By John Portch

‘The ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.’

So wrote Arie de Geus in the Harvard Business Review in 1988 while serving as the Head of Strategic Planning at Shell.

This idea was amplified by systems scientist Peter Senge in his seminal 1990 book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organisation.

They both emphasise the idea that learning is not a mere ‘nice to have’; it should be woven into your environment and enable your people to strive for continuous improvement.

They also discuss a problem that persists nearly four decades later: that learning in numerous organisations is inconsistent, unstructured, individualised and event-based.

This idea set the premise for a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable where members convened to chat through their challenges in this area and potential solutions.

“In some quarters, we get caught up on a single event; you go to a conference or someone comes into your environment and we see that as a learning moment,” said Luke Whitworth, the Sport Performance Team Lead at the Leaders Performance Institute. “Whereas it’s really what we’re going to talk about today, which is how we embed this in what we’re doing.”

Firstly, he shared a selection of eight primers for the session ahead:

The table then conferred on the areas where learning currently breaks down in their systems and the challenges that prevent the creation of effective and impactful learning cultures. They raised a selection of common themes:

Time pressure and competing priorities

This was the most common challenge at the table. The struggle was succinctly captured by three attendees who have all worked in Major League Baseball. “The breakdown is typically the perception that I don’t have time for this,” said one. “The to‑do lists take precedent over the to‑be list.”

“You’re just constantly on to the next day and there’s not a ton of time to pause and reflect,” added another.

“Coaches think learning is getting in the way of getting the job done,” observed the third.

A lack of (the practice of) reflection

This is intertwined with the lack of time.

“The reflection piece is where we see a breakdown a lot,” said the Director of Player Development at an MLB club. “They probably don’t allow themselves enough time to review and reflect,” added an L&D manager at a British sporting organisation.

There is no consensus over “when is the right time to do all of this teaching and learning and, therefore, we simply don’t do it,” said a coaching lead at a British university.

Basic performance pressure

“There is a need for performance in the now rather than the development piece over time,” said a coach working in English football. “The managers are under real pressure.”

That coach was not alone. “The environment praises immediate results,” said another coach from the world of MLB. “There’s this pressure to produce over learning.”

This has engendered fixed mindsets when it comes to learning. “This is how we’ve always done it,” said the coach in English football citing a typical excuse.

A lack of clarity

As the Director of Player Development in MLB explained, “our group really wants to learn but is trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none.”

“It probably confuses coaches,” said the manager working at a British sporting organisation. “What do they want to be learning?”

As a consequence, that learning often happens in silos.

A lack of role modelling from leaders

“If leadership is not only supporting but modelling this, others then feel like they can take the time,” said the NCAA performance specialist, who explained that learning may be on the agenda of the lower ranks but “it stagnates at those middle tier leadership positions.”

Another leader based at a British university asked both the table and himself: “Are we doing enough as a manager to drive that thinking and priority?”

Poor quality teaching or coaching

“A lot of coaches are either overdoing the teaching so there’s not any learning taking place or there are too many missed opportunities for the teaching and learning,” said the head of coaching at a British university. “It’s also changing the perception of the teacher; I’m doing it to you versus facilitating learning.”

Then there is the question of timing. “Do you jump in straight away? Do you wait till the end of the session and reflect? Do you wait till the next day and do some teaching and learning?”

Then Whitworth invited the table to share what they need to do to make learning a competitive advantage in their organisation. As before, there were some common themes:

Space for ‘failure’ and ‘messy’ learning

“Learning is messy,” said a coach working for the NBA. “Learning is not ‘you learn it, you go and execute it, and everything’s beautiful’. If we don’t allow the space for mistakes then learning won’t happen.”

And, as an individual working in MLB, said, “it’s going to be messy, it’s not going to be pretty and we have to be okay with that.”

There also needs to be a shift in tone and content from negative to positive, as another coach working with the NBA noted. “A coach will highlight, ‘okay, you did this wrong’, but there is not too much focus on what you can improve.”

Psychological safety is further built through clear scaffolding. “If I’m dedicating time, how does it apply? How can I put it into play? How does it connect to my role?” asked a performance specialist working at a US college.

Crucially, messy does not mean unplanned. “We need to be more intentional in planning it,” said a nutritionist based at a British university. He was supported by a colleague who added that we need to “put it front and centre in objectives and appraisal meetings.”

Leaders that role model learning behaviours

“You’ve got to create that psychological safety,” said the Director of Player Development in MLB. “It goes back to modelling.”

“Do we give it time?” said the nutritionist. “Do we prioritise it in conversations and in meetings and in one-to-ones? Do we celebrate it when it’s done well? Do we hold people accountable when it’s not done?”

Embedded learning

“What about consistency and integration?” asked a performance specialist from an NCAA college. “Is learning aligned with the daily fabric of the organisation? It cannot be those one-offs. We’ve all been to those workshops, and it gives you a little energy boost, but what’s the lasting impact? What’s the follow up? How do we actually put it into play?”

Self-directed learning

“How can people take accountability for themselves and identify where they need to go?” asked a coach working in the NBA. “How can you create those spaces for self-reflection or guided discovery for them to self-assess against the framework or anything else; to use a reflection-type tool to think about those things so that they can then identify and take ownership themselves?”

Facilitated learning

“Are we really coaching if we’re not teaching or are we just hosting sessions?” asked the coaching lead. “There is that skill of being the facilitator of learning rather than just being the teacher.”

Collective learning

As De Geus and Senge argue, organisations achieve sustained advantage when individuals learn faster together. A performance expert working at a US college echoed their thoughts, noting that “the competitive advantages are the creativity, the collaboration, innovation, and the consistency.”

This reflects Senge’s concept of collective intelligence, where the quality of thinking across the group exceeds that of any one individual. Collaboration enables better shared thinking, faster learning cycles and better decisions, which ultimately allows organisations to adapt more quickly than their competitors.

Balance the short, medium and long term

“What do you need to change now and where can you take a longer view?” It was an important question, that was posed by a coach working in the NBA. “I think it’s being comfortable with the different timelines and knowing what the objective is and then being able to work through that with your staff and in your one-to-ones.”

What to read next

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

By John Portch

In a coach-led environment, 20% of the job of the coach is actual coaching, while 80% is managing people, the environment and recruitment.

That is according to Mark Jarram, the Head of Coaching and Performance Development at Loughborough University.

“There’s such a huge chunk of the coach’s role that takes them away from the on-court or on-pitch coaching,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2023.

However, as he explained, “most of their passion is in the 20%” because the majority “do the job because they like making a difference, they like having a lifetime impact; but, at the end of the day, they also do it because they enjoy competing and winning. Sometimes that creates a lot of friction. You have the element of winning today versus development for tomorrow.”

Where a leader sits on that spectrum between performance outcome and performance growth will depend on the individual. It is worth asking:

• Where does your organisation over-index today?
• What have you prioritised at the expense of something else?

There are four further elements where leaders can begin to strike a balance.

1. Clarity

Clarity is essential when addressing the tension between outcomes and growth.

When England Head Coach John Mitchell spoke at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, he did so having just helped the Red Roses win the Women’s Rugby World Cup for the first time in 11 years.

For Mitchell, who took the coaching reins in 2023, it began with a “compelling vision”. “We were very visual about where we wanted to go,” he said. He also shared the three questions he continues to pose to his playing group. “What will earn the right [to retain the World Cup in 2029]? What will we keep and take forward with us? And then, thirdly, is what will we need to start again?”

Never before had their ambition and targets been so clearly articulated, as World Cup-winning centre Emily Scarratt explained onstage with Mitchell. She had lifted the World Cup with the Roses in 2014 but had experienced a series of near-misses in the subsequent decade.

“I think it has to come from the leadership and how important they perceive it to be,” said Scarratt, who has since joined Mitchell’s coaching ticket. “In previous campaigns that hasn’t been the case and therefore inevitably could get a little bit sidetracked or lost along the way.”

Ask yourselves:

• What are you currently not saying clearly because it might create pressure or accountability?
• If your ambition were made brutally explicit tomorrow, who in your organisation would feel uncomfortable and why?

2. Behaviours

When a leader has identified what’s missing, the collective must ensure their values and behaviours enable them to bridge that gap.

This is not easy, as Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain and Commandant of the RAF’s Tedder Academy of Leadership, explained at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

She believes the RAF is good at training to execute tasks, but “less good at [managing] the tension between when we need discipline versus ‘I want your diversity of thought, I want you to challenge, and I want you to ask’. I don’t think we’re as good at helping people navigate the nuance of those spaces.”

Keith is trying to address this imbalance; and it begins with setting standards. “They really matter, but what’s important is making sure it’s not the petty ones, the silly ones. If you’re doubling down on standards, it’s because they matter and if you let them go, it will erode performance. It will impact your environment,” she said, adding that “the standard you walk past is the standard that you accept.”

The RAF has a communal document, the prosaically titled Air Document One, which sets out the service’s values and behavioural standards. Crucially, at Keith’s behest, its contents have been shaped by the organisation as a whole. “I really wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe it, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of,” she continued. “We know from all of the different behavioural models of change that actually it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Ask yourselves:

• Are you rewarding the behaviours you say matter or just the outcomes that look good?
• Where in your environment has ‘freedom’ become a lack of accountability or ‘discipline’ become a fear of speaking up?

3. People

Focus too heavily on the outcome and you risk burnout; focus too heavily on growth and you risk losing accountability or results.

“It seems really simple, but we’re judged by winning bike races ultimately,” Dr Scott Drawer, the Performance Director of the Netcompany-Ineos Cycling Team, told the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

In March 2024, he rejoined a team who had enjoyed their greatest successes as Team Sky in the previous decade. The Ineos Grenadiers (as they were then called) were at a low ebb.

“It’s very much an ongoing sensemaking process of just understanding this environment, this sport, this team, the people within it,” said Drawer. “It’s also knowing that there’s this tremendous legacy behind us of what the team had done as a disruptor, but we were no longer there and it was always ‘how do you get back into that mix?’”

Everyone needs to step up, but Drawer recognised that psychological safety was crucial. “We’ll set ourselves up next year in some ways ideally with less constraints and a lot more freedom for our riders to feel like they can just go and race,” he continued. “This is more of an entrepreneurial time for us, the startup mentality. Let’s try stuff. If it doesn’t work, what’s the worst that can happen really?”

Ask yourselves:

• Who is being held back by your expectations or impatience?
• Are your people performers who occasionally learn or learners who are expected to perform?

4. Systems

Systems provide the structure for balancing outcomes and growth.

“Systemisation allows the opportunity to ask: how can I contribute? What are my deliverables? To therefore have some form of accountability,” Jarram told the Leaders Performance Institute. “I’ve seen it benefit in indicating what it actually takes to win. Systemising helps us to confront brutal facts.”

When something is tracked, it usually gets done. “Are we making a difference? Are we focusing on the right things?” he added “[The answers] can determine opportunities to create collaborative conversations.”

He echoes Keith in stating that a system “should be a living, breathing thing that gets reviewed rather than saying ‘we’re going to create this document, it’s going to be signed off, and then it’s going to sit on the shelf’. It should be co-created by all members of staff; ‘this is what we’re trying to achieve, this is how we’re going to do it, this is how you’re going to contribute to that’; so therefore it should dictate ‘what am I doing today?’ and what you’re doing today should impact winning and performance.”

Ask yourselves:

• Have your systems been designed deliberately or been born from habit and urgency?
• Where are you relying on heroics instead of process?

What to read next

How to Spot the Need for Change and to Respond Effectively

By John Portch

As Tom Kelley once asked, if you blew up all the systems at your organisation, what would you keep and what would you change?

Kelley, a partner at global design firm IDEO, was an inspiration for Lachlan Penfold when he was appointed Head of Performance at the Melbourne Storm in 2017. The team were reigning NRL premiers and keen to build on that success.

“That was a challenge that I put forward to all of our football staff, coaches, performance staff, football ops,” Penfold told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2024. “If we blew this up, what would we keep and what would we change?”

It was a necessary question because, as he explained, “sometimes when you have a lot of success, you don’t want to change things because you think that there’s only one way to do it.” Instead, he is a firm believer that there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, which is central to Kelley’s argument. “That was a really refreshing approach of how to go about it.”

Penfold’s approach both encouraged collaboration across the Storm’s performance team and harnessed the expertise in the room as the group sought to provide the best possible performance support to their players.

Below, we return to a selection of our most insightful conversations with performance directors to discuss their approach to balancing the need for integration with excellence and pose the reader five questions.

1. Are your team’s efforts coordinated or are you just busy?

Daily meetings are a must, even for those who admit they’re “not a big meetings guy” such as Michael Italiano, the Head of Athletic Performance at the Rajasthan Royals.

For all that, he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins, as he told the Leaders Performance Institute last year.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

At daily 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.” That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything.

From the IPL to the NBA, where Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, uses structured check-ins to establish communication loops on athlete priorities.

“We want to try and distil it from one to three points in each of those areas. We then meet as a larger group, all of health and performance, so we can go through each player,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2025. “What the other clinicians are doing is really important in my view. Whatever issues I’ve seen here it is very rare, almost never, that things get missed.”

2. How do you preserve expertise in an interdisciplinary system?

Shared goals do not mean a dilution of the expertise within a performance team, they merely indicate that specialists are contributors to the holistic performance picture.

As Rice said of the Sixers, “we can have the best strength coaches, the best nutritionist – and that’s really important – we have excellent clinicians, but the context is really what underpins it. It doesn’t really matter how good that rehabilitation plan is if we don’t understand the context”. Once that context is understood, “that allows us to put the pieces around them to support the athlete.”

“I need to think like a football coach,” said Penfold of his work at the Storm. “In my role as a head of performance, often there’s a physical element to what we do but I also need to think like a football coach; how is this going to make them a better football player versus just a fitter, faster, stronger football player?”

It is a shared performance team goal. “Are they prepared to put developing a better football player first and having a growth mindset around that versus just staying in their little bubble and just working on their area?” Penfold continued. “So there’s a lot of parts that that go into making up a successful team or a great team outside of just the wins and losses.”

3. How do you approach trade-offs?

The pursuit of trade-offs is all about balancing competing tensions in performance.

Jack Nayler, for one, is convinced that control has its limits. ‘The more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term,’ the Head of Sport Science at Everton wrote in an article for the Leaders Performance Institute. He added: ‘we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future; all decisions are essentially gambles.’

Penfold is of a similar mindset. “If you’ve got 35 players, they’re 35 different players with different responses,” he said. “There’s always a lot of different decisions you’ve got to make and hopefully you get more right than wrong.”

You certainly don’t want to duplicate the work. “If we have three people doing five lots, all of a sudden we’ve got 15 sets instead of five,” said Rice, before outlining his true concern. “It’s very rarely missing things – it’s everyone trying to do the right thing.”

4. Do you and your team have a shared mental model of performance?

Simplification is key to Rice’s approach at the Sixers; and he admitted that the team’s small roster size (15 players) helps.

“It allows us to distil the focus areas which become the priorities in each area for each player; and then we have that in a spreadsheet,” he said. “The flow on from there is reasonably straightforward to see what programmes need to be implemented for this player and who’s going to drive them.”

This is easier with a shared mental model, which is also something Nayler explored. ‘The first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation,’ he wrote.

5. Does your culture enable or inhibit collaboration?

Collaborative structures are critical, but “have you created an environment that encourages people to want to get better, that allows them to thrive?”

The question was posed by Penfold, who described how his department adapted its approach ahead of the 2024 NRL season. “One of the things I believe we did well this year, was to create an environment of joy in which people want to immerse themselves in getting better.”

When there is that level of commitment in a psychologically safe environment, “it becomes the ‘mastery’ environment” that all performance directors crave.

What to read next

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

By John Portch

When it comes to performance planning and reviewing in sport, Teena Murray sees plenty of room for industry growth.

“We have grown immensely in high performance sport, especially in the team behind the team,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but we haven’t really evolved in terms of how we think about the structure and how we organise these teams.”

Murray is ten months into her tenure as the Senior Vice President of Integrated Performance Support at US Soccer, where she oversees the delivery of high-performance services to the 27 national teams that compete under the federation’s banner.

She recently hosted a virtual roundtable where members of the Leaders Performance Institute shared their challenges in this space.

“The common denominator remains the challenges we face around interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary connection,” says Murray, who feels that sport’s organisational designs and structures have “lagged” behind other high-performance domains. “We also talked about how we lead up and get some of the senior stakeholders in the organisation more engaged around advancing the models that we’re working within.”

As long as such disconnects exist, “we can’t build something significant and we can’t have the sustained success until we really take a critical look at how we’re organising these teams.”

She cites other contributory factors, such as ever shorter coaching tenures and even the limitations of a team’s physical space. “There’s environmental challenges in the way some of our buildings are designed, where we might have medical over here and performance over there. And I think we all know that structure drives function.”

To that end, US Soccer has opened its new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Atlanta [the ribbon was cut last week]. “It has been an incredible ride getting this place up and running and getting all of the equipment installed and getting organised for the first camps that will also begin in this building next Monday [18 May],” says Murray. The timing could not be better with the Fifa World Cup on the horizon and the US serving as co-hosts of the tournament.

“It’s been fast and furious at times, but it’s also incredibly rewarding; and just to see the pride. This is the first time US Soccer’s ever had a home, and it’s been a pipe dream for a long time. So to see it truly becoming a reality for so many folks who’ve been part of the federation for a long time is very rewarding and really exciting.”

Murray is the first to admit that US Soccer still has plenty of work to do when it comes to planning, reviewing and delivering sustained improvement, but she was still happy to speak to us about some of the elements she hopes to see come together in the near future.

Alignment: a shared understanding

“The complexity is very real,” says Murray when reflecting on her work. She and her leadership team are “trying to solve for complexity by creating a philosophical foundation and trying to really align mental models around who we are, what we’re here to do, and how we’re going to work together.”

It is often easier said than done and, as she explains, “you can only move at the speed of trust”. “At times, it feels like I’m moving very slowly. At other times, I realise even though it feels slow, it’s still too fast. It’s really toggling between the fast and the slow.”

They ask themselves: “When is there an opportunity to move fairly quickly and get something accomplished and try to get a few wins on the board? And when do we need to slow back down and just stand and have a coffee and continue to get to know folks?”

It points to the search for alignment. “I use the term ‘radically aligned and seamlessly integrated’,” she says. “So everyone involved needs to feel like we’re truly radically aligned, philosophically and operationally, and that the delivery, the execution is meeting the standard.”

Sustained improvement: ‘learning at speed’

Radical alignment and seamless integration are about enabling US Soccer to “learn as fast as we can”, as Murray puts it.

She echoes former New Zealand All Blacks’ GM Darren Shand, who recently cited American systems scientist, Peter Senge, when describing learning as “the only sustainable competitive advantage”.

Murray explains that her team employs a “closed loop process” of “plan, do, review, learn.”  She speaks of their daily debriefs (morning and evening) and more formal gatherings held after national team camps.

As a result of these touchpoints, they can tweak their strategies in the pursuit of sustained improvement. It’s a real team effort. “Everybody needs to contribute to that process and align on what we feel are the key learnings and then how we are going to iterate or improve our process together.”

There is also a balance to be struck between consistency and innovation. “We need to find that sweet spot between continuing to do the key things really well and then also starting to elevate or advance and start to integrate maybe some of the new pieces that are now possible for us here at US Soccer.”

She wants her team to “think outside the box” and embrace the opportunities provided by a new facility, but she also knows they “have to be smart about how much new are we going to try to incorporate or how much new are we going to try to adopt.”

Review: multi-level and psychologically safe

“A lot of honesty and a lot of feedback – fast feedback – is critically important if we’re going to learn and adapt quickly,” says Murray. “It’s also about making sure that we have the psychological safety in the room and also the ability to be truly honest with each other when things are not going the way they need to go in figuring out how we’re going to course correct.”

The aforementioned daily huddles are new for a lot of members of staff. “We have people who aren’t used to being at the table with some of the other groups,” she continues. “It’s great to get people in the room, but we’re almost trying to learn together how we want these meetings to go and how we want the debrief to go and how we want to feed some of the learnings back in. So it’s been fun. We’re learning a lot and evolving very quickly in real time.”

The US Soccer Integrated Performance Support team’s goal is clear. “If we have the right processes in place, we’re automating the right things and we’re using dashboards effectively and the tools and technologies that we’re using to gather data, the ability to be effective and successful on the day should be pretty straightforward.” Then, when things inevitably go awry, “we know exactly how we’re going to manage it and bring it back online.”

‘But not everything is collaborative’

When a team has a shared mental model, individuals understand their domain, they know where there’s overlap and where there’s room for collaboration. “But not everything is collaborative,” says Murray. “I think we oftentimes confuse it, but we don’t want collaboration all the time.”

She wants her staff to be able to ask themselves “when am I the leader? When am I working in collaboration with another area, whether it’s nutrition, mental performance or sports science with strength & conditioning?” The answers provide “a clear understanding of who owns what but ultimately knowing what it is that we’re trying to deliver upon and what are the target outcomes that we’re really trying to reverse-engineer with all of our processes.”

What to read next

How the British Red Cross Continuously Adapts While Staying True to its Values

Main Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

By John Portch

“I tend to think of a strategy as a bridge between where you are and where you’re dreaming of getting to,” said Michael Bourne.

“In order to build the right bridge, you need to understand those two things.”

Bourne, the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA], was the first to speak at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, which took place at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London in late March.

Members of the Leaders Performance Institute travelled from far and wide for a day that challenged assumptions and provoked some of the sharpest minds in the sports industry to rethink how strategies emerge in high-performance environments.

Bourne was joined on the bill by Milano Cortina mixed skeleton gold medallist, Tabby Stoecker, and speakers from organisations including the Football Association, luxury retailer Selfridges, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Together, they explored how strategies are built, stress-tested and executed by the best in the business.

Below is a snapshot of the day’s proceedings; five fresh insights to help strengthen your own planning and execution.

1. A strategy starts with a brutally honest discussion

Bourne joined the LTA in 2018, when they were two years into their ten-year performance strategy designed to tackle the lack of players coming through the British tennis system.

Yes, Andy Murray had won three majors in recent memory, but the sense was that this was “despite the system, not because of it”.

“In essence, between 2016 and 2017, the organisation undertook a diagnosis of the situation,” said Bourne, “and they came up with a number of different issues”.

This diagnosis, which included a lack of coherent pathways, limited programmes for talent ID, and resources spread too thinly, enabled the LTA to have a long, hard look at itself without pointing fingers at individuals. It lowered stakeholder defensiveness and provided the foundations for what they needed to do next.

Bourne was not present for the diagnosis, but he was recruited shortly after to ensure the LTA adopted the right approach and a coordinated set of actions. But they could not jump ahead. As he said:

I believe that you have to have that first element of the diagnosis and your guiding policy right first.

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

2. Your strategy must be co-created

At luxury retailer Selfridges, Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding, Sharlene John, faced the challenge of trying to tie her work to commercial outcomes while challenging the idea that DEI is “fluffy” and irrelevant.

The result was Selfridges’ award-winning DEI and culture strategy Open to the World. On John’s watch (she joined Selfridges in 2021), female leadership within the organisation has grown from 32% to almost 70%; Selfridges is also an industry leader in ethnic representation.

Open to the World flourished because of John’s efforts to ensure it was a co-created initiative from the start. She said:

Before we even put pen to paper, it was going out and speaking to my teams, but also my leaders, to understand what does DEI or culture mean to you? And where there was that missing voice, it was bringing people into the room. So not just relying on those senior leaders where we don’t have representation, it was ‘OK, we’ll go down a layer’… I was talking to people across our business with a headcount of around three and a half thousand… We’ve got stores in Manchester, Birmingham, a tech suite in Leicester, and then the flagship in London. I went to every site speaking to people from grade 2, which is our junior role, up to our grade 7, which is exec positions, to understand what Open to the World actually means to them.

Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, describes her organisation’s award-winning Open to the World inclusion programme, which was built by a plurality of stakeholders. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

3. Evaluation (and re-evaluation) is continuous

“If you don’t get it right when you’re there in the moment, doing a review process at the end is worthless.”

So said Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association [BOA] who recently joined English Championship side Norwich City as Performance Director. He spoke alongside Tabby Stoecker, the mixed team skeleton gold medallist at the Milano Cortina Games alongside her teammate Matt Weston.

When it comes to in-the-moment tweaks, Ford has a point. The BOA must work with national governing bodies, coaches and athletes continuously throughout a four-year cycle. “It’s making sure that we are doing it hand in hand with our sports as frequently as possible,” Ford added.

A macro ‘plan-do-review’ alone is not adequate. Of competition time itself, he said:

It’s on a daily cycle during delivery mode at a Games. [We ask] what are you planning for this day? What are we doing this day? How has this day gone? Because if you don’t make the most of that experience in the moment, it’s not going to happen for another four years.

Stoecker benefited from this approach, as demonstrated by her success. She said:

There wasn’t just the review of that specific race, but also ‘what are you taking from this that you’re going to change or carry forward for three years’ time, two years’ time, six months’ time?’… you can get quite swept up in what you’re doing and you have these extreme highs and lows. So I think staying focused, and when you’re then doing that and being so process-driven, the results just come.

British Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker is deep in conversation with Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association, as they discuss Team GB’s strategic approach to Olympic cycles and, more specifically, Stoecker’s path to gold in the mixed skeleton at the Milano Cortina Games. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

4. Be ready to act on incomplete information

You and your team may enjoy clarity and alignment of purpose, but optimal operating conditions are likely to be elusive whatever your efforts.

With this in mind, Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience how British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information. They are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.

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

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

Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence (centre), in conversation with moderator Iain Brunnschweiler (left) and Football Association Head of Strategic Development & Operations, Paul Cleal (right) as she explained what it takes for military personnel to act with incomplete information. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

5. What are you ready to discard?

New initiatives, new processes and new ways of thinking are great, but what are you prepared to discard?

“One of the things about strategy is making choices,” says Paul Cleal, who spoke alongside Reay-Kemp in his capacity as Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association. “If you’re trying to change something, it almost always involves stopping doing something else.”

However, as he has experienced, this is often easier said than done. “If things involve stopping doing something for the new thing you need, a lot of organisations struggle with that.”

Evidence, he explained, is critical in making those choices:

When I walked in three years ago, my job was not to throw things in the bin and do them differently. It was to ask: is what we’re doing now meeting the strategic aims and to what extent do we need to get closer to our strategic aims and what is it we can change?

Paul Cleal, the Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association, explains why it’s important to discard programmes and processes when they no longer serve the collective. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute

See you at the Sport Performance Summit in New York?

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

‘Peace-time plans are of no particular value but peace-time planning is indispensable.’

Former US President Dwight D Eisenhower wrote that line in a letter to a US diplomat in 1950 and repeated the sentiment throughout his eight years in the White House.

The line was quoted by Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, at a presentation to Leaders Performance Institute members in 2025.

“The idea behind this quote is that high-performance teams don’t necessarily have a static plan,” said Mannix.

“The plan is constantly evolving as new information comes to light, whether that’s in relation to the tournament that we’re playing in, the players that we’re working with, and a variety of other contexts that are relevant to the world of international soccer.”

With a considered plan, a leader can align their people and allocate their resources effectively. With a structured review process, improvements can be sustained.

That is the message at the heart of a forthcoming case study virtual roundtable hosted by Mannix’s US Soccer colleague, Teena Murray, who will speak in her capacity as the organisation’s Director of Performance and from her experience of leading performance programmes at the NBA and NHL.

Here, we foreground Murray’s presentation with a selection of five best practice insights in the realms of planning and reviewing delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.

1. The VMOST framework

‘The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less,’ wrote James Thomas. ‘They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.’

Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club, wrote these words in February.

He argued that while planning is often perceived as control, he believes it to be the opposite:

When the direction is clear, planning is decentralised. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

Thomas then introduced business strategist Rakesh Sondhi’s VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics) framework, which ‘provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there’: 

‘The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity,’ Thomas continued. ‘In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation.’

Finally, ‘when applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame’.

2. Find the right time for athlete education

Paul Ford, the outgoing Head of Performance at the British Olympic Association, explained in a recent article that an Olympic Games environment ‘is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities’. He wrote:

Athletes are compacted into a brand-new village of more than 16,000 people who are all subject to a constrained competition schedule in what amounts to 52 world championships in 17 days, all in the same city.

It’s almost like they are being set up to fail when they’re expected to deliver the best performance of their lives.

The key, he argued, is tapping into the bits of the Olympic experience that build you up and not the elements that can detract from your performance. Athlete education is a critical element of the BOA’s fixed Games plan and comes in the form of discussions. ‘When to land these discussions is the next question,’ wrote Ford, before adding:

[Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics] some sports, such as sailing and canoeing, will know their Olympians as early as September 2027; others, such as track and field, won’t select until May 2028. So the education journey we go on with the sailors and canoeists is long; we can plan out and get that right and drip feed it at the right times. Whereas the track and field athletes don’t want to hear anything about the Games because they’re not necessarily going. We must be smart in making the education bespoke and fit for purpose for each sport. Equally, some will want us to sit down and talk it through while others just want those short videos and podcasts. It’s finding out how the different cohort of athletes’ best digest information.

3. It is critical to learn from failure

In October, Everton’s Head of Sport Science, Jack Nayler, penned his thoughts on what it takes to look at a failure and ensure lessons are learned (primarily in the context of complexity in sports high-performance systems).

He shared his reflections on the late Richard Cook of the University of Chicago, specifically his treatise entitled How Complex Systems Fail.

Nayler wrote:

Around this time, I was challenged by a friend in the industry to put together my thoughts on building a performance department for a sports team. I found it challenging just to make an org chart and list positions without giving the background and rationale for why and how the department existed in that structure as well as its philosophical construct. This exercise of transferring ideas from my head on to paper forced me to critically confront my assumptions and crystallised my thoughts on how I believe we need to operate in the complex environment of elite professional team sports (specifically football as this has been my professional experience).

4. Embed review mechanisms

Mannix and his colleagues at US Soccer continually face the club vs country balance. In his aforementioned presentation, he spoke of the process that takes place when American players report for international duty.

“Building rapport and trust with those clubs is massively important because that helps us drive a lot of the exchange of information,” he said. “We need to know when our equipment and staff are arriving and where our players are coming from.”

Some may be in better shape than others, which underlines the need to review ahead of a session. Mannix said:

When a coach is trying to build out the session plan, the right hand is a good sports scientist or a performance coach, and the left hand is the first assistant, and those three individuals are working very closely to ensure that there’s a good plan in place for every training session. There’s good understanding as to what the availability of the players is going to be, particularly in the first two days of training, because what we’ve found through communication with clubs is we sometimes have to be flexible when players are coming into our environment simply because although Europe observes FIFA windows, we have to work with our partners in MLS on when players are released to come and join our environment.

Mannix and his colleagues understand the range of fixed and dynamic constraints they face. They use that understanding to find ‘optimization indicators’:

5. Pursue collaborative planning where possible

Where can you pool your resources with others for the collective good?

In 2024, the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand formed the Global Alliance, which enables them to share sports science research and best practice when it comes to their female athletes.

The Global Alliance is a case study in what can be achieved in time and resource-limited environments when organisations collaborate in areas with little impact on competition itself (they still want to beat each other).

The Alliance’s main objectives, as explained on a Leaders Community Call in November 2024, include…

• Sharing best practices and resources: By pooling their collective knowledge, Alliance members can develop and implement the most effective health initiatives and signpost others towards the best practice or research already implemented by their colleagues in different regions.
• Benchmarking and baselining efforts: The goal, as Helen Fulcher, the Athlete Performance Support Lead at HPSNZ explained, is to “create a baseline that is higher”. Members of the Alliance will regularly assess and combine their efforts to ensure continuous improvement which, in theory, should result in healthier female athletes and higher levels of competition.
• Addressing misinformation: The group are passionate about making sure that the information available would be representative of the global athlete population, and therefore diverse, whilst being evidence-based. You want to be able to say “‘as of now, this is the best way to treat X’,” said Amber Donaldson, the VP of Sports Medicine at the USPOC. Athletes from different nations will also help spread accurate information about health topics, such as menstrual cycles and nutrition, through their platforms.
• Speeding up progress: As a collective the alliance can move practices along more quickly, be that through raising baseline levels faster, or by being able to increase sample sizes.
• Conducting collaborative research: Richard Burden,  who leads the Female Athlete Performance Programme at the UKSI, said: “If you can combine multicentre research, with those multicentre being in different countries around the globe, then you are naturally going to get a more diverse, rich database and, therefore, the insights that we’re going to be able to get from that are going to be just way more valuable for everybody”.

Additional reporting by Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland and Lottie Wright.

By James Thomas

Strategy does not have a great reputation in high-performance sport.

Often the word elicits a raised eyebrow amidst busy training and competition schedules or it alludes to scarce downtime for coaches and practitioners.

It is also associated with corporate language, long documents and theoretical discussions that feel disconnected from the daily reality of training, selection and competition. In high-pressure environments, planning (reviewing and learning) can be seen as a luxury, something to revisit once results improve or uncertainty settles.

My experience has been the opposite. I’m passionate about helping raise awareness of the importance and performance impact of great strategic planning.

Strategy: a precursor to performance

After more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I have come to believe that performance strategy and planning are not distractions from performance, they are precursors to it. In environments often defined by pressure, volatility and constant change, strategy provides something invaluable: direction, connection and a level of continuity.

High-performance sport is inherently unstable. Calendars shift, athletes get injured, form fluctuates, staff move on, leaders change and external demands arrive without warning. In that context, the absence of a clear performance strategy does not create freedom. It creates noise. Decisions become reactive, alignment erodes, and short-term fixes quietly undermine decision-making rooted in the agreed long-term ambition.

The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less. They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.

Planned Olympic success

One of the clearest demonstrations of the value of performance strategy in my career came during my time as Performance Director at British Gymnastics in the build-up to, and during, the delayed Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.

This period was defined by disruption. The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how athletes trained, competed and lived. Lockdowns restricted facility access. Competition schedules collapsed and re-emerged unpredictably. Athlete preparation was fragmented, and long-term planning was constantly challenged.

At the same time, the organisation was navigating a significant cultural crisis. The Whyte Review had been co-commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England in 2020 following allegations of abuse and mistreatment within gymnastics in Britain. Trust had been damaged, scrutiny was intense and the responsibility to rebuild confidence, both internally and externally, sat alongside the imperative to perform on the world’s biggest stage, the Olympic Games.

In that environment, strategy became an anchor.

It provided stability when circumstances were anything but stable. Performance strategy gave athletes, coaches and staff a clear sense of direction at a time when certainty was scarce. It reminded us of our five principles of high performance, our data informed team strategies for qualifications and finals, and created a shared understanding of what mattered most, even as day-to-day plans shifted repeatedly. This anchor also supported me during really challenging times when key staff behaviours or direction of travel didn’t align to our beliefs and approach. It gave me confidence to hold the line and make the tough decisions that leaders are so often faced with.

Rather than attempting to predict an uncertain future, the strategy focused on the team, the people, the data and practitioner-informed principles that we talked about for over three years. It established how decisions would be made, what trade-offs we were prepared to accept and those ‘what if’ scenarios that can always catch you off guard. One of these being the Head Coach breaking their leg 48 hours before heading to Tokyo. We actually had a plan for this!

This allowed the system to adapt without losing its identity.

That experience was one of the most challenging of my career, but always hugely exciting and rewarding. Three planned, but hard-earned medals secured for Team GB reinforced a core belief: strategy is not about certainty. It is about people, collaboration and coherence.

Different sports, same principles for high performance

The same principle holds true in professional football, albeit at a different scale.

During my time as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, operating within the City Football Group, I saw first-hand how long-term strategic planning can drive sustained performance improvement across an entire ecosystem.

At Manchester City, consistent performance progression was not the product of isolated excellence or short-term cycles. It was anchored in a clear long-term plan that connected the Academy, Women’s and Men’s first teams through shared principles, aligned methodologies and a common performance language.

That plan did not seek to eliminate fluctuation. Ebb and flow were expected. Injuries, form, competition demands, squad evolution and commercial demands were all recognised as natural parts of elite sport. What mattered was that the long-term vision, the direction of travel remained consistent, even as tactics and personnel changed.

Crucially, this strategic clarity extended beyond a single team or season. It flowed across the wider City Football Group model, creating a level of coherence across clubs operating in different countries, cultures and competitive contexts. While local adaptation was encouraged, the underlying performance philosophy remained aligned.

The level of consistent on-pitch success at Manchester City over the last 5-7 years, in many ways, is unparalleled, from Academy player progression and sales to the Men’s first team treble in 2023. Long-term business and performance strategy has a lot to do with this, in my opinion.

Good performance strategy increases speed

Modern high-performance environments are defined by complexity. Multiple competitions, condensed calendars, overlapping priorities and increasingly specialised roles place constant strain on alignment. Planning in these environments is often misunderstood as control. In reality, it is the opposite.

When direction is clear, decisions decentralise. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

The VMOST model

At this point, structures and frameworks matter.

One of the most effective ways I have seen performance strategy articulated in high-performance sport is through clear, simple models that translate long-term ambition into day-to-day action.

One such model is VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics).

VMOST was created by business strategist Rakesh Sondhi and first proposed in 1999 book Total Strategy. The framework provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there.

The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity.

In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation. In my last two roles as a performance director, my VMOST strategy was etched onto a big wall, one which staff members and athletes walked passed regularly. And when curious conversations or even debates took place, we often found ourselves standing around the visual, challenging whether a new idea could really help us achieve a strategy or the mission, or was it something that could derail us and divert energy, with no clear route to helping us win. This is definitely something I am taking into my new role in professional cricket.

When applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame.

A new era in professional cricket

In cricket, this strategic clarity is particularly valuable and I’m living this right now as Performance Director at Warwickshire and the Birmingham Phoenix.

Across a single season, players move between formats that demand entirely different physical, technical and psychological outputs. Red-ball cricket rewards patience, control and endurance. Short-form formats demand clarity, aggression and adaptability. Players are selected for specific skill sets, yet all must contribute to a collective performance.

Without a clear strategic framework, these transitions become chaotic. Workloads conflict, roles blur and development stalls. With strategy, complexity becomes more manageable. Individuals understand their role, how it evolves across formats, and how their contribution supports the team’s wider ambition.

At its best, performance strategy connects people.

High-performance sport is full of specialists. Coaches, analysts, medics, strength staff and operations teams all operate in defined roles, and rightly so. The risk is not a lack of expertise, but fragmentation. Excellent work happening in isolation without a clear line of sight to the bigger picture, is one of the biggest risks leaders can face.

A well-articulated strategy creates connection. It allows people to see how their work links through to the final mission and vision of the organisation. Daily decisions gain meaning. Trade-offs become easier to navigate. Autonomy increases because intent is understood.

When people understand why their work matters, they can make better decisions.

Strategy also provides continuity in environments where turnover is inevitable.

Athletes move on. Coaches change. Support staff rotate. In some organisations, meaningful personnel change happens every season. Culture alone cannot carry performance identity through that level of churn.

Strategy creates continuity of thought.

It anchors philosophy, ambition and non-negotiable principles beyond any individual. It allows new people to arrive and quickly understand how performance is built, what standards matter and what success really means in that environment.

In my experience, the strongest systems are those where people can come and go without the performance identity being lost. That does not happen by accident. It happens because strategy has been made explicit, shared and lived.

This requires leadership discipline.

Performance strategy only creates connection and continuity if leaders reference it consistently, use it to explain decisions and hold themselves accountable to it under pressure. When strategy is visible in how leaders talk, select, invest and prioritise, it stops being a document and becomes a shared language.

That language matters when pressure rises.

Under stress, people revert to what they understand. Strategy provides a common frame of reference. It reduces anxiety, accelerates alignment and allows honest conversations about performance without personalising every decision.

Planning also helps organisations say ‘no’.

In elite sport, opportunity is constant. New competitions, new technologies, new interventions and new ideas arrive relentlessly. Without strategy, everything feels urgent, and every new opportunity feels like one we can’t miss out on. With strategy, priorities are clear. Resources are allocated intentionally. Energy is focused where it matters most.

Importantly, you need to find ways to stay flexible, and not become rigid, bound to a strategy you developed years ago.

The best strategies are not scripts. They are frameworks. They define principles, priorities and trade-offs rather than fixed answers. They allow adaptation without drift.

Good performance strategy answers simple but powerful questions:

1. What are we optimising for right now?
2. What are we willing to trade?
3. What will we not compromise on?

The human impact of planning is often underestimated.

Clear strategy can reduce uncertainty. It gives people confidence in decision-making. Applied well, it creates psychological safety by replacing ambiguity with intent. Athletes and staff perform better when they understand direction, expectations and how success is defined.

This is particularly important in high-performance environments where accountability is high and pressure is constant.

For leaders looking to build effective performance strategy, a few principles matter.

Competitive advantage

Across Olympic and professional sport, one belief has remained constant for me: strategy is a competitive advantage if organisations are willing to treat it as such and invest in the people who are delivering it.

In high-performance sport, change and uncertainty is guaranteed. Strategy does not eliminate it, but it determines whether change becomes a threat or can be used as an advantage.

When planning for performance connects people, aligns ambition, creates continuity and promotes curiosity, performance shifts from reactive winning to sustainable success.

James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

More from James Thomas

Olympic Champions Often Begin Their Journey in Modest Circumstances, But it’s Not About What Those Environments Lack – it’s About What they Have in Abundance

By Paul Ford MBE

The Olympic Games environment is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities.

Athletes are compacted into a brand-new village of more than 16,000 people who are all subject to a constrained competition schedule in what amounts to 52 world championships in 17 days, all in the same city.

It’s almost like they are being set up to fail when they’re expected to deliver the best performance of their lives.

However, we like to flip this as an opportunity.

At the British Olympic Association we feel if we educate and mentally prepare the team for what to expect it can bring a performance gain. We unite all the athletes competing as part of Team GB while giving them the platform to perform to the best of their ability.

It builds on the concept of ‘One Team GB’ as I wrote here.

A part of something bigger

‘One Team GB’ is the idea that while Team GB is made up of various national teams and individuals – and the last thing we want to do is remove that individuality – we are all there united under the same common goal as Team GB. To perform at our best and inspire our Nation!

An awesome colleague, Olympian Georgie Harland, conducted a project with the help of Owen Eastwood, during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games cycle. They explored our Olympic heritage dating from the 1896 Athens Games. That process unearthed so many different stories, which say to today’s British Olympians: ‘you’re not the first to go to the Games, you won’t be the last either, but you are the next and you now have the opportunity to create your own story’.

More recently, our Athlete Services Manager, Olympic rhythmic gymnast Rachel Smith, evolved this with some exceptional work going into the 2024 Paris Games around generating a true sense of belonging for our future Olympians.

As a Sport team, we visit all the different sports in advance of the Games (our Games Ready roadshow) and talk about these stories going back 130 years and always bring it back to the idea that you have the opportunity to create your own story, leave your mark as an individual in your sport and inspire the nation and next generation.

We encourage athletes to think ‘you matter as an individual’ but also ‘you’re part of a collective effort, and most importantly, you belong here’. They have their individual focus, and being selfish is fine, but we recognise that we’re here as part of that greater common purpose. Bonded by the collective support of one another. This is hugely important when the pressure is so high. No one is on their own!

Looking forward, we will engage past Olympians to continue support this process because they can bring their own stories to life. The athletes of 2028 will recognise the stars of 1984 (when the Olympics were last in LA) such as Daley Thompson and Seb Coe. That peer-to-peer connection is so much better than me trying to tell the same stories alone third hand.

The Opening Ceremony: to go or not to go?

At an Olympic Games, there are certain things you can use as a performance boost. It might be attending the Opening Ceremony: if you walk behind the flag as part of Team GB it can be a massive ‘switch on’ moment ahead of going into competition. However, if you’re competing the next morning at 8:00am in the pool, attending the opening ceremony is not ideal preparation.

You must look at the opportunities afforded by the Games and tap into the bits that are going to build you up without compromising your preparation.

If it’s your first Games, it can be hard to understand just how these different experiences might affect you. You may be on your feet a lot more than normal, meaning your hydration may be lacking, as may your sleep, because you don’t necessarily go back to your room after training and you may stay up later than normal because of the Games ‘buzz’. You may well be looking at your phone and messaging people more so than normal in competition; all that blue light exposure may ruin your sleep quality.

We find that several first-time athletes will struggle to stick to their plan because they might see their role models or idols in other sports who are hugely successful doing something in the gym and they think to themselves ‘oh, maybe I should give that a go’. That’s a potential recipe for injury disaster.

We must prepare that message in advance and tell athletes that when the Games arrive, they must stick to their process because the performances will be there and the results will take care of themselves if they do so. Don’t deviate from the norm at the crucial moment!

When to land these discussions is the next question. Some sports, such as sailing and canoeing, will know their Olympians as early as September 2027; others, such as track and field, won’t select until May 2028. So the education journey we go on with the sailors and canoeists is long; we can plan out and get that right and drip feed it at the right times. Whereas the track and field athletes don’t want to hear anything about the Games because they’re not necessarily going. We must be smart in making the education bespoke and fit for purpose for each sport. Equally, some will want us to sit down and talk it through while others just want those short videos and podcasts. It’s finding out how the different cohort of athletes’ best digest information.

Athletes will already have their own coping strategies and, as with anything else that goes into the preparations, it’s about not trying new things at a Games. Their coping strategies shouldn’t be any different to what they normally are – it’s just that the amplitude of the noise is going to be greater than anything you’ve experienced before.

Our former Team GB psychology lead, Dr Kate Hays, in the build-up to Tokyo 2020, talked through ‘stress buckets’ and the ‘taps’ you place on that bucket are your coping strategies. Our thoughts remain the same: everyone’s release mechanisms will be different, but you need to know when to turn on those taps.

We encourage athletes, coaches and support staff to openly discuss their taps ahead of time so that they are both known and understood, and crucially, supported by their peers.

Blue days, white days

At the Games, we also arrange ‘blue days’ and ‘white days’ where athletes and staff wear Team GB attire of the corresponding colour.

It may sound autocratic, but it is deliberate – even if it’s harder at Winter Games because you’re in so many layers – and there is a rationale. If you walk into an unfamiliar space where you are unknown, it can be uncomfortable, particularly if you’re not from a team sport where the squads tend to move on mass. If you’re an individual fencer, archer or table tennis player, you might be there by yourself and it can be a lonely environment as mentioned – and the last place you want to be lonely is at an Olympic Games, stuck in your own head, when the pressure is mounting.

If you go into the dining hall on a ‘white day’, you’ll see the British athletes stand out against all the other national colours. It’s a safe and comfortable place for you to be part of; it says, ‘we’re all over here’. We tend to say where we’re going to sit each day but the blue and white does make it easier; and it’s not just in the dining hall but also when moving around the village. It’s a conversation-starter and you’ve broken down the barrier because you’re bonded by the kit.

In Paris, we also had our own barista in our Team GB Olympic block so that we could create this common space for people who are all there for the same reason together. You’re not forcing them out of their room but you’re offering it as an incentive.

Our role in performance preparation

We leave the technical work to the coaches, but we need to look at the whole performance picture: what does it take to maximise this and what facets can affect that? What can we tweak within the environment to facilitate comfort, safety, and ultimately enable people to be brave and thrive?

A fundamental part of how you prepare people to perform is as much about getting them mentally and emotionally ready of what to expect. Whilst the swimming pool at a Games is still 50m, and the athletics track is 400m long; it’s the bells and whistles around them that change. We help to prepare athletes and staff for what to expect of the ‘circus’ around them. Their belonging and sense of value to the team, and how by going into this together we can thrive when it matters most.

Paul Ford is the Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association. If you would like to speak to Paul, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

What to read next

Team GB always Strive to Create an Olympic Home from Home for Athletes and Staff – and the Performance Benefit Is Clear

By Paul Ford MBE

As Team GB prepares to deliver a successful Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, the British Olympic Association also has a firm focus on the future.

We have long since secured Stanford University as our main team preparation base for Los Angeles 2028. We did the groundwork starting in 2023, and planning is well underway with our sports to do warm weather camps there this year. Likewise, we are on the cusp of announcing our in-competition High Performance Centre in LA to support us at Games-time as well.

We believe that securing the best multi-sport facilities is an essential component of helping British Olympians to perform at their best, as I hope to explain below. And its importance is why we’re already underway on Brisbane 2032!

Creating a home from home

Much has been written and said about British athletes enjoying their tea, baked beans and tomato ketchup in Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Paris outside of the Olympic Village bubble within our Team GB exclusive Preparation Camp and in-competition High Performance Centres, but there is a clear performance benefit in having access to these bare necessities.

The media understandably focus on those elements because it forges a connection between the athletes and the public they represent. These may be highly skilled performers, but they are regular human beings too; and if people feel safe, happy and comfortable, they tend to perform better when it matters most. Support staff just as much as the athletes. Everyone on our team has a role to play, and we need them to all perform their best.

It dawned on us ahead of the 2012 London Games, where we, as hosts, were afforded a huge opportunity, but equally given a broader challenge too. We took 541 athletes, which was approximately two-thirds more than we would normally take. We had to find a way of uniting this extended team above and beyond what we would normally do.

One element is our belief that all our athletes and sports come together as ‘One Team GB’ (which conceptually we’ll explore in the second article). Another element is more structural: we needed to find a space where we could be exclusively just who we were: Team GB. Extending our normal multi-sport pre-Games Preparation Camp at Loughborough University was one thing, but we needed an exclusive in-competition hub as well beyond just our residential space in the Olympic Village during competition.

It is still largely unknown that we were able to build our own hub within the London Olympic Village (very much a host nation benefit) as we traded off space for our full bed allocation within the main accommodation blocks. So while we were able to pull strings with the Organising Committee (as all host nations do) when we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

It provoked a question: how do we create an optimal physical way of uniting the team within the Games environment? Part of it was using our Olympic Village residential space smarter. But you can’t expect this of the local organising committee to do on our behalf, since their brief is so vast. Instead, we decided to take it out of their hands. And for each of the subsequent Summer Olympics we have found an out-of-village space exclusively for our use.

The benefits are significant. When athletes arrive in the Olympic Village, they are greeted by chaos. With all those different nations in the same place at the same time, it is not conducive to rest and relaxation. Our in-competition High-Performance Centres in Rio, Tokyo and Paris provided a stress valve; a haven that removed British athletes from the chaos and the noise. Our ‘Performance Lodge’.

At each of those games we set up the Performance Lodge in local schools, near the Village. These are multi-purpose spaces that no-one is using in the periods in with the Games take place, as it’s the summer holidays. We can effectively go in and do a ‘DIY SOS’ for 72 hours and flip around several classrooms into, say, medical spaces, lounges or meeting areas for family and friends; we can build boxing rings in their sports gymnasium; we can install our own catering services for the team. It creates an in-competition environment to support performance readiness for GBR athletes and staff only. It complements and cultivates the team feel and supports optimal recovery & regeneration at the same time.

Nothing left to chance

We go by the name British Olympic Association most of the time as the National Olympic Committee for Great Britain & Northern Ireland, but when it comes to competition we flip into Team GB mode.

We know our place in the congested British sporting landscape: we are solely concerned with delivering the team to the Games. We try to take the other stakeholders on a journey, including the National Governing Bodies, UK Sport as the funding agency, the UK Sports Institute and home countries sports institutes. To ensure everyone is clear what the plan will be. Crucially, we aim for no surprises at the Games.

We plan and deliver nine Games and Youth Festivals every four years. As illuded to above, whilst we could just plan one at a time, in chronological order, we do it concurrently, as to achieve what we want to we need to work ahead of our competitors.

As mentioned, we have secured Stanford University as our primary preparation base for the 2028 Olympics. We believe this is a massive coup, again, because we’re going to be able to transition our athletes through the nine-hour time zone shift, get over the 12-hour flight fatigue, adapt to the California summer heat, and do final technical training in a world class environment. They’re going to be able to do that in our exclusive controlled bubble and be forged as a united team. Critically, they’ll be comfortable and familiar by the time they go into the Olympic Village with being around each other from other sports, which only happens once every four years. For many this, if not planned for, can be a massive derailer, a shock to the system, and scupper performance.

But for us to have confidence in that Preparation Camp, we must test it. We must run that Camp environment multiple times as best we can beforehand because we’re working with a university that has never hosted an Olympic team before and new hotels who have never had such an array of requirements. The Camp alone in 2028 will be a five-week performance operation. We’ll have individual sports go there this summer, and in 2027 where we’ll run a bespoke multisport camp too. We don’t leave anything to chance. We simulate and test. Hopefully we flush out as many things that could go wrong as possible. The east coast of Australia will get the same treatment ahead of 2032.

‘The most-local non-local team’

Yet things can and do go wrong, which is where our planning and diligent solutions-oriented mindset comes into its own. In Paris, there was, as widely publicised, some challenges with the athlete dining experience in the Olympic Village. It’s complicated to cater for ~16,000 people in one dining hall. Local Organising Committees are almost setup to break at points given the enormity of the task they are given. Yet it’s the most important moment for an Olympian to have everything just perfect. That’s where we must be solutions based and see the opportunities, have the Plan B and C ready. So, in Paris, when this became tricky, rather than just moaning and complaining, we went into action, and that’s where our Plan B came in. We worked with the affected sports and transported athletes to our Performance Lodge and double our services covers to supplement the affected athletes performance nutrition to aid recovery. It came at a significant additional cost to us, but we had to do it.

Though not the same issues, this was not a first. There is always a curve ball at a Games. And truth be told we like it. As we have always thrived in adversity and used it as a performance opportunity. In Tokyo, the obvious one, we had to manage the pandemic and layered COVID complications at the Games. It remains a point of pride that we were the only ‘big’ nation to get every athlete who travelled to the Games to make the start line of their event, and to perform. The results spoke for themselves.

As an example, there were restrictions on numbers in the Olympic Village, and a limitation on how early teams could bring athletes into the Olympic Village. For nations travelling across multiple time zones, from climates not like the intense heat and humidity of a Japanese summer this was a performance inhibitor. But we did get in early. That’s because of some solid groundwork and efforts with the locals in the years in advance. We achieved special dispensation and were able to bring the Team into country to acclimatise and prepare in our own unique bubble in the city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. It gave us, again, a massive performance advantage. It was not by chance (though we couldn’t predict the pandemic obviously), but we achieved this exemption because we had worked so hard in advance to win the hearts and minds of our hosts beforehand. They saw us as their local team.

In 2019, a year before the originally planned Tokyo Games, we held a series of community engagements at our Preparation Camp base in Yokohama, to test things, and connect with the locals. Swimmers Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott, for example, brought their medals from Rio and put them around kids’ necks at an open swim session. That was a ‘money can’t buy moment’. We are incredibly privileged with what we represent and are custodians of the Olympic values. Bringing it to the communities that the Games affect is so important. Yokohama city officials saw and truly felt this, which is why they were so supportive of us still going through the Preparation Camp in 2021, ahead of the rescheduled COVID Games. That’s not something we had planned for but was a consequence of undertaking that process properly.

Similarly in Rio, we set ourselves a challenge: when Brazil isn’t cheering for Brazil, how can we encourage Brazil to cheer for Team GB? Again, this was off the back of a Home Games and seeing the power of what having loud and enthused crowds could do for our athletes. We approached that in two ways. At our Preparation Camp in Belo Horizonte, one hour north of Rio, we invited local children to Athletics and Rugby 7s training sessions prior to the Games. It built that connection and was reported in the local media. We were seen as ‘the most local non-local team’. We also did a series of community engagements, including sending our boxing, judo and taekwondo athletes into favelas within the greater Rio area. It carried an element of risk, but we had the mindset of this work being the right thing to do. When adversity ensued in Rio as the system creaked during the Olympic Games, the locals supported us with whatever we needed.

And so, wherever Team GB athletes go, whenever they attend an Olympics, we plan, prepare and deliver an all-encompassing home from home model. Everything is centred on the athletes.

Through following the principles above, all the athletes need to do is arrive and execute their best performances when it matters most. The results take care of themselves.

Paul Ford is the Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association. If you would like to speak to Paul, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

Read part two

How Team GB sets the stage for British Olympians to write their Own Stories

By John Portch

When the Leaders Performance Institute trend survey asked practitioners for their team’s greatest barriers to tech-supported innovation, nearly 45 percent cited cost and human resources.

The figure surprised both the Leaders team and Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, because most of the survey’s respondents work for well-resourced professional teams. It was reasonable, we felt, to assume that they’ve progressed beyond such concerns.

“We thought this warranted further discussion,” said Serpiello, who led the first of a three-part virtual roundtable series aimed at exploring the dynamics of tech-supported innovation in sport.

We must point out that none of the Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance contradicted the survey’s findings (which you can read in our Trend Report). Some recounted the type of problems they encounter when it comes to innovation.

“Some problems can definitely be too big,” said one experienced high performance specialist working with military units in the US.

“You may not get support because of the priorities of the major decision makers that control the purse strings.”

What is ‘innovation’?

Serpiello believes the first step is simply to define ‘innovation’.

Even more importantly, he argues that teams should alight on a shared definition; one that does not conflate the concept with ‘creativity’. (Creativity, as Serpiello explained, is the outcome of an ideation phase, while innovation covers the execution and eventual impact of an idea.)

He makes the case that when teams have an agreed definition of what ‘innovation’ means to them then it offers a “clear way to approach and analyse whether the innovation processes in your organisations work or not.”

Serpiello himself likes the definition proffered by Scott Anthony in his 2011 Little Black Book of Innovation: ‘Innovation is something different that has impact’.

He then asked the practitioners and coaches at the table for their definitions. Answers ranged from the refinement and optimisation of processes to the value of novelty and pursuit of greater efficiency.

“These are all linked to a practical outcome,” said Serpiello.

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

Innovation, Serpiello argues, comes in several shapes and forms depending on the nature of the problem. To make his point, he introduced renowned change management specialist Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation, which provides a practical framework for introducing innovative practices, encourages strategic thinking about problems and helps to facilitate better collaboration.

He presented a diagram of Satell’s model to the table:

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

Basic research – a low understanding of both domain and problem: “We don’t really know what the problem is and we don’t really know in which field or area it happens.”

Disruptive innovation – a well-understood domain but poorly understood problem: “In this area you may need something like innovation labs or launch pads.”

Breakthrough innovation – a poorly understood domain but well-defined problem: “This is the reverse of disruptive innovation… the classic example of open innovation.”

Sustaining innovation – a well-understood domain and problem: “The most common form in sport [and often the subject of] continuous research, design thinking or road mapping.”

There were three areas in particular where the table thought Satell’s model could prove useful:

1. For clarifying expectations. “I like the idea of using this model to frame leadership’s expectations for innovation,” said a director of performance working in the US. “They say they want innovation but they may not know what that means and they may not understand the differences between basic research that requires long timeframes versus continuous improvement.”
2. For working out who can contribute. “Often you get the best answers from within and you often get the best solutions when you use the power of the people working on it,” said a high performance specialist based in New Zealand. Others agreed, including a sports scientist from Australia. “I think it’s everyone’s role, particularly in high-performance sport, we’re solving problems every day.” While the wisdom often lies within, the opposite may also be true. The New Zealander added: “This model also helps you think about where you need to go outside.”
3. Long-term planning cycles. This facet is pertinent for teams, federations and confederations alike, as a representative from a world governing body explained. “We’re trying to build some more of that collaboration to actually understand,” they said. “Not just trialling things for the sake of it, but if there is a genuine area of the game we want to try and improve.”

As Serpiello wrapped up proceedings, he set the scene for session two, which will focus on decision-making frameworks in the context of technology-driven innovation.

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