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 described 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.”

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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 John Portch

“I’m the most decorated female freeskier in history. I think that’s an answer in and of itself,” said Eileen Gu.

The Chinese-American star, who had just won silver medals in the slopestyle and big air at the Milano Cortina Olympics, had been asked at a press conference if she saw those medals as “silvers earned” or “golds lost”.

She chastised the journalist for his “ridiculous perspective” but her wider comments were more telling.

“How do I say this? Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for every athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder because every medal is equally hard for me, but everybody else’s expectations rise, right?” she said.

“I’m showcasing my best skiing. I’m doing things that quite literally have never been done before. So, I think that is more than good enough, but thank you.”

It called to mind the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who was similarly exasperated in a press conference when he was asked about the Bucks’ ‘failure’ upon their elimination from the 2023 NBA Playoffs.

“There’s no failure in sports,” he responded. “There’s good days, bad days, so days you are able to be successful — some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. That’s what sports is about. You don’t always win — so other people are going to win, simple as that. We’re going to come back next year, try to be better, try to build good habits, try to play better.”

Gu, it must be said, won gold in the halfpipe just days later (making it three golds and three silvers in two Olympics) but she and Antetokounmpo (who won the NBA Cup with the Bucks in 2024) hinted at how unhelpful it is to frame high performance as anything less than first place or a gold medal.

Setbacks are inevitable, but as Gu and Antetokounmpo show, athletes, coaches and programmes can choose how they meet the moment. Those that prepare smartly, with the right focus and guidance, can give themselves improved chances of success.

These ideas came up time and again at the Leaders Performance Institute in February. Here is a flavour of what was said.

Insight of the month

The Winter Olympics are on the agenda across the Performance Hub, with high-performance specialist Richard Young telling us what happens when teams stray from their mission:

As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Read more here.

Quote of the month

This month its Peter Hodgkinson, who wrote of his time working as Build Operations Manager for the INEOS Britannia sailing team during the 37^th America’s Cup.

Given the youth and inexperience of his build team, psychological safety and intent-based leadership were the order of the day. He wrote:

Surprises are for birthdays and Christmas, in my book. I wanted this young team under pressure to speak up. I wanted them to feel that it was wrong not to say something if they were concerned about a part or a process or were having a problem. I wanted to hear what they had to say, I was desperate to hear what they were thinking, and it was important that I responded productively when they did bring me bad news. 

INEOS Britannia in action at the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Getty Images/Fiona Goodall

Good to know

Pressure doesn’t make you better, but it does reveal what is already here.

That is according to high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery, who led a virtual roundtable for members looking at how they can reduce their athletes and coaches’ allostatic load – that is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold.

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

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

Read more here.

Coach wellbeing

Though often neglected, members of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to share ideas on how they can better support their coaches.

In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.

This, their former manager explained, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.

Read more here.

Aussie rules

In early February we welcomed many of you to Brisbane for Leaders Meet: Australia, where organisations including the Brisbane Lions, Cricket Australia and World Rugby tackled the challenges of the day.

Chief amongst those was the ever-pressing need for alignment.

The Lions’ Senior Coach Chris Fagan favoured strong relationships with senior management; Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry espoused the value of psychological safety in cricket; and World Rugby Chair Brett Robinson, as an executive, emphasised trust built on clarity from the top.

We picked out five elements for your consideration.

Chris Fagan (centre) in conversation with Michael Maguire (right) and moderator Rachel Vickery. Photo: Albert Perez

One you might have missed

Ben Ashdown and Dr Mustafa Sarkar of Nottingham Trent University pondered the behavioural elements of resilience in young players at football academies in this exclusive interview.

Their research has identified six resilience behaviours:

Their hope is to use these six to fashion a tool to help academy staff identify and develop resilience behaviours in their young athletes.

Read more here.

What’s coming up for members

Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy

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

Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images

By John Portch

Football academies tend to prize resilience, but few can agree on a definition.

“Even within the same football academy we’ve seen staff have different views of what resilience is,” Ben Ashdown, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Lead Researcher at Nottingham Trent University, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.

“They’ll say ‘resilience is a really important part of our philosophy but actually we don’t really know what it is, we don’t really know how to measure or assess it, we don’t really know how to track it’,” says Dr Mustafa Sarkar, who also joins the call. He is an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent and Lead Supervisor of the research programme.

Together, alongside Dr Chris Saward, Dr Nathan Cobb, and Dr Julie Johnston at Nottingham Trent University, they are leading a research programme to identify behavioural indicators of resilience in English academy football and develop a resilience behaviours observational tool. As part of the research, they have worked with academy stakeholders including coaches, psychologists, scouts, and analysts. They are also conducting a season-long study at a Category One academy (Derby County Football Club).

Based on their research, they have found that resilience behaviours can be categorised under six themes:

At the end of this research programme, they hope to have developed a tool for sport psychologists and coaches primarily, with some benefit to analysts who might contribute to the tracking of these behaviours through video-based analysis.

Sarkar says: “We don’t necessarily see it as a tool for identifying talent. I think it would be more as a conversation-starter with a player for player development purposes.”

Resilience: a behavioural response

As the exploration, measurement, and assessment of resilience in sport has tended to rely on self-report alone, myths and misconceptions have emerged (such as resilience being related to endurance and the suppression of emotion), and there is a gap between what resilience truly entails and what practitioners witness on the pitch.

“Coaches and support staff are starting to recognise that both physical and mental rest are critical to sustained resilience over time,” says Sarkar who has spent time with academy stakeholders dispelling those myths and misconceptions. “Part of resilience is about helping individuals to develop their thought and emotional awareness. It is not about encouraging people to hide their emotions”.

Additionally, “resilience requires more nuanced (context-specific) language because a person’s resilience in relation to being injured might be quite different to their resilience in relation to a loss of form”.

The behavioural elements of resilience lay at the heart of their research programme.

“We see resilience as a behavioural response,” says Ashdown, “but, up till now, there hasn’t been any literature that has actually asked what do these behaviours ‘look like’? How do we observe them? I think our work, in a behavioural sense, gives us some directly observable, reliable and valid indicators of resilience in football.”

The appeal for coaches, psychologists, and analysts is clear. “They’ve really bought into this idea that we’ve got something to look for on the pitch, and if we can see it [resilience], then maybe we can then develop it and track it over time,” Ashdown continues.

Their initial 2025 study/paper identified 36 behaviours (across six themes mentioned above), which have since been refined to ten. “We retained at least one across the six themes, which is another indicator that they’re pretty reliable.”

These behaviours include: demonstrating supportive actions during pressure or adversity (support-focused behaviour); positive body language in response to stressors (emotion-focused behaviours); and regaining focus in the face of challenges (robust resilience behaviours).

How might coaches approach these behavioural themes in their resilience development work?

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Ashdown and Sarkar about each of the six themes and they give consideration to each in turn with the caveats that a) they should be viewed collectively in order to develop a holistic view of an athlete; and b) the data collection and analysis of their research programme remains ongoing.

1. Teammate support-focused resilience behaviours

When players support or encourage teammates in stressful moments, especially after mistakes.

Ashdown admits that the relational aspects of resilience are more significant than he initially thought. “At times I probably assumed resilience was an individual capacity that you developed almost by yourself without realising that social support (through your teammates) is really significant,” he says.

“Through the work of Ben and others we’re starting to find that resilience is very much relational,” says Sarkar. “The development of resilience is dependent on cultivating high quality relationships. The interesting bit about social support is that we’ve found that it’s not necessarily about getting social support, but it’s about the perception that that support is available to you. From a resilience perspective, the perception is more important than receiving the actual support itself.”

Ashdown then shares a story of academy training drills, at Derby County FC (work led by academy sport psychologist, Lyle Kirkham, and supported by Ashdown), where players had a “secret support partner”. “We tasked some players with, right, when your teammate experiences some adversity or stressor or when they’re under pressure, find ways of offering them support,” he says, adding that the process raised the players’ awareness of how they’re reacting, responding and interacting with their teammates.

2. Emotion-focused behaviours

When players attempt to regulate their own emotions when encountering pressure, errors or frustration.

While there isn’t yet the data to support a definitive conclusion that emotion-focused behaviours depend on age and phase, as Ashdown explains, “there’s so many points where the participants said ‘we would expect to see a different response from a 10-year-old than one of our under-18s’.”

Emotional maturity is sure to be a factor. He adds: “How these players react and respond to things, particularly at younger ages, it’s a lot more visible, whereas maybe the older players tend to try and disguise how they’re feeling.”

This is a behavioural theme where interdisciplinarity comes to the fore. “We’re working with performance analysts to try and identify these behaviours through video footage and I think we’ll end up with a bespoke set of behaviours based on the phase [foundation, U9-U11; youth development, U12-U16; professional development, U17-U23].”

3. Effort-focused behaviours

Displays of physical and psychological effort used to cope with setbacks, fatigue or demanding situations.

What does making an effort ‘look like’ in any sport? “There’s a danger of making assumptions because every player is different,” says Ashdown with reference to both physical and psychological indicators of effort. Their work has talked of pairing GPS data with observations but, as he admits, “this is where we need to be careful and cautious of not mislabelling players based on a perceived lack of effort and we must be aware of individual differences”.

For Sarkar, again, it is more about setting the terms for a player development conversation. He says: “You might come up with a resilience profile to say one player has got hypothetically high effort-focussed behaviours and lower teammate-focussed behaviours, but we see this observational tool more holistically across all six themes”.

4. Rebound resilience behaviours

These reflect a player’s ability to bounce back quickly after a mistake or negative event.

These need to be channelled. It is no good if a player makes a mistake and runs around like a headless chicken for the next 10 minutes and is sent off.

“One of the participants in our research mentioned that exact point in relation to effort-focused behaviours,” says Ashdown, before echoing Sarkar’s earlier reflections. “The most value in this behavioural approach is the opportunities that it creates for player-coach or player-psychologist reflection.” This, Sarkar suggests, could be a joint review of game video clips where the coach and/or psychologist says to the player ‘talk us through your thought process. What were you thinking and feeling at the time? How might you react and respond differently?’ or it a series of ‘what-if’ questions and scenarios. ‘What if this were to happen in the future? How would you react and respond?’

Sarkar adds that any intervention should be context-specific. “If a player has done that once are we then making an assumption that they’re doing that all the time – is this a one-off occurrence versus a pattern of occurrences? If it’s a one-off, like Ben said, then it’s probing that player about what they were thinking at that particular point in time. But we have to be careful that we’re not intervening based on a one-off versus a pattern.”

5. Robust resilience behaviours

The ability to maintain stable performance while under sustained pressure or after setbacks.

Ashdown and Sarkar make the point that robust resilience behaviours risk being conflated with youthful inconsistency – and all its causes – at academy level.

“One of the participants in our research said it’s not about consistency of performance but the consistency of behavioural responses to things. So performance will fluctuate but is there some consistency in the way they’re behaving, reacting and responding?” says Ashdown. “What some of the coaches are after is a flattening of the curve emotionally and the way the players are managing things on the pitch.”

Sarkar believes coaches may be able to use the resulting observational tool as a means of evaluating the efficacy of pressure training scenarios. “What are you, the coach, actually seeing in terms of their reactions, responses, certainly from a behaviours point of view, and as a result of that pressure training, are you actually seeing an increase in some of the resilience behaviours in relation to these themes?”

6. Learning-focused resilience behaviours

When players learn from mistakes and adapt their actions rather than repeating ineffective responses.

Pressure training also presents an opportunity for self-reflection and learning through its video component – this is the ultimate purpose of this resilience behaviours work. “If we’re aware of that, can we support them in navigating those more effectively when they’re inevitably going to come up on the pitch?” says Ashdown.

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Sarkar, paraphrasing the American educational reformer John Dewey. “Pressure training shouldn’t just be about putting people under pressure in training and then automatically assuming somehow that they’re going to develop their resilience to future situations?”

At Derby County, led by Kirkham and supported by Ashdown, they have also introduced a series of gamification principles in delivering education and feedback at the academy through a resilience behaviours lens. This includes FIFA-style cards for players, and a football-specific version of snakes & ladders to mirror the ups and downs of the academy journey.

The future of resilience tracking

When it comes to resilience, coaches are acting on intuition, which is valuable but ultimately has its limitations.

“We’re trying to make that process more objective and systematic; hence this is where the interdisciplinary piece comes in,” says Ashdown. “We wouldn’t expect coaches in the moment in the game to be thinking about necessarily tagging or noting these behaviours. We might ask the analyst, with support from the psychologist, to do live coding or tagging of these behaviours or retrospective tagging based on the recording. That would then lead to conversations with the players. With this work, there’s a big opportunity to bring together coaching, performance analysis, and psychology.”

Sarkar explains that they are using the behavioural data to create a resilience profile for players across the noted behaviours. “That gives you a holistic viewpoint,” he says. “A player might have higher team-focused resilience behaviours and slightly lower effort-focused resilience behaviours and a medium level of learning-focused resilience behaviours. So, it gives you a nice overall resilience profile of an individual.”

The hope is that their work will eventually provide an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.

“It can also then become part of the everyday conversation with multiple staff. So rather than just a conversation in relation to psychology, it’s a broader conversation about player development.”

What to read next

Playfulness and Resilience: How Ballet and Music Schools Link Them Together to Amplify Both

By John Portch

“Some of you will laugh out loud when I ask this,” says Rick Cost, the Director of Performance at Olympique Lyonnais, “but how do we deal with what Mother Nature gives us?”

Cost was speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London where he was invited to share his views on injury prevention and rehab.

He explained that while planning is important for a director of performance, the human element ensures there will always need to be a degree of flexibility when providing sports science services to athletes.

As he said, there is no “magic sauce” when it comes to reconciling coaching intent, the training required, the athlete’s experience of that training, and making tweaks as required.

Nevertheless, Cost and his peers have to be cognisant of the trends currently shaping athlete development, which we have divided into five themes.

1. The athlete as a member of your interdisciplinary team

Athlete-centric development is long been in vogue but athlete-involved approaches are starting to gain traction.

“Our goal is to put the athlete in the centre and then we fit the jigsaw pieces around them,” said Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, in our Teamworks Special Report.

Those jigsaw pieces – the technical, tactical, physical and cognitive – will depend on the individual, which has inspired a trend towards athlete-involved development, as Jack Nayler explained in the context of his work at Premier League Everton.

“I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge,” wrote Nayler, the club’s Head of Sports Science. “Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training.”

For Nayler, the benefit is clear. “The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global.”

2. The continued rise of external clinicians and coaches

As high profile athletes continue to work with their own personal trainers, the sports scientists of the major leagues are doing everything to bring them into the fold.

“It’s about role clarity,” Rice told the Leaders Performance Institute. “If a player has an external strength coach or external physical therapist, you try to sit down with them and work out what the player’s programme is going to look like. So what access do they have? Are they going to be working out in our facility? Are they going to do it separately?”

It is increasingly common for group chats including the athlete, their personal coach, and the key members of a team’s high performance staff. “We want all the information in one place so at least we know what everyone else is doing, and then it allows me in my role to make sure we’re not doubling up on things,” added Rice. “Can we agree on what the goals are for this player, understanding that we may be trying to get there in different ways with different philosophies, but what are the key points that we can agree on and can we get the data in one place so we can all access it and share it? We’re trying to work together, not fight against what the other people are doing.”

3. Better defined performance and clinical psychology

The highest-performing teams will understand psychology’s role in preparing their athletes.

This is a problem for many. As mental skills specialist Aaron Walsh wrote, “In other areas of performance, we give a clear mandate of what we want to happen in the programme, there are regular checkpoints to ensure we are on track, and we review the work after the season. With the mental stuff [skills] we tend to find a person and just let them loose, we don’t follow best practice.”

Walsh argues that is important to define the scope of the work, establish a clear framework, and provide the right content so that the delivery lands.

Whether it’s performance psychology, mental skills or a clinical issue, all staff members are called upon to play their part, as Dr Lyndell Bruce of Deakin University told a Leaders Virtual Roundtable.

“It’s not a once-off conversation because they flagged on the wellbeing this week and then two weeks later they’re back in their normal range – we continue that conversation and check-in,” she said of her work at Deakin.

“Where pathways are regularly communicated, [it’s about] checking for understanding of do you know when to use it, how to use it, what the process is, destigmatising it through education, through raising awareness so it becomes a normal part of life,” said Emily Downes, the General Manager of Leadership & Wellbeing at High Performance Sport New Zealand. “It’s not something that you go and necessarily do when you’re at your worst. So how can you use all of these services proactively to keep you actually performing?”

4. AI as a useful ‘sparring partner’

However AI is used in athlete development, there are some fundamentals that are likely to hold true, as Maximilian Lankheit explained to the Leaders Performance Institute.

“If you don’t know the question, if you don’t know what you’re asking for, you’ll never get a good answer,” said the Senior Medical and Performance Manager at European Football Clubs, which is the representative body for Europe’s football clubs.

“People don’t know what they’re actually looking for. They’re trying to find something in the data that either validates their bias or whatever, but you need to know what you’re looking for.”

With that first question answered, Lankheit believes AI could be “a useful sparring partner that can make you more efficient” when it comes to areas such as devising periodisation protocols.

However, he preaches caution. “When it comes down to everybody’s individual work, I think it will make us much better, but the human sense-making is important.” He cited Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who said: “I have AI myself: actual intelligence”.

“Without actual intelligence,” Lankheit added, “artificial intelligence doesn’t matter because we as the human users need to add the right context.”

By Jamie Taylor

Most people in sports coaching have little interest in research.

Additionally, one of the key challenges in coaching is that there is a world of evidence that can help practice, but most do not know about it.

At Dublin City University we are trying to subvert that attitude through our online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

We have a community of around 100 coaches and practitioners who appreciate the capacity for research to enhance both theirs and their organisation’s practice in ways that have long been transformational in, say, S&C or medical.

In many respects, coaching is a discipline apart, yet sports performance has long-been reliant on other domains to pick up and apply research. More research can and should be done.

Below, I explore – drawing on insights from students across the doctorate and MSc programmes – the common barriers in coaching, before making the case for evidence-informed research that can meaningfully support practice. The programmes are delivered by a team of practitioner-researchers, including Áine MacNamara, Dean Clark, Robin Taylor, Rosie Collins, Stephen Behan and myself.

The common barriers

As a coach, you should be weaving research into your practice – it should not be additional.

“Last Friday, we protected two hours for some internal professional development with a group of practitioners,” says Ian Costello, the General Manager of Munster Rugby. “There’s 20 reasons not to do it, but if it’s important, it’s protecting the time in your diary, no matter how busy you are.”

Ian believes the programme has opened up new career options, potentially even beyond professional rugby union. He has now got into the habit of writing in his diary in three colours: black for operational matters; green for strategic issues; and blue for learning and personal development.

“Someone gave me one of those multicoloured pens – I hate them because of my bad handwriting and these don’t help – but it’s brilliant for my diary,” he continues. “Learning and personal development can be anything from podcasts to light reading or heavy reading. It can be writing too – that was a good life skill and practical skill that a mentor shared with me.”

Additionally, coaches have not often been shown how to critically organise their thinking, even when they thought they were doing so.

Ian has been coaching for more than two decades, but still wouldn’t describe himself as the finished article.

“The first year broke me down in terms of questioning everything I know around critical thinking and reflective practice,” he says. “What the doctorate does is give you more structure to that process. It provides you with a more robust and applicable skillset to be accurate in research terms and then to think critically about the information you’re absorbing. As time goes on, you’re able to transfer that to your practice more readily and with a lot more clarity.”

He is not the only one to find the first year challenging. “It was quite confronting and shocking,” says Jamilon Mülders, the Performance Manager at the Royal Dutch Hockey Association. “You try to present where you’re coming from, what you have achieved, what you have done and why you have done things, and the staff at DCU will pose little questions like ‘where’s the evidence?’”

Jamilon has won Olympic and world championship medals as a coach, and yet, as he says, “I have to acknowledge that nine out of ten things we did worked for whatever reason at that stage, but there was no underlying theory, no evidence. There was nothing you could fall back on where you can explain it or also just make sure that you detect possible mistakes, issues, challenges, hurdles which might have happened or occurred in other areas.”

He sensed that something was absent. “I felt that something was missing in my personal education and growth,” he continues, further reflecting on that induction period at DCU.

Some coaches may never have set foot in an academic setting but, whether it’s our doctorate or MSc programme, we don’t need to simplify course material for coaches. We just need to make sure we are providing the right provocation.

“When we’re asked better questions it causes us to say ‘actually, I took that situation for granted, but I need to peel that back a little bit more’,” says Rachael Mulligan, the Athlete Support Manager at the Federation of Irish Sport. “It forces you to go ‘what is the best question to ask in order to get to a better outcome?’”

The most recent cohort of students on DCU’s professional doctorate and MSc programmes lines up for a group shot at DCU in Dublin.

The case for evidence-informed – not evidence-based – research

I hear all the time that ‘we need to quantify this’. It leads us to measure things that don’t really matter simply because we can count them.

There are different ways of seeing this and my view is that evidence should inform coaching, working alongside professional experience, theory, and context, rather than being treated as something on which coaching can be straightforwardly evidence-based.

“For anybody to be genuinely comfortable about their view of the world or their view on practice, it should be research-informed,” says Scott McNeill, the Head of Coach Development at the Premier League. “The risk and challenge of research is that sometimes things can go out of date very quickly. A body of research can be nearly out of date the day that it’s printed. So to keep that as a consistent and live way of engaging in practice would make sense to me, that suggestion that knowledge isn’t fixed, that these things keep evolving.”

“The first thing I said was my issue with research is I sometimes think researchers are almost in an ivory tower and very much removed from what goes on in the day-to-day field of performance sport,” says Rachael of the topic.

“That perception was completely quashed after a couple of weeks in the programme because there’s so much emphasis in terms of, yes, this is fantastic in the academia space, but how do we move this into real-life practice?”

“I used to always say I was evidence-based and a lot of coaches will pride themselves on that,” says Christoph Wyss, the Lead Physical Performance Coach at Red Bull. “But I think evidence-informed makes more sense because if a research paper comes out, being evidence-informed is taking that research, reading it, critiquing it, seeing what’s good and what’s not, and then applying that to your setting, because every setting is different.”

As he says, “with evidence-based you’re just transplanting it, doing exactly what they did, but then evidence-informed is more translating it.”

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” says Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.” The key for Eilish in her work is to ensure she and her colleagues are “making as informed decisions as possible when we’re designing learning activities” because “not everything from research may be transferable into a practical environment and, equally, every practical environment is going to be hugely different.”

“Being evidence-informed is probably more aligned with what we do on a day-to-day basis,” says Niall O’Regan, the Head of Education & Development at the Football Association of Ireland (FAI). “It is something that has helped me to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative in adapting what the research is saying is to suit the needs and the context and the environment that you’re in.”

Plus, as Scott says, “people sniff you out pretty quickly whenever there’s a gap between what you’re saying and what might feel real to them. Our job as people that work in this space is to either translate the messaging in a more accessible way or to admit that there probably still is a gap.”

And therein lies the opportunity to ask better questions.

Research should never be far from practice

While the programmes can be intimidating for coaches, we’re here to help in any way we can because it is important that research is not too far from practice. When they are close, the research finds practical application.

“This was a part I enjoyed from day one because you could immediately see the practical implications and make an impact,” says Jamilon of his coaching in field hockey. “So if I were talking with S&Cs about load management around our training, my new way of approaching them and asking questions really helped me to have a clearer view on the team and the environment.”

In some cases, research can help to highlight the current inadequacies in a high performance programme.

Niall, for one, thinks differently these days about coach development structures at the FAI; and it feeds into his practice.

“There are some experienced coaches that have so much knowledge and so much expertise in their fields that they may not need to go systematically through a certain set of steps,” he says. “They may have the ability to effectively communicate, empower others or share knowledge in a way which doesn’t require them to go through a checklist. They can get to the end with the exact same learning and sometimes even more learning.”

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily sit right with the coach and it wouldn’t necessarily sit right with the coach developer. “There’s a grappling effect where those people probably feel like, ‘well, I’m being rigidly pushed into a checklist of things and being asked to do things that I naturally wouldn’t do myself’.”

It comes back to being research-informed. “The person in front of you is the actual start point, and then it’s up to us as the educators and developers to be able to link it into research. The practice comes first and then it’s a matter of layering in what research is out there that can inform the decisions that that person is making.”

If you would like to know more about the professional doctorate and MSc programmes at DCU please email Jamie Taylor at:

[email protected]

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

When Barcelona paid £107 million for Antoine Griezmann in 2019, the club acquired a cognitive anchor that would influence team selection for years, regardless of performance.

When managers delay substitutions despite trailing, they’re exhibiting loss aversion. When entire industries pursue the same talent, driving compensation packages to irrational levels, they’re succumbing to herding behaviour.

Professional football provides a vivid laboratory for understanding managerial decision-making. The biases visible on the pitch are identical to those undermining leadership across every industry. The consequences are measured in billions of pounds of misallocated resources and missed strategic pivots.

Behavioural biases cost organisations far more than technical incompetence. Yet most leadership development ignores the psychological patterns that systematically undermine even the most talented executives. Understanding these five critical biases – and building processes to counteract them – is essential for effective leadership.

1. The sunk cost trap

Once an organisation invests heavily in a strategy, acquisition, or hire, the psychological pressure to justify that investment becomes overwhelming. Leaders consistently double down on failing initiatives simply because of what was already invested.

In football, expensive signings receive playing time despite poor performance. Nicolas Pépé (£72m), Philippe Coutinho (£142m), and Antoine Griezmann (£107m) continued starting despite underwhelming contributions because admitting the transfer was a mistake felt too painful.

In organisations, executives defend failing projects and persist with underperforming business units for the same reason.

The antidote:

Establish clear criteria for evaluating ongoing investments independent of what was spent. Ask: ‘If we were making this decision today, would we proceed?’ If the answer is ‘no’, the sunk cost is irrelevant.

2. Loss aversion: the paralysis of admitting error

Losses hurt roughly twice as much as equivalent gains feel good. This asymmetry creates a bias towards inaction even when action is optimal.

Managers wait too long to make substitutions or tactical changes. Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s Manchester United, down 2-0 to Liverpool at Old Trafford in 2021, waited until the 46th minute to make their first change, and until the 60th minute for meaningful tactical shifts. By then, Liverpool had scored three more goals.

Making early changes feels like admitting the initial plan failed. Waiting preserves the illusion of control and delays psychological pain. Meanwhile, the opposition exploits the unchanged approach.

In organisations, leaders persist with failing strategies far longer than optimal because changing course mid-year feels like admitting error.

The antidote:

Build pre-commitment devices. Decide in advance what triggers will prompt strategic changes (e.g. ‘if we’re losing at half time, we make two changes immediately’). Remove emotional bias from in-the-moment decisions.

3. Herding behaviour: following the crowd

Every summer, multiple football clubs pursue the same handful of players, driving prices to astronomical levels whilst equally talented alternatives are ignored. The 2023 pursuit of Brighton’s Moises Caicedo saw his valuation jump from £80m to £115m in days, not because his ability changed, but because two clubs (Chelsea and Liverpool) were competing for his services.

In executive recruitment, the same pattern repeats. When a particular executive becomes ‘hot’, multiple organisations suddenly pursue them, driving compensation packages to irrational levels.

The antidote:

Implement rigorous, independent evaluation processes before considering what competitors are doing. Be willing to hire exceptional talent that others have overlooked – this is where competitive advantage lives.

4. Confirmation bias: seeing what we want to see

Once an organisation commits to a decision, confirmation bias takes over. Leaders see what they want to see; concerns are explained away or ignored.

Alexis Sánchez at Manchester United provides a textbook example. Signed in 2018 on a contract worth £560,000 per week, Sánchez continued to start matches despite consistently poor performances because the club needed to justify the astronomical wages. Every decent performance was highlighted; poor form was explained as “still settling in”. The confirmation bias persisted for nearly two years before he was loaned out.

The antidote:

Before major decisions, actively seek disconfirming evidence. Assign someone to make the case against the decision. Force these counterarguments to be addressed explicitly.

5. Anchoring: trapped by first impressions

Leaders anchor to preferred approaches – formations, business models, management styles – that become reference points for all subsequent thinking. Even when circumstances demand different approaches, the anchor holds firm.

The Chelsea Manager between 2019 and 2021, Frank Lampard, remained committed to the 4-3-3 formation even when results suggested alternative systems might work better. As opponents adapted and key players aged, the system became less effective, yet the anchor made adaptation psychologically difficult.

The antidote:

Regularly challenge foundational assumptions. Ask: ‘If we were designing this from scratch today, would we design it this way?’ If the answer is ‘no’, the anchor is costing you.

Lessons for football coaches: building better decision-making processes

The best-run clubs implement systematic approaches:

1. Pre-commitment devices: Decide substitution triggers before the match. This removes emotional bias from in-the-moment decisions.
2. Separate process from outcome: Evaluate in-game decision-making independently of the final score. Did you make the right call at the right time, even if it didn’t work out?
3. Active disconfirmation: Before committing to a tactical approach or signing a player, assign an assistant to argue against it. Force these counterarguments to be addressed explicitly.
4. Decision journals and bias checklists: After each match, document key decisions and outcomes. I have created a football manager/coach behavioural bias checklist – a series of yes/no questions that identify which biases may have influenced decisions.

Each question links to one of the five key biases:

• Did you delay substitutions despite trailing? (Loss aversion.)
• Did you continue with a failing tactical approach? (Anchoring.)
• Did you select a player primarily because of their transfer fee? (Sunk cost.)
• Did you dismiss evidence that contradicted your pre-match plan? (Confirmation bias.)
• Did you pursue a player because other clubs were interested? (Herding.)

A ‘yes’ response flags that decision for deeper review. Over time, this checklist makes invisible biases visible, allowing managers to identify personal patterns and build awareness of when they’re most vulnerable to specific biases.

5. Cooling-off periods: Don’t make major tactical or personnel decisions immediately after wins or losses when emotions are highest. Wait 24-48 hours. Decision quality improves dramatically.
6. Objective performance metrics: Separate player performance from transfer fee. Track how often expensive signings play regardless of form. Make invisible biases visible through data.

Conclusion

The margins in elite organisations are razor-thin. A single strategic decision can mean the difference between market leadership and irrelevance. Yet organisations routinely leave value on the table because of psychological biases that are well-documented, predictable, and preventable.

The invisible opponent – our own cognitive biases – may be the most formidable challenge in leadership. But unlike external competition, this opponent can be beaten with awareness, process and discipline. The organisations that master this mental game won’t just avoid costly mistakes. They’ll outcompete rivals who remain blind to their own biases.

For football coaches, every decision is analysed, every outcome is measured, every mistake is scrutinised. By implementing systematic processes that counteract bias, coaches can improve decision-making quality, reduce costly errors and build more resilient organisations.

The mental game is the game. Everything else is just preparation.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

What to read next

Even the Best Tennis Players in the World Are Worse When the Stakes Rise – and it’s Not Just Down to Random Variance or Bad Luck

By Jack Nayler

During the course of this series we have explored the hallmarks that define complex environments.

We also looked further at the implications for this in a sporting organisation, notably that complexity is fractal, exists at different levels, and that each person within the organisation will exert different levels of influence over the performance at any given moment.

Last week, I began to look at what this means for those in leadership positions.

Leadership in complexity requires you to have the humility to accept the ignorance of your position and the understanding that autocracy won’t work. It is impossible to micro-manage every decision in the fast pace and short turnaround of games in a professional sports season. You will not be present to control every interaction that occurs and you will not possess all of the information available to make every decision.

With the inherent fluctuations that occur in a complex environment, it is incumbent on the leaders to provide a framework within which everyone can operate, as effectively as possible, in a transdisciplinary manner.

I believe there are four pillars to this framework, that are characteristics of high-performing environments.

1. A clear direction of travel
2. Solid collective decision-making processes
3. Processes robust to pressure
4. A culture of curiosity and learning

Your role as a leader is to ensure that these are in place so your team operates as effectively as possible.

I explored the first two pillars here. Let’s now delve into the third and fourth pillars below.

3. Processes robust to pressure

 The complexity of the sporting season ensures that as results wax and wane so will pressure and external noise. The processes you have in place need protecting from this pressure and the associated emotion.

For some simpler tasks and processes you can have checklists or flight manuals where processes can be recorded, ratified and referred back to (1). However, these only go so far and will be less useful as the complexity dials up.

When you and your staff are committed to helping the team perform, it is easy (or just human nature) to become overly emotional about performances (both positively and negatively), and this can leach into your decision-making processes. Leaders need to be aware of the propensity for this as well as the influence of subconscious bias on any decision making (this is a wider topic than the scope of this series but a good place to start is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, 2). Setting up your team/environment to reduce the effect of these factors is key to leading your team effectively.

As the leader, with your wider viewpoint and greater access to those higher up the organisational hierarchy, you should have a greater appreciation of the pressures you and your team face. As emotions tend to affect quality decision making, it is your job to be judicial over which pressures you allow to filter through to your team and which you will bear.

Objectivity must become a cornerstone of making decisions. We need to collect data on the subject (player or situation) over which we are trying to make a decision. This data then needs turning into information (tables, graphs and other visualisations) by adding context (use of appropriate statistics) to help the reader understand the magnitude of any effect. This information turns into knowledge when the reader reflects on the new information, with respect to what they already know and understand.

As we have discussed, each person will have their own unique take on a given set of information. Organisations that can successfully make the leap from individual to organisation level knowledge will be better prepared to perform in complexity.

The threat to an organisation if knowledge sits siloed with individuals is two-fold. Firstly, the quality of the decisions being made will fall and secondly the organisation is fragile to an individual leaving and removing the intellectual property (IP) from the building.

I believe the threat to the organisation is greater from the loss when IP walks out of your facility, than if that person was to be employed by a rival team. As each organisation is its own complex mix of culture, practitioners and athletes, it is difficult to transfer tacit knowledge from one environment directly into another.

Once you have objective information around which you can make decisions, you can begin to plan what you and your team will deliver. This planning process provides a framework for everyone involved to work within and should remain just that: a framework. Remember that in complexity the person closest to the action has the most information in a given moment. This framework provides a set of parameters that act as a fallback, against which new information can be assessed. In the moment, under pressure, this framework coupled with a clearly understood direction of travel from you as leader should help the practitioner on the ground make a better decision.

As the outcomes of the decisions we have made as a team become apparent our framework can become the basis against which we can reflect and review the decisions made, by providing a reminder of the conditions as they existed in that moment. This again helps to objectify the review process and fosters a culture of psychological safety (3).

Understanding the complex nature of this environment has helped me to appreciate that we cannot get everything right all of the time (remember there is never a perfect game) and my first thought when things fall down is: how could I,  as an intrinsic part of this complex system, have acted differently through the process to have affected a better outcome? This helps me to remain less emotional when analysing failures as and when they happen. I do this before turning my lens outwards to think how we could have done better as a team.

4. A culture of curiosity and learning

The fact that complex systems are never perfect and we cannot predict outcomes with 100% accuracy creates uncertainty. In their book Radical Uncertainty, John Kay and Mervyn King describe uncertainty as “the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world, or about the connection between our present actions and their future outcomes.” (P. 13, 4). We need all members of the team to understand that although this space is uncertain, performance will emerge from it.

There is then a gap that exists between our expectations and the outcomes. Acknowledging the inevitable existence of this gap allows the leader to be more sanguine and less frustrated by it, putting us in a better headspace to explore why the gap exists like it does and how we can narrow it in the future. I see little point in the wasted energy that would be spent railing against this gap’s existence. Rather I see this gap as the learning space, a space to be curious about. It is the space where the information mentioned in the previous section becomes knowledge.

When we reflect on information in the context of what we already know, we develop our knowledge base. This should then spark off further questions as to why we ended with the result we did, restarting the cycle back to collecting more data. This process is critical in the complex world. As the system shifts and changes, so do our levels of expertise (5). Further, knowledge developed in other environments and populations diminishes in power the further away from that population it moves. The most powerful learning will come from research done in our own group of athletes. This should be a mix of quick and dirty in-house enquiry and more formalised research carried out with partner universities and led by in-house research and development departments.

You also need to lead your team into this gap by putting in place structures that allow your team the time and space for reflection. We are really good in team sports at planning and doing, before all too soon the next fixture rears its head. You need to be intentional about reflecting and reviewing. Reflecting skills can be learnt and should be fostered amongst your team. Make reviews normal and model behaviour by openly reviewing the things you personally have done and seeking feedback. This normalises the feedback process and creates space for you to feedback to your team members more easily (6). Mix regular small hot reviews in the moment (7) with more analytical, larger reviews. In these, review a specific subject (e.g. grade 2b hamstring injury rehab) as opposed to generalised time periods (e.g. pre-season). Signpost your reviewing – create a structure or framework around how you want to reflect and share it with the team ahead of time. Your team should then turn up in the spirit of reflection, rather than having it sprung upon them. Most critical of all is to have concrete outcomes that everyone is aware of and can be held to.

The second space we need to be mindful of as leaders is the space from which the performance of our team emerges.

In 2012, Google embarked on a large study to try and discover what made a successful team within their organisation, they called it Project Aristotle (8). Google studied 180 teams from across the business and looked many combinations of factors (e.g. personality traits, emotional intelligence, demographics and skillsets of team members) that they hoped would indicate levels of learning and performance. Whichever way they crunched the data, they could find no pattern as to what would bring success. Some of the factors that did not influence team success intuitively sounds like items that would be important when trying to build a successful team:

• Location of teammates
• Consensus-driven decision making
• Extroversion of members
• Individual performance of team members
• Workload size
• Seniority
• Team size
• Amount of time spent working at Google

Eventually the researchers looked away from the hard skills and instead looked at interactions between team members, driven by the work of Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Professor Edmondson’s research has also studied effective teams and the work at Google confirmed her theories. The number one factor that will describe team success is termed psychological safety, which she describes as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking… a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up” (P. 354, 3).

A psychologically safe environment is one which recognises that the space between the components of the complex system is where the magic happens and works to ensure that all members of the team can lean into said space.

In a complex world, we cannot see the connection between our decisions and their future impact, we only make sense of them with hindsight. As the author Robert Louis Stevenson said: “The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day.”

However, there is evidence to suggest that better predictions and decision making come from cultures that “harness the power of collectives and encourage diverse opinions, perspectives and collaborative teamwork” (9).

The challenge we face when leading in an increasingly complex world is that it is constantly shifting in front of us, and we only see what is happening through our lens. There are a whole host of things we cannot see and second and third order effects that we cannot predict. Therefore, any time we take an immovable position or opinion, we are also opening ourselves up to being incorrect.

As leaders these positions, either polarised, immovable (or worse, both) are dangerous places to be. This is demonstrated by the work of Philip Tetlock, summarised in his book, Expert Political Judgement: How good is it, how can we know? Over a nearly 20 year period Tetlock ran forecasting tournaments with 284 experts from a variety of fields, leading to 28000 predictions (10).

Experts were only slightly more likely than chance to be correct, however the interesting part was in discovering that how the experts thought was more important than what they thought when it came to the accuracy of their predictions. Tetlock characterises these two styles as Foxes and Hedgehogs after the title of an essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, based on a quote by the Greek philosopher, Archilochus: “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing”.

When the hedgehog is challenged, they curl up in a ball with their spikes out to deflect the world. It is the same with the experts, their position is immovable, and they deflect critique. Experts who were more fox like were less sure of their predictions and more willing to change them as events unfolded. Foxes were more likely to be accurate in their predictions than hedgehogs in the long-term. Hedgehogs had the potential to be more precise, but with a much greater chance of being wrong. When dealing in complex environments, when you are wrong, you have the potential to be spectacularly wrong.

By contrast, foxes will recognise that they do not have a complete perspective and therefore not all of the answers. They will lean into the space between themselves and others, inviting their perspective and collaboration, seeking to co-create solutions for the best possible outcome.

To develop a climate in which foxes can flourish, we must create psychologically safe environments that protect the space between the members of our teams as sacred and encourage them to lean into these spaces to collaborate and provide diverse perspectives. Edmondson (3) describes it as “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”

This process takes modelling from us as leaders. If we cannot show up, be true to ourselves and honestly lean into the space between us, those we lead, and our teammates, then we can never hope to engage others to do the same. If we fail to do this effectively, we may struggle to create a high performing environment.

Further thinking

• How are you able to cut through the noise to create clarity for your team in a complex environment?
• Are you able to remain consistent in your convictions?
• How able are you to let go of decisions and instead empower your team to make better ones?
• What information do you possess as a leader that you can share with your team to help inform their decision making?
• Can you insulate your team and their processes from unnecessary noise and pressure when needed?
• Where do you create space for reviewing and learning?
• Do you intentionally seek feedback? Where?

Bottom line

Throughout this series, I have endeavoured to explain the way that I have come to see the world and, because I work in performance sport, how this applies in that context.

In the spirit of this, I also see how it has emerged from my own upbringing, education and experience to form in this way, at this point, and that you may well see things differently. This is OK because we all encounter this world in different ways. As my own experience grows, I am sure these ideas will develop and adapt.

The biggest messages I would wish to convey is that as a leader, show up and be authentic to yourself and your beliefs, don’t be afraid to try things and fail (as long as you’re willing to do the work to understand why) and go looking for feedback.

Writing is a fantastic way to force you to critically confront your thoughts and assumptions, and writing for an audience, to distil your ideas down as succinctly as possible.  I would recommend it as an exercise for anyone leading or aspiring to lead as clear communication of your ideas helps bring people on a journey with you.

References

1. Gawande, A., 2010. The checklist manifesto: How to get things right. London: Profile Books.
2. Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books.
3. Edmondson, Amy C. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383
4. Kay, J. and King, M., 2020. Radical Uncertainty: Decision-making for an unknowable future. London: The Bridge Street Press
5. Cook, R.I., 2000. How Complex Systems Fail. [online] Available at: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ [Accessed 29 September 2025]
6. Scott, K., 2019. Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean (Fully revised and updated edition). London: Pan Books.
7. Scott, M., 2019. ‘Thinking On Your Feet: How Coaches Can Use Reflection-in-Action to Develop their Coaching Craft’. Applied Coaching Research Journal, 4, pp. 10–15.
8. https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness
9. Wilson, P.J. and Kiely, J., 2023. Developing decision-making expertise in professional sports staff: what we can learn from the Good Judgement Project. Sports Medicine – Open, 9(1), 100.
10. Tetlock, P.E., 2005. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.