure. As one attendee put it, “It’s ‘do something quickly, do it on your own’ versus ‘do something better and do it together’.”

The All Blacks’ system did not buckle under pressure in November 2013 when they trailed 22-17 to Ireland in Dublin in their final Test of the year with the 80 minutes expired. A victory would mean New Zealand ended the calendar year unbeaten. Crucially, the All Blacks retained possession and play continued. They would advance 63 metres through 12 phases and 21 passes before Ryan Crotty scored a match-levelling try, which was converted by Aaron Cruden to deliver his team to a 24-22 victory.

It was a dramatic finish, for sure, but not a miracle in Shand’s eyes. That team, he explained, had “no heroes, no superstars, no X-factor individual moments”. Instead, they were “just taking what we’d trained onto the field of play.”

They could not rehearse every possible match scenario, but they could practise how they would convene, communicate and reconnect with their playing principles under pressure.

As Shand wrapped up the session, he reiterated that a successful plan is one people can recognise in each other’s behaviour and execute without waiting for the leader. A plan must define not only what the group needs to achieve, but also what it needs to become.

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‘The Best Teams Don’t Choose Between Outcomes and Growth – they Create Systems Where Growth Drives Outcomes’

By John Portch

If you wait for ‘perfect’ information before acting, it’s unlikely you’ll ever move, according to Aneaka Reay-Kemp.

“You’re never going to know more than 60% of information, so you deal with that as best as possible,” said the former Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence. “You’re almost comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Reay-Kemp, who has since joined England’s national football federation, the Football Association, as Men’s Technical Strategy & Operations Manager, was talking to Leaders Performance Institute members at March’s Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy.

She was joined onstage by the man she succeeded in August, Paul Cleal, which makes for an interesting, if unusual, dynamic in retrospect.

Cleal, whose business interests include serving as Chair of the Palace for Life Foundation, told the room that knowledge is inevitably distributed across a team. “I know 30%, you know 40%. It’s possible we might know 100% between us,” he said, before adding that if leaders prevent that knowledge from being combined then “you’re sunk”.

Aneaka Reay-Kemp (centre) in conversation with Paul Cleal (right) and moderator Iain Brunnschweiler (left) at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy at Lord’s Cricket Ground. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Robert Obreja

Together, Reay-Kemp and Cleal explained why the execution of a strategy depends on teams being able to make coherent decisions as reality veers away from expectations.

Collective creation

“Being part of having created it, you’re more likely to make it successful,” said Cleal. He wants to avoid the fate of strategies that look impressive but are then left “sat on shelves”, ignored and unloved.

A strategy is more likely to succeed, he argued, when the people responsible for its delivery are involved in its creation. Staff have the operational knowledge to reveal where resources are already stretched or proposals may encounter resistance. Their direct involvement in strategising can expose gaps, challenge latent assumptions and clarify their responsibilities.

“Get people to really surface those assumptions,” added Cleal, who explained that these should not be mistook for wisdom. “The more you can break people out of the normal, the better.”

He made the distinction between the divergent process of the collective challenging assumptions and generating alternatives, and the convergent process of the leader turning them into choices.

This approach is echoed in Reay-Kemp’s “analysis of competing hypotheses”, where teams generate several possible explanations and test the available evidence against each, which enables them to establish “what’s likely and what isn’t likely”.

Set the intent, then let your team decide how to do it

Reay-Kemp explained that teams in the military are told the purpose and specifics of their missions but retain discretion over how they proceed.

“How you go about it is completely up to you,” she said. “It will vary according to who you’ve got available and what they’re capable of.” This strikes a balance between being overly prescriptive, which can prevent teams from adapting in the field, and offering a vision too broad to guide action.

Reay-Kemp spoke of three layers of preparation: core individual readiness, specialist expertise and an understanding of the wider team’s capabilities. As she put it, preparation means “understanding your individual, your basic soldiering, your trade, and then the people around you” because a team must be able to respond to the circumstances.

Collaborate for a clearer picture

Reay-Kemp has seen the military move away from the assumption that rank determines the value of an opinion.

“It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, but they still bring value no matter how junior they are,” she said before emphasising the need to understand the person behind the role. They are, she added, “people first before they’re a soldier, before they’re a player, or whatever kind of athlete they are.” A leader may learn something about their previous work, interests or experiences that reveals previously unseen capabilities, she argued.

Cleal concurred. “You’ve got to have the ability to override the hierarchy,” he said, adding that a leader should not prevent relevant information from reaching the person making the decision.

No new priorities without trade-offs

“One of the things about strategy is making choices,” said Cleal. Some are easier than others. For example, adding a specialist, programme or priority is relatively easy if no existing activity is displaced. But, as he asked: “What have you decided not to do?”

Too often a strategy fails because previous commitments endure in daily practice. People may understand your new direction but will not act if they lack the time and resources to give it proper attention.

Lessons must inform new practice

A review should be judged by what people do differently afterwards.

Reay-Kemp explained that military personnel returning from exercises submit reports containing recommendations for future teams. She said: “We extract any suggestions they might feel would be beneficial to feed back into the pipeline for the next person going out or the next team.” Ideally, these would be used to inform training. “Does it happen all the time? No,” she admitted candidly.

Programmes, Cleal argued, tend to advance when one person has accountability; with this sense of ownership comes the capacity to change practice. He said the FA tries to give each strategic programme a clearly accountable lead. The difficulty increases when programmes cross departmental boundaries. As Cleal put it, “the more people are involved, the more outcomes of those programmes are less clear.”

In summary, Reay-Kemp said: “Understand that picture, understand what you have, the people you have, the resources that are available to you, and then work as best as possible off of that.”

Five tests of your strategy:

1. Were the people responsible for delivery involved in its design?
2. Is the intended outcome clear without every action being prescribed?
3. Can information travel across hierarchical and departmental boundaries?
4. Has the organisation decided what it will stop doing?
5. Do reviews produce identifiable changes in training, systems or daily practice?

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‘Strategies Don’t Deliver Outcomes – that’s the Reality’

By John Portch

“It is a lot easier to create performance than it is to sustain it,” said John Bull.

The Director of High Performance at Management Futures expanded on his observation during a Leaders Virtual Roundtable in June.

“To sustain success requires a focus on some really different things to what you do in creating performance initially.”

Leaders Performance Institute members tend to operate in environments of constant change, heightened risk, and increasing complexity.

However, with thoughtful planning for leadership transitions, you can reduce the risks that come with knowledge loss, cultural drift, disrupted decision‑making, and performance instability when key people move on.

Succession planning is often treated as a hiring problem. But as the thinkers below suggest, it is fundamentally a system-design challenge. The most sustainable organisations do not simply replace leaders when they leave; they deliberately build cultures, processes, talent pipelines and learning environments that make leadership transitions less disruptive.

Here, we suggest four ideas for preparing to execute more effective succession plans.

1. Avoid a cultish focus on individuals

Professor Alex Hill, the Director of the Centre of High Performance, has conducted extensive research into high-performing systems across the world in a variety of industries. One thing was peculiar to sport.

‘Many of the sports leaders we spoke to were worried their team “was a cult rather than a sustainable system, too dependent on one or two individuals for its success”,’ he wrote for the Leaders Performance Institute. ‘Egos often get in the way, limiting their ability to learn from others. And they are happy see us lose after they leave, to show how important they were.’

The answer? ‘Humble stewards’, as Hill put it. These are ‘more concerned about the organisation they’ll leave behind than how it looks whilst they’re there’. In other words, a leader who acts as a caretaker of the organisation’s future; they prioritise continuity, learning and succession over personal status.

For Hill, humble stewards:

• Think about what happens after they leave.
• Do not hoard expertise or influence.
• Actively develop successors years in advance.
• Do not need the organisation to prove how important they were.
• They prioritise organisational health over personal recognition.

Identifying humble stewards is only the first step. Organisations must also ensure that the knowledge, relationships and decision-making expertise held by those individuals can be transferred successfully.

2. Prepare handovers thoroughly

John Bull, the Director of High Performance at Management Futures, who has been inspired by Hill’s research, has observed the same cult-like qualities in his own work. For Bull, this raises a key question: “these are largely cults and how do we make them not cults, but a repeatable formula that can pass from generation to generation?”

As he told that Leaders Virtual Roundtable, sustained organisations possess “an obsession with working out and codifying what works and then protecting that and maintaining that knowledge.” Then, once you have codified what works, “identify who the valuable experts are within the organisation” and then be “really careful in managing handovers”.

He cited the Royal College of Art as an extreme example, with their up to eight-year-long handovers in key roles. They also rely on their alumni to return to the college as educators.

Bull argued that the goal is a culture with “enough roots”, that if a new leader arrives and attempts to change direction, “the culture will kind of push back against that”. He cautions against leaders who are too willing to rip everything up. That requires board members to understand their cultural role in selecting the next leader and prospective leaders themselves who are humble. “Look to recruit for curiosity and humility,” said Bull. “You also want them to spend some time figuring out what has worked and not change everything.”

If stewardship and handovers reduce dependency on key individuals, the next question becomes how organisations identify the people who may one day replace them.

3. Hire for potential, not just experience

Anna Edwards, the Global Managing Partner at Elite Performance Partners, the performance and recruitment consultancy that supports, builds and grows high-performance teams, is another believer in smart succession planning happening well ahead of time.

In this guest column for the Leaders Performance Institute, she argued that it is important to understand the gap and not the so-called ‘ideal’ candidate.

‘No candidate is ever more than an 80% fit against a theoretical position,’ she wrote. Rather than chasing perfection, organisations should understand ‘where the 20% could lie’. Teams should ask themselves ‘who else is already there to support them, whether the rest of the team are in the right roles, what training or mentoring could be given and where the flex exists in the organisation?’.

‘Every role is 50% capabilities, 50% cultural fit,’ she continued. ‘Knowledge can be transferred, experience gained, skills developed.’

Identifying future leaders early, however, is only useful if organisations create systems that help them develop.

4. Bake-in learning and development

Jon Bartlett, the Vice President of Performance Solutions at Hexis, told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2022 that future leaders should not be developed through sporadic courses or annual reviews. Instead, learning should happen every day through structured reflection and feedback.

“Often, performance reviews in sport are done on an annual basis,” he said. “If you’re just going annually, and you’re on a three-year contract, you basically only have two touchpoints on your development.” The issue is even more pressing for those on 12-month rolling contracts.

“Organisations can consistently provide opportunities, tailored towards each staff member, and you can visit progress on a frequent cadence,” he continued. “For example, something as simple as after-action reviews. They have a massive part to play in learning and development. They can be as simple as: ‘what were the intended outcomes? What actually happened? What’s the gap between those two? And how can we bridge that?’ You might have one or two outcomes. We’ve learnt what worked well, we learnt what didn’t, and so we can apply those outcomes next time. We know from adult learning pedagogy that learning takes place through reflection and making meaning of experiences, whether that’s individual or shared.”

As Bull observed, it is a lot easier to create performance than to sustain it. Taken together, the lessons from Hill, Bull, Edwards and Bartlett point to the same conclusion: succession planning is an ongoing process of stewardship, knowledge transfer, talent identification and capability development. The organisations most likely to sustain success are those that make all four part of the way they operate every day.

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]

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What Can we Learn from Organisations that Sustain their Success?

By John Portch

Michael Bourne, the Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association, believes he is in the business of building dreams.

“I don’t know what makes people good at strategy,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy, “but I love it.”

“Strategy is a dream with a road built to it and, when I think about strategy, I love the idea of making things possible that aren’t currently possible.”

Bourne is on hand at Lord’s Cricket Ground to discuss the LTA’s ten-year performance strategy, on which the national governing body embarked in 2018.

“I actually joined the LTA in 2020, so I’m telling you a story of how I received the strategy, how I sought to understand it in my team and also where we’ve taken it since that period.”

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

The ‘kernel’ of a good strategy

Bourne has been heavily influenced by Richard Rumelt’s 2011 book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

“It’s actually a book I walked past for years in the airport just thinking it was one of these random books that they sell at airports,” he said, “and actually, when I checked by own biases and decided to read the book, I found that it had some of the greatest insights into building a strategy that I’d found anywhere.”

The element of Rumelt’s work that resonated most with Bourne was the idea of a “kernel of a good strategy”. Bourne said: “you can have multiple strategies that will get you from where you are to where you want to get to, but I like the idea that there’s elements you have to master in order for your strategy to be successful. There’s an understanding of where you are at the time and the challenges you’re trying to overcome.”

The LTA arrived at their kernel in the three areas described by Rumelt:

1. Diagnosis – that defines the challenge
2. Guiding policy – for addressing it
3. Coherent actions – to implement the policy

1. Diagnosis

Between November 2016 and February 2017, the LTA conducted a ‘current situation analysis’ of its performance pathway and performance coach development systems and how they stacked up against their foreign counterparts’.

The analysis did not make for pleasant reading. “In essence, we’re talking about a chronic undersupply of junior players and senior professional players,” said Bourne. There was no coherent pathway, no process for identifying and developing talent, and resources spread too thinly.

Yes, Great Britain could point to players such as three-time grand slam winner and double Olympic gold medallist Andy Murray, but the sense was that he came through despite – not because of – the system.

Participation numbers were down too. “It wasn’t a sport that everybody felt welcome to,” added Bourne. “It didn’t feel open and it didn’t feel inclusive.”

The LTA needed a unifying mission. “The performance strategy came from many of the same grounding points as the wider organisational strategy — a feeling like it needed to have more identity, it needed to be more open to people, it needed to find new ways of driving success for the sport.”

The LTA landed upon: ‘make Great Britain one of the most respected nations in the world for player development’.

“The first thing is ‘Great Britain’ – it doesn’t say ‘make the LTA the most respected NGB in the world for player development’. It’s an open scale; and how we think about implementing the strategy has to take into account it’s not just about us in blue jackets; it’s actually about the whole nation and how it’s perceived as a tennis nation.”

The second thing was ‘respect’. “When I inherited this strategy it was the one word I focused on because it was different to any of the strategies I’d worked on before.” In Bourne’s work at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board, strategies tended to focus on tangible outcomes such as medals and accolades. The sense at the LTA is that titles will follow when people understand the mission.

The LTA had created the space to devise their guiding principles.

2. Guiding policy/principles

Back in 2016, the LTA developed 11 guiding principles. They preceded the full diagnosis but provided the foundations and recommendations on which the LTA’s strategy could be built.

Bourne shared a screenshot of the first draft. The detailed document outlined the LTA’s intention to build a nationwide, integrated development system that identifies talent, creates the right experiences and reduces barriers to entry; but he explained that it had limited utility in and of itself.

“I have colleagues in the room,” said Bourne. “If you ask them if they’ve ever seen this page I suspect the answer would be no. This is not what gets lived. This is what the board use to sign-off on these things [but] we have to live this strategy on a daily basis.”

Bourne holds two beliefs in his approach to guiding policy. “Firstly, you try and make them as simple as possible. We have 64 people in our performance team; we have over 100 partner organisations delivering our strategy; and our senior players, of which we support 45, plus 50 in wheelchair tennis; each will have individual coaches, physios, S&C coaches, therapists etc. That’s a lot of people delivering the strategy on a daily basis. So simplification is important because that’s the message that sticks.”

The LTA alighted on the following:

Secondly, with all these different areas of activity (Bourne calls them “nested strategies”), he explained that one has to “understand that the programmes you put in place, the philosophies, the training camps, the trips, the competition structures are actually making an impact on what it takes to become an elite level tennis player or elite level wheelchair tennis player.”

He added: “we should be able to draw a line from all these activities that we’re doing in our guiding policy back to developing [the required] skills in players over an extended period.

“That takes us to coherent actions.”

3. Coherent actions

Bourne freely admits he loves strategising but, as he said, “strategies don’t deliver outcomes – that’s the reality.”

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.”

There are still two years left in their strategy and Bourne’s work is not finished. “Our diagnosis is about right; we’ve probably got in place the right guiding policy; we just need to make sure that on a daily basis we’ve never ignored coherent actions to help us move towards that point.”

What to read next

How to Build, Stress-Test, and Execute an Effective Performance Strategy

Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

Change in high‑performance (HP) sport is rarely resisted because people are opposed to improvement.

More often, it is resisted because proposed change is perceived as threatening what people care most deeply about: identity, legacy, fairness, and standards.

This article uses the evolution of the 3×3 Tall Blacks programme as a case study in applied change leadership, exploring how innovation can be mobilised without destroying trust or fragmenting a system.

Specifically, the article examines how 3×3 Basketball shifted within Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) from being viewed as a peripheral or competing format to a legitimate, strategically prioritised pathway for international success. Drawing on innovation and change management research, it demonstrates how leadership decisions around pace, protection, communication, and culture shaped the programme’s trajectory. Central to this case is a simple but often neglected principle: organisations can only move at the speed of their people.

What is 3×3 basketball?

3×3 Basketball was formalised by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in the late 2000s as a condensed, high‑tempo version of the game designed for urban environments, broadcast appeal, and global accessibility. Played with three athletes per team on a half court, a 12‑second shot clock, and first‑to‑21 scoring, the format demands rapid decision‑making, tactical clarity, athletic versatility, and exceptional individual skill under pressure.

Since its inclusion as an Olympic discipline at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, 3×3 has moved decisively from an alternative format to a mainstream high‑performance sport. It now operates with its own world rankings, qualification pathways, professional circuits, and national team competitions governed by FIBA. Crucially, success in 3×3 is not achieved by lightly adapting 5×5 systems; it requires distinct preparation models, athlete archetypes, and tactical identities.

Who are the 3×3 Tall Blacks?

New Zealand competes in 3×3 Basketball through a clearly defined international competition pathway. The men’s senior programme, known as the 3×3 Tall Blacks and, known on the FIBA circuit since 2025 as #2PointNation, contests major national team events including the FIBA 3×3 Asia Cup, the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and, where applicable, Olympic or Commonwealth Games qualification tournaments. Athletes may also compete in FIBA‑sanctioned professional events such as World Tour Challengers, World Tour Masters, and selected Pro circuits, which contribute to global ranking points and qualification status.

These competitive realities require BBNZ’s 3×3 programme, across U21, U23, and senior team, to be innovative by necessity. With constrained resources and limited margins for error, the Men’s (and Women’s) programme has had to identify where competitive advantage is possible, how learning can be accelerated, and how athletes can be developed into genuine 3×3 specialists rather than part‑time participants (through also prioritising 5×5).

3×3 as a strategic opportunity, not a threat

Within the New Zealand basketball landscape, historical emphasis has understandably sat with the Tall Blacks (men’s 5×5) and Tall Ferns (women’s 5×5) programmes. These teams carry deep cultural significance, reinforced by landmark performances such as the Tall Blacks’ fourth‑place finish at the 2002 FIBA World Cup and the Tall Ferns’ participation at the 2004 Olympic Games. However, podium finishes at pinnacle 5×5 events, and consistent Olympic qualification, have become increasingly difficult in a global ecosystem shaped by professional leagues, deep talent pools, and significant financial asymmetry.

Within this context, 3×3 has emerged not as a replacement for 5×5, but as a distinct strategic opportunity: a format in which New Zealand can plausibly compete for medals through deliberately creating an identity, strategy and specialisation by targeted coaches and athletes. Yet recognising opportunity was not sufficient. Elevating 3×3 within a 5×5‑dominant system required leaders to manage legitimate fears that resources, attention, or cultural value would be diverted.

As 3×3 Tall Blacks Head Coach Piet Van Hasselt said:

Resistance to 3×3 didn’t mean disloyalty. It often meant people cared deeply about 5×5 and felt responsible for protecting it. 3×3 is still the new kid on the block in basketball terms and is very different to 5×5.

This framing was critical. Resistance was interpreted not as obstruction, but as a signal of attachment and responsibility. That distinction shaped how change was approached: not through mandate, but through dialogue, clarity, and deliberate pacing.

Three roles that support successful innovation in HP environments

Across HP sport and other expert systems, innovation research converges on the importance of leaders occupying multiple complementary roles rather than relying on individual charisma or isolated expertise (1,2,3). Three roles are consistently evident in successful innovation initiatives.

1. The System Architect

The ‘System Architect’ role is grounded in organisational ambidexterity and strategic leadership research. Scholars such as Tushman and O’Reilly (1, 2) demonstrate that breakthrough innovation depends on senior leaders designing separate but integrated systems, protecting exploratory work from short‑term performance pressures while integrating it at the top through strategy, resourcing, and authority. Mintzberg’s work on “designing the organisation” (3) reinforces this view in that effective leaders shape structures, decision rights, and power flows rather than running experiments themselves.

In HP sport terms, the architect decides where innovation sits, how it is protected, and how it is judged. Without this role, innovation becomes personality‑dependent and fragile; with it, innovation becomes institutional.

2. The Technical Champion

The ‘Technical Champion’ is one of the most empirically supported roles in innovation literature. Research by Howell and Higgins (4, 5) shows that innovations outperform when championed by credible insiders who persist under resistance, mobilise informal networks, and translate abstract ideas into legitimate practice. Subsequent work clarifies an important dependency: champions burn out or are marginalised (6) without organisational protection from architects.

In HP sport, champions are domain‑credible leaders for example coaches, senior athletes, or tactically fluent specialists who are willing and able to absorb resistance on behalf of others while legitimising change through performance.

3. The Cultural (Learning) Enabler

The third role of ‘Cultural’ or ‘Learning Enabler’ is supported by Amy Edmondson’s (7) research on psychological safety. Innovation fails less often due to lack of ideas than due to fear. Leaders who frame their strategic initiatives as learning problems, without lowering standards, create environments where experimentation, respectful conflict, and early failure are informational rather than punitive. This role ensures innovation does not collapse into compliance or defensive behaviour, particularly in high‑stakes environments such as elite sport.

The blended roles within BBNZ 3×3

Within the BBNZ 3×3 system, Nikolay Mikhalchuk (High Performance Manager, 3×3 – hereafter HPM) and Piet Van Hasselt (Head Coach, 3×3 Tall Blacks) can be viewed as functioning as deliberate amalgamations of all three innovation roles, in part due to the realities of scale and resource constraint.

Architectural leadership

As system architects, Mikhalchuk and Van Hasselt emphasise structural protection and integration, explicitly designing daily training environments and pathways for learning rather than forcing premature exposure. Mikhalchuk explains:

Decisions are made to take a step back, spend more time… align yourself, the coaching staff, and then prepare, rather than throwing athletes in the deep end before they understand the system and role expectations.

This reflects programme ambidexterity through protecting exploration (learning the 3×3 system) while gradually integrating it into the national pathway across U21, U23, and senior programmes.

Champion and cultural leadership

As technical champions and cultural enablers, both leaders are able to translate strategy into daily training behaviours while safeguarding learning. Van Hasselt captures this when he notes:

We’re trying to find a gap we can exploit based on our strengths… We have forged an identity, with clarity, and our players have bought into it.

He further explains how culture and learning interacted:

Great leadership and athlete ownership has meant we’ve been able to build through younger players, and now these players are becoming specialists.

Through deliberate ‘test and learn’ cycles, particularly in the Under-21 and Under-23 Nations League exposure and targeted senior competition, 3×3 specialists have emerged organically rather than being imposed.

Managing change in a 5×5-dominant culture

At a technical level, the transition from 5×5 to 3×3 can present genuine challenges. Mikhalchuk notes:

There are a lot of nuances and rules around 3×3 which would drive 5×5 players mad… The transition from a 5×5 star to the 3×3 court is close to impossible.

Yet once athletes choose to engage, the experience is often transformative. Van Hasselt observes:

Every time a 5×5 player comes in they absolutely love it… We have found players who are courageous and ready to take a leap of faith to this exciting new challenge.

These insights reinforced a core leadership lesson that people cannot be rushed through change they have not yet made sense of. Progress depended on aligning belief, understanding, and competence. Indeed, moving at the speed of people, not planning cycles.

 

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Applying Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model

Recognising the complexity of this transition, BBNZ have applied Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model (8) to structure and evaluate progress. A central insight of Kotter’s model is that sustainable change is built deliberately, sequentially, and with reinforcement. This model, and its contextual application is summarised here:

Concluding remarks

Within the global FIBA 3×3 landscape, the 3×3 Tall Blacks’ #2PointNation identity signals strategic clarity and a commitment to playing to New Zealand’s strengths rather than mimicking others. The Men’s programme accelerated once 3×3 was framed, and accepted, not as a format that could rely on occasional 5×5 participation, but as “our game, our way.”

An aligned approach to innovation, grounded in organisational values and supported by deliberate change management, has enabled the programme to become a respected and emerging force internationally. As Van Hasselt reflects:

Our programme and players strong commitment to improvement has helped us perform better game by game.   The commentators tell us we can beat anyone in the world… they like us because we’re different.

Mikhalchuk adds:

We’re quick, we’re strong, we’re consistent and tough… We feel we can build those twos, and when opponents adjust, we can drive and create uncontested shots.

Ultimately, what gets funded gets celebrated. With increased High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) investment toward the 2028 quadrennial, the Men’s 3×3 programme has moved from experimentation to embedded strategy. As Van Hasselt summarises the ambition:

We’d love to medal at LA 2028… We are continuing our exciting journey and improving every game and event as a team.

The broader lesson is clear. Successful innovation is not a hero story. It is a role system, paced deliberately, anchored culturally, and led with respect for how people actually change.

References

1) Tushman, M. L., & O’Reilly, C. A. (1996). Ambidextrous organizations: Managing evolutionary and revolutionary change. California Management Review, 38(4), 8–29.

2) O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard Business Review, 82(4), 74–81.

3) Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

4) Howell, J. M., & Higgins, C. A. (1990). Champions of technological innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(2), 317–341. [jstor.org]

5) Howell, J. M., Shea, C. M., & Higgins, C. A. (2005). Champions of product innovations: Defining, developing, and validating a measure of champion behavior. Journal of Business Venturing, 20(5), 641–661. [researchgate.net]

6) Shea, C. M. (2021). A conceptual model to guide research on the activities and effects of innovation champions. Implementation Research and Practice, 2, 1–13.

7) Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383

8) Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

By John Portch

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

Performance specialist Darren Shand, the former General Manager of the New Zealand All Blacks, posed this question at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable.

He continued: “I know if you hold a leadership role, it’s probably a conflict that you fight pretty regularly as you go through a season or a campaign because they can sometimes pull against each other, these two competing priorities, and depending on the type of leaders you have within your organisation, it can create a tension.”

The Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance were invited to think about where they sit on the spectrum between performance outcomes and performance growth.

Teams, as Shand explained, tend to oscillate along the spectrum. “Traditionally, early season tends to be growth-focused and, as we get further into campaigns, outcomes tend to take over.”

This presents a series of risks. “If there’s too much focus on outcomes alone it often creates fear, short-term thinking, and sometimes even stagnation caused by that fear. But if you’ve got too much focus on growth only, you start to dilute standards.”

He is in no doubt that “championship environments require both” and, over the course of 30 minutes, delivered a presentation to provide the members in the virtual room with practical ideas to strengthen their approaches to building sustainable, high-performing teams.

Aspire or inspire? Prove or improve?

Shand illustrated what he sees as the distinction between outcomes and growth.

‘Outcomes’ is what one aspires to win or achieve, while ‘growth’ is based on the desire to improve and develop (or “inspiration”, as he put it).

Both are essential. “The best environments don’t choose one – they learn when to lean into each,” said Shand. “They ask what’s the appropriate time and moment in a campaign, a season or an event.”

He posed two questions: “Which philosophy dominates your environment when the pressure increases? As expectation, scrutiny and pressure rises, where do you go?”

Teams under pressure tend to focus more on outcomes and, as such, they risk falling into what Shand called the “outcome trap” i.e. the negative consequences that come with an excessive focus on outcomes.

It usually starts when success is defined by results, trophies and external expectations. He noted a series of signs of which to be cognisant:

• When people start trying not to fail rather than striving to improve.
• Increased conservatism and narrow thinking.
• An absence of learning and, therefore, innovation.
• When organisations lose sight of long-term development.
• When mental fatigue builds as the pressure rises.

At the All Blacks, Shand, his colleagues and the playing group sought to separate outcomes and growth.

Firstly, their ‘why’ (their vision) was a deliberately “uncontrollable aspiration”: to be the most dominant sports team in the world.

Their mission (‘to develop self-reliant athletes’) and purpose (‘to enhance the All Blacks’ legacy’), on the other hand, were determined by their behaviours and their ability to learn and develop. This combination enabled continuous improvement even when under pressure.

Shand then explained that 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.”

When Shand concluded, the table had the opportunity to share their reflections. The conversation brought several themes to light:

• There is no fixed process for measuring whether your focus needs to be on performance outcomes or performance growth. His work with the All Blacks was rooted in the cultural and behavioural rather than the structural. “It just became part of our DNA; we could see or we could hear it more than we wrote it down.”
• Recognise competing pressures rather than forcing a solution. “I’d come back to what’s the environment like.” One must identify what’s going wrong first.
• Performance is about continuous improvement (‘editing’). Shand suggested filtering out noise (both external and internal) by focusing on the “critical few” factors that truly impact success rather than the “important many”.
• Performance needs to be fun (but not too much). If there’s too little fun, the environment becomes heavy and draining; if there’s too much fun, learning is compromised. With this balance in mind, Shand’s All Blacks tried to build fun into their weekly sessions. He said: “Once it became part of the normal structure, people started to look forward to it, and they knew they had permission to be themselves.”
• Do not be seduced by quick fixes. When one attendee noted the negativity around their athletes, Shand spoke of New Zealand’s ignominious quarter-final exit from the 2007 Rugby World Cup. “We had a very strong programme with the community and the fans; and we knew as long as we kept that connection with them that was real and authentic then we could deal with people making opinions and noise about us,” he said, “because we knew they cared and they knew that we cared because we gave them our time. The consistency of that alignment really allowed us to work through those periods.”

What to read next

Darren Shand’s Three Key Principles for Building Effective Performance Strategies

By John Portch

‘Integration’ has become a buzzword and, as Dr Robin Thorpe observed, people in high performance are “encouraged to maximise integration at every possible opportunity”.

Thorpe, who has worked across multiple elite high-performance environments, recently led a virtual roundtable for performance directors entitled ‘Finding the Balance Between Integration & Excellence’.

He began with a short presentation in which he argued that while integration is often favourable, it is not always the case; there are times when excellence can be achieved without the collaboration of an entire multidisciplinary team.

Thorpe illustrated his point with reference to Ryan King’s research on ‘tame’ and ‘wicked’ problems. He then explained each in turn:

Tame problems can rely on specialist knowledge alone when there are clearer, more defined problems that can be solved by one discipline or a small expert group. These do not require extensive collaboration.

Wicked problems are complex, ambiguous or a consequence of several factors. They represent “challenges where having more specialist perspectives is clearly a positive method to try and answer or come up with the outcomes that we’re looking for”.

A good leader, Thorpe explained, can spot the problem and organise the correct response, with the goal being the optimum rather than maximum integration.

Too often, however, teams adopt the wrong approach; and there are several risks that can emerge as a result of too little or too much integration. Thorpe set out these risks on the following continuum:

Teams should strive for the ‘optimal’ centre ground.

Thorpe then shared two hypothetical examples of how it might look when organisations occupy the two extremes:

Example 1 – too independent

• A high-pressure, results-driven culture
• A clear, singular objective: winning
• A strong emphasis on standards and performance outcomes
• Little time or priority given to collaboration or reflection

In this example, integration is not consciously ignored but simply not prioritised; the system defaults to specialist expertise with an added sense of urgency.

Thorpe said: “Generally speaking, such environments can be successful, but things may be left on the table where if there were a more deliberate understanding of how some of these things can integrate there might be even more success going forward.”

Example 2 – over-integrated

• Multiple, shifting objectives (not just performance-focused)
• A strong emphasis on inclusion, collaboration and harmony over outcomes
• Less clarity around what success actually means

Priorities are unclear; and challenge is not always facilitated because it is perceived as a negative. “These characteristics can reduce a culture of excellence within an organisation,” said Thorpe, who emphasised that cultural barriers, whatever their source, can be significant when striving for optimal levels of integration.

That is why the key thing for a leader “is knowing when to say ‘let’s go all in on integration and collaboration’ and when to say ‘okay, this is actually the right moment that we have to focus on excellence and this is a win-at-all-costs moment’.”

Next, the assembled performance directors highlighted five of their most pressing challenges in this area, which we illustrate below in the form of direct, anonymised quotes:

1. Too much collaboration leading to slow, unclear decisions

“We had way too many opinions in the room, way too many meetings and way too many rabbit hole discussions.”

“We had two, three or four-hour meetings that should have taken 30 minutes… at times our leader just needed to make the decision.”

2. Too little collaboration leading to silos and competing agendas

“If you’re in a team where there is a lack of integration and collaboration and people are only seeing the main thing from their own lens, then we’re going to have competing interests immediately.”

3. The absence of or confusion over accountability

“Who’s the decision maker? Who is the one directing the goals for the athlete? We’re constantly sorting through who really needs to lead that. Is it the coach? Is it the strength coach? Is it the physio? There’s sometimes not a lot of clarity.”

“It really made the entire club suffer because at the end of the day, a lot of times decisions were not being made at all because the performance director wanted everyone to come to an agreement.”

4. Finding the ‘right’ balance (because silos are not always negative)

“Is it optimal for everybody to push towards the middle? Or are there scenarios in which we want certain groups to lean one way or the other?”

“I think there are certain areas where collaboration really works well and other areas where I’m still happy enough being in a silo where our job is, say, the physical performance side and we know best.”

5. Cultural and structural barriers

“The majority on this call is still being led from above; how much influence does the [executive / head coaching level] have in where we are on that continuum?”

The performance directors on the call also suggested five solutions, which, as before, we illustrate 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.”

At the session’s end, Thorpe left the table with some questions to ponder:

• Where does your organisation currently sit on the integration continuum? How is this determined? Is it measurable?
• How do you preserve specialist excellence while encouraging collaboration?
• What structures help create productive challenge rather than destructive silos?
• Have you experienced environments that became over-integrated or over-centralised?

What to read next

Leading Beyond Silos: Dr Robin Thorpe Explains How High-Performance Organisations Can Integrate Expertise

Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

In a recent Leaders Performance Institute article, Áine MacNamara outlined ten characteristics of effective performance pathways, emphasising environmental intent over time and the deliberate design required to support athletes through uncertainty (1).

What I took most from it was the challenge to move beyond static talent identification models and build environments that can respond to developmental reality as it unfolds. In my day-to-day work as a General Manager of High Performance (HP), that distinction matters as we cannot just select ‘talent’ and hope the system does the rest. We have to shape the conditions that help young athletes keep progressing.

In this article, I build on MacNamara’s recent discussion through the lens of the Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) 5×5 HP pathway. Drawing on my experience in the role, I describe how we currently operationalise talent identification and development decisions in a decentralised, resource‑constrained national system. I will discuss how those decisions collide with ethical responsibility, developmental uncertainty, and the lived reality of athletes and families in the Under 15–19 space.

To clarify, I am not presenting a model to be replicated. Instead, I want to be transparent about the trade‑offs, risks, and responsibilities that sit underneath age‑grade selection and programme design within BBNZ. My aim is to contribute honestly to the HP conversation about what great can look like when resources, time, and certainty are limited – and when decisions still need to stand up to scrutiny.

Framing the context: the BBNZ 5×5 age‑grade HP pathway

The BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway (Under 15–19) operates within a decentralised system that relies heavily on secondary schools and regional associations as the primary environments for daily training, competition, and athlete support. Unlike many international systems, New Zealand does not have a centralised academy structure or fully funded national talent development programme for basketball. Instead, development occurs across a distributed network of environments, each with varying levels of resourcing, expertise, and capacity.

A defining constraint within this system is that the BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway has historically been ‘user-pays’. Families of selected athletes contribute financially to participation in national camps and international FIBA tournaments. While basketball can be considered relatively accessible at an entry level, requiring little more than a ball and a hoop, progression into HP pathways requires regular access to facilities, specialist coaching, competition, and international travel. For many families, this represents a significant financial commitment.

Within a low‑resource, user‑pays environment, BBNZ’s ethical obligation is therefore not to over‑promise outcomes, but to ensure families clearly understand pathway intent, selection meaning, and developmental trade‑offs before engaging. In this way, transparency becomes a safeguard.

For New Zealand athletes, participation in FIBA Under 15–19 events serves a dual purpose. While these tournaments are legitimate international competitions, they also function as the primary global shop window through which US college programmes can assess New Zealand talent. They offer verified age‑grade competition, standardised rules, and direct comparison against major basketball nations which serve as reference points that NCAA recruiters rely on heavily given limited exposure to the New Zealand domestic school and association systems. This reality means that BBNZ age‑grade teams competing in FIBA tournaments are both development environments and exposure platforms that ultimately are significantly influencers regarding almost every strategic decision regarding the HP pathways.

Jackson Ball is a significant example of impact the 5×5 Men’s Pathway is having. Jackson’s pathway illustrates a progressive transition through BBNZ’s age‑grade system, representing New Zealand at U17 and U19 World Cups (2024 and 2025 respectively) before earning Tall Blacks selection as a 16-year-old and consolidating his development through ANBL competition in Australia.

Of his journey, Jackson says:

The NZ age-group pathway was huge for my development. It offered me elite coaching, international experience, the chance to compete against top players, and gave me the exposure required to earn college opportunities. Being part of the Hawks (Hawkes Bay) also showed me the level of physicality and toughness needed to compete at the professional level, and taught me how to balance basketball, school, and other commitments. Both opportunities sharpened my focus and showed me what it would take to continue on this path.

Developing self‑sufficient, coachable athletes

Across BBNZ HP pathway programmes, there is strong alignment with MacNamara’s emphasis on developing psycho‑behavioural skills that enable athletes to cope with the inevitable volatility of development (1). In the New Zealand context, this focus is not optional – it is essential.

In the absence of a fully professional domestic league and given the opportunities currently afforded by US collegiate scholarships, the vast majority of high‑performing youth athletes aspire to secure places in offshore environments. It is currently believed that success in these environments depends as much on self‑regulation and adaptability as on basketball ability.

To this end, BBNZ HP pathway programmes prioritise the development of self‑regulation, goal‑setting and reflective practice through progressive ownership of an Individual Performance Plan (IPP). These competencies are embedded through a combination of remotely, in assembled camps and during performance campaigns. Through conversations with NCAA, and professional coaches, there is a consistent emphasis that international athletes must manage training load, academics, recovery, and behaviour with minimal supervision if they are to thrive. Preparing athletes to meet these expectations is, therefore, a deliberate development outcome, not a by‑product.

Similarly, in preparing athletes to be coached across cultures, playing styles, and evolving on‑court roles, BBNZ places high value on coachability, responsiveness to feedback, and tactical learning capacity. Within both coach recruitment and athlete selection processes, values alignment is considered foundational. Learning behaviours such as; active listening, feedback integration, curiosity, and self‑direction are explicitly discussed, developed and ultimately rewarded.

This emphasis aligns with MacNamara’s advocacy for athlete agency (1) and is reinforced through multiple mechanisms for athlete voice. These mechanisms are not tokenistic; they actively inform IPPs, strengthen connections, and improve decision‑making quality across HP programmes.

Gender specific considerations

Male 5×5 programmes

A uniquely influential accelerator within the New Zealand male pathway is the Sal’s NZNBL and Rapid League. Running from February to August, these semi‑professional environments provide male youth athletes (sometimes as young as 15) with elevated learning opportunities. Examples include; daily exposure to senior level competition, experienced coaching, international imports regarding professional habits, and current Tall Blacks to share top down cultural learnings. Coupled with schools and associations, male athletes are being exposed to multiple coaching voices and styles.

Across these environments, a consistent observation that is emerging is that athletes who integrate performance and behavioural feedback openly, without defensiveness, tend to progress faster and attract greater interest. This is both domestically and offshore.

Female 5×5 programmes

In contrast to the men’s semi‑professional league, the equivalent for the women’s pathway in New Zealand is between October and December and falls after the FIBA tournament windows. An absence of genuine ‘best vs best’ training and competition year round is a constraint for female youth development. As a NSO, BBNZ must continually redesign development and identification processes for young women and cannot simply translate the male templates and processes. Regional ‘hotspots’ have emerged where the majority of selections currently come from however this dilutes the depth of possible talent that is FIBA capable and consequently reduces the number of female athletes capable of progressing through the pathway beyond school.

Some key strategic considerations moving forward include cross‑sport monitoring where BBNZ has the opportunity to engage female athletes currently participating in other sports. Typical sports include netball and volleyball domestically. A cross sport approach would include a perspective shift from output spotting to capacity sensing. Expanding on this there would be a requirement for coaches in the pathway to be able to identify and prioritise indicators of adaptability when looking for potential athletes. These may include; learning speed, response to adversity, competitive curiosity, and self‑regulation as well as direct screening days to observe and measure basketball potential in a variety of positions.

One athlete cited the transferable skills from netball to basketball:

Netball helped me develop decision‑making, competitiveness, and confidence in contact. I wasn’t a natural basketball athlete at first, but the coaches gave me confidence to try and helped me to quickly learned and adapt.

Present challenges

The decentralised model in New Zealand offers reach and diversity of experience but also presents enduring challenges. Some of the most prominent being: inequitable access driven by cost, variable regional quality and capacity, limited national contact time, and tension between long‑term development intent and short‑term performance expectations. Without a central academy, progress depends on alignment, trust, and shared standards across schools, associations, families, and national programmes which makes clarity, transparency, and consistency critical.

Designing selection criteria that withstand scrutiny

BBNZ age‑grade selection criteria for both male and female programmes are deliberately co‑designed across coaching staff spanning the full pathway (Under 15 through to the Tall Blacks and Tall Ferns). This breadth of input ensures decisions are not made in isolation from senior performance realities.

The criteria explicitly balance current performance contribution (“ability to impact a FIBA tournament now”) and projected long‑term potential (“future senior international capability”). This balance guards against over‑reliance on early output alone. BBNZ HP age grade selection decisions draw on multiple evidence streams, including: projected future roles, quality of daily training environment, positional needs and “international superpowers” and a clearly defined set of BBNZ HP character attributes (coachability, preparation, recovery behaviours, competitiveness, and clarity of purpose). The intention is to assess athletes holistically rather than through a single performance lens.

A part of the BBNZ system, transparency is critical. Criteria are communicated early to families, expectations are clearly articulated, and mechanisms exist to sense‑check or challenge alignment before processes are too far progressed. This is essential in a system where selection meaning can easily be misinterpreted as long‑term endorsement. BBNZ is acutely aware that age‑grade selections attract parental scrutiny, media interest, and retrospective evaluation. Robust criteria are therefore designed not to prove decisions “right”, but to ensure they are defensible, consistent, and ethically sound under uncertainty.

Navigating FIBA cycles, maturation, and performance horizons

A unique complexity within youth basketball is the three‑year FIBA competition cycle. Year one requires a top‑two Oceania finish to qualify for the Asia Cup in year two (which requires a top‑four finish to qualify) and in the final third year is the possibility of a World Cup.

When analysed through evidence‑informed What It Takes To Win frameworks, the performance requirements of year‑one competitions are significantly lower than those of Asia Cup and World Cup phases. Without multi‑horizon awareness, the BBNZ HP system would risk rewarding early maturation, or tolerating sub‑optimal psycho‑behavioural behaviours in athletes who initially dominate early levels of training and competition. Current research supports such caution. Mikołajec et al. (2) demonstrates that performance differences among U15–U16 national‑level basketball athletes are heavily influenced by biological maturation, underscoring the need for flexible selection horizons and avoidance of fixed judgements. Similarly, a recent systematic review of youth development manuals from leading FIBA nations (USA, Spain, Australia, Canada, Argentina) found consistent emphasis on long‑term development, technical‑tactical foundations, and diverse experiences over early specialisation (3).

BBNZ HP therefore frames its selection decisions around clarity of pathway position at a point in time, rather than prediction of ultimate success. Athletes and families are supported to understand where an athlete is now and what it will take next. This approach helps manage expectations and protects against the conflation of age‑grade selection with permanent endorsement.

Ethical responsibility in a user‑pays system

Ethics in talent pathways are rarely about perfect solutions. They are about honest framing.

In a user‑pays, low‑resource environment, ethical failure most often occurs when systems promise certainty they cannot deliver. BBNZ’s responsibility is therefore to ensure clarity of intent, informed consent, and realistic understanding of probabilities and trade‑offs.

One family of a former pathway athlete was able to reinforce this perspective, stating:

What we appreciated most was the honesty. No one promised that this pathway guaranteed selection or a future contract, but they were clear about what our child would learn, what the experience would involve, and the probabilities involved. That clarity helped us make a decision we were comfortable with—even knowing there were no certainties.

Another added:

Looking back, the value wasn’t whether our child was selected. It was the development they received while they were in the system. If that quality hadn’t been there, selection alone would have meant very little.

These lived experiences reinforce a central principle that selection without development quality is a false positive.

What are BBNZ HP selecting into?

The previously discussed points raise a critical question for any national system: are we selecting athletes into teams, or into development environments?

If selection confers visibility and pressure but not improved coaching quality, learning support, and behavioural expectations, its value diminishes. Effective pathways must ensure that selection meaningfully enhances development and not merely exposure. Equally important is retrospective evaluation. It is important that HP systems are committed to rigorously examine their processes and at a youth level considerations include; who was missed, who exited and why and who re‑entered later and succeeded. The sentiment of creating continuous learning systems resonates with MacNamara’s (1) recent identification that continuous cycles of reviewing, debriefing and reflection being a characteristic of good pathway environments.

Performance shifts

Over the past two years, the BBNZ HP 5×5 pathways have seen a clear step-change in performance and pathway outcomes across the system. At the performance end, U17 Men delivered back‑to‑back 4th‑place finishes at the 2024 and 2025 FIBA U17 and U19 World Cups, underlining New Zealand’s improved ability to consistently compete with the world’s best in the most demanding age‑group environments. That momentum was reinforced in 2025 with the U17 Men winning New Zealand’s first ever FIBA Oceania Cup gold medal, a significant milestone for the programme.

In parallel, the U17 Women qualified for consecutive FIBA U17 Women’s World Cups (2024 and 2026), reflecting growing depth, continuity, and competitiveness in the female pathway. Equally important, these results are being underpinned by strong off‑court outcomes. The 2025–26 season saw a record number of New Zealand male and female athletes competing in NCAA Division I, demonstrating that the pathway is not only producing teams that compete globally, but individuals trusted to perform and develop in elite daily environments. Taken together, these outcomes point to a system that is converting alignment, selection, development and competition into sustained performance, not one‑off results, and building a broader base of high‑quality athletes capable of succeeding on the world stage.

Concluding reflections

Strong HP pathway systems are not defined by how often they predict perfectly, but by how transparently they operate under uncertainty. Early selection can be complex and require evidence to make the most complete decisions possible. Decisions that influenced by maturation, opportunity, and environment rather than guaranteed trajectory. High‑quality HP systems therefore should prioritise adaptability, multiple pathways, and ethical clarity over certainty.

Consistent with FIBA’s youth strategy, age‑grade international tournaments are best understood as development accelerators, not performance forecasts. In resource‑constrained environments like New Zealand, the real work lies in designing systems that respect developmental variability while maximising opportunity.

That, ultimately, is what it really takes.

References

1. 10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes – Performance Institute
2. Mikołajec, K., Arede, J. & Gryko, K. Examining physical and technical performance among youth basketball national team development program players: a multidimensional approach. Sci Rep15, 3722 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-87583-7
3. Santos, Jhonatan & Sato dos Santos, Yura & Goi, Cauê & Junior, Eduardo & Godoy, Sergio & Galatti, Larissa. (2024). Training young people in basketball (under-15 to under-19): what are the tactical-technical contents described in the manuals of leading countries in the FIBA ​​ranking? Rectos. 61. 1474-1483. 10.47197/retos.v61.108287.

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