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

By 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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Transparency, Empathy and Empowerment: Five Ways Teams Are Serving their People in 2025

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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Talent ID and Development: The Race to Deliver Formula 1’s First Female World Champion

By John Portch

At the 2017 APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] meeting in Vietnam, the then-Prime Minister of New Zealand, Dame Jacinda Ardern, was physically barred by security from entering the main meeting room.

“It was a leader-only event and they’d decided I was not a leader,” she told an audience during an onstage appearance at Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall earlier in June. “I find myself really holding back from saying ‘I’m the Prime Minister’ as if somehow it’s name-dropping,” she continued.

Within moments, Malcolm Turnbull, the then-Prime Minister of Australia, with whom she had been talking in the corridor, returned, grabbed Ardern’s arm, and walked through with her while indignantly uttering the words ‘she’s the Prime Minister of New Zealand’.

Leaders at that APEC meeting had been given identifying pins to wear, but Ardern’s was covered by her long hair.

Ardern, who served as Prime Minister of New Zealand between 2017 and 2023, has spoken of her impostor syndrome during various public appearances and also in her recent memoir A Different Kind of Power.

The APEC security staff may have perceived her as an impostor due to her gender – she was one of just three female leaders at that meeting – but that was not an issue for Ardern herself. New Zealand has long had women serve in senior governmental posts, including Prime Minister [three], Speaker of the House, and Governor-General [four]. “I didn’t look out at the world and think that a woman couldn’t lead,” said Ardern, “but I didn’t think you could lead with my personality.”

She was 14 when her favourite teacher introduced her to the concept of impostor syndrome, ‘a phrase,’ she writes, ‘I would remember for the rest of my life’. It represented ‘puzzle pieces clicking together’.

Some telltale signs of Ardern’s impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome is not a recognised psychiatric disorder but it is experienced by a whole range of people regardless of their accomplishments.

Ardern alludes to three areas where her impostor syndrome has tended to manifest.

Her perfectionism: as she explains in her memoir, she was noted as a skilled public speaker and debater at high school. Nevertheless she suffered from debilitating nerves. Even with her exhaustive preparation she ‘could not shake the feeling that something could go terribly wrong. And when it did, it would also be proof that I wasn’t good enough to be there in the first place.’

Unrealistic personal expectations: during her recent appearance on HBR’s IdeaCast, Ardern spoke of the notion in leadership “that confidence is built through absolute knowledge and displaying a sense of the fact that we have all of the answers all of the time.” It is an idea she has come to refute.

Unfavourable personal comparisons: Ardern’s father once protectively described her as ‘too thin-skinned’ for politics. There were times when she concurred. She noted the resilience of Helen Clark when she worked as a researcher in the former New Zealand Prime Minister’s office in the early 2000s. ‘And while Helen Clark had shown me that it was possible to be a woman in politics,’ Ardern wrote, ‘no one had shown me that you could be sensitive and survive’.

How Ardern deals with it

She accepts that impostor syndrome doesn’t go away. “In my experience, it does not,” said Ardern onstage. In any case, “it’s such a broad turn of phrase,” she added. “I would prefer to just describe it as a confidence gap because I think there’s a spectrum and, at any given time, you can be in different places on that.”

She does not accept it as a sign of weakness. When she was asked to go beyond her perceived areas of competence, her instinctive response as PM was “to anticipate risk, to prepare, to bring humility to what you’re doing, to bring in experts, to bring in advisors. And don’t we want that in our leaders?”

She does not believe that impostor syndrome is always bad. “Just remember all that it brings you,” she said. “It doesn’t take everything, it brings you something as well. Just remember that I existed as Prime Minister for five years with my monkey on my shoulder and I do believe it made me better at my job.”

A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern. Available now from Penguin Random House.

By John Portch

Let’s start with a question: is the VUCA Framework still fit for purpose?

Many of you will be familiar with VUCA (which stands for ‘volatility’, ‘uncertainty’, ‘complexity’ and ‘ambiguity’) and employed it in your day to day work.

It looks like this:

VUCA was devised in military circles in the 1980s as a strategic response to external forces and is both analytical and structural. It remains a useful tool for planning and building resilience.

However, there is a growing consensus that VUCA alone does not capture the emotional and psychological toll as environments become increasingly complex.

In 2018, the author Jamais Cascio, a self-styled ‘futurist’, published his BANI Framework, which is his effort to introduce a more human-centred lens, that emphasises fragility, emotional responses, and the breakdown of linear logic.

Here is an outline:

And here is how it may look in your environment:

“Cascio sees BANI as parallelling VUCA, but he thinks VUCA is not real enough,” said Tim Cox of Management Futures, the host of a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “He’s not saying BANI replaces VUCA, but he feels that it’s much more up to date with what’s going on at the moment.”

It helped to set the scene for the second session of our three-part Virtual Roundtable series entitled ‘Leading in Complexity’.

Which trap is most common in your organisation?

In part one, we explored how adaptability can increase the chances of an effective response to complexity.

In part two, we turned our attention to four common factors that can inhibit your ability to be adaptable and asked the table to select their most common ‘trap’.

1. Being overwhelmed or hijacked by our emotions – cited by 11 per cent
2. Operating from out-of-date assumptions or an out-of-date map of the world – 47 per cent
3. When authoritative leadership causes a bottleneck – 21 per cent
4. Inflexibility – 21 per cent

Cox then spoke to each trap in turn.

1. Being overwhelmed or hijacked by our emotions

This trap was cited by the fewest attendees but, as Cox explained, “even in sport we are often hijacked by emotions and we fail to adapt because they override our thinking.”

One must “relax, observe, and make a call”. Cox has some tips on that front:

• Recognise and harness your emotional responses – don’t suppress them – to help maintain equilibrium under pressure.
• Practise deliberate breathing to help regulate arousal levels and maintain composure.
• Rehearse for high-pressure moments – this enables leaders to respond with intention rather than reacting impulsively.

2. Operating from out-of-date assumptions or an out of date map of the world

Nearly half of attendees cited this as the most prominent trap.

It is an enacting metaphor too. “The classic operating from an out-of-date map was the belief that the world was flat,” said Cox. “It limited people and it spread fear in people not to go beyond certain points.”

Without active sense-making, he explained, leaders risk falling into mental ruts that limit adaptability.

Cox recommended the following:

• Stay open to both the internal and external environment. Seek new insights from all sources and, as far as possible, foster the ‘collective brain’ in pursuit of collaborative reflection and shared understanding.
• Leaders should routinely challenge their assumptions, not just during crises or formal reviews. Unchecked assumptions can be a major blocker to progress and adaptability.
• Find ways to surface and explore new ways of thinking. Cox has witnessed Lego Serious Play, which is a facilitation method designed to provoke conversation.
• Employ the OODA Loop and STOP frameworks. The OODA Loop is explained in all its glory here. Cox shared a slide that illustrated STOP.

It is a practical method for fostering adaptability and creative problem-solving in complex environments:

3. When authoritative leadership causes a bottleneck

Our poll indicated that more than one in five attendees rank this as their team’s most prominent inhibitor.

“Authoritative leadership has been proven time and time again to be effective in very short bursts,” said Cox, “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 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

4. Inflexibility

As with authoritative leadership, our poll indicated that more than one in five attendees rank this as their team’s most prominent inhibitor.

Cox had a selection of ideas that leaders might consider:

• Low-risk experimentation and incremental learning. “If you want to test something test it small. Only once you’ve proven it do you test with a bigger project.”
• Create safe zones where teams can experiment without fear of failure. “Where’s the sandbox that we can play in so that we can adapt? Then we’re not just sat there waiting for the world to change.”
• Environmental design and psychological safety both foster flexible thinking. “Place the brain in a space that’s more amenable to learning.”

Other inhibitors cited by Leaders Performance Institute members:

• Success can create complacency. When an organisation is winning or leading, there’s often less perceived need to change. This can reduce the urgency or willingness to challenge existing practices.
• Excessive caution and due diligence. Even when presented with novel opportunities, organisations may hesitate due to fear of doing something untested or unfamiliar.
• Over-reliance on process and certainty. This is especially problematic when emerging technologies require rapid experimentation and adaptation.
• Emotional bias and distorted perception. To build on Cox’s earlier point, leaders should be aware of their own cognitive and emotional filters when interpreting events or people. It takes intellectual humility to recognise that your perspective may be limited, biased or closed to certain viewpoints. Such self-awareness helps to prevent emotionally-driven or misinformed decisions.

Sign up for Part Three

In the third and final session on 3 July, we will explore building a collective playbook for leading in complexity:

Learning Series: Leading in Complexity (Part Three)

By Luke Whitworth

The coaches and practitioners who downloaded The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport were given the opportunity to share their thoughts at a recent Virtual Roundtable.

The session was led by two report contributors, namely Edd Vahid, the Head of Academy Football Operations at the Premier League, and Ben Baroody, the Executive Director at the Center for Sports Leadership & Learning at Abilene Christian University.

Firstly, the duo asked the virtual room to select which of the five trends highlighted in the Trend Report resonated most with them. This is what the poll revealed:

1. Alignment is more integral to success than ever before – 42 per cent
2. Leadership is stagnating – 16 per cent
3. Resourcefulness continues to trump resource – 16 per cent
4. Psychology is increasingly game-changing – 16 per cent
5. Smart teams are leading the tech arms race – 11 per cent

We now had the basis for our discussion of the five.

Trend No 1: Alignment is more integral to success than ever before

The clear winner in our poll. Baroody suggested that while ‘alignment’ is a commonly-used term, its practical application is often vague; additionally, silos persist. There are several common factors that hinder alignment:

• A lack of clarity, including board-level understanding (and support).
• The growth of multidisciplinary teams and the complexity of performance mean there is often tension between organisational purpose and departmental goals. This can lead to unresolved interdepartmental tensions.
• The increasing commercialisation of sport as business and performance operations converge.
• The post-Covid transition to hybrid working continues and the comparative lack of in-person interaction means teams must be more deliberate in their efforts.

Baroody stressed the need for clarity in daily operations, especially in decision-making and strategic direction, if alignment is to be brought to bear. Vahid also praised practitioners who can simplify complexities and present ideas in a clear manner that promotes unity.

Trend No 2: Leadership is stagnating

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 the floor pointed out, have less bandwidth, less time for staff development and even less time for staff onboarding.

Baroody observed that even at organisations that prioritise leadership development, stagnation is still reported.  For him, 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 highlighted the importance of skills including influencing, an ability to hold honest conversations, and active listening.

Trend No 3: Resourcefulness continues to trump resource

Performance programmes are impacted in all directions whether it’s by ownership, internal politics or resource allocation.

As Vahid illustrated, your people remain your central competitive advantage. He argued that success is less about having greater resources than prioritising more effectively. Both he and Baroody emphasised a leaders ability to adapt, which comes from greater alignment around a clear purpose. With clarity comes a greater ability to prioritise.

Trend No 4: Psychology is increasingly game-changing

The Trend Report identified psychology as the most underserved area across the human performance disciplines in sport.

More than 40 per cent made that point despite a full 80 per cent stating their belief that psychology is ‘very important’ to the enhancement of human performance.

So if we know psychology is vitally important, why is the consensus that it isn’t working effectively across parts of the industry? There are several commonly cited reasons:

• Too often psychology is perceived as a tool only for when things go wrong.
• A lack of understanding in how psychology interacts with adjacent disciplines such as player care and wellbeing. This leads to inconsistencies for both the psychologist in their practice and stakeholder understanding.
• Mental skills, as an element of psychology, were described by one participant as a “side dish” rather than as a core component of their programme.

There are, however, steps that teams can take:

• Adopt a strengths-based, proactive approach that integrates psychological skills into daily routines for both athletes and staff.
• Better integration stemming from clearer role definitions and broader access to psychological services.
• Psychological services can be hard to measure. Find metrics that enable psychologists to demonstrate the efficacy of their work.

Trend No 5: Smart teams are leading the tech arms race

Vahid stated that while we remain “data rich” we are still “insight-poor”. In the Trend Report, only 43 per cent of practitioners reported having a clear decision-making process for adopting new technologies, which means the rapid pace of development is not always matched by effective integration.

Vahid, Baroody and the wider table offered a series of tips:

• First understand the performance questions you are trying to solve before engaging with tech; be more evidence-based and solution-focused.
• Not all tech is created equal and it is too easy to accumulate unused tools (which add to the inefficiency). Promote rigorous evaluation processes that take into account your organisational goals.
• More sports and teams are hiring chief technology officers or R&D leads to oversee their tech strategy and to guard against siloed adoption. It’s worked in other industries and sport should pay heed.

Other trends in your sport, discipline or environment that are not mentioned in the Trend Report:

• A lack of diversity in leadership. The hiring of the same people for the same roles. Perhaps this contributes to stagnating leadership. Recruitment methods must evolve to meet the changing landscape and more time must be spent identifying good leaders.
• Similarly, there is a lack of suitable mentors. Teams must invest more in their staff and mentorship schemes to ensure healthy levels of both challenge and support.
• A lack of resource and clarity around wellbeing and belonging. Both are crucial as work environments evolve.
• More openness to learning. People are increasingly looking beyond sport for inspiration.
• The increasing need to demonstrate ROI. It is important to find suitable mechanisms.

And if you haven’t read the Trend Report yet:

The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport

Main Image: Fred Pompermayer / Red Bull Content Pool

By John Portch

“Time really slows down,” says Red Bull surfer Ian Walsh of the moment he rides a big wave.

“In every other part of my life there’s a million things going on. I feel like I always have ten balls in the air. Did I forget to take the laundry out? Did I put it in the dryer? I have bills to pay, groceries to buy. And surfing is one of the few places in the world where that all just drifts away.”

This level of focus may sound familiar to athletes, but the stakes of big wave surfing are something else entirely. One false move and Walsh risks serious injury every time he mounts his board.

Walsh has built a career on his coolness under pressure, which is why he was invited to share his insights at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull Media House in Santa Monica last year.

Ian Walsh poses for a portrait at the Volcom Pipe Pro on 4 February 2018, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, USA. [Zak Noyle / Red Bull Content Poo]l

1. He acknowledges and harnesses his fear

“Those nerves and everything you fear are natural, and you can use that to elevate your performance,” said Walsh. “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.”

This ability comes with “repetitions and time”. Walsh was in town for a training block at Red Bull’s state-of-the-art Athlete Performance Center ahead of the northern hemisphere summer season. “I’m going to take full advantage of having this amount of time in a facility like this,” he added. “It gives me the chance to push myself in a controlled environment.”

2. He keeps his ‘smart brain’ online

Walsh can keep his ‘smart brain’ online under pressure. It is a term often used by high-performance specialist Rachel Vickery. “Have you got enough buffer in the system to absorb that natural increase in arousal state peaking?” she said on the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2023.

“Every human has a threshold that basically says if my arousal stays below my threshold or below my red line, I can perform in a way that I’ve got a lot more control of. If I’ve got more buffer in the system, so to speak, then when I get the normal increase in arousal it’s still under control and it’s not shooting me across the red line.”

In Walsh’s case, he de-escalates and grounds himself through the ‘breathe-up’ technique, which is a cycle of diaphragmatic breathing aimed at lowering his heart rate and preparing his body to stay relaxed underwater for an extended period.

Additionally, thanks to training alongside Red Bull freediver Kirk Krack, Walsh has learned to hold his breath underwater for up to five minutes. “It’s creating situations where I could elevate my heart rate and then get into a breath hold and understand how my body is going to react and eventually adapt to those scenarios.”

“It’s a skill in and of itself to then go, ‘how do I apply that once this physiological threat response kicks in? How well am I able to adapt and adjust and execute when all those changes happen?’” said Vickery, who would no doubt approve of Walsh’s strategies.

3. He already knows what to do when things go wrong

Walsh has long had a firm interest in meteorology and bathymetry [the study of the seabed, lakebeds and riverbeds]. He can pinpoint with reasonable accuracy when and where the most suitable swells will appear during both the northern and southern hemisphere surfing seasons. He said: “The reason it evolved to so much precision is to give myself as much of an opportunity on those special days as I can, because those days are rare and everything can change so fast on those mega swells.

He then readies his equipment and support team. “By having my preparation done, I can get absolutely smoked on a wave, break my board, everything gets washed onto the rocks, but I have everything ready to go again. I can go right to the boat or the jet ski, get my second board, catch my breath, make sure everything’s good and then get back into the lineup within 15-20 minutes.

“If you don’t have that ready, you could spend two hours dealing with it and it could be another month to six weeks or even the next season when you get another opportunity to push yourself in that calibre of surf.”

His meticulousness extends to listing and ranking restaurant menus in different locations. It drives his partner up the wall. “I take it into my normal life and my girlfriend can attest to how annoying those details are.”

Jokes aside, Walsh’s approach calls to mind the words of mountaineer Kenton Cool, who once told an audience at a Leaders Sport Performance Summit: “People often think of extreme adventure athletes as possessing a ridiculous appetite for risk, that we’re reckless, foolhardy and make illogical decisions. In reality, it’s quite the opposite.”

Ian Walsh photo session for The Red Bulletin, Los Angeles, 19 July 2024. [Maria Jose Govea / The Red Bulletin]

Walsh’s near-catastrophic failures have taught him to be humble when ironing out creases in his performance. “Letting go of some of your ego will create a lot more latitude for opportunities,” he said. “Maybe I did get annihilated on that wave, but I was also an eighth of an inch from making it.”

Walsh studies film of his efforts. He is also a comprehensive note-taker. “I can go back and be like ‘this swell angle, these winds, these tides are shaping up like January 10, 2004 [a date on which he suffered a severe injury – one of several throughout his career]’.” He can then tell himself “maybe I should have ridden this forward or tried those fins. Maybe our water safety protocol could have been a little more buttoned-up.”

What to read next

Neurodiverse Athletes: Some Key Coaching Considerations

By John Portch

Even at the moment of her greatest coaching triumph, Arsenal Women Head Coach Renée Slegers was thinking about the future.

“We want to keep on building from this,” said Slegers after her side had defeated Barcelona Femení 1-0 in May’s Uefa Women’s Champions League final.

“We believe in who we are and what we do and we want to keep on building and keep on going next season.”

Slegers, who is less than a year into her first head coaching role, knows the risk of standing still, both as a team and as a head coach.

Throughout the fifth month, the Leaders Performance Institute was on hand to deliver a selection of sessions to help members further hone their leadership skills, from the art of influencing to introducing and managing more efficient processes for testing tech.

Here are some of the choicest cuts.

To influence, you need to listen

Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures hosted an ‘influencing skills’ session for Leaders Performance Institute members as part of our Leadership Skills Series.

He introduced the topic of ‘listening well’, which supports influencing in two specific ways.

“It helps the intimacy part of the trust equation and it gives you the context for a person’s point of view,” he said. “You’re more prepared when the time comes for you to share your knowledge and suggest a course of action.

“Active listening is when you’re not only tuned into what someone says but also what they feel and believe picking up on both their verbal and non-verbal communication is the foundation of intimacy and the antithesis of self-interest.”

He shared the following image to illustrate his point:

When you’re talking to someone you are hoping to influence it’s always useful to reflect on the goals of each conversation, both what you want and what the other person needs as a way to determine the best way to listen at the moment. And you may realise that a different mode or combinations of modes would be better.

Jeff Pagliano, Management Futures

Top tips for leading in complexity

In May, we also launched a Learning Series that explored adaptability in the complex world of high performance. In the first session, Tim Cox of Management Futures offered a series of seven tips, including: prioritise time for analysing what is changing.

Here’s what that entails:

• 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?

Read all seven tips here.

Are you able to thoroughly assess tech solutions?

At the beginning of May, we published our Trend Report entitled ‘The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport’.

The report delves into the barriers that prevent organisations adopting new technologies and is informed by more than 200 individuals from nearly 40 sports. While cost was predictably high on the list, three other challenges emerged as equally, if not more, critical.

It was the perfect opportunity to run a virtual roundtable discussing the systems and processes that members have in place at their teams. The table identified a number of critical success factors.

While much of the conversation focused on systems and structures, several participants emphasised the importance of culture and communication as critical to the success of these processes. One high performance manager noted that their organisation is “risk-averse” when it comes to new tech, not because of a lack of interest, but because of a desire to protect core business functions. “If there’s anything we can use to get all the noise out of other people’s way so they can actually do the day-to-day job better, then we’re normally onboard with that.”

Another pointed out the generational divide in digital fluency. Younger staff are digital natives and eager to adopt new tools. Older staff, by contrast, may be more cautious or feel overwhelmed. Bridging this gap requires not just training, but empathy and thoughtful change management.

Additionally, performance sport may need to rethink its leadership structures. In other industries, CTOs and innovation directors play a critical role in aligning technology with strategy. In sport, these roles are rare but increasingly necessary.

Without someone to “own” the innovation agenda, organisations risk falling into reactive patterns and chasing shiny new tools without a clear sense of purpose. As one contributor put it, “We need someone who can sit above the noise and guide us forward.”

Coach development cannot be separated from athlete development

Another virtual roundtable looked at helping athletes to bridge the gap from the youth to senior ranks.

While discussing an array of approaches, the table underlined the importance of investing in coach development as a key influence on transition experiences for athletes. One element of this is ensuring coaches are equipped to recognise and understand different transitions as they occur in different contexts and, therefore, deal with them more effectively.

An environment within the Olympic system explained how their decentralised programme has witnessed new performance records at junior level due in part to their consistent approach to coach development. Their heightened emphasis on coach support and development extends not only to their current athletes but those next on the pathway.

Also, coach-to-coach exchanges enable individuals to discuss both common transitions and those lesser-considered transitions that are nevertheless challenging, such as injuries.

Additional reporting by Luke Whitworth.

Read the Trend Report now

The Winning Formula for the Future of Performance Sport