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?”

What to read next

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

By Paul Ford MBE

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

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

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

However, we like to flip this as an opportunity.

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

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

A part of something bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opening Ceremony: to go or not to go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue days, white days

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

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

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

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

Our role in performance preparation

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

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

What to read next

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

By Richard Young PhD

High performance always comes with plans, systems and structure.

These hold the work together and give people a sense of direction, yet across numerous Olympic cycles and my work with teams in many countries, something deeper has shown up again and again. Repeat performers live by a small set of values that give their journey meaning, and that meaning becomes the story they return to when things get hard. Plans can organise a campaign, but meaning organises the person, and when the person is organised, behaviour aligns with purpose, decisions become cleaner, and responses under pressure strengthen.

Values are not abstract. They sit under the story people tell themselves about why the work matters. When performers are clear on their values, the story they live by gains weight and coherence. Meaning forms around those values, and behaviour follows the meaning. High performance at its core is high quality communication, and that communication begins with the internal dialogue that shapes how people approach their craft, their relationships and their response to the environment around them.

I learned this early in my work with an athlete who became a repeat performer. She spoke often about why she was doing the work, not in long speeches or motivational lines, but in a simple story grounded in a few clear values she believed in. Those values shaped how she behaved each day. She arrived ready because preparation mattered to her. She trained with intent because craft mattered to her. She kept close to people who steadied her because connection mattered to her. When she spoke with her coach she spoke with ownership because responsibility mattered to her. When we reviewed performance she measured herself against her values and her story rather than emotion or expectation. Her story filtered the noise and held her attention on what she could influence, and it stayed steady right through from her hardest performances to her best performances.

This pattern has repeated across many sports, campaigns and environments. The data I collect from repeat performers compared to the rest shows a consistent thread: they carry a story that fits their values and the meaning they bring to their journey, and they speak from that story in ways that guide their behaviour. Their story gives shape to their days and coherence to their choices. It grounds their relationships and helps them navigate difficulty. They are not waiting for meaning to arrive. They are building it and living inside it.

Those who are new or underperforming also care deeply and work hard, yet often do so without a clear set of values or a meaningful story that holds the work together. When values are unclear, meaning becomes vague, and when meaning is vague, behaviour loses structure. People get pulled by changing circumstances, shifting expectations and the noise around them. They work with effort but without consistent, clear direction, which slows their progress and creates friction in the system. This is not a comment on motivation or desire. It is a matter of clarity. Values anchor meaning. Meaning anchors story. Story anchors behaviour.

The power of distributed leadership

We know that the story in high performance environments is more than narrative. It is how people make sense of the path they are on and the role they play in it, and this is where distributed leadership becomes essential. In Amplify I wrote about leadership from the front, which is not the authority of the leader but the agency of the performer. When people are clear on their values and the meaning they bring, they contribute to the collective story of the team rather than waiting for the team to give them one. This alignment accelerates the group because each person brings their own clarity into the shared environment. When people are unclear, they wait for meaning to come from the outside, and that waiting creates misalignment and slows the group when pressure rises.

Distributed leadership grows when individuals write the story they want to live, then bring that story into the environment to help shape the story of the team. It is a form of contribution. It lifts the standard of communication. It clarifies the system. It allows people to act with confidence inside their role and in service of the whole. A team of people who know their own story and the story of the team has more alignment and more collective intelligence than a team with one story and many passive recipients. The power of meaning becomes a competitive advantage when everyone is an author rather than an audience.

One experience stands out to me from a world championships preparation phase. The team had come through a long training block. Performances were mixed, and the meetings were becoming heavier as the event approached. You could sense the pressure beginning to close in. To reset the group, we asked each athlete to tell the story of their season so far, not as a performance review but as an expression of the values they were trying to live and the meaning they brought to their work. One of the younger athletes spoke first. He said his season was about learning how to prepare in the right way and becoming someone who took responsibility for his craft. His values were clear. Growth. Responsibility. Trust. His story immediately shifted the tone in the room. Others followed with similar clarity. They spoke about identity, family, commitment, team and progress. Meaning returned to the group, and with meaning came direction. The environment lifted. And the team leaders connected the individual stories and values to the ambitious story of the team was creating together; people saw themselves first, then saw a clear and inspiring connection to the team story.  That shift carried through to their highest calibre performance due to their collective ability to respond and adapt under pressure.  They had triggered a conviction and belief in a story they had not experienced before.

Belonging: built from a shared sense of meaning

Meaning is one of the strongest levers of behaviour. When people know the values they stand on, their story gains structure. When their story has structure, their behaviour aligns in ways that support agency, transformation and performance. When teams share a sense of meaning built from individual values and stories, belonging grows. Belonging here is not sentiment. It is foundational to team performance.  It keeps the group connected when tension increases and when pressure and uncertainty lift; and helps people stay inside their ‘circle of importance’ rather than drift into the noise.

I often ask leaders and high performers a simple question: What is the story you want to be able to tell about yourself and this team or organisation at the end of this campaign, cycle or career? Their answer reveals their values, priorities and the meaning they bring to the work. It opens the door for the team to see the personal stories that sit underneath performance and the personal meanings that drive behaviour. Most importantly, it gives leaders the opportunity to connect these stories, deepen the shared meaning and align the group around something that feels true to everyone. This is where distributed leadership grows. When people speak from their own story, they lead from the front. They help shape the environment rather than wait for the environment to shape them.

The advantage of meaning follows a clear line. Values shape meaning. Meaning shapes story. Story shapes behaviour. Behaviour shapes performance. When each person knows what they value, understands the meaning behind their work and brings that meaning into the collective story of the team, the group strengthens. Performance lifts. Cohesion deepens. The system grows more resilient because leadership is no longer held by a few. It is carried by many. When people wait for meaning to come from outside, the system slows. Alignment weakens because the stories underneath the work are not visible or connected. Teams are transformed when personal meaning becomes shared meaning.

Meaning does not guarantee medals, yet it strengthens the behaviours that make medals possible. It brings clarity to decisions, alignment to relationships and consistency to daily work. It supports cleaner communication and steadier responses when pressure rises. When meaning is present, people move with intent, and when people move with intent, performance grows.

Medals matter, but meaning matters most.

Richard Young is an internationally renowned performance advisor. He has been involved with 11 Olympics as an athlete, coach, researcher, technologist, and leader working across more than 50 sports and seven countries focused on sustained high performance. He has won international gold medals and coached world champions. He founded international performance programmes including, the Technology & Innovation programmes for Great Britain and New Zealand, and a Performance Knowledge & Learning programme for the New Zealand Olympic, Winter Olympic and Paralympic teams. Across seven Olympic cycles he has researched the differences between medallists and non-medallists, their coaches, support staff, leaders and the system they are in to unlock the keys that separate them from the rest.

More from Richard Young

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

By John Portch

In January, Indiana became college football’s first first-time national champion in 29 years.

It was a lesson to all sleeping giants. Here was a team with the most losses in the sport’s history and, over the course of their 16-0 season, had compiled more wins than between 2020 and 2023 in total.

Indiana Head Coach Curt Cignetti spoke of a “paradigm shift” in the aftermath of the Hoosiers’ 27-21 defeat of Miami.

“People can cling to an old way of thinking, categorising teams as this or that or conferences as this or that or they can adjust to the new world, the shift in the power dynamic in college football today,” he said.

Cignetti was brought in ahead of the 2024 season and transformed the mindset of a team that had been treading water for decades.

“There’s got to be a lot of like-minded individuals who come together for a common purpose, and sometimes that belief has to be a little bit irrational,” said Indiana centre Pat Coogan.

“Especially in a place that hasn’t had success like Indiana. I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen the way this place has been characterised, and when Coach Cig got here, he believed, and he got people to believe. Sometimes people laughed at him and thought he was crazy, but that’s irrational belief. You’ve got to get people to buy-in and believe in the mission.”

With a host of senior players set to graduate, success may not be replicable in the short term, but Cignetti is ready for whatever comes next.

“Perfection is impossible to attain on a consistent basis,” he said. “But we’ll continue to take it one day at a time, one meeting at a time, one practice at a time, and just keep improving and committing to the process and showing up prepared, trying to put it on the field, and see where it takes us.”

It was a powerful message to kick off the year in sports performance and one that underlined the importance of the fundamentals while refusing to stand still.

Which brings us nicely to the happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute these past four weeks.

Insight of the month

‘What underpins successful teams across formats is not uniformity, but clarity of individual responsibility within a collective framework. Team performance does not replace individual accountability; it depends on it.’

In a guest column, James Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire CCC, spoke about facilities being a secondary concern until the leaders had created the right environment to enable athletes, whether they’re the Olympic champions with whom he has worked or Premier League and Champions League-winning footballers, being paramount.

Read more about why high performance is not something leaders should demand. It is something they should enable.

Britain’s Anthony Joshua on his way to winning gold at the 2012 London Olympics. (Scott Heavey/Getty Images)

Surprising insight of the month

Did you know that Team GB built its own hub within the London Olympic Village in 2012. This was very much a “host nation benefit” as Paul Ford MBE called it in another popular guest column last month.

The Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association wrote:

When we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

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

Read more about their approach here.

Team GB flag bearers Helen Glover and Tom Daley pose for a selfie outside the residence of the British Ambassador to France ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Best advice

Leaders Performance Institute members across the globe strive to encourage learning throughout their teams and while it will always be an important feature of any successful team, you should not waste your time on the wrong people.

As performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler explained at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable:

“There’s definitely some people who, you can try as hard as you like to get them to learn and I think we have to be cognisant of our own energy as someone who’s seeking to help. It’s a bit like athletes, isn’t it? If you’re up for it, I’ll give you 150% of my energy. If you’re not, after a period of time, I’ll just go, ‘look, you crack on’. So I think we have to be accepting of that.”

Over the course of an hour, Brunnschweiler and a band of LPI members noted ten strategies for more effective learning.

One you might have missed

Jamie Taylor of Dublin City University and the CoEx|Lab made the case for evidence-informed as opposed to evidence-based practice.

He enlisted the help of students from DCU’s online doctorate and MSc programmes, which are aimed specifically at coaches and practitioners in high performance sport.

One such student is Eilish Ward, the Head of Player Development at the Ladies Gaelic Football Association.

As she told Taylor, you can’t simply drop research on top of a sports programme. It must be used critically, in conjunction with a coach’s own research, and applied in an informed manner.

“There’s not necessarily one solution,” she said. “There’s no one way to learn anything or to gain experience or expertise.”

The key for Ward 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.”

Read more about DCU’s programmes here.

Quote of the month

“We have to become diplomats, high‑level development people who can manage such diverse groups. Somewhere along the line, we need to start creating those development opportunities for everybody who’s on this call.”

These are the attention-grabbing words of a performance director working in India who spelled out the challenges in talent identification and development.

He and a host of LPI members listed five of the most common trends (and five opportunities) in that space.

Good to know

Organisational values should be your carrot, not your stick.

That’s according to Emma Keith, a Royal Air Force Group Captain, is the Commandant of the Tedder Academy of Leadership at the RAF. In 2015 she became the first woman to run RAF Officer Training.

In her appearance at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, she spoke about how the RAF’s values, all contained within the prosaically titled Air Publication One document, had been used to browbeat good people.

“Actually 99% of my organisation are amazing, they really are, and I wanted a document that was aspirational for them, that they could believe in, that it was the organisation they wanted to be a part of. And we know from all the different behavioural models of change that it only happens when people want to change, not because it’s been forced on them.”

Again, the focus was learning strategies in an inspiring presentation.

The RAF’s Emma Keith onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. (Leaders)

What’s coming up for members

Virtual Learning

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.

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By John Portch

“I hear a lot these days about how the pace of change is getting faster and faster. I actually think we’re almost past that now,” said Tim Cox.

“It feels like change is everywhere all of the time, which means that we need to be as good as we can be, so that we can respond appropriately all of the time. It’s no small ask.”

Cox, the Director & Lead for High Performance Research at Management Futures, is leading a Skills Sprint Session virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the topic of adaptability.

It is a skill, as Cox explained, that was highly coveted by the coaches and practitioners who contributed to our Trend Report earlier this year.

Not that this is anything new. “It is well known that Charles Darwin did not talk about ‘the survival of the fittest’,” Cox continued, with reference to Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of the Species.

“The endpoint of Darwin’s research was that it’s not the strongest or the most intelligent of the species that survives, it is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Over the course of 25 minutes, Cox discussed traps that people can fall victim to in pursuit of better adaptability. He also brought into focus the qualities of adaptive leaders and the skills that can aid adaptation.

Firstly, those four traps that inhibit adaptation:

1. Operating on outdated assumptions. Look at the decline of ’90s giants Nokia and Blockbuster: what works today will not always work. As the business author Jim Collins half-joked, “only the paranoid survive”.
2. Being hijacked by emotions. If you’re emotionally affected by the challenge ahead, it can inhibit your response.
3. Failure to create sufficient buy-in for the change. Sharing the message is one thing, but you have to understand how others feel about it and work with them.
4. Overly directive leadership. A crisis may require directive leadership, but not indefinitely. Over time, when people look to take the cue from their leader it reduces autonomy and inhibits adaptability.

Cox then set out the four qualities of adaptive leaders and the skills and tools that support those qualities:

1. They spot the need for change

“It is important to actually spot the need for change and not just continue doing what you’re doing.”

Adaptive leaders…

Are able to shift perspective. “Adaptive leaders don’t just sit within their position,” said Cox. “They can see it from others’ perspectives, whether it’s a stakeholder’s or your competition’s.”

Are good at listening. “Our response to challenges to the status quo: how are we receiving them? Are we hearing them or are we just simply emotionally responding and cutting them down in whatever way?”

Conduct regular debriefs and reviews. Cox mentioned both the OODA Loop and the STOP framework, the latter of which he outlined:

“There are many other frameworks. You will have your own,” said Cox. “But in whatever shape or form, remove yourself and take a moment on the balcony to see things from a different perspective.”

Scan for assumptions. “What we are assuming may not be that useful. Think of an issue you’re currently dealing with and write down eight assumptions you’re currently holding about it.”

Cox then invited Leaders Performance Institute members to ask themselves two questions:

• Which of these assumptions might be holding me or holding us back?
• Which of these assumptions are worth testing?

2. They are the grandmasters of their response.

“This speaks to calmness but it also speaks to the strategic element and scanning ahead in terms of the decisions that might need to be taken.”

Adaptive leaders…

Plan for contingencies. “They red team in peace and look for what might happen in the same way that a team will plan for what happens when they go two goals down or receive a red card.”

Understand that self-care isn’t a luxury. “They put on their own mask first,” said Cox. “What might be your first response that buys you time to then consider a better, wider, more sustainable response?”

3. They empower people to contribute to the adaptation response.

“This is about understanding ideas from both within and outside the team.”

Adaptive leaders…

Convene their people and successfully convey the need to adapt.

Encourage collaboration and gather ideas. “Invite the outside in,” said Cox, citing the words of professor Alex Hill.

Test and learn. As Cox put it, they fire bullets before cannonballs. “Let’s test it small and then let’s see if it works; then we can fire the cannonball.”

4. They are adept at leading the change

“This is often where adaptation fails. It’s one thing to spot the change, it’s another to decide your response and empower people to put their mark on it.”

Adaptive leaders…

Mobilise people behind the strategy. “Key to this is understanding the roles individuals will play in that strategy,” said Cox. They communicate tangibly what they’ll be doing and what they can expect from the leader.”

Navigate resistance or conflict. “Enabling people to voice their emotions and values. Often, once they’ve been heard, even if they disagree, they’ll commit.”

Flex where flex is required. “Again, they spot the need for change.”

By John Portch

In October 2024, Harlequins ended a run of eight consecutive defeats to their London rivals Saracens.

Quins’ 17-10 victory at the Twickenham Stoop ended five years of frustration and marked a complete turnaround from the 2023-24 Premiership Rugby season when they conceded 90 points in losing both home and away to Saracens.

Stephan Lewies, the lock who captained Quins to their long-awaited victory, had also endured every one of those losses. The run was particularly galling given the relative parity between the teams during that period. Quins were themselves Premiership champions in 2021.

So what was different this time? “Coming off a record like that in your derby game, in a way you go looking for answers in the wrong places,” Lewies told an audience several weeks later at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“In the past, we’d review what’d gone wrong, and the coaches – who often feel pressure in a different way to the players – would go ‘let’s change this and let’s add that’ because Saracens are brilliant.”

It took eight reverses for Lewies and his team to work out why. “We’d always changed our tactics for Saracens,” he continued. “We would change how we structured our week.”

Quins, he explained, usually worked off an 80:20 game model where it is “80 per cent us and 20 per cent we change for the other team”. However, “we often went 50:50 against Saracens; training 50 per cent on us and 50 per cent on them.”

They did things differently ahead of the October 2024 match. Firstly, the players and coaches met independently before convening to discuss what was needed. The club had adopted a similar approach in their successful quest for the Premiership title in 2021. Their director of rugby [the de facto head coach] departed mid-season and the players worked with the remaining coaches to devise a winning formula after the club decided to wait until the off-season to appoint a replacement.

Once again it gave the team clarity in their convictions. “We said we’ve been constantly changing for this opposition because of the pressure that’s mounting on us,” said Lewies, “and we agreed that we should go back to what we do and just try to do that better.” That meant “doubling down” and going almost “90:10” in the week building up to the match. “That created clarity and alignment from the coaches to the players. And when the pressure came in this game, we could turn to something we’d done for the whole season, and basically for years, versus something new in a pressured moment.

“It’s much easier to stuff up something new under pressure versus something you’ve done for a long time because it’s already second nature.”

Stephan Lewies in conversation with Rachel Vickery onstage at the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval.

Lewies’ reflections chimed with session moderator Rachel Vickery, a high-performance specialist helping teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

“So much of pressure is what happens off the pitch. When you’re on the pitch that’s actually your comfort zone in many ways and so you’re more prepared for that,” she said.

“Many teams have a monkey on their back around a particular opponent and that can change how the game is approached, which adds a lot of pressure.”

Lewies agreed and felt that being process rather than results-driven was ultimately what led to the result that day.

“It gives you freedom on the pitch to just go out and play,” he said. “You know your prep is done. Go out and express yourself. When you have clarity and alignment with the coaches you’re not asking yourself on the pitch ‘what’s the coach thinking?’ whenever there’s a tough decision. You almost know the answer to the question before it happens because you’re totally aligned in what you want to achieve in the game and at different stages of the game.”

It is an attitude Lewies takes into difficult conversations, which he faced often during his four years as Quins captain. The key was to be well prepared and, more often than not, those conversations would not be as tough as anticipated.

“If you kick the can down the road it can become a bigger problem. It can be scary to have that tough conversation in the moment, but that’s where growth happens, in that adversity. You grow closer as people and as teams.”

He recounted the story of a teammate who once skipped training and was suspended. Lewies endorsed the punishment but was labelled a ‘Judas’ by the player in question. The pair eventually made up after a frank exchange of views when it was clear that Lewies would listen to what his teammate had to say. It stopped matters escalating further and, as Lewies happily explained, made their relationship stronger.

“Getting him back on board and understanding him was critical for us.”

It was in such moments that the bonds, self-belief and confidence were forged that would eventually see off Saracens.

“There is so much value in creating opportunities to collaborate.”

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How Do you Develop the Most Expert Coaching Workforce in World Football?

By John Portch

More than half of coaches and practitioners feel they could be better at balancing challenge and support for their athletes and other personnel.

That is according to a straw poll of Leaders Performance Institute members conducted at the outset of a virtual roundtable we hosted in late-August.

Some members – 42 per cent – rate themselves at four out of five, but everyone in attendance felt there was room for improvement.

With the scene set, members went on to highlight four factors that underpin a good balance of challenge and support, with reflections on how these look in practice in their environments.

1. Psychological safety… or psychological confidence?

The idea of psychological safety was raised several times. Psychological services are a key offering in the provision of safe spaces. A member who works in a senior health and wellness role in a major US league, spoke of their organisation’s success in providing confidential counselling services that support individuals in their pursuit of performance goals.

Psychological safety has long been a performance buzz term, but a team in motorsport is taking it upon itself to reframe its terminology. Their wellbeing lead told the table: “We’re playing around with the idea of creating psychologically confident people. In meetings, we make sure that we give everybody a chance to speak up… there’s also got to be challenge, to get [people] to that psychologically confident point.”

Words clearly matter, as a performance support coach in British varsity sport pointed out. “The language we use when we’re talking to the athletes, it’s not a ‘challenge’, it’s not an ‘adversity’, it’s ‘exploration’, ‘playing’, ‘responsibility’.”

Another idea proffered is to take steps to reduce the fear of (inevitable) failure by creating a low-support, high-challenge environment. “We’re trying to make our training environments more intimidating and challenging than the game would be, so that’s not only going to make those game environments easier and normalise failure, but it also allows them to fail in front of their peers and get more comfortable in that space,” said a coach from American baseball. “Then what the support side looks like to that is not just coach to player but player-to-player; figuring out those challenging environments and finding different solutions with each other.”

2. Set standards and expectations first

This provides clarity and should remove doubts. “The places that do this really well, without exception, spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a training block or at the beginning of a year discussing what the priorities for that thing are and what the standard is,” said a performance science advisor from the Canadian Olympic system.

With those standards in place you have a framework on which to build trust. “When you get to work with a player that you might not know as well, that’s just going to help you get to the trust piece faster and be able to challenge each other in that way,” the baseball coach added.

“One of the things that I see,” said a performance science advisor based in Canada, “is when it’s not just the coach that’s holding athletes accountable, it’s the athletes holding each other accountable as well. That’s much easier when there’s been some time spent talking about what the expectations for the standard are.”

The idea, as a wellbeing lead in motorsport said, is to create “better challenging conversations because it really is a massive coaching benefit. Just creating that space for challenging conversations, practising it, scripting it, and it becoming a natural part of our every day”.

3. Customised support

An attendee with experience of coaching in English football argued that challenge and support is more about the individual than the environment. They said: “Individuals need different things at different times, so if we understand an individual’s needs, then we, as a group, are best placed to cater to individual needs based on where somebody is.”

This is reflected in the psychological services provided by teams. “We are mainly here to navigate and help them navigate their career progression on an individual level,” said the aforementioned health and wellness lead. These services are increasingly integrated and perceived as a part of a holistic offering. “The fact that we have this space in and of itself is really hitting the nail on the head in terms of how much just caring on an individual level really does impact performance.”

It is also incumbent on coaches and staff to know their athletes. “I was reflecting on an athlete who’s getting three buses in order to just get to training, and is just struggling to feed himself,” said the coach in English football. “Lots of that wouldn’t be known unless we were properly getting to know somebody.”

“It literally is just needs analysis,” a member added. “I think just really understanding the individual, because there’s just so much variety and meeting them where they are in the correct language.”

4. Foster autonomy

This is critical in an era where, as one attendee put it, “we’re observing that student-athletes are almost afraid to try new things.”

“Getting athletes to engage in ‘what does this need to look like in order for us to have success?’ really helps foster autonomy,” said another member whose work brings them into regular contact with younger athletes. “They’re an active part of the process of deciding what’s going to happen next, what went wrong, how do we fix it.”

“Getting them to buy into their own responsibility is critical,” added a race engineer when reflecting on drivers in their motorsport. “They have to be ready to leave here with the ability to be responsible for their own actions.”

Another participant spoke of an idea they had while working in English football: “We put constraints in place that meant that the athlete couldn’t revert to his normal type. He had to go and find a new way to execute the same outcome.”

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By John Portch

Innovation in the NHS can all too easily be stifled by tradition or, in the worst cases, hierarchical cultures rooted in fear. It is no wonder that crises emerge.

Having read that, you may think that just as readily applies to the world of sport.

“How can we transform underperforming environments into thriving ones?”

That is the question Rakesh Patel, a nephrological surgeon who works at Barts Hospital in London, asked the audience at last November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

His remit includes working on the NHS’s Recovery Support Programme [recently renamed the Provider Improvement Programme], which is designed to support underperforming hospitals and medical providers who have been placed in ‘special measures’.

Patel and his colleagues will work with these hospitals to help identify systemic issues that lead to habitual failures. They will implement evidence-based interventions and build local capacity to sustain improvements once they’ve left the building.

Away from clinical practice, Patel is a professor at Queen Mary University, where 2,300 medical students matriculate at any one time.

As such, he has given a lot of thought to learning and failure in the NHS, which is the ‘sacred cow’ of British society.

What does the Recovery Support Programme do?

Its aim is to mitigate crises and enable people to learn from their mistakes. For Patel, it has to start with rethinking underperformance, because jumping to conclusions helps no one.

“We only see the world as we see it, but not how others see it,” he says. “In a performance role, if we’re assessing someone, we often see the world as we think it should be and not actually how it is.”

Underperformance, whether in experienced clinicians or medical students, cannot always be attributed to a lack of skill or effort.

Just as distractions, pressure, poor communication or emotional stress are prevalent in sport, their presence is felt with greater consequence in medical settings.

Take this feedback from medical students when reflecting on video footage of their mistakes:

“The last one upset me most as a doctor,” says Patel, who later added that judgement can degenerate into reported cases of outright hostility. “I found it upsetting that these doctors were coming in to do work and we’re being nasty to them and that was why they were underperforming.”

At some level, as Patel explains, these errors point to the human limitations of working memory.

He cites The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, the highly regarded 1956 paper by psychologist George A Miller, who said that a person has a working memory capacity for five chunks of information, plus or minus two. That means placing the working memory under too much strain will lead to (often avoidable) errors.

Patel says: “Any threat to working memory will impair performance. If you need your brain and you need to think through things, it’s likely you’re going to have underperformance.”

It follows then that to enable better learning – and prevent avoidable errors – there needs to be less pressure on people’s working memory.

“If you add up all those bits contextual things – inattention, distraction – you can see why memory matters,” says Patel. “You can literally only remember three to seven things and, in that moment, when it hits your eyes and your ears, if you do not do something with it in the first half a second to three seconds, it’s gone. That’s why in high pressure situations when we’re under stress is when our memory gets hit. We can only focus on what we need to.”

That is why medicine values reps and evaluation as much as any team. “When things get complex, you don’t need to think about it.”

With this in mind, it is easier to choose the right form of feedback.

“We all talk about feedback and there’s probably more books on feedback than anything else,” says Patel. “There is an evidence base around how you give it and we wanted to give the best feedback, in the way that it needed to hit and cut through.”

This was tricky to navigate in hospitals placed under special measures. “They weren’t the easiest characters to work with,” he adds, “but it depends on what’s important. If there’s the greater good and we’re going to work together, then even the biggest ego you can get down to your level and work through.

“And we only went into hospitals if we had CEO buy-in and everyone was going to engage. So we taught them how to give feedback better.”

He highlighted four formats favoured in the NHS:

1. Facilitated self-reflection

“One of the most important interventions you can ever do is ask someone ‘how do you think that went?’ And if you do that before they start and you say ‘how well do you think you’re going to do before you start?’ You then get them to calibrate what they think with what you think.”

It was, as Patel says, “the lightbulb moment”. He also underlines the value of sitting with doctors as they watch themselves on video. “It’s not about telling them what they’ve done but asking them; ‘these are your notes, you wrote them, tell me what you were thinking at the table’. You don’t dictate, but get them to reflect.”

2. Revisit video assessments at periodic intervals

Patel and his colleagues test doctors and students from the outset and provide instant feedback. More critically, however, they will also revisit feedback at regular intervals over the following weeks.

“I’ve told you about working memory and fear – they’re going to forget it,” he says of that instant appraisal. “So we videoed everything and we drip fed the feedback over time. Why was that important? Because I don’t know if you’ve ever done it, but watching yourself make a mistake three or four weeks down the line when you know you’ve made that mistake, and being reminded of it, is really powerful.”

3. Peer to peer learning

Sometimes Patel takes himself out of the equation. “We often forget what it’s like to be a novice. That’s why peer-to-peer works really well. So if you’ve got someone new, get someone who’s of a similar age that can explain it better.”

4. Ask them to ‘teach it back’

“We do this when we teach clinical skills,” says Patel, alluding to evidence pointing to the efficacy of this approach to learning. “There’s something about having the confidence plus the competence to be able to explain a skill to someone else.”

The Recovery Support Programme approach is scalable too.

“I couldn’t go into all these hospitals, and this training model needed to be scaled,” says Patel, who explains that pharmacists were uniquely placed within hospitals to deliver the model in his stead. For one, a large proportion of the noted errors were prescription-based.

And it worked. Doctors trained by Patel’s team and those who have taken the training model make fewer mistakes. “We trained them to be resistant to all the trauma and all the nonsense around them, to still focus on the task.”

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