By John Portch

Emily Scarratt’s joy was uncontained when England defeated Canada 33-13 to win the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup in front of a full house at Twickenham.

The centre had just competed in her fifth tournament (a joint record in the women’s game), claimed her second winner’s medal, and helped to complete an 11-year quest to bring the World Cup trophy back to England. It was almost the perfect way to bow out after 17 years as an international, 115 caps and a world record 754 points.

Yet she had only played 19 minutes of England’s campaign – all as a second half substitute in the Red Roses’ opening pool match; a 69-7 defeat of the United States in Sunderland.

“I’ve definitely been part of environments before where that kind of non-playing player can become quite negative and toxic,” she told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“For a large part of my career, I was starting and therefore it’s very easy to say the right things and present in that way when you’re not under the stress of not being selected or not playing as much as you would like.”

Scarratt was joined onstage by England Head Coach John Mitchell, who in early February extended his contract until the 2029 World Cup and added Scarratt to his coaching staff.

The session moderator, Rachel Vickery, asked him what it meant to see Scarratt and her other non-playing teammates (known within the Red Roses setup as “pillar” players) celebrating with such vigour.

“I reflected that we actually hit the sweet spot with the culture,” said Mitchell. “Sometimes you don’t get that sweet spot and we might not get it again.”

Rachel Vickery (left) talks to John Mitchell (middle) and Emily Scarratt (right) onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Here we reflect on what Mitchell and the Red Roses got right for 2025.

He spoke up when something wasn’t quite right

When Mitchell signed up to become England Head Coach in 2023, his remit was to win the World Cup. He was a coach with a proven track record in the men’s game who had now been handed the resources and the players to deliver the Women’s World Cup on home soil.

But in 2018 and 2022 England had lost World Cup finals they could, or perhaps should, have won.

“The leading question was how do we get done what we haven’t through the years?” said Mitchell.

It involved integrating young talent (eight players made their World Cup debuts against the US) and tactical tweaks (they had been too reliant on their maul). Both required an environment that enabled the best team on paper to prove they were the best team on grass.

To deliver on that front, Mitchell and the team’s leaders landed on three guiding values: ‘courage’, ‘take the handbrake off’ and ‘be all in’.

These values inspired England’s veterans and new internationals alike. “If the top person genuinely believes that culture is important it makes a difference,” said Scarratt. “Potentially in previous campaigns that hasn’t been the case and culture could get a little bit sidetracked or lost along the way.”

Mitchell even spoke up when he spied a shortcoming in the players’ well-meaning desire to ‘do it for the girls’.

“My thinking was that emphasis might be slightly calibrated towards ‘me’ – not intentionally – but how do I get the girls to calibrate towards ‘we’?” he said. “Because if I inspire you and I’m inspired by you, isn’t that more important, more inspiring to the person next to you? We get the job done and then our voice around our individual ‘why’ will be far greater.”

The cultural tweaking never stopped

“It’s very easy to just pick values, put them somewhere and hope that people live by them,” said Scarratt. “Our values were genuinely threaded through a lot of what we did, whether it was medical presenting or S&C presenting” and, when you witness that, “it’s very easy to buy-in”.

Mitchell held difficult conversations when necessary, but all players and staff, Scarratt said, were expected to speak up when necessary “to nip things in the bud before they became potentially bigger.”

At the suggestion of leadership consultant Patrick Marr, Mitchell would ask his player leadership group and support staff on the eve of each international camp to tell him “who’s going to pull the cart forward? Who’s going to sit on the cart? Who’s going to hold up the cart?”

After an hour he would “come back and I’d see two or three players, plus a couple of staff, where our priority needs to go,” he said, adding “we would then decide on who I would speak to and who they would speak to.” For every player or member of staff, there would be someone who could bridge that gap and “communicate around standards of behaviour”.

Mitchell even danced on TikTok when duty called

If you’re an England supporter, you may have seen the TikTok video of Mitchell dancing with his players.

“I needed to show vulnerability,” he said of such moments, which was not something he considered as a younger coach. “I had to do things that I probably don’t normally do and join in with the girls on certain things.”

Psychological safety may start with players or their head coach dancing in the dressing room, but it ultimately manifests on the pitch during tricky spells or in performance meetings when a staff member has the courage to raise a performance issue.

Mitchell knew he had to lead from the front. “Sometimes you’ve got to be the leader of those actions before somebody else does them.”

That said, his belief in the power of the head coach has been softened (and his self-awareness amplified) by three decades in the sport. “You learn through emotional intelligence that you don’t have to be absolute or right when making decisions. Just use your people. Listen to your people.”

John Mitchell and Emily Scarratt shake hands as their session draws to a close at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

The team talked about the pressure they felt

For the first time, England openly spoke about winning the World Cup. It served as a pressure valve and, again, gave voice to their values.

“It might sound a bit silly but we hadn’t done that before,” said Scarratt, implicitly acknowledging how awkward the group felt at first about such an “un-English” sentiment.

As the English media and public latched onto the team ahead of the US match, the pressure grew. The players trained poorly on one occasion but, instead of dismissing it, they discussed it openly.

“I think we did a really good job of dampening it down by not not speaking about it,” Scarratt added. “By actually putting it out there and allowing people to know that other people felt like that.”

And Mitchell’s words after England eased through the gears on the opening night set the tone. He said: “There’s bigger games coming where teams will put even more pressure on us, so let’s take confidence from what we’re building and stacking as we’re going along. Our game doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be effective, and that will win us the tournament.”

He was right and, looking to 2029, their goal is to win back-to-back World Cups, establish a legacy as one of women’s sports greatest teams, and to further grow the women’s game.

These lofty goals provoke three questions that Mitchell and England must answer: “What will earn the right? What will we keep and take forward with us? And then, thirdly, is what we what will we need to start again?”

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Meaning Does Not Guarantee Medals, But it Strengthens the Behaviours that Make Medals Possible

By John Portch

“In this era where there’s so much data, there’s so many insights, there’s a risk we forget that human learning is a major part of how we progress.”

With those words host Iain Brunnschweiler, who runs the Focus Performance Consultancy, set the scene for a virtual roundtable discussion during which Leaders Performance Institute members shared the strategies that have facilitated better individual and organisational learning within their teams.

“There’s definitely something about learning being contagious,” he added in expectation. “If credible, valuable members of staff are going after things deliberately like you are, I’d hope that there’s some sort of contagion within your organisation.”

To start proceedings, Brunnschweiler outlined a four-part model of organisational learning. “This is an unpublished model,” he said of it. “This is the world according to me.”

Effective priming

“How can we deliberately set people up for learning? That’s something that I’ve increasingly considered,” said Brunnschweiler, who highlighted one-to-one conversations with staff members as a way to identify their aspirations and their motivations.

Appropriate stimulus

“How do we provide a stimulus to create thought in aspirational people?” In a previous role, Brunnschweiler implemented weekly 30-minute meetings with staff members. He also enlisted external speakers and asked individuals to present on a teaching project.

Sense-making (culture)

“If within your organisational culture there are people and spaces that allow you to have conversations, check and challenge your thinking, that is a really good way of helping the learning to land,” said Brunnschweiler, while emphasising the cultural dynamic.

Committing to action

“Often,” Brunnschweiler said, “the greatest risk here is that we have a brilliant conversation, and then we do nothing about it’. How do we commit to something that’s going to make some sort of change, whether it’s small or large?”

The group then shared ten strategies to encourage more effective individual and organisational learning:

1. Give staff members the freedom to explore learning

“If we want to happy or we want to have happy staff, we need to give them some freedom,” said a sports scientist working in the major US leagues. “And if we want them to be free, then we have to encourage them to be courageous and pursue what they want to have and what they want to do.”

Brunnschweiler said:

“A learning culture starts with recruitment… can we keep shifting that culture by recruiting naturally curious and hungry people and maintain momentum.”

 2. Hunger for learning must be role-modelled from the top

Often, staff members are eager to learn, as a psychologist working in the US college system observed, “but having leadership model this is so key”. Only then will staff members carve out the time, as he said:

“If your staff members don’t feel like they have the grace and space to allocate time in the day they’re going to say, ‘I have to do this,’ or ‘I have a meeting’ instead.”

3. Understand people’s motivations

If you can understand someone’s motivations or aspirations then you have an anchor for a conversation about their development. Brunnschweiler explained that it is important to focus on those who want to learn, not those who don’t. He said:

“Some people have little appetite for self-development. And I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy… and accepting of that fact.”

4. Create individual development plans for staff members

The aforementioned psychologist made a convincing case for staff IDPs. He said:

“We talk so much about player development plans, but do we truly have staff development plans, like, ‘here’s where you are, here’s where you can go, here are the gaps to be filled’?”

5. Place staff on secondments when possible

“We don’t put barriers in the way of our people going out on secondment,” said a director of cricket in the English game, where the season is not a 12-month schedule. This is, as Brunnschweiler observed, a cost-effective way of bringing IP back into the building. He said:

“How can we be resourceful? Can we create opportunities for people to visit places and return with knowledge without spending money?”

6. Find your critical friends

Sense-making can be difficult, but sometimes it just takes opening your phonebook. A call with a critical friend is what Brunnschweiler calls a “micro sense-making space”. He said:

“I’ve accrued a small network of people who, for example, when I’m driving, I just phone them up and I know they’ll challenge my thinking and that I’ll learn from that conversation.”

7. Learn from failures

“I’m far more interested in the failures,” said a physiotherapist at a globally renowned organisation. “When my team see me talk about failures, when things have gone wrong, that makes people listen a bit more; and I often think we should prep to fail. Are we ready to fail, so that if we fail, we can look back and say, ‘okay, we did everything we wanted to do?’” Brunnschweiler agreed, adding:

“It’s a good sign if you’ve lost and a staff team are reviewing and reflecting on it and they’re genuinely unpicking and they’re able to call each other out or go, ‘do you know what, I messed up today’. That is a real signature of a place that wants to get better.”

8. Importance of managerial vulnerability

Leaders can role-model learning, but they can also demonstrate vulnerability.

“If you can put your hands up and say, ‘I made a mistake’, that sets the culture, it sets the environment,” said a physiotherapist working in Australian sport. In building on that point, the physiotherapist from No 7 said:

“If we can guarantee that removal of blame, it will encourage us to talk about what we can learn.”

9. Job security

It sounds obvious, but managerial vulnerability goes hand in hand with job security.

“In a fast‑paced environment there is more chance of people getting sacked. I think this could be almost correlated to your hunger for learning,” said the physiotherapist based in Australia. “You might just sit there, be quiet, go insular, and just tick our day‑to‑day off – you don’t want to put your neck out there.” He has witnessed the impact of leaders reiterating that people’s jobs are safe.

“When you are told people aren’t just going to get sacked, it creates the environment for learning.”

10. Appoint a dedicated staff member for learning

“I’ve never worked somewhere that’s had a dedicated head of learning,” said an analyst working in Middle Eastern football. “It always falls on line managers and it’s hit and miss.” Brunnschweiler agreed and added:

“How does any organisation ensure that a PDR process is not just some tick-box exercise, but there’s genuine validity in what you’re going after, what you’re going to commit to, and then it’s followed up on?”

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Five Effective Learning Strategies at the Royal Air Force

By John Portch

Three come-from-behind wins in a row propelled the Brisbane Broncos to the NRL premiership following a 26-22 Grand Final defeat of the Melbourne Storm in early October.

Michael Maguire’s team were behind at half-time in every game of the finals series but came back to beat the Canberra Raiders (the minor premiers) in the qualifying and elimination finals; they over-turned another half-time deficit to beat the Penrith Panthers in the preliminary finals; and lightning struck thrice in the Grand Final when they faced a 22-12 deficit at the interval.

“I didn’t have to say too much at half-time. I just said to them ‘your best half is about to come’, because we have come from behind over the last month. I said if you go and do that, we win the game,” said Maguire – a former speaker at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit – after the Grand Final.

This was a team whose belief in their ability was forged in adversity. Maguire stuck by his players at tricky moments during the season. At times, following a run of poor results, it seemed unlikely that the club would challenge for its first NRL premiership since 2006.

“I remember Madge’s passion and him sticking up for us midway through the year when we were getting rinsed through the media about the way we go about things, but the care he has for us, no one knows outside the club,” said fullback Reece Walsh.

“The way he looks after us as people, the way he looks after our partners, there is nothing more we could ask for. He demands a lot, as he should demand a lot – we have just won a comp.”

Both Maguire and Walsh hint at the ingredients for high performance – empathetic leadership, high standards and mutual trust – that underpinned the agenda at the Leaders Performance Institute in recent weeks.

Below, we give a flavour of the conversations that commanded attention during that time.

‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’

Maguire was in attendance at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in November where the Broncos appeared onstage courtesy of General Manager Troy Thomson.

We also heard from rugby’s other code, rugby union, as England’s former fullback Emily Scarratt and Red Roses Head Coach John Mitchell explained how the Women’s Rugby World Cup was won; before that, Johann van Graan delved into the transformation he led at English Premiership champions Bath Rugby.

Nestled in between was an inspired presentation by Emma Keith,  a group captain, who is the first female to run Royal Air Force officer training.

Hers, much like Maguire’s, was a message of empowerment rooted in accountability and care. She said:

“The standard you walk past is the standard that you accept. That can be poor infrastructure that you don’t report; it could be poor behaviour. If you walk past it, you’re saying it’s okay. And that’s a slow rot from within.”

Group Captain Emma Keith talks to UK Sport’s Alex Stacey following her presentation on officer training in the Royal Air Force.

Read more from the summit here.

The price you pay for poorly delivering feedback

“In terms of feedback, we’re quite basic creatures,” said Simon Eastwood. “We will react and respond instinctively to what we perceive as threat or reward.”

As Eastwood, the Head of Leadership Skills at Management Futures, explained, the wrong word, tone, timing or even body language from a coach can trigger a negative reaction when giving an athlete feedback.

Eastwood hosted a virtual roundtable aimed at helping coaches and practitioners to improve how they deliver feedback.

He shared a number of tools on the day, including the SCARF model.

This framework, devised by neuroscientist David Rock, explains five domains that influence human social behaviour and motivation. SCARF stands for:

1. Status – our relative importance compared to others.
2. Certainty – our ability to predict the future.
3. Autonomy – our sense of control over events.
4. Relatedness – our sense of safety and connection with others.
5. Fairness – our perception that exchanges are fair and equitable.

“It’s a great tool for stepping back and assessing your team and thinking about what really makes them tick,” said Eastwood. “Crucially, it’s not about avoiding that feedback.”

He suggested that leaders should reward these needs through feedback, so people feel valued and motivated rather than threatened and, to illustrate his point, presented a table that set out what ‘threat’ and ‘reward’ may look like in each domain:

Eastwood then posed a question: “When giving positive feedback, which elements do you find most need to be reinforced?”

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

The evolving work of the psychologist

Elsewhere, Dr David Fletcher, a Professor of Human Performance and Health at Loughborough University, and Dr Danielle Adams Norenberg, the Head of Psychology at the UK Sports Institute co-hosted a roundtable on the evolving role of the psychologist.

They outlined two ways in which a psychologist may be a useful asset for the head coach:

1. The development of the coach’s leadership skillset

A psychologist, Fletcher explained, can help a coach to develop their “time management skills, body language, and communication skills” in the pursuit of better performance.

By the same token, psychologists have been instrumental in facilitating a shift from deficit-based to strengths-based coaching. Adams Norenberg said: “Even if planted within a very generic training session, athletes have the self-awareness, knowledge and autonomy to make the most out of their training session by focusing on developing their strengths.”

2. The development of their psychology skills

Psychology is another string in a coach’s bow. If they understand the types of pressures that athletes experience they can “choose a particular training session to not necessarily develop technique or tactical skills, but psychology skills.” Adams Norenberg cited the example of the VR headsets used in training by Team Europe ahead of the 2025 Ryder Cup. Some players simulated the spectator abuse they would endure at Bethpage Black; others used it not for pressure training but relaxation, such as the Norwegian Viktor Hovland, who recreated the fjords of his homeland.

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

True innovation must have an impact… but what is innovation?

Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, posed this very question at a recent virtual roundtable.

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

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

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

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

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

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

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

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

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

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

Leaders Performance Institute members can read more here.

By John Portch

“I knew it was a mountain,” said Johann van Graan, “but I didn’t know it was Everest.”

The South African, then with Munster, had agreed to become the Head Coach at struggling Bath in December 2021.

A few days later, he switched on the TV only to see Bath go 0-28 down after just 25 minutes of their Champions Cup tie with Leinster.

It prompted the Everest comment, as Van Graan told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

He eventually took the reins at Bath’s Recreation Ground in July 2022 and, over the next three years, led one of the most remarkable transformations in English rugby history.

In May, Bath lifted the European Challenge Cup, Premiership and Premiership Rugby Cup.

The tale of Van Graan’s ‘Rec Revolution’ set the tone for an international gathering of over 300 high-performance leaders to share knowledge, best practice and inspiration.

The agenda took its lead from our Trend Report in which more than 200 performance leaders from almost 40 sports told us how they expect the industry to develop in the years ahead.

Five trends stood out:

1. Alignment is now a competitive advantage
2. Leaders increasingly seek to empower and collaborate
3. Teams value resourcefulness over resources
4. Psychology will be a game-changer
5. Teams are engaging in a tech arms race

Van Graan is at the vanguard of several of these trends and, across both days, the Leaders Performance Institute delivered a range of guest speakers from organisations including England Rugby, the Royal Air Force, and the Haas F1 team to speak to each trend.

The following is a snapshot of what they said.

1. Alignment is now a competitive advantage

For evidence of the stock placed in being aligned, look no further than Bath’s transformation from a rabble to the best team in England in just three years.

Van Graan said: “I put up a picture of Twickenham on the very first day. I said ‘I can’t tell you how we’re going to get there, but we will get there.”

He wanted his playing group, coaches and other performance staff to coalesce around three values: connection, clarity and commitment. The trick was then bringing those to life.

“One of the things that we underestimate is what alignment really looks like. We can never communicate enough. Do we really let people know what standards actually look like, what we actually are, what are we actually going to attack?”

Johann van Graan

Bath Head Coach Johann van Graan in conversation with host Iain Brunnschweiler.

2. Leaders increasingly seek to empower and collaborate

John Mitchell offered another inspiring story from the world of rugby union.

In 2023, when he signed on as Head Coach of the England women’s national team, it was Mitchell’s first time coaching a women’s team.

The Red Roses had a genuine shot at winning the Women’s Rugby World Cup on home soil in 2025, but a talented team needed an experienced guiding hand.

The team delivered, with Mitchell receiving plaudits for his role as England secured their first world title in 11 years.

Two months on from that achievement, the audience found Mitchell (affectionately known to his peers as ‘Mitch’) in typically reflective mood alongside the recently retired Emily Scarratt, who was part of the Red Roses’ winning squad.

Sport (and rugby union) grows ever more complex and yet, after 30 years, Mitchell feels he has never been better equipped to coach.

“You don’t have the full scope,” he says of his early coaching days in the mid-90s. “You have strengths early on that are recognised but then also you sometimes don’t know the whole of yourself. So you take the time to understand the whole of yourself.”

He came to a critical understanding. “When I was younger, I was going to try and be right. Maybe I was trying to prove myself as a coach.”

“You don’t have to be absolute or right when making decisions. Just use your people. Listen to your people. They’ll give you information; and probably enough information – you don’t need it all – to be able to make decisions.”

John Mitchell

England Red Roses Head Coach John Mitchell shakes hands with former England fullback Emily Scarratt at the conclusion of their panel session.

Emma Keith built on the theme of empowerment in her presentation on officer training in the Royal Air Force.

“Cultures and environments can only grow when everybody takes accountability,” said the Commandant of the RAF’s Tedder Academy of Leadership. Keith, a group captain, is the first female to run RAF officer training.

“The standard you walk past is the standard that you accept. That can be poor infrastructure that you don’t report; it could be poor behaviour. If you walk past it, you’re saying it’s okay. And that’s a slow rot from within.”

Emma Keith

Group Captain Emma Keith talks to UK Sport’s Alex Stacey following her presentation on officer training in the Royal Air Force.

3. Teams are prioritising resourcefulness over resources

As Team Principal of MoneyGram Haas F1, Ayao Komatsu knows as well as anyone that his team is competing with better resourced and more illustrious teams.

The team has 375 staff members, which may sound like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the likes of Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren.

“If we cannot work together, if you’re not supporting each other, if you’re not aligned, we’ve got zero chance against organisations minimum three times our size,” said Komatsu, who had just flown in from the Brazilian Grand Prix in São Paulo where Haas’ Oliver Bearman achieved a creditable top-six finish the weekend before the summit.

“I know we have good people. It’s a matter of putting it together, giving them clear direction, organisational structure that promotes – forces – communication.”

Ayao Komatsu

Ayao Komatsu, the Team Principal of Haas F1, shares insights into life in the pitlane.

Similarly, albeit in vastly different circumstances, the Red Cross must make the most of its limited resources when emergencies strike.

Chris Davies, the Director of Crisis Response and Community Resilience at The British Red Cross, cited his team’s core operational process:

“First off, ensure that you’re not over-promising and under-delivering. So you know what resource you have and work with key partners to make sure that you know which resources are available to you so that you get that embedded into the planning; and then we’re really clear on the capabilities that we have. It’s the basic forms of: what capabilities do you have? What can you deploy and when? What’s your deployment times?”

Chris Davies

Chris Davies of the British Red Cross in full presentation mode.

4. Psychology will be a game-changer

The mental and behavioural side of performance was an ever-present topic on both days of the summit. Our guests discussed several elements:

The importance of individual expression and acceptance

“People need to be themselves. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what language you speak, the colour of your skin – everybody’s mum and dad loves them.”

Johann van Graan

Belonging as a contributor to wellbeing (and performance)

“There is potentially 40 women in a group and they’re all going to be quite different and they’re going to need something different, but nonetheless, they’re all as important as each other and need to be valued in the same way.”

Emily Scarratt

Psychological safety

“If you’re afraid of failure, nobody’s going to move. So you’ve got to give them a clear message that, ‘come on’, you’ve got to almost take yourself out of your comfort zone every day. If you haven’t taken yourself out of your comfort zone once a day, actually, I don’t think you’ve done your job.”

Ayao Komatsu

5. Teams are engaging in a tech arms race

Professor Tom Crick spoke in his capacity as Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

He presented on the growth of AI and continually stressed how important it is to keep “the human in the loop” regardless of whatever advances are coming.

To this end he offered Leaders Performance Institute members a series of recommendations.

You must be able to explain why you are using an AI tool…

“You can’t just say ‘the computer says so.’ There has to be some understanding and explainability, and there has to be trust.”

An AI tool should not replace your people…

“AI should not erode or disempower or remove agency for people within your domain. It should augment human capability, not replace it,” said Crick. He added: “It is about co-design, co-decisions and co-evolution as we go forwards – keeping humans embedded in the process.”

Don’t assume your AI tool is right…

“Don’t automatically trust the system. Always ask: is that the right data? Does that feel right? Can we verify and validate it another way?”

Tom Crick, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, answers questions from Leaders Performance Institute members.

Next stop for the Leaders Performance Institute

Leaders Meet: Australia

By the Leaders Performance Institute team

Inevitably AI was top of the agenda at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Philadelphia last month.

Michael Jabbour, the AI Innovation Officer at Microsoft Education, was on hand to explain that while our futures will look different, there will be simple steps we can all take within our daily practices to integrate AI in useful and supportive ways.

“Quality use of AI comes from communication,” Jabbour tells the audience at the Wells Fargo Center, while running through some of the different types of AI, from simple to advanced and from retrieval to autonomous.

Fundamentally, he speaks to the human side of AI usage. Jabbour is a firm believer that with the right prompts AI is a superb teaching tool. “You’re going to have to fight for friction in order to grow,” he continues. Content generation, summary, code generation and advanced search are all areas where the right prompt can reap dividends.

Whatever the AI’s form, however you use it, “great communicators are excellent in what they get out of AI.”

The same can be said for coaching and high-performance work in general, with speakers from teams including the Philadelphia 76ers, Flyers, Gotham FC, USA Gymnastics and US Soccer joining the University of Pennsylvania and the American School of Ballet to discuss how we can better support the people we serve.

Here, we pick out five things to think about in promoting better alignment, more people-focused approaches to performance, and more thoughtful use of data.

1. Be transparent in your decision making

It is perhaps only in retirement from competition – and in going on to assume admin positions in sport – that Yael Averbuch West and Li Li Leung fully understood the value in organisational transparency.

West has been the General Manager and Head of Soccer Operations at Gotham since 2021, while Leung has served as President and CEO of USA Gymnastics since 2019 (before that she was a Vice President at the NBA).

Both have enjoyed success and endured tough times during their tenures and both explain that without transparency, there can be no alignment. And without alignment, you’ll never be able to establish your priorities, set a course and make big decisions.

There is opportunity in moments of hardship, as Leung explains. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” she says, repeating the words of American political theorist Saul Alinsky. There are obvious moments when it’s right to make a change and align people behind a strategy but, Leung adds, “it’s tougher when you’re deciding whether you need to push through and commit to a process or change.”

“The decisions I’m most proud of are the ones that were the most difficult to make – and often they’re the ones with the clearest answer…”

Yael Averbuch West

“… and you’ll still get crucified for it.”

Li Li Leung

“It can be difficult to commit to a process and find a way, rather than start again, but it’s often the right thing to do.”

Li Li Leung

2. Cut through the noise around the athlete

Alignment is key because the simple fact is that athletes increasingly ask for support beyond their sport and performance. Everyone must be on the same page.

“Do you think the modern athlete has changed or has it always been like this, but as performance staff, have we failed to notice it?” asks Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers.

“We think it is 50:50 as there is no denying that they are more informed because of more information being available,” he adds, “but this does create noise.”

The remedy requires trust as players in the modern era tend to ask for an explanation more often. The Sixers talk to their players and they talk to them early as they seek to understand what’s important to them. “Do not shut things down right away, work with them to find solutions.”

There is, however, a limit. “It is important to have your non-negotiables so they know where the line is too.”

“The guiding light is that everything that we do needs to help players thrive at NHL level,” says Ian McKeown, the Vice President of Athletic Performance & Wellness at the Philadelphia Flyers, who sat next to Rice. “We are being very intentional in using [the concept of] ‘thriving’ in our language.”

It is important to meet athletes where they’re at, understand their wants and needs, and to involve them in the decision-making process.

And lean into change. See it as comforting – it doesn’t automatically mean that what you did before didn’t work.

“As the person overseeing the performance programme, it is important to listen well and be curious about what is going on across different departments and relationships in that environment. I sought to explore the physical barriers and other impacts of what was going on and I intentionally adapted the flow of the environment to change this.”

Ian McKeown

3. Better leader = better human

“Social and cultural connection is the secret to our success as a species.”

So says Dr Michael Platt, the Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. “If you want to be a better leader, be a better human.”

He speaks to the importance of the social brain network, which is a set of interconnected brain regions involved in understanding, interpreting and responding to social information. This could be recognising emotions, understanding others’ intentions or navigating social interactions.

To that end, he encourages leaders to employ perspective thinking. This can be as simple as writing down five things that illustrate your point of view before then attempting to think about them from another person’s perspective.

Platt also encourages eye contact and deep, rich conversations as starting points on the path to greater connection. Neuroscience explains that good relationships emerge when our brains are synchronised and there is a pattern of activity aligned to the other person.

“Your social brain network is like a muscle: the more you use it, the bigger it gets, so it’s critical to exercise it.”

Michael Platt

4. A programme should protect and empower

Ian McKeown at the Flyers made the point about helping players to thrive. Similarly, the notion of holistic support underpins the work of the American School of Ballet with its students.

“We want students to develop so that they are thriving and not just training,” says Katy Vedder, the school’s Director of Student Life, when speaking of their Whole Dancer Approach.

“We acknowledge their adolescent brain and try to create a sense of belonging as they discover who they are and what they value. We want to support their humanistic needs too and their competencies beyond performance, including self-awareness, peer connections and a healthy comparison framework.”

Wellness isn’t supplementary – it’s central to performance, identity and longevity.

Integral to this reframing has been a realignment of performance priorities, with re-education around cross training and strength & conditioning helping to reduce injury rates while better considering wellness and recovery.

“We can’t work in silos,” says Aesha Ash, the school’s Head of Artistic Health & Wellness. There were several nodding heads in agreement around the room. “The dancers have to be at the artistic centre and we have to work to collaborate in support of them.”

“Our students are not just artists or athletes, they intersect both and need a support system that honours their full, true identity.”

Katy Vedder

“We have to challenge the definition of success at a systemic level. We celebrate those not pursuing becoming a professional dancer, widening the parameters of success.”

Aesha Ash

5. Use data, but don’t discount the person

We close the circle by returning to the question of technology, specifically data.

Both Sam Gregory, the Director of Data & Analytics at US Soccer and John Boyles, the Director of Research & Development at the Sixers, make the point that data isn’t here to take from a coach’s systems or expertise, but to elevate it.

“We want to help you do what you’re best at and take away the parts humans aren’t as good at,” says Gregory. “We’re not trying to replace the system and the expertise.”

That means presenting data in robust but useful formats that never lose track of the human subjects at the centre. With this in mind, it is a good practice to exhibit caution in overcommunicating the data and what the numbers are saying.

Analysts should focus on connection, communication and clarity, especially with those departments and individuals who perceive data as a challenge to their daily workflows.

Finally, infrastructure readiness is critical. There is a lot of noise in the ether when it comes to data and technology, with numerous vendors trying to pitch the exclusivity of their datasets. To abate the noise it is important to build robust strategies and infrastructure to ensure that the noise doesn’t find its way into programmes.

“The aim is to get to the point where data is available to support every decision made, even if it’s not used for every decision.”

Sam Gregory

“We need to think about the importance of what’s visible when discussions are happening. The insight displayed can have an effect on the conversation.”

John Boyles

What to read next

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

By John Portch

Why is alignment seemingly on everyone’s lips across the world of sport?

“When you get everyone in a system pushing in the same direction, it can have a multiplier effect. The momentum of each person’s efforts building on each other,” said John Bull, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures.

“It is,” as he adds, “a key area of performance at which we can all get better.”

In his online presentation for members of the Leaders Performance Institute, Bull outlined the common obstacles as well as steps all teams can take to get better at coordinating their efforts.

How alignment affects performance

Alignment – the coordinated efforts of a team – takes several forms. Each has different implications for performance outcomes.

Bull illustrated some of those differences using mathematical symbols (and idea lifted directly from Ineos’s Sir Dave Brailsford).

In an ideal world, each stakeholder’s efforts would multiply the others in this fashion:

“One person’s talent is building on and adding,” says Bull. “The multiplication becomes exponential.”

He used the analogy of a group of people pushing a car up a hill. “It’s also about timing. Are we pushing at exactly the right time, which is really what the multiplication symbol is because you get this amplifier effect.”

Additions are more commonly found, but it’s not true alignment:

“What I would mean by a plus is that two parts of the organisation are still moving in the same direction, still aiming at the same goal, but it’s not joined up. It’s independent activity,” said Bull. “They’re still adding their talent, so it’s still a positive contribution, but you’re not getting that momentum multiplier effect. And we all know what that feels like.”

The risk is that subtractions or divisions rear their ugly head:

“If you’ve got two parts of the organisation with very different interpretations of the strategy, you have it taking away from each other,” said Bull of the subtraction.

As for the division symbol, “that would be where, politically, you’re starting to get factions, briefing to the media, or people actively recruiting allies against another part of the organisation. Or sometimes where you have a board or owner deliberately undermining the coach.”

If teams are to achieve the multiplier effect, Bull highlighted five critical considerations:

1. Who?

Who are you trying to align and what different talents can you bring to bear on a problem? Be sure to involve all relevant parties, including those who may be excluded for fear that they will be distracted.

2. What are you trying to achieve and by when?

Misalignment often arises not from disagreement on the goal itself, but on the timeline and resources needed to achieve it.

3. Alignment on strategy i.e. the ‘how’

The distinction between strategy (high-level direction) and tactics (specific applications) is not always understood.

4. Ways of working

Alignment is an outcome of agreed processes of communication, collaboration and decision-making.

5. Vertical and horizontal dimensions

While vertical alignment (e.g. between board and coach) attracts a lot of focus,  horizontal alignment between departments or teams underpins a truly joined-up approach.

Bull then highlighted some common tensions:

He said: “The reason I want to share these is to highlight where you might go for opportunities for improvement. Where do you see the opportunities for improvement in your environment and what’s your role in that? Where can you make a difference?”

The same goes for tests of alignment:

Each type of test presents opportunities to strengthen systems through reflection, planning and proactive leadership if you’re minded to look.

What actually works?

Bull suggested several methods for Leaders Performance Institute members to mull over:

What to read next

Do you Feel your Team Has Plenty of Clarity But Still Suffers from Misalignment?

By John Portch

“The one thing I believe about high performance is that it’s pretty simple but it’s also really hard to do consistently over time.”

The Leaders Performance Institute has just asked Greg Shaw, the High Performance Director at Swimming Australia, for his thoughts on the growing complexity of performance environments.

This complexity is both reflected in and a reaction to what Shaw calls the “growing sophistication” of performance roles. In many respects, as he noted in our Teamworks Special Report earlier this year, Shaw perceives himself as a “project manager”.

Which is not in itself a bad thing. Fields such as sports science have blossomed in elite sport, but consistency of application and outcome, whether locally or at scale, has often proved elusive.

“We all make bad decisions,” adds Shaw, “and a lot of smart people make dumb decisions.”

Here, we highlight four areas where Shaw and Swimming Australia, are trying to give their athletes, coaches and staff every chance to make better choices.

1. Identify the barriers to better decision making

“We heavily invested and remain interested in behavioural science and how we can help our athletes and coaches make smart decisions and follow hard behaviours,” says Shaw. Swimming Australia’s aim is to “help make those decisions easier and those hard performance behaviours more frequent.” They enlisted the help of behavioural design experts to help identify and understand the existing barriers.

Shaw himself has a background in sports nutrition and illustrates his point through the lens of dietetics. “It’s the behavioural component of nutrition,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter what you know in terms of, say, biology, it’s if you can make the right choices and how social and cultural drivers impact those choices.”

2. Manipulate the environment to remove those barriers

The ideal, as Shaw says, is for the athletes to “turn up, do what they need to do, and live a high performance lifestyle”. This, he admits, is easier said than done. Even a disciplined athlete can inadvertently harm their health and performance. “It often leads to concerns around wellbeing, being overloaded, overworked and over-stressed.”

The key is to “manipulate the environment and the process to help the athlete make it simpler and easier.” Shaw continues: “I think the future of high performance is designing things purposefully, not just the training we do but everything that fits outside of that; the life, the social environment, the club culture, the programme culture, the experts around you so you know to make the right choices and adaptations.”

He is clear that it is “more about environment and behaviour than it is about science and the expertise of performance.”

This is in keeping with Swimming Australia’s ‘people-first’ approach. “It’s understanding what’s a good stress and what’s a bad stress,” says Shaw, who explains that there is an increasing empathy for what athletes go through to sustain high performance over extended periods of time.

“An athlete may enter our ecosystem at 15 or 16 and leave our ecosystem at 35, so if we don’t have that ability to understand how we must adapt in how we interact with and support our athletes, then they’ll leave.”

3. Let people refine their processes before looking for scalability

Shaw admits that Swimming Australia, when it comes to system-wide initiatives, has traditionally been an organisation that “scales first and tries to find efficiencies later”. However, the organisation has typically excelled when it comes to individual and group piloting. Shaw has noted the distinction and continues to learn as he goes. “Over the last 18 months I’ve realised it’s not about adding more, it’s subtracting and refining ideas to their simplest and easiest, then letting people add their flavour to it,” he says, warming to the theme.

“Oftentimes, we try to scale and have things fit within boxes, but scalability comes from understanding the fundamentals of an idea or process, making sure that happens, and then giving enough space for others to iterate and develop their own process.”

4. Use AI as a co-pilot

Shaw sees the potential in automation, with caveats. “As we automate, we free up time to interrogate the data more and more, but that puts people behind the screens and offices we’re trying to free them from in the first place,” he says, adding, “automation should free coaches to spend more time on the pool deck and in performance environments”. Doing this will enable coaches to “be compassionate with the athlete, to better understand what they’re going through, or to understand if a piece of information is going to be necessary for them at this point in time.”

As for AI, he sees the benefit as being rooted in “augmented decision-making”. “We want to use AI to help people make good decisions, to help strip away the noise, to make the signal a bit clearer,” he continues.

Such clarity helps to reduce “data hallucinations and noise, which you may not realise for a couple of months”. By that point, “you’ve wasted your time.”

That does not mean outsourcing data interpretation entirely to AI. “We believe in the co-pilot model of AI rather than having the artificial intelligence doing it for people.”

What to read next

Coach and Staff Wellbeing: Five Approaches to Five Common Challenges

By John Portch

Dan Jackson recounts a conversation he had with the analyst team at the Adelaide Crows during the AFL off-season earlier this year.

“There’s a team of six and I asked them what their job was,” the Crows’ General Manager of Player Development and Leadership tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“Their response was along the lines of ‘we’re there to support the coaches’,” says Jackson, while admitting that this response isn’t wrong. “That is inherently what their job is. They’re looking at the data, they’re putting together PowerPoints. They’re also the ones plugging in all the computers at a game to make sure that the visuals are right. Everything for them is about getting the detail right in the background. If they weren’t there the wheels would fall off.”

Jackson did not find their answer wholly satisfactory. The analyst team’s relative invisibility to everyone else was part of the problem.

Connection to vision and mission

In the analysts’ response, there was no mention of Adelaide’s vision (“to earn the pride of South Australia”) or their mission (“sustained success, winning multiple premierships”).

Jackson reframed his question. He wanted to see if the group could align their work to the bigger picture. “I said: ‘how do you guys see your role? What’s your purpose as an analyst group to help us achieve that vision and mission?’”

A fear for Jackson was that if the analysts see their contribution as little more than background support then others will surely do the same.

First clarity, then alignment

“When you’ve given everyone clarity around what we are trying to achieve, how we’re going to go about it, and how I need you and you and your team to play your role in it – I think that’s what people would say when they feel like there’s alignment,” says Jackson.

The group’s second answer was a step in the right direction:

We help drive performance by supporting, innovating and getting the little details right, so that everyone else can work their job seamlessly.

They hinted at their sense of alignment and already sound more empowered.

“At great organisations, people feel like they have some autonomy to make decisions,” Jackson adds, “but it’s really hard to give that trust over as a leader if you haven’t provided clarity or aligned them to the strategy, the vision and the mission.”

Those three areas have been areas of intense focus for Jackson and his colleagues. The analysts, now emboldened by Jackson’s encouragement, went further:

We play a pivotal role in the team’s performance as we look to earn pride and win.

“Now they’re feeling strongly aligned to how they’re going to help us achieve the vision and the mission. I think that goes a long way to help engagement, retention or even decision making.”

It led to a wider conversation about their roles and contributions.

“One of our values is ‘courage’,” says Jackson, who asked the analysts what that looked like for them. They connected ‘courage’ to their need to balance innovation and risk-taking in their day-to-day work.

For us to get a competitive advantage in how we use the data, present our messaging and tell our stories, we might have to take a risk. For example, we might have to use some new AI platform to enhance our presentations. It may fail once or twice, but if it works really well then we can visualise data better and tell our story better.

Jackson now heard what he had sought. “A small department can be really empowered when they’re aligned to something that they understand of the big picture.”

That said, Jackson guards against any team getting too hung up on words when it’s actions that matter.

He observes that there’s little difference between the values one team puts on their wall and another.

“Around 80 per cent have ‘integrity’ as a value,” he says. “You’re guaranteed to have something like ‘commitment’, ‘hard work’, ‘dedication’ or ‘excellence’.

“Then there tends to be a mindset one. So we have ‘courage’, but it might be ‘ruthlessness’, ‘relentless’ or ‘belief’. Sometimes they have a fourth, which is more unique. It could be like ‘celebrate your authenticity’ but, inherently, every sporting organisation has the same face because there’s no real secret sauce of success.

“With the great teams, it’s not that their words are great: it’s the way they actually go about living, the behaviours that underpin it.”

Jackson has seen it time and again during his career. “I probably spend the least amount of time worrying about whatever words they’ve got,” he says. “Often, I don’t even bother changing them because if you want ‘connection’ or ‘unity’ or ‘team first’ or ‘family’, it doesn’t really matter. What I want to know is the behaviours you’re going to commit to, your system of accountability, and how you drive those behaviours.”

Dan Jackson also features in…

Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By John Portch

The 2025 French Open men’s champion Carlos Alcaraz is one of a select few to have won a Grand Slam final from match point down.

“I think the real champions are made in situations when you deal with that pressure,” said Alcaraz at Rolland-Garros in Paris last month. “That’s why I saw my best tennis in crucial moments, and that’s why I saw my best tennis in those difficult situations.”

Performance under pressure was a theme that run through the month of June here at the Leaders Performance Institute, starting with the wise words of Red Bull’s big wave surfer Ian Walsh.

His approach is geared around managing his fear. “Those nerves and everything you fear are natural, and you can use that to elevate your performance,” he said in this article. “It commands every ounce of your being and your focus to deal with what’s coming at you and how you want to navigate it to try and finish on your feet.”

Elsewhere, we returned to the question of alignment, named the common causes of inadaptability, and asked the Brisbane Lions to talk about their approaches to female athlete health.

What if there’s clarity in your communication as a team, but still you suffer from misalignment?

Edd Vahid, the Premier League’s Head of Academy Football Operations, answered this in a recent interview with the Leaders Performance Institute.

He explained there could be a few factors at play, all of which point to the importance of feedback:

Staff development needs. If a staff member commits an error of execution, it is an opportunity to deliver developmental feedback. Vahid says: “Does everyone understand what we’re going after? If they do and they step outside of that, then feedback is warranted.”

Psychological safety. “It’s a buzz term,” says Vahid of the commonly used phrase, “but it’s crucial for people to feel they are in a feedback culture.” The leader must show that the intent of feedback is to help the individual to progress. “You’re taking time to give them feedback because you care,” he adds. “You’re then seeking to work with the individual to create that development.”

The leader’s behaviour. Leaders must also demonstrate their willingness to listen to feedback. “They need to provide ‘speak up’ signals,” says Vahid with reference to the work of psychologist Megan Reitz. “The leader needs the skill to understand the position they’re in and the power they carry in that dynamic.”

The four inhibitors that prevent adaptability in a complex world

Those four inhibitors are discussed in great detail here, but one that will discuss below is when leaders themselves become the bottleneck due to their authoritative approach.

“Authoritative leadership has been proven time and time again to be effective in very short bursts,” said Tim Cox of Management Futures at a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, “but it isn’t much good for adaptability.” The reasons are simple enough. “It’s really difficult for one person to be able to think through, be creative, respond to the environment around them when things are changing at a high pace.”

Leaders, Cox said, should:

• Set the ambition or intent but remember: “the empowered leadership style is always more effective.” It fosters motivation, creativity, and collaborative problem-solving.

• Consider the four Fs of effective, empowered leadership. “Any good model needs a four something or a three something,” said Cox, “and here are the constituent parts, which you will recognise.”

Focus: The leader must deliver clear, strategic alignment where everyone understands the direction and purpose of their work.

Feedback: Regular feedback and debriefing are essential for learning and continuous improvement, especially in dynamic settings.

Freedom: Give people autonomy and allow them to explore, innovate, and respond to change.

Fusion: This is about building strong relationships and collaboration, both within and beyond your organisation with a view to harnessing collective intelligence

Leadership is stagnating

This idea of leadership stagnating was revealed in stark terms in our Trend Report earlier this year.

The Trend Report revealed that 57 per cent of practitioners believe that leadership within their organisation has stayed the same or got worse in recent years.

The primary factors appear to be the shift towards task orientation and the pressure to ‘win now’, which can act to stifle innovation and long-term thinking. Leaders, as a selection of Leaders Performance Institute members agreed during a June roundtable, have less bandwidth, less time for staff development and even less time for staff onboarding.

Ben Baroody of Abilene Christian University, who co-led the session with Edd Vahid, observed that even at organisations that prioritise leadership development, stagnation is still reported.  For Baroody, this is compounded by what he sees as the link between alignment and (high) quality leadership.

Vahid questioned whether leaders are giving themselves enough capacity to lead effectively and, as such, he is an advocate of distributed leadership models and leaders who invest in their own development as well as that of their people.

The virtual floor also highlighted the importance of skills including influencing, an ability to hold honest conversations, and active listening.

The Brisbane Lions have turned female athlete health into a performance question

The renewed focus on female athlete health is a direct result of the work of Matt Green, the Lions’ High Performance Manager for AFLW and his team.

As an organisation, the Lions focus on five key, interrelated areas:

1. Pelvic health. “This is of primary importance,” said Green. “We want to give women and girls information around what’s normal, what’s not, and what we can actually do about it.” Services include a women’s health specialist physio. These help bring conditions such as stress urinary incontinence to the fore “when a lot of female athletes may be dealing with these issues in silence”.
2. Breast health. Annual breast-screening and bra fittings (plus the provision of a bra) are now standard. “There’s some damning statistics that more than 50 per cent of female athletes wear an ill-fitting bra,” said Green, who alluded to the increased risk of breast injury when an athlete is not wearing suitable equipment.
3. Gynaecology. The Lions now have a gynaecologist embedded in their program and the club is “starting to get players thinking about family planning”. This helps normalise the conversation and provides a safe and supportive environment for all athletes thinking about family planning.

By Luke Whitworth

“An unwillingness to adapt and evolve is one of the things that stifles great cultures – it stifles great coaches too,” said Dan Jackson.

The General Manager of Player Development & Leadership at the Adelaide Crows was speaking in The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport, our recent Trend Report.

The sentiment struck a chord with Jackson’s fellow contributor, Tim Cox of Management Futures.

“We work in sport and other sectors, and there is that feeling of stifling,” Cox told a recent leaders virtual roundtable. “The pace of change, the demands on us are increasing, and it can feel almost suffocating for leaders sometimes. What do we do here? How can we respond effectively?”

Cox, who co-hosted this Learning Series with the Leaders Performance Institute, hinted at the growing complexity of sport and the ever-increasing importance of being able to lead through complexity, which is the overarching theme of a three-part virtual roundtable series that seeks to help leaders develop the necessary skills.

To follow up, we shared five areas where complexity continues to grow in sport. Most if not all will be familiar to athletes, coaches and practitioners alike:

Adaptability: a vital skill

Session one explored the concept of adaptability and how leaders can increase the chance of an effective response from their teams. This came up in the Trend Report. The following also stood out from the report’s findings:

The Magnificent Seven: tips for leading in complexity

Cox distilled his thoughts on the topic into seven ‘magnificent’ areas. “Whether they’re magnificent or not, you’ll be able to make a call on it,” he said.

1. Rapid change can be a great leveller

In a world where change is constant, smaller or less-resourced teams can gain a competitive edge by being more agile.

• Mindset is important. Cox said: “We can respond to the disruptions that are there in our world, whether they be internal or external… there’s something to be said for going on the offensive wherever we can, when we’re able to actually disrupt things, certainly in a competition environment. Others are going to have to deal with the disruption that we’re bringing.”
• Resourcefulness beats resource. Cox shared the example of a fintech CEO with whom Management Futures work. “We’re working with the senior team and he was saying. ‘Do you know they’re doing my head in. They want the pace of change to slow down, they keep saying “we just need to pause, we just need to focus, we just need to do this”. And actually, they’re missing the point: our survival as a smaller player with fewer resources than others actually depends on disruption. It depends on us being really fast and being the drivers of disruption’.”

2. Prioritise time to analyse what is changing

“This is a simple one: it’s really prioritising time to actually analyse what is changing.”

• Internal and external scanning. “We have our senses, we’re hardwired to pick up on change and be aware of what’s going on within the environment, whether close to us or outside,” said Cox, with regards to such elements as team morale or performance trends, “but what are the mechanisms for systematically analysing how the wider environment is changing?” These could be shifts in policy, competition rules or tech advancements.
• What are your existing mechanisms? These matter. “There will be ways in which you’re doing that already. There may be player leadership groups who understand what’s changed within the squad. You may even have player liaison roles.”
• ‘Upstream’ thinking. Dan Heath’s book Upstream offers a provocation to people working in sport: it challenges us to stop reacting to problems and instead start preventing them. In sport, people pride themselves on being problem-solvers, but how often do we step back to ask why the problem exists in the first place?

3. Tap into collective wisdom at pace

As one participant said, “adaptive cultures are the ones where everybody has a voice. They can voice feedback, they can push back on ideas, and ultimately, that helps you get to the right idea.”

• Psychological safety. As Megan Reitz and John Higgins once argued in the Harvard Business Review, managers are more intimidating than they think. Cox cited then built on their point. “I’ve been in lots of environments where just a look from a senior player, just a look from a coach, or a manager, or someone in a senior position has stopped somebody from sharing an opinion that they might have had,” he said. “I’ve also been in environments where I’ve been able to call that out, to stop the conversation and ask ‘what’s just happened?’ and understand from the individual who was just about to share their opinion ‘what was it?’ Very often it is not what the person, the leader, or the senior coach, or the senior player thought it was going to be. It’s much more valuable and it often takes the conversation in a different direction.”

• The ‘diamond’ tool. Cox proposed the following series of questions as a way of ensuring teams hear from each and every member. It opens up the discourse and then closes it when a decision needs to be made:

4. Processes and mechanisms aligned to learn fast 

While tapping into collective wisdom is essential, it must be balanced with the ability to make decisions and act quickly. Yet while on-field decisions can be taken in minutes, “off the pitch,” as Cox said, “we can often be inordinately slow in adapting and responding to change.”

• What processes and systems help your team to align? Cox argued that we might marvel at the organisation and agility of a school of fish, but struggle to replicate such manoeuvres in our own workplaces. “The processes and mechanisms that we’ve got in place can help us to respond much more naturally and much more quickly over time. Whatever you’re using, how can we come together, make decisions, and adapt really quickly?”
• Teams often fear that hearing from everyone will slow down decision making. However, this simple matrix, which assesses effort and impact, can help you to arrive at swifter decisions:

The ideal choices are those that are high impact and low effort. These are the quick wins. Conversely, high effort and low impact choices should be avoided as they are distractions and drains on resource.

5. Long-term planning and agility in harmony

Agility requires action, even in the face of uncertainty. Not knowing everything shouldn’t prevent progress.

You can, however, take a structured approach by recruiting wisely, implementing training programmes and pivoting smartly. Teams, Cox suggested, can ask themselves “what are our skill gaps for now or where are we strong now? What are the skills we’re going to need to make this pivot?”

6. Correlation between debriefing and adaptability

“To adapt, we’ve got to learn,” said Cox with specific reference to the special forces, “and the better we are at debriefing, then the better we are at learning and then adapting.”

He explained that debriefing should be a deliberate, embedded practice. It’s not just about reviewing what happened – or when responding to a crisis – but extracting lessons to fuel future action.

7. Leadership change is a big source of disruption

“To what extent can we get these transitions right?” asked Cox. “Because obviously they have big organisational and team impacts, not just on the individuals close to them, they can filter down to the whole organisation.”

Who are your cultural guardians? Cultural guardians, as discussed by Dr Edd Vahid, are the individuals or mechanisms that ensure core values and practices are preserved during leadership changes. They are, as Cox explained, indispensable. “Any new leader is going to want to change things,” he said, “but what are the pieces that we need to absolutely hold on to? What is handed over to the leaders that we know to be true about this culture in this organisation?”

To sum up…

Looking ahead

This session was the first in a three-part series. Future discussions will explore:

Part 2: Inhibitors to adaptability – what gets in the way?

Part 3: Building a collective playbook for leading in complexity