By John Portch

The Australian children’s cartoon Bluey has inspired at least one international cricket team to greater heights.

“We used an episode to bring to life our ‘embrace change’ value,” said the team’s performance lead at a recent virtual roundtable.

It made sense. For one thing, the eponymous character, an Australian cattle dog (known colloquially as a Blue Heeler) puppy, is cute; secondly, the show’s themes of self-development and selflessness resemble the values often espoused in dressing rooms.

With his fellow Leaders Performance Institute members smiling, the performance lead explained that his playing group had gone as far as creating a ‘Rusty Award’, which is named in honour of Bluey’s friend Rusty, an Australian kelpie, to celebrate teammates.

He continued: “At the end of each camp, the players pass the Rusty Award to whoever they think has either embodied our values or has been a real good person around their teammates over that camp or weekend.”

That insight set the scene for a conversation on how members believe their own team cultures are evolving; what is working well and where the opportunities lie.

This is a snapshot of what they shared.

Firstly, there are five things that most teams on the call tend to do well:

1. Articulate their values in a resonant way

Values have to be more than words on a wall.

“Having consistent language has worked well for us,” said the aforementioned performance lead. “We have three values or pillars – ‘embrace challenge’, ‘evolve yourself’ and ‘enjoy the ride’ – and the coaches and support staff have been forthright in using that language within sessions so that the players can always draw back to that.”

A performance support specialist from the Australian Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of her organisation’s renewed emphasis on transparency.

“We’re trying to communicate to athletes as frequently as we can to drive that connection,” she said. “If they feel like they’re well informed and they’re part of the planning, they can also hear reflected back to them things that they have potentially asked for in our feedback mechanisms.”

“We can’t leave any of this for chance,” added a head of coaching and development from the British system. “How intentional can we be with spending time on it? To start to label things so they aren’t subject to misinterpretation?”

2. Inspire personal accountability

It is a question of the standards you walk past being the standards you’re prepared to accept, whoever you are.

“That starts with leading yourself,” said the performance support specialist. “You’ve got to be able to look after yourself before you can look after your teammates.”

“When are we nudging?” said the head of coaching and development. “When are we realigning and checking and challenging the behaviours that we do not want to see or may not be in line with our desired options?”

3. Make their people feel safe

Whether you encounter resistance from long-tenured staff or you are dealing with rapid turnover, your people must feel that you are listening to them.

“Listen to the system and the system will tell you what it needs,” said the performance support specialist, adding, “I think a large part of where culture can get derailed is where people don’t feel heard and valued.”

In response, a sports scientist spoke of their institute’s desire to engender a collective sense of belonging in the pursuit of innovations.

“It’s allowed people to feel like they can make another level of contribution,” she said. “It opened the door in ways where some of our different support team members and our coaches have been given an opportunity to talk about their ‘why’ and talk about their own attachment to our values.”

From that place of interpersonal safety, teams and team members are ready to tackle the issues of the day, even if they end up down “rabbit holes” as an athlete support officer working in the UK system put it.

The first step is to establish the performance question. “That enables us to have challenging conversations without it feeling personal”. Then you must “make sure your people have the ability to express themselves, bring new ideas, problem-solve and make decisions and add their own flavour.”

3. Try new things in low-risk settings

Comfort in risk-taking cannot be separated from notions of accountability, belonging and safety.

“We have benefited from a strong, overt, and repeatedly iterated attitude from our new director and leadership team to take on and try new things,” said one long-tenured attendee presently adapting to new management at a new practice facility. “There’s a sense that we’re not writing a new story but a new chapter.”

4. Celebrate their people

The Rusty Award is a prime example, but gestures can be just as important.

“A lot of people probably perceive working on your culture as a grand gesture moment,” said one attendee, “whereas the little gestures and the little interactions matter way more because they stack and pound over time”.

On top of these encouraging signs of progress, there are three areas where teams can further strengthen their culture with simple tweaks:

1. Celebrate progress, not perfection

“I like to celebrate our imperfections and reframe expectations to give the team belief in its potential,” said a performance support specialist based in Australia. “We say pressure is a privilege, but expectation can sometimes make culture deteriorate because of the pressure and expectation to perform or to behave in a certain way.”

2. Focus on the small interactions

“Corridor conversations are key,” said the athlete support officer, “and I think we forget the impact that they can have.”

3. Keep challenging your assumptions and biases

One attendee suggested red-teaming, which is the practice of stress-testing ideas. He said: “How do we check our blind spots? How do we identify them? How do we systemise those processes?” Doing so is important because “what don’t know what we don’t know”.

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The Leader’s Paradox: the Closer you Get to the Centre of a Complex System, the More Difficult it Is to See the Whole

By John Portch

“Why might alignment seem more significant in sport?”

The question is posed by Mo Bobat, the Director of Cricket at the 2025 India Premier League champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru. He also serves as Director of Cricket at London Spirit.

“We don’t know that it is more significant in sport,” he continues, “in fact it’s probably the same in other industries”.

Still, the Leaders Performance Institute knows from our Trend Report that more than a quarter of practitioners believe that alignment (or misalignment) has the single greatest impact on the quality of leadership at their team.

So why might alignment seem more significant in sport?

“In a lot of other industries you may have to wait a quarter before you get that ripple effect of trends and feedback,” says Bobat, who also spoke to the Leaders Performance Institute for the report.

“In sport, there’s actually feedback every week; and it’s pretty open and transparent feedback too. It isn’t the way that someone interprets a board report or a set of accounts, it’s ‘one-nil’, ‘two-nil’, it’s ‘lost by an innings’. “That means there’s a lot of judgement attached to how things are going and, therefore, I think any misalignment is highlighted quite quickly.”

For Bobat, this raises another question: who actually needs to be aligned?

“When you think about alignment, you can almost convince yourself that everyone in the building needs to be aligned,” he says. “Of course, that’s true to a degree, but not every single person in the system has the same proportional impact when it comes to alignment.”

The most important is alignment between your executives, board and key performance decision makers.

“You can add the captain in cricket just because of the role they play,” he continues, “and if you’ve got those four or five people aligned you can almost guarantee that everyone else will be.”

The flipside is true as well. “If that core is misaligned, it doesn’t matter if everyone else is aligned to something.” He repeats his second question: “So who needs to be aligned? I think it’s worthy of debate.”

In sport, the immediacy of the feedback and, therefore, the judgement, has implications for how a performance director seeks alignment within their team.

“You’ve almost got to approach it like a psychologist,” says Bobat, who explains that sport is full of practitioners and coaches exhibiting protective tendencies in the workplace.

These people can protect for different perceived threats. An owner, for example, might be trying to protect the value of the team, a CEO may also have financial concerns. If that were the case, then it stands to reason that the CEO may have a different level of appetite for transfer/trade risk to the head coach, who will perceive threats of their own.

Bobat says: “If you’re protecting for a different threat, you’re going to value different things, and you’re going to have slightly different emphases. That’s misalignment already.”

His solution is easy to say but potentially much harder to deliver, as he freely admits.

“What you need to create – and this is hard in a high-judgement environment – is everybody having exactly the same purpose and intent, with nothing going unsaid.”

If the performance director or head coach perceives differences in key stakeholders then it is incumbent on them to find ways of managing in all directions.

Bobat says the leader has to “bring people back to the same North Star and try not to let the things they’re protecting for drive the behaviour” of other key stakeholders because when highly functional people are unshackled from protecting for things, you tend to see the best results. When they are dysfunctional, it tends to be the opposite.

Is psychological safety the answer?

“Yes, although that’s quite idealistic,” says Bobat. “People talk about ‘psychological safety’ like its dead-easy. Ideally, you want to feel safe enough so that you’re not reacting to those threats, but it’s unrealistic to think that those threats are going to go away. They’re not.”

The true answer, he believes, is “to try and create a culture where you can at least call it out. That’s what you’ve got to aim for.”

Another variable is your stature within an organisation. “Your ability to influence events, as optimistic as anyone is, is a little bit contingent on your own level of authority as well.

“So it’s tricky. It’s not straightforward. It sounds simple, but it’s not easy.”

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There Is a Fine Line Between Protecting your Team from Excessive Workload and Delivering the Required Work. Here Are Five Considerations for any Leader in a High-Performance Environment

By John Portch

“I tried planning out my days then I realised there was no point,” says Michael Italiano.

The Head of Athletic Performance at the Royal Sports Group is telling the Leaders Performance Institute about his first season working with the Rajasthan Royals in cricket’s most prestigious Twenty20 competition the India Premier League. The year was 2024.

“Every day was different,” he continues. “The IPL is so dynamic, there’s always something going on, whether it’s some sort of virus that’s hit the team or there’s some underlying niggling issue.” Throw in the compressed nature of the league (75 matches between mid-March and the end of May), plus the travel demands in a country the size of India, and minor problems can quickly escalate.

In Italiano’s first season, the Royals reached the play-offs and played 16 matches in just 62 days and travelled more than 10,000 km (6,214 miles) in fulfilling their schedule.

High player and coach turnover is baked into the format too. Ahead of the 2025 season, the Royals released 17 players and bought 14 in the IPL auction. Just six players were retained from 2024. Rahul Dravid was appointed Head Coach in the off-season and, 12 months on, has departed. His successor is yet to be appointed.

As for Italiano, during the course of an IPL campaign itself, he rises at 7am to prepare for the day ahead. He is often the first at the breakfast table and meets with his staff daily at 9:30am. The players tend to wake up at 10:30 or 11am and, during the course of the afternoon, they begin to trickle in for prehab, conditioning and recovery work before training begins at 6pm (to match the rhythm of the league’s evening-based playing schedule).

“It’s a pretty crazy tournament, I won’t lie,” says Italiano with a smile. “You spend the first two weeks back at home just catching up on sleep.”

Which is not to say that Italiano and his colleagues work without structure. Their morning meetings are designed to bring together the disparate elements of the performance team. “We run through any data and we run through all the players just to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”

This intense schedule goes someway to explaining why our interview was necessarily postponed until the off-season. As we speak, it is mid-summer in the UK. Italiano has just completed a “review week” in London with his colleagues at the invitation of the Royal Sports Group’s majority owner Manoj Badale.

In a rare quiet moment, he tells the Leaders Performance Institute how he works to ensure everyone in the performance team is on the same page.

‘I felt like I was going back to school’

Italiano arrived in Jaipur having spent six years working as a high-performance coach for McLaren F1. He had no prior experience of cricket when he was appointed the Royal Sports Group’s first Head of Athletic Performance in 2023. “I had to get up to speed on bowling loads and the other physical demands of cricket,” he says. “I felt like I was going back to school.”

Performance systems, at least, can be transferrable. Italiano wanted to replicate the effective interdisciplinary communication he enjoyed at McLaren.

“We had 85 people travel to a race weekend and everyone is just so aligned and everyone knows what the driver’s saying in the press conference, everyone knows what the car upgrades are”.

It would not be the same in Jaipur. “That was something I noticed straight away at the Royal Sports Group: a very clear cultural sensitivity in the Asian culture where people feel they’re not allowed to make a mistake and, if you do, then you don’t say anything.”

Italiano felt an instant lack of trust, from both colleagues and sceptical players. “I felt I had a really low level of compliance on a personal level, which I wasn’t used to.”

Yet from day one he used his inexperience of cricket to build bridges. “I told them: ‘you know what, I don’t have the answers right now and I need you guys to help me because you’ve been in this culture and environment way longer than I have and so I’m sitting here asking you for help’; and that was a big shift in our team because I could see them thinking ‘oh wow, he’s asking for my help’ and it got the ball rolling.”

Honesty and transparency underpinned all of the good work Italiano’s performance team did in that first pre-season.

‘You should make it safe to fail, with the right intention’

Italiano admits he had a lot of ideas of how things could be improved, but also realised he couldn’t change too much in one go.

“I just went for feedback,” he says. “I spoke to all of the players, all of my staff, I spoke to my coaches. I collated themes and then I prioritised them based on impact and execution. So what’s the simplicity of the execution? How relevant is it now and can it be done at a feasible cost?”

He compiled a list of 12 “parameters”, some physical metrics, others more structural in nature, and “brought them across to the leaders for discussion”.

Together, they decided on three or four elements that could be implemented in the first six months and a further four to be implemented over the next 12 to 18 months. “You could almost say we unintentionally came up with a three-year strategy just based on trying to fine-tune how we operate.”

Sometimes the performance team will take risks. Italiano candidly reveals that their new interventions have enjoyed no more than a 50 per cent success rate. “It never turns out the way you think it’s going to turn out no matter how much input you have.” He cites cultural, environmental and performance-based reasons. However, as he says, “once the execution phase goes on, there’s always learnings.”

Under his stewardship the Royals embrace these lessons. “When certain elements didn’t work you’d go back to the drawing board and that happens in business all the time. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of this role and you should make it safe to fail, with the right intention.”

‘You can’t be perky in every meeting’

Italiano admits he’s “not a big meetings guy”, but he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins.

“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.”

As for those 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. In fact, ‘stay curious’ is one of a series of daily reminders that Italiano has noted on his personal “cheat sheet”. The others are ‘bring empathy’, ‘listen first’, ‘be self-aware’, ‘be transparent and vulnerable’, ‘bring my authentic self’, ‘check-in first’ and ‘do the one percent’.

All of these are important during the course of an IPL season. “It’s an emotional rollercoaster so, as you can imagine, we’re not all rocking up to every meeting perky. There’s about 75 meetings in 75 days and I can’t expect everyone to always be smiling and greeting me in the best place.”

The potential monotony is a risk that Italiano understands well. “When I feel there’s been a tense week, I may start a meeting by going around the room and asking ‘what pissed you off yesterday?’ and just let them go to town. You’d be surprised what they say.” Italiano will always help them if he can.

“Other times we’ll go the opposite way and I’ll say ‘let’s label something that we’re grateful for today’. We’ll also mix up the environment. One day we’ll meet by the pool, another day we might visit our favourite roasting coffee shop in Jaipur. That perks everyone up because they have amazing pistachio croissants.”

Additionally, Italiano gives each of his staff the opportunity to lead a meeting and set the agenda. “Why should I lead when we’re a team? I did that throughout last season and it kept us going. Those meetings were the best times of the day because we’re all like-minded and we have the same goals together.”

While the team strives for success on the field, Italiano is proud of how his performance team have acquitted themselves. “Rajasthan has a clear goal of being one of the leaders in high-performance in cricket,” he says. He retains the excitement that induced him to leave the world of F1.

What about his hopes when next season rolls around? “I’m most excited about sitting down with my staff and actually knuckling out career development pathways for our team.”

He mentions player data too. “How are we showing them data? Why are we tracking what we’re tracking? We haven’t nailed that flow yet but it’s one of our focuses this year. Also making sure that the players understand and buy into the importance of their data.”

Ultimately, his focus is on making the Royals’ performance programme be as good as it can be.

“I’ve had an interesting time in cricket so far, and if anyone has better answers, then I’m all ears.”

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

By Luke Whitworth

David Beckham was one of the first athletes in sport to be described as a ‘cultural architect’.

The label was used by sports psychologist Willi Railo, who worked as a consultant in the early 2000s for Sven-Göran Eriksson, the England men’s national team Manager at the time.

“He has grown to become a cultural architect,” said Railo of then England captain Beckham in a BBC documentary titled The England Patient, which was broadcast ahead of the 2002 Fifa World Cup.

“[Beckham] has today a very great influence on the attitudes of the other players and he is thinking along the same lines as Sven-Göran Eriksson. So he’s a very good tool for Sven.”

According to Railo, cultural architects are “people that are able to change the mind-set of other people. They’re able to break barriers, they have visions, they are self-confident and they are able to transfer their own self-confidence to a group of people”.

Present day cultural architects include figures such as the Phoenix Mercury’s Diana Taurasi, Australia men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins, and Chelsea Women captain Millie Bright. The list is endless when you dig down.

Your cultural architects can be coaches or staff members too. They can be anyone who pays enormous attention to culture. Critically, while they are not always the most senior leader, they do have to have the ear of those leading.

The idea that cultural architects can emanate from anywhere gave real impetus to a recent Leadership Skills Series session, where members of the Leaders Performance Institute explored various interventions and the value of adopting a strengths-based approach to building culture.

Current cultural goals

What established goals do you have in your organisations that relate to your wider organisational culture?

One of the trends we’re noticing when it comes to cultural leadership is a focus on one specific aspect of culture at a time. The participants in the session identified a series of culture-strengthening goals that, if achieved, would deliver a competitive advantage:

• Collaboration across functions
• Continuous improvement
• Innovation and creativity
• Belonging, identity and wellbeing
• Psychological safety
• Use of data to inform decisions

When you align behind a goal, progress can be swift.

The six levers needed to lead a cultural change

In the session, we revisited six key levers for leading cultural change.

1. Make the key principles ‘sticky’

A message needs to be heard at least six times for a person to take it in and, if the principles are ‘sticky’, they naturally become easier to remember. Consider your straplines or strategy: do they meet that level of ‘stickiness’? A good example from the Olympic world is the question: ‘will it make the boat go faster?’ Another is the All Blacks’ ‘leave the jersey in a better place’.

2. Role models

This is the classic example of ‘words on the wall’ versus living the values. If the leaders and cultural leaders really model those behaviours, it’s what people will experience and lead by. Research in the field of inclusive leadership shows that leaders can influence the people, the athletes, the organisation around them by up to 70 per cent with their behaviours.

3. Culture conversations

A team must constantly review their organisation and culture and reflect on their current status. Ask yourself: where are our gaps? Where are our strengths? How can we improve? You can use a system rating scale from 1-4 to guide some of these insights. These system rating scales create an opportunity for those culture conversations to emerge and they provide an insight into the health of the culture at a specific moment in time.

4. Develop skills and processes to support intent

Take psychological safety: it is important to enable people to speak up. If you provide such opportunities it supports the intent to make positive change.

5. Feedback

Feedback is critical, yet people do not always deliver skilful feedback. Too often it can feel personal, it provokes defensiveness and is ultimately counterproductive. It is better to create a feedback loop and a culture of ‘skilled candour’ (a twist on Kim Scott’s ‘radical candour’) so that people are able to deliver feedback in a skilful manner.

6. Get the right people on the bus

When engaging in culture change, do you have the right people in your environment? It may come to a time when you have to make a decision about who needs to be on the bus – and who doesn’t.

The power of AI (appreciative inquiry)

Appreciative inquiry is a social constructivist-informed model that seeks to engage people in self-determined change. The model, which was devised in the 1980s by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastva, is inherently positive. It focuses on discovering and amplifying the best of what already exists (individually and collectively) within a system or organisation. It stands in contrast to most change models, which tend to identify problems and seek to fix them.

What are some of the benefits of appreciative inquiry?

The model:

• Leverages existing strengths, requiring less change and new learning.
• Creates positive energy, building confidence and pride.
• Taps the experience of those on the frontline and fosters ownership for performance.

How we do it:

• Identify and share examples where you have been at your best and forensically unpick those.
• Identify behaviours that stand out and challenge people to be specific.
• Maintain disciplined focus on positive examples.

Here are some reflective questions you can use within your environments when considering what aspects of your culture you want to develop:

• Think of at least one example of where you have seen this behaviour at its best in your culture. A subsequent coaching question could then be: ‘what stands out from these examples?’ The key is to be specific.
• Think of an individual who exemplifies this behaviour in your culture. Here’s an additional coaching question: what specifically do they do? Summarise key behaviours and standards from your discussion within a ‘we are at our best when we…’ framework.

By John Portch

Did you see January as a time for reflection or a time for pushing on towards your goals?

Ideally, you found time for both and, here, we highlight a selection insights from the first month of 2025 that may help you to consider a problem in a different way or enable you to identify the right people to whom you can turn.

We hope to see some of you in Melbourne later this week for the Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

And, whether or not you can make it to the Glasshouse, here are five thoughts for all leaders to ponder.

1. Redefine or reframe the problem with alternative goals

If you can find new ways to consider your problems, it can open up new ways of thinking.

In this article, John Bull of Management Futures used the example of an elevator. Perhaps your goal is to make the elevator go faster, but what if your aim was to make the wait less annoying?

“Most hotels will put a mirror beside the elevator,” he said. “That seems to kill time when we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror.”

Bull suggested we “think of at least three different ways we could define our goal, to help open up new ways of thinking about the problem”.

He also share the STOP process for creative problem-solving:

2. As a leader you’re not bulletproof – don’t try to be

In November, John Longmire called time on his 14 years as Senior Coach of the Sydney Swans. He has taken a new position as the Swans’ Executive Director of Club Performance but, before doing so, he reflected on his tenure as Senior Coach, which brought two AFL flags and four Grand Final appearances in total.

You can read his thoughts here, but here is a snapshot of his desire to remain “connected and relatable” to his players and staff. As he said onstage at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, “the coach is no longer looked upon as being bulletproof” whatever their standing may be within the game.

His final speech to the players and staff as Senior Coach attested to that belief. He weaved in personal stories and his voice cracked at times. He wiped away tears too.

It called to mind the weekly ‘storytelling’ sessions that Longmire made a key feature of the Swans’ environment. He told the Leaders audience that players and staff share stories or complete a series of tasks for discussion each week. Recent examples included writing ‘a letter to your 16-year-old self’. These sessions are popular with players and staff alike.

“Sometimes it’s a photo of something that mattered to you and quite often there’s tears involved,” he said. “The way I looked upon coaching 25 years ago is completely different now – these 18, 19, 20-year-olds need to be able to relate to you. If you can show that you’re human, you get a lot more back.”

3. Performance improves when you match team density, size, and space to the task at hand

The question of team dynamics sits at the heart of The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey and Robin Dunbar. The trio has spent decades observing the worlds of academia, business, and government as they look to better understand the workings of high-performing teams.

Camilleri and Rockey came to the summit in London to discuss how their research has its applications in the world of sport. Decision-making was one such area:

For decisions made at speed, you’ll count on five people.

Five is the number of intimate relationships a person can have. Rockey said: “These are the relationships that protect us, make us thrive, and ensure that we go through life in a joyful way. They protect us from ill-health and from some of the psychological challenges that we might have from feeling insecure.” They, of course, occur in intimate spaces.

For more complex decisions, you’ll count on 15 people (including your original five).

The ‘pain’ comes when you look to insert new thinking into complex decision making in a group space. “We spend about 60 per cent of our social time with just 15 people,” said Rockey. “With the 15 in the workplace, they would have built long-term relationships and loyalty to you over time – that’s how we work as humans – so breaking up those people to bring in new thinking is painful.”

According to Dunbar, the upper limit on the number of social relationships we can enjoy is 150

Dunbar suggests that people can have no more than 150 social relationships at any one time. “It’s a very stable number across all societies and cultures,” said Rockey.

From The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey, and Robin Dunbar.

4. Athletes crave individual – and team – development

Young athletes are bolder in stating their desire for belonging and connection than their forebears, but this comes with a paradoxical demand for more personalised training and attention. There are clear implications for the time coaches spend on team dynamics in an era where the power has shifted to the athlete. The topic was discussed on a recent virtual roundtable. “Staff and coaches are more vulnerable,” said one participant, who pondered where the balance needs to sit. “Give the athletes a voice and a choice, give them ownership, have the consultation, but there is a line too.”

Another participant with experience of coaching in European football, highlighted that individual work will mean different things to different people and can be dependent on team selection. They argued that there is room for better management of expectations and, more broadly, a consensus for coaches and athletes alike on what constitutes ‘individual’ training.

5. The best performance tools are co-designed

In February 2024, the England & Wales Cricket Board launched its Insight 360 platform, which adopts a data-driven approach to athlete and performance management.

Ahead of the launch, the ECB gathered input from practitioners and coaches across the English game. “This means Insight 360 is bespoke for women’s cricket,” said Anna Warren, the Head of England Women’s Science & Medicine. Players, she said in this article, are happy with an app that allows them to review their own data in as much detail as they like. “This is good for player buy-in, which is always a challenge in relation to athlete monitoring.”

There is also the power of a co-designed project. UK Sports Institute have found as much with their Project Minerva. Dr Richard Burden, the UKSI’s Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance, said: “Get the practitioners involved, get athletes, get the teams and bring them along with it because if they’re onboard you get easier access to them and you’re going to produce something that’s more translatable, meaningful and applicable to them.”

Warren is on the same page with Insight 360. “You can link loads of different data sources together and start to answer some key performance questions – we’re not looking at everything in isolation.”

By John Portch

The lack of useful data in women’s sport is an enduring problem, but the England & Wales Cricket Board hope its Insight 360 project will be a game-changer.

Insight 360 is a data-driven approach to performance management and athlete monitoring. It was launched in February 2024 by the ECB in collaboration with Ascent, their digital services provider, and includes an app for players (to view their data), a dashboard for practitioners (to view data across the board), and a portal that practitioners can use to input data.

“When you see the little research that’s out there, you’ve not got much to hang your hat on,” said Anna Warren, the Head of England Women’s Science & Medicine, at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. “We’re using this platform to better understand in depth the female cricketer; what they look like from the academy through to the international cricketer.”

The rollout has been a success and, as the ECB launches phase two (the wider introduction of injury data and more sophisticated use of match data), we highlight the factors that led to its sport-wide take up.

It reflects the concerns of players

Insight 360, as the name suggests, represents a holistic approach to collating athlete data. There is a focus on availability and performance, but there is also a focus their health, home life, and career progression. “Players come to us and discuss their issues quite openly,” said Dr Tham Wedatilake, the Lead Physician for England Women’s Cricket, who joined Warren onstage to discuss the project. “They want to perform without any barriers.”

It is a co-designed platform

Ahead of the launch, the ECB gathered input from practitioners and coaches across the English game. “This means Insight 360 is bespoke for women’s cricket,” said Warren.  Players, she said, are happy with an app that allows them to review their own data in as much detail as they like. “This is good for player buy-in, which is always a challenge in relation to athlete monitoring.”

There is also the power of a co-designed project. UK Sports Institute have found as much with their Project Minerva. Dr Richard Burden, the UKSI’s Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance, said: “Get the practitioners involved, get athletes, get the teams and bring them along with it because if they’re onboard you get easier access to them and you’re going to produce something that’s more translatable, meaningful and applicable to them.”

Warren is on the same page with Insight 360. “You can link loads of different data sources together and start to answer some key performance questions – we’re not looking at everything in isolation.”

It provides a single source of truth

Collaboration can be easier said than done. “When you have so many people pull data together it becomes almost impossible for the human brain to comprehend and then deliver effective, unbiased solutions to players’ needs and expectations,” said Wedatilake.

Insight 360 is the single reference point and it provides continuity. “As soon as one person leaves and another is working with the players, that record gets lost,” said Warren. “We’re really trying to create a joined-up system.”

It is future-proof

Wedatilake explained that Insight 360, as part of its next phase, will include injury data. He said: “It will be a game-changer for us in terms of load and injury risk and other factors such as the menstrual cycle and wellness.” The platform is primed to integrate future sources of data.

He does, however, also temper his excitement with a note of caution. “We didn’t want to get greedy too early,” he added. It was critical to have the right structure and means of integration before adding different elements, whether they are rooted in stats or video.

One of the next steps is further automation, particularly with regards to match data. “That’s the beauty of this system,” said Warren. “It’s so much quicker for people.”

She and Wedatilake wrapped up their presentation by setting out their ambitions for Insight 360:

By John Portch

When Australia retained the Women’s Ashes in the English summer of 2023, there were mixed feelings for future captain Alyssa Healy.

“It feels a bit dirty in a way, but we got the result we were after,” said Healy in the aftermath. “I think the gap’s not necessarily been there as much as everyone has spoke about.”

There was a sense amongst Australia’s players that their success owed to a quirk in the format. Yes, they had won the series’ only Test match, but they had lost both limited-overs series 2-1 to England. Nevertheless, the scoring system was weighted in favour of the Test and, at the series’ conclusion, the teams were tied on eight points each, which meant Australia retained the Ashes as holders.

It was not the type of emphatic victory to which Australia and their Head Coach Shelley Nitschke had become accustomed. After years of blazing a trail and lifting trophies galore, Australia’s rivals were beginning to bridge the gap.

“There were just a few signs along the way that the game was changing and other teams were getting close to us,” Nitschke told an audience at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

She also spoke of her team’s resilient but laboured performances in their 2022 Commonwealth Games semi-final and final. Those matches against South Africa and India, respectively, could have gone the other way were it not for decisive moments of inspiration from Australia’s serial winners.

“We were finding ourselves in those positions more often than I would have liked,” Nitschke continued.

She had led Australia into the Commonwealths as Interim Head Coach and was appointed on a permanent basis after the competition. For all the planning that went into retaining the Ashes, the drawn series rang alarm bells in Nitschke’s mind, and the post-tour debrief was not going to her liking.

“We were happy to bring the Ashes home, but we knew there was work to do heading into the T20 World Cup [taking place in the UAE in October] and the discussions just weren’t moving the dials as much as I was hoping.”

Nitschke responded by pushing for change and her efforts have so far been vindicated by Australia’s subsequent results. The holders enter the World T20 as the favourites to defend their title.

Here, we explore the four steps Nitschke has taken to keep Australia ahead of the chasing pack.

1. She found the reason for change

Nitschke had noted Australia’s opponents’ increased aggression and strategic use of powerplays [ten-over spells in an innings where the fielding team is restricted in the number of players they can place outside of a 30-yard circle around the batting team’s wicket]. Without adaptation, Australia’s approach would not cut it at the highest level for much longer. “I went to the analysts and started to crunch the numbers and have a look at what other teams were doing and where we fared in regards to the rest of the world,” said Nitschke. “We like to think that we would have been ahead of the game, particularly around powerplays, but there were certain parts of the game where we just weren’t.” It led to a fresh set of winning measurements and KPIs; and Nitschke had her vision for change.

2. Then she found the right words

It would not be what Nitschke said but how she said it. As she prepared her pitch for change she first presented to her Team Psychologist Peter Clarke, a popular figure within the playing group. Nitschke said: “He was really useful in recommending the language to use; saying ‘don’t dumb it down and ‘don’t say it’s not a huge challenge’ or ‘just a few tweaks’.” Clarke guided Nitschke in her use of words and reassured her that in several key elements, such as assessment, stakeholder analysis and change strategy, she and Australia had already made a start. Armed with the right delivery, Nitschke could begin to instil the team’s revamped style and strategy.

3. She asked for input

After the initial pitch, Nitschke would deliver a data-informed dossier to every player during Australia’s October 2023 series with the West Indies. The coaches had already decided it was not the moment to implement wholesale change. “We contacted them and just let it stick with them for a while – it probably would have hit a few between the eyes.” It was a frank admission and not without risks. The trick was to ask each player for their opinion. “It led to some really good suggestions,” said Nitschke, who also consulted her staff, several of whom chipped in with ideas from beyond cricket.

4. She identified her change agent

When leading a transition, you need influential people to have your back when enduring setbacks. “We’ve lost a few games we ordinarily may have won,” said Nitschke, who was keen to take advantage of the relatively low stakes series following the Ashes. She would lean heavily on Alyssa Healy, who was appointed Australia captain in December 2023. “Alyssa was involved from the start in driving [the change] through the playing group.” Nitschke would need to call upon every bond of trust developed between the duo in their six years working together. She continued: “There were some senior players that were probably challenged a little bit through being asked to play a little differently than what they had been for the last few years, even though they’d been successful. It could have gone in a completely different direction because if we didn’t have buy-in from the captain then we probably weren’t going to get buy-in from the rest of the team.”

By John Portch

Pat Cummins’ decision to put India in to bat first in the 2023 Cricket World Cup final divided opinion.

The Australia captain won the coin toss and defied conventional wisdom by electing to field during the first innings when most teams might have preferred to set their opponents a formidable target. On top of that, the dry conditions on that November afternoon at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad appeared to favour batting first.

“I’d have batted first,” said India captain Rohit Sharma. “It looks a good pitch, it’s a big game, let’s put runs on the board.”

Cummins obviously disagreed. “It looks a bit of a dry wicket; bowl on it during the day and back ourselves to chase whatever we need to,” he said before pointing to the weather. “Dew is one factor, it gets quite dewy here at night. It feels like this venue has got better and better to bat so hopefully the same today.”

Dew can make it easier to bat under the lights as the ball skids onto the bat, but some accused Australia of overthinking the conditions. It is easy to dismiss those criticisms in light of Australia’s subsequent six-wicket victory – and sixth men’s World Cup triumph – but they do point to the traditional thought processes that tend to govern cricket.

Andrew McDonald, Australia’s Head Coach, picked up on this two months later at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Melbourne. “An important piece is that this group is making decisions not on what’s happened in the past,” he said.

In cricket, the captain is tasked with most on-field team decisions during play and, the day before the final, McDonald and his coaches spent two hours weighing up the pros and cons of batting first and second; and yes, the dew was discussed. “We had great fun solving these problems and then said to Patty: ‘this is our recommendation. Over to you, mate, because ultimately you’re accountable at the toss’.”

There were several factors beyond the dew that supported their recommendation, but the underlying story is one of how McDonald, who was promoted to Head Coach in April 2022, has worked to engender trust between players and coaches while also streamlining the team’s high-performance systems.

“One of our philosophies in the Australia cricket team is on the day you have to be less dysfunctional than your opponent,” said McDonald with a combination of pragmatism and humility.

Here, we explore what that philosophy entails for Australia’s men.

‘Environment’, not ‘culture’

McDonald insists on referring to the team’s ‘environment’ rather than its ‘culture’, even as he admitted that it may just be words. However, given that he had served for three years as an assistant coach to his predecessor, Justin Langer, and could quickly take the pulse of the team upon taking the reins, one should give McDonald the benefit of the doubt.

“We felt as though ‘culture’ was quite rigid and it was almost the players coming in and needing to conform with what the team required,” he said, indicating that he had thought deeply about the idea. “We’ve shifted to ‘environment’ and made sure that people could commit to that.”

The Australia men’s team is on the road for more than 220 days per year and, if they are not competing at home, they are almost always touring in far flung foreign lands from the West Indies to the Asian sub-continent. It can be isolating, stressful and even boring. Therefore, it was a good idea, McDonald argued, to let his players shape their environment.

“We wanted to create some safe spaces for people to operate in and make sure that they could be themselves. Hopefully that shines through in the way our players represent the country,” he continued.

The players and coaches’ families are also free to join them on tour whenever possible; and it works both ways. McDonald encouraged all-rounder Mitchell Marsh to fly home mid-World Cup to visit his ailing grandfather, who passed away during the tournament. Anyone reading that line with reservations should note that Marsh, with the full support of his teammates, returned to hit an unbeaten 177 in his next match against Bangladesh.

Getting the creative juices to flow

Another key decision McDonald made was to complement structured training sessions (coach-driven with the coach at the heart of the work being done) with unstructured sessions where the players choose what they want to do within the wider strategy. His aim was clear: “when you’re trying to build a team to problem-solve under extreme pressure on their own, you’ve got to give them choice in the training activities they do” as this will get their “creative juices flowing”.

This is also dependent on the team having the right players at the outset across the three main formats in which Australia compete. McDonald joins Cricket Australia Chairman George Bailey and former Test all-rounder Tony Dodemaide on the three-person National Selection Panel.

McDonald, however, felt that too often the interested parties operated in silos and true collaboration would only come from sitting the key decision-makers down at the same table. There is now better dialogue between the coaches and the panel, with McDonald serving as the go-between.

He said: “Selectors ultimately have the final decision, but knowing what the coaches and players are trying to achieve, and the style we’re playing, I think it streamlined our decision making and we could move more quickly.”

‘We had to throw chaos at India’

Australia lost their opening two matches in the World Cup group phase. The first, a six-wicket loss to the hosts India in Chennai, offered some mitigation. Afterall, India were the favourites and would eventually reel off ten wins in a row on their way to the final.

The second, an ignominious 134-run defeat to South Africa, provoked greater introspection. Yet the team emerged from the post-match review committed to doubling down on the aggressive style they had adopted in the buildup to the tournament.

The Australians, as McDonald explained, were not going to throw 18 months of collaborative planning down the drain. “Every conversation with coaches was about where we thought games would be won and lost in India,” he said. These conversations were data-informed. “The eye test can lead you towards a certain bias,” he added. “We always have our checks and balances there with our data scientist to make sure that we’re on task.”

Their approach received its first memorable vindication when Australia claimed a 2-1 victory in a one-day international [ODI] series in India six months out from the World Cup. “That checkpoint was important in terms of belief for our playing group.”

It helped them at 0-2 in the group phase and in the World Cup buildup when they lost batter Travis Head to a fractured left hand. Head was given every chance to recover, which is just as well given his match-winning 137 runs off 120 balls in the final.

It did, however, prompt the team to amplify the aggression that led Australia to win their next nine matches, including avenging that opening defeat to India in the final itself.

“We knew that India were probably the better team on paper so we had to throw chaos at them,” said McDonald, explaining that the shift was to a style more akin to short-form T20 cricket. “A lot of things go into building that.”

The team had developed its capabilities in the harshest conditions, seen evidence that their style could win matches, and so they didn’t “throw the baby out with the bath water”.

That meant that come the final, when match referee Andy Pycroft tossed the coin and Cummins called correctly, the Australia captain had every confidence in his planning and preparation when electing to field.

“I think it was a great reflection of the work the data team put in with the coaches and the collaborative approach that Patty invites as a leader,” said McDonald.

“If we keep presenting decent options to him then he’ll keep listening to us. If we don’t, then he’ll probably shut us out. That’s our challenge.”

By John Portch

Brendon McCullum had no first-class coaching experience when he was appointed Head Coach of the England men’s Test cricket team in May 2022.

Nevertheless, the New Zealander was the favourite candidate of England & Wales Cricket Board [ECB] Managing Director Rob Key, who himself had been appointed a month earlier.

McCullum, assisted by captain Ben Stokes, introduced a bold playing style that has been labelled ‘Bazball’ (a reference to McCullum’s nickname).

England have improved on his watch and are moving in the right direction ahead of their primary objective, which is a successful 2025-26 Ashes series in Australia. There have been resounding victories in the past two years and there have been some chastening defeats too, which McCullum had anticipated.

‘Are you prepared to take a punt?’ He asked Key during the hiring process. ‘This could go wrong.’ Key was not fazed. ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’

Key shared this story at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval, where he spoke alongside the ECB’s former Performance Director Mo Bobat (who now works in the IPL with Royal Challengers Bangalore). The duo discussed the ECB’s efforts to transform the way England’s men think about and play cricket following a meagre run of one Test win in 15 months prior to McCullum’s appointment.

The subsequent teething troubles were as inevitable as the criticisms that accompanied them, but they have not dissuaded the ECB.

Here, we highlight four beliefs that underpin their resolve.

1. Brave decisions lead to good outcomes

Key inherited a “bruised” performance team riddled with insecurity. Key, who believes that brave decisions made by the right people can lead to good outcomes, got to work immediately. He began to give people the latitude to make decisions without any blowback. With the atmosphere of negativity stripped away, Bobat’s playful side began to emerge. “If you don’t take yourself too seriously, what appears like a risky or brave decision to someone else just feels like the right thing to do.” This was Bazball in the boardroom.

2. Positive reinforcement is critical

McCullum is Key’s ideal frontman. His belief in a fearless style of play, much like Key’s, is born from memories of feeling stifled by coaches when he was a player. So when England batter Ben Duckett was caught and bowled for a duck during England’s 2022-23 tour of Pakistan, McCullum simply said: ‘well done, you’re going to get all your runs with that approach – keep committing to it’. It’s another story Key told at the Oval. “In that moment, it’s not about the ‘well dones’, it’s the player who got nought that Brendon’s reinforced,” he said. “I’ve had so many coaches when I was playing and they’re all over you when you’ve scored 100. What about the bloke in the corner who’s got no runs and he’s thinking that the world is coming to an end? That’s the person who needs you; sometimes they just need you there to listen.”

3. Progress cannot be taken for granted

Anyone looking for a stick with which to beat Key, McCullum or Stokes would not have to look further than their recent high profile defeats. “In English cricket we unravel quickly,” said Key of the criticisms that come his way. “That’s the time when you’ve got to look like you’re the most calm; you’re the one in control; you’ve got all the answers.” This was underlined in the one-day game, specifically following England’s group stage elimination from the 2023 Cricket World Cup. Key’s view is that he and his colleagues made the mistake of assuming their messages had landed. “When people say ‘just go out there, be aggressive and we’ll back you’ they’ve got to believe it,” he said. “We ended up with players who doubted the way we wanted to go.” Do not take your progress for granted.

4. Understand your strengths, minimise your weaknesses

England’s underage teams have adopted the same playing principles as the seniors. The ECB’s hope is that English cricket will produce players with the confidence to back themselves and their technique in the face of adversity. “We’re trying not to be overly focused on technique or fault-spotting, both of which are easy to do in performance systems,” said Bobat specifically of the England Lions and under-19s programmes. Weaknesses are addressed by coaches, but not dwelt upon. “We’re trying to be focused on moments and situations where you use your strengths to put the opposition under pressure.”

By Iain Brunnschweiler

An 8-year-old goalkeeper throws his hands up in the air and complains for the fifth time about a decision that the 14-year-old referee has made.

This demonstration of frustration is clear for all to see, despite his young age. To compound matters, the opposition coaches, having both prowled angrily around what passes for their technical area, pointing and shouting for the whole game, join in the protests against the teenager who is officiating the game, as a part of her development.

This was an actual scene that I witnessed last weekend in an under-9s grassroots game.

Behaviour can be contagious. It can spread like wildfire. And it isn’t restricted to those directly in contact with you, especially if you are in a position of hierarchical influence.

Now, I could write an article pointing out some of the clearly unhelpful adult behaviour that seems to emerge on the side lines of kid’s sport, however, for the moment I will leave that for the governing bodies to address. The area of interest to me here is the impact of role modelling.

There are two clear examples above of where individuals have been influenced by the role modelling of people of significance to them. The young goalkeeper will have seen and be mimicking the behaviours of one of the many keepers displaying this approach on TV. For the impressionable mind, that’s what goalkeepers do. They complain about every decision. They run directly at the referee when any decision is made. They shout and throw their arms in the air in disgust.

Secondly, the coaches on the side lines – probably two incredibly well-meaning parents who have committed their free time to support youth sport – are doing what they’ve seen on TV, or live from the stands. Standing up for the whole game, allowing the emotion (attached to the score line of the clearly very important under-9s match) to spill over into behaviours they would never normally enact within the bounds of normal life. Shouting at the children within their care, shouting at the child who is learning to referee, whilst being accountable for the experience for all of these impressionable young folk.

The point of real interest for me (and hopefully others who have the privilege and responsibility of being in a leadership role) is to consider which of our behaviours are contagious. How aware are we of the impact of our behaviour both directly upon others, and indirectly through the role modelling we demonstrate? What are the things we see in others around us that mimic our behaviour, and how comfortable are we about this? How can we raise awareness of these factors?

One great way is opening yourself up to feedback. I received some highly valuable feedback in the past from a colleague, about getting the best out of my team. She generously pointed out a specific behaviour (one of my preferences) that she didn’t think helped the team get in the appropriate state for a given meeting. It was brave of her to give me this feedback, and I valued it hugely. She skilfully raised awareness of a learned behaviour, and allowed me to consider how I responded. I committed that day to make a change.

Organisations will often commit to a set of values, sometimes written on the walls or company documents. In many cases the words ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity’ might appear. Yet how often are people within the organisation encouraged to provide genuinely honest feedback to leaders around the impact of their behaviours? How often do we ask how we make others feel at work? I’ve experienced some feedback-rich environments, and I’ve experienced some that felt very unsafe. The former was certainly far more enjoyable to work in, and far more productive for all. Once awareness has been raised, one still has to consider whether they will take action or not.

Some examples of contagious behaviour that I’ve seen are:

The workaholic. A key leader spends enormous lengths of time at the workplace. They are online even when they are home.

The standards monitor. A key leader is incredibly hot on standards of clothing, office space, and punctuality. They will regularly call out colleagues who are not achieving the leader’s expected level.

The time-giver. A key leader regularly is seen taking time to speak to colleagues, getting to know them.

The HIPPO. Within meetings, the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion is always the decisive one. They shut down others in order to make the call, based on their perception.

The joker. A key leader is regularly seen making jokes and having fun within the work place.

The calming influence. A person of hierarchical position who demonstrates a calm, thoughtful and logical approach at times of pressurised decision-making.

The above are just a few examples of contagious behaviours, and I will let you decide to what extent you perceive these attributes to be helpful, or a hindrance, within the workplace. This will no doubt be relative to the context and the complexity of the organisation and the people surrounding the leader.

However, in my experience, the contagion is very clear and obvious. We see miniature versions of these behaviours permeating throughout the organisation. This becomes the culture.

One successful and overt strategy to utilise role modelling within the work place that I have seen has been the deployment of experienced professional players within an U-21s team. Southampton and Brighton & Hove Albion Football Clubs have very successfully deployed Ollie Lancashire and Gary Dicker respectively into player-coach roles. These players, both in their 30s have role modelled the behaviours, approaches and attributes that a consistently high performing player possesses, all at very close proximity to the club’s top youth talent. I’m sure there will be other examples of this within sport, military and business.

Behaviour can be contagious. I have, as most of us who are sporting parents, felt all of the emotions that come to the surface when a loved one is either doing well or doing badly in front of you. I have the urge to shout in support, to shout words of encouragement or at times words of despair. However, I remember watching a video that Arsenal FC pulled together where they interviewed young players about what they wanted to hear from their parents on the sidelines, and the messaging stuck with me. “I don’t want you shouting from the side of the pitch… I just like it when you clap when I’ve done something well” or words to that effect. I now have a strategy of holding my hands behind my back when I’m watching my kids, to remind me of this video. This physical act helps me. Hopefully my side line approach would be perceived as helpful role modelling to other parents who want the best for their kids.

Questions for leaders:

• How aware are you of your level of contagion?
• Who are the people most affected by your behaviour?
• How helpful is your most contagious behaviour to the cause or purpose of the organisation or department?
• What could you differently that might have a more positive impact?

So, if you are not happy with the behaviours you see in front of you, consider how you can act. As Ghandi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. Role modelling has a huge impact. If it is contagious enough through a TV screen to affect an 8-year-old and a couple of adults at a kids match, imagine the power of this in person.

And, by the way, if you know an adult who behaves like this in kids sport then please pass this article onto them! As I’m 100% sure that coaching kids looks very different from coaching professionals.

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and most recently was the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.