By David Clancy & Richard Pullan

“Your network is your net worth.”

Porter Gale, former VP of Marketing at Virgin America and a leading business and marketing advisor

In today’s fast-paced world, high-performing individuals and teams face increasingly complex cognitive demands. These challenges are not just about processing information but also about managing stress, navigating uncertainty, and maintaining clarity amid competing priorities. This is where the power of strategic and intentional network building comes into play.

There are several means available to help build this network. They include purposeful twinning with others, developing an ecosystem of critical friends and identifying a web of second-opinion teammates. Each of these connections provides leaders with the means to make more informed and rounded decisions, make perspective shifts as well as provide objective feedback.

Twinning

‘Twinning’ refers to the practice of forming reciprocal partnerships with other teams or organisations that share similar goals, challenges, or conundrums – perhaps they might even be competitors, if the context makes sense. This is a huge part of what the Leaders Performance Institute does, in fact, forging ‘partnerships’ with teams and individuals. This is how the Houston Texans of the NFL became professional friends with the Texas Rangers of MLB, as an example. This symbiotic relationship allows for mutual learning and growth, where both parties can share best practices, resources, and insights. A term we often hear is ‘collaboration over competition’ – we can all row the boat faster if we are willing to exchange protocols, philosophies and pain points.

Professional sports teams all face their unique set of struggles but, oftentimes, there are numerous similarities with these. Sharing best practices and ways to approach challenges is a significant benefit downstream of this pairing. By ‘linking’ with another team, leaders can expand their knowledge base, reduce the isolation often felt in high-pressure roles, and benefit from other viewpoints.

In terms of innovation, if teams are open to sharing what they do (to a degree), how they do it, etc, they can draw on the experience and solutions already implemented elsewhere. This save them time, effort, and energy. Food for thought.

Critical friends

Critical friends play a unique role in leadership, deliberation and decision-making. A critical friend is someone who offers candid, constructive feedback and is unafraid to challenge assumptions. This is ideally someone outside the team/ franchise. They are trusted individuals who can act as a sounding board for ideas, provide a second perspective, and offer checkpoints when needed.

Creating and nurturing these ‘friends’ requires energy and effort, but the payoff can be huge. As an example, if you are ideating a new return-to-play system and method, bouncing ideas off someone with exposure to this in another environment could help make your system better. A no-brainer if you ask us!

We have witnessed the benefit in relation to cognitive demand also, as critical friends offer a safe space to validate thinking and refine or rethink ideas. Critical friends help prevent blind spots, biases and assumptions by encouraging the leader to pause and reflect before executing a critical task. The best critical friends strike a balance between support and challenge. They are not afraid to disagree, but they do so with the intention of helping the leader grow.

Second-opinion teammates

Second-opinion teammates (teammates being a crucial word) serve a similar purpose, offering alternative viewpoints to ensure a more well-rounded decision-making process, such as another set of eyes on an MRI report and image for a hamstring injury.

Particularly in high-stakes environments, seeking a second opinion reduces cognitive stress by distributing the weight of responsibility and allowing leaders to feel more confident in their choices. Knowing that a trusted colleague has reviewed the same data or proposal with rigour and objectivity can provide a sense of reassurance and clarity.

Strive to stock a bullpen of second-opinion teammates. It’s a game-changer.

Mentorship

“The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves”, said Steven Spielberg. To create themselves entails helping one to find their way. Consider giving a project to a more junior member of staff from a senior ‘mentor’, rather than the ‘easier’ option, of giving the project to a ‘middle manager’ who has done the type of project before. That’s an example of what this could look like.

Mentorship is a timeless strategy – one for managing both the emotional, physical and intellectual demands of leadership. This is typically someone with more experience who can offer guidance, advice, and lessons learned from mistakes, and successes. Great mentors provide leaders with the tools to think more effectively for themselves, enabling them, giving them their own toolkit; this helps them navigate complexity, prioritise, and mitigate stresses. They leave breadcrumbs behind.

Mentors can help leaders manage cognitive demands by offering perspective on what truly matters, helping to sift through the noise and focus on the signal i.e. what is essential. They also provide historical insight, showing leaders that many challenges they face are not new and can be tackled using time-tested methods. This reduces the sense of overwhelm that comes with thinking one must always reinvent the wheel. The issue you are facing has been faced and solved before.

Moreover, mentors are invaluable in helping leaders manage their wellbeing, as they can provide reassurance and encouragement when times get tough and they can acknowledge that these times come with the intense world of competitive sport.

Building a network

In high-pressure environments, leaders often find themselves juggling multiple competing priorities, balancing short-term, ‘urgent’ demands with long-term, ‘important’ goals.

Here are five reasons for nurturing a network to help with this:

1. Perspective: By offering alternative viewpoints, these individuals help leaders avoid tunnel vision, providing the clarity needed to make more informed decisions. As author John C. Maxwell said: “one of the greatest values of mentors is the ability to see ahead what others cannot see and to help them navigate a course to their destination”.
2. Stress relief: They provide a safe space to vent frustrations or discuss difficult situations, reducing the emotional and cognitive strain on the leader.
3. Cognitive load reduction: They help leaders prioritise by distinguishing urgent tasks from important ones, easing decision-making and reducing the burden of figuring everything out on their own.
4. Feedback loops: They offer real-time feedback, allowing leaders to course-correct early, reducing the mental load associated with second-guessing decisions.
5. Confidence: With someone experienced offering reassurance or advice, leaders can make decisions with greater confidence, reducing self-doubt, fracturing under duress and mental fatigue.

What makes a good mentor?

The best ones share several key traits that make them invaluable in helping leaders grow and meet the demands of high-performance sport.

Here are five traits we often see:

1. Trustworthiness: A good mentor must be someone the leader can trust implicitly. This relationship relies on openness and honesty and, without trust, it can’t function effectively. Trust hinges on credibility, reliability and that willingness to be vulnerable. Look up the Trust Equation for more on this.
2. Empathy with objectivity: They need to be empathetic to understand the leader’s challenges, but objective enough to provide clear, unbiased feedback. A mentor must challenge, but from a place of care, not criticism.
3. Experience and expertise: Particularly for mentors, having a depth of experience is critical. They need to offer insights that come from having walked the same path or navigated similar challenges.
4. Active listening skills: The ability to listen without immediately offering solutions is key. Great mentors and critical friends give space for the leader to articulate their thoughts fully before stepping in with advice or feedback. ‘Beware the advice monster’, as Michael Bungay Stanier wrote in The Advice Trap. And, as Stephen R Covey proclaimed in his book The Seven Habits of Effective People, ‘seek first to understand, then be understood’.
5. Encouragement to reflect: The best mentors help leaders reflect on their own experiences, pushing them toward self-discovery and growth, rather than always offering the answers themselves.

And let’s not forget that mentors need mentors. This could be your partner at home, as an example.

So, here’s our challenge for you reading this article today – take on a mentorship role in some capacity, to give back…to pass the ladder down, as it were.

Final thoughts

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape in high-performance sport, a leader’s success isn’t just defined by individual strength – but by the strength of their network. Jobs these days in sport are complicated and complex. It is now rarely possible for one individual to serve a function fully without seeking support from other disciplines, to deliver the final solution to a given problem.

By cultivating relationships through twinning, critical friends, second-opinion teammates, and mentorship, leaders create a support system that fosters psychological safety, collaboration, and continuous learning. These connections enable leaders to confidently navigate complexities, make incisive decisions, and lead afront with impact. After all, just as every great athlete stands on the shoulders of their team, no leader can truly flourish without a trusted network standing behind them.

David Clancy is a Learning and Development Consultant at the Houston Texans and Director at The Nxt Level Group. He is also the Editor of Essential Skills for Physiotherapists: A Personal and Professional Development Framework, which is available now from Elsevier.

Richard Pullan is a Director at The Nxt Level Group, the Visionary Founder of The Altitude Centre, and leads the training of clients for flash ascents of Everest and other 8,000m peaks, while also preparing professional athletes and elite sports teams. He is formerly of Sporting Health Group.

If you would like to speak to David and Richard, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By Luke Whitworth

‘Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We.’

This powerful quote from the legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson rings as true today as it did in his 1995 book Sacred Hoops.

Trust is a fundamental component of team cohesion – a topic that formed the basis of August’s Leadership Skills Series session for Leaders Performance Institute members.

That session features prominently in this month’s Debrief but, before we get into it, we wanted to thank those of you who have already completed our Future Trends in High Performance survey.

As members of our Institute and community, we’d love for as many of you as possible to complete the survey and, in doing so, gain access to the insights we unearth. You can complete the survey here.

Without any further ado, let’s reflect on some of the key moments for members at the Leaders Performance Institute.

Growing cohesion, quickly

‘Cohesion’ is defined by Gain Line Analytics as ‘the level of understanding between the component parts of a team system’.

Gain Line – who have worked with elite teams in business and sport for the past decade – contributed to last month’s Leadership Skills Series session, which explored the dynamics of team cohesion and the datapoints that can help you to build that cohesion at speed.

They express their findings through an equation: Skill x Cohesion = Capability. They suggest that even if a team has highly skilled individuals, their overall capability will be limited if they lack cohesion. Conversely, a team with lesser skill levels but high cohesion can outperform more skilled but less cohesive teams.

Leaders Performance Institute members were invited to share ways in which they feel cohesion can improve performance. They suggested:

• Knowledge of strengths.
• Communication.
• Willingness to accept challenge from each other.
• Empowerment.
• Shared understanding of strategy.

What works when growing cohesion at pace? Here are five recommendations:

1. Create a strong sense of belonging

Send strong belonging cues from the outset and develop your inclusive leadership skills. In fostering belonging, allow people to share their personal story and cultural background, widening your ‘us’ story to encompass everyone’s unique background. It’s important to not overlook the past, so look at connecting the team to its heritage. Shine a light on key moments and individuals from which we can draw inspiration or lessons. Finally, ensure you create a shared vision together for the legacy this generation want to leave behind.

2. Acknowledge shared responsibility for building high trust relationships

Relationship mapping is a practical way to reflect on your relationships with other members of your team and encourages shared responsibility. Base your score on how well you know each other, your openness to each other’s thinking, and the quality of your collaborations. Where are you areas for opportunity to elevate trust or relationships?

3. Teaming skills: speaking, listening and psychological safety

The fastest way to improve collaboration is to get individuals to think about their part in the process and getting good at the balance between speaking and listening within the group. Are people speaking up? Do we have that level of psychological safety? Are they listening?

4. The use of ‘getting to know each other’ questions

Skilled questioning can be powerful in developing relationships and cohesion. What are some examples of ‘getting to know each other’ questions? Here are some examples:

• Can you think of something challenging you’ve achieved which you’re proud of?
• A behaviour you would like to change, which you recognise can frustrate others?
• A strength you’d like to make more use of in your role or in life?
• What is something you admire in others that you’d like to make a strength of yours?
• What is something that has helped shape who you are today? Share how it has shaped you.

5. Increase knowledge of your ‘A-Game’ strengths and weaknesses

What do your athletes and staff do when they are on their ‘A-Game’? When you are bringing you’re A-Game, what is it that they are bringing too? Knowing this allows everyone in the team to know what they are looking for – then the team has a collective responsibility. Equally, when you are not on your A-Game, what do you see?

Addressing the challenges surrounding performance analysis in high performance environments

Nearly three-quarters of practitioners believe that their organisations could be better at using data to make decisions.

That is according to a straw poll of attendees at a recent Virtual Roundtable hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

We have collaborated with BASES on a three-part series called Advances in Performance Analysis. We then kicked things off with a first session titled ‘The Influence of Performance Analysis on Organisational Strategy’.

Leading the conversation were Natasha Patel, the Director of Sporting Analytics at US Soccer, and Simon Wilson, the Director of Football at League 1 side Stockport County.

They began by leading a discussion of the biggest challenges facing people who use data analysis in sport. There were four that stood out:

1. Integration: it is difficult to set up efficient datasets that allow different data points to intertwine. One attendee referenced performance analysis and skill acquisition as particular sticking points. The sheer volume of metrics collected can lead to a lack of clarity and inability to prioritise.
2. Communication of data: data should tell a story but, at present, it is hard to visualise and communicate to athletes in a way that ensures data or analysis is understood and actionable.
3. Buy-in: as one attendee observed, those in charge of the budget occasionally lack the understanding around the value of performance analysis so won’t invest in it or see value in other disciplines. Similarly, head coaches often call the shots but do they truly buy-in? There is also the question of how you measure impact. Departments are being encouraged to demonstrate the influence of their work.
4. Data management: it is a time-consuming process to regularly assess data quality, validity and reliability – time many simply don’t have. A participant observed how one can get stuck in a mindset of data collection versus the type of analysis that can truly have a performance impact. In fact, knowledge translation is another sticking point, particularly given the general lack of education around performance analysis.

By John Portch

Women’s football is not the right environment for some coaches and practitioners, particularly expansion franchises.

That is the view of Lucy Rushton, the former General Manager of NWSL expansion team Bay FC.

“Of the people I know working in male football, 95 per cent probably would never consider coming to the women’s game,” she told an audience at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica. “And, to be honest, they probably wouldn’t be right for the women’s game either. I’ll say that. I think the person that you’re looking for, especially in expansion, is someone who’s willing to challenge themselves, willing to go outside the box.”

Bay represented Rushton’s first role in women’s football. She built her reputation in the men’s game in a series of scouting and analysis roles at the Football Association, Watford and Reading. In 2016, she left her English homeland to join Atlanta United as Head of Technical Recruitment & Analysis. The team won the MLS Cup two years later. Between 2021 and 2022, she served as DC United’s first female GM.

Back at Bay, the team were finding their feet following a tricky start to their inaugural season when Rushton unexpectedly resigned in late-June. Her departure shocked observers, but her achievements during the year she spent in southern California were considerable.

It is an exciting time for the club, who attract average crowds of nearly 15,000 to a stadium that is not their own. They speak enthusiastically of planning a new practice facility and stadium. Crucially, the ownership group have the means and the will to make it all happen.

But beyond supportive owners and astute marketing initiatives, what does it take to get a new team off the ground? The Leaders Performance Institute explores four factors put forward by Rushton.

1. A vision that informs your culture

Bay want to be the best team in the world and renowned for their people-first approach. They plan to get there by adhering to their B-A-Y values (Brave, Accountable, and You). Rushton explained each in turn:

• Brave: “being bold in the industry, pushing boundaries and innovating”.
• Accountable: people “being responsible for their actions and being willing to push themselves forward”.
• You: this stems from Bay’s desire to “celebrate each other as individuals so you can bring your true, authentic self to work every day”.

2. Finding the right personalities

Rushton believes it takes a particular type of personality to thrive in an expansion environment. “You have to have someone that’s more risk-OK,” she said. “To bet on themselves to go ‘I can go there and make a difference.” Her appointment of Head Coach Albertin Montoya showed that they can be male. “A lot of males would find it refreshing to come to a female team because it’s a different environment, with a totally different feeling, vibe, boundaries, rules.”

It is crucial, however, that you hire for diversity of background and experience despite the inherent challenges. “It’s much easier to sit in a room with people who are like you,” said Rushton. “It brings added work because you’re taking yourself outside your comfort zone – you have to be willing to do that.”

3. Elevate player care and support

Rushton explained that while male players tend to consider the bottom line above all else, female players are compelled to prioritise their living conditions. It led her and Bay to use all available mechanisms – housing, support staff, medical care – to tempt players to this corner of southern California. “How are we on a day-to-day basis trying to help them a) be in the best position they can be for the longest possible; and b) live a nice lifestyle out of football?”

It has given Bay considerable pulling power beyond the US. Three ceiling-raisers arrived in the form of Barcelona’s Asisat Oshoala, Madrid CFF’s Rachael Kundananji, and Arsenal’s Jen Beattie. Others are sure to follow.

4. Managing challenges and setbacks

Bay have had their fair share of challenges in year one, but the club has not been fazed. They went as far as dropping a player over a disciplinary issue on one occasion. It likely cost them the game, but the senior leadership believed that team values were more important. “It’s in those difficult moments that you set the culture,” said Rushton. “It showed our players and our staff what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

By John Portch

Leaders don’t always know how best to have those difficult conversations.

They may recognise the need to take someone to one side, but if they are unable to broach the topic in a skilled and productive way, then a small problem can quickly escalate.

At the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London, Jide Fadojutimi and Marianne O’Connor from Management Futures led an onstage skills session explaining what to do and what not to do when approaching someone to have a ‘courageous conversation’.

What is a ‘courageous conversation’?

The term was coined by executive coach Kim Scott, who argues in her 2017 book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing your Humanity that leaders have a ‘moral imperative’ to step into difficult conversations and challenge with skill. This requires courage because it is simply easier to avoid such conversations.

Scott devised a skills grid to illustrate what it takes to lead a courageous conversation. O’Connor and Fadojutimi shared Scott’s grid with the Leaders audience but changed the top-right quadrant from ‘radical candour’ to ‘skilled candour’:

Image: Management Futures

“We’re going with ‘skilled candour’ because it’s a skill we can all learn and build,” said Fadojutimi of Management Future’s way of teaching the topic.

The three pitfalls to avoid

The arrows on the grid suggest that the path to skilled candour lies in giving people a sense of psychological safety and the feeling that you care about them. The grid also suggests three pitfalls, which were discussed at length by Scott in Radical Candor:

1. Ruinous empathy: when you want to spare someone’s short-term feelings, you don’t tell them something they need to know. You care personally but fail to challenge them directly.
2. Manipulative insincerity: when you neither care personally nor challenge directly. You offer insincere praise to a person’s face and criticise them harshly behind their back.
3. Obnoxious aggression: when you challenge someone directly, but don’t show you care about them personally. It’s praise that feels insincere and feedback that isn’t delivered kindly.

The five steps towards skilled candour

O’Connor explained that there are five steps you can take to help develop your ability to approach conversations with skilled candour:

1. Master your story: if you hold negative views of a person it is going to hinder your ability to make them feel safe. O’Connor said: “It’s really important that you master your story and any assumptions you might have about the other person and what’s going on for them”.
2. Create safety: this starts before you have the conversation in both the broadest and narrowest sense. Do not ambush someone in the corridor and don’t shut the conversation down once you’ve made your point. Bear this in mind when the other person is feeling challenged, vulnerable and defensive.
3. Provide skilled feedback: this means evidence-based feedback free of judgement. “To be able to give evidential feedback, you need to talk about what you observed and the impact that it had,” said O’Connor. “It just helps to keep the conversation safe and on track.”
4. Open a two-way dialogue: don’t just download information on someone without being curious about their perspective or seeking to understand what might be at play for them.
5. Make the other person feel heard: after a balanced conversation, it’s important for both parties, as O’Connor said, “to agree next steps or further action so that things don’t get lost in translation.” This enables both parties to feel accountable and understand what they need to do next.

By John Portch with additional reporting from Henry Breckenridge

“One of the great things about the job is there’s no typical day,” said Michael Bourne. “There’s gate posts and structures in place to keep us on track, but my job is very much to adapt to that.”

The Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] was a guest on the Leaders Performance Podcast in early July, where he discussed his remit.

“I break it down as if we want to deliver performance, then performance equals the talent that you’ve got multiplied by the exposure you can give that talent to them to develop and grow, minus interference.”

When it comes to high performance, tennis has several traits that separate it from other sports and this is reflected in the LTA’s provisions. For example, the organisation offers full-time multidisciplinary support to players from under-10s through to elite level, but player needs vary from individual to individual. They provide coaching too, at camps and competitions, but players tend to have private coaches.

It is a balance and one that he has been trying to strike during his four years in the role, which began during the first year of the pandemic. “It was a huge learning curve for me,” said Bourne, whose non-tennis background has never held him back.

Here, we reflect on his thoughts about his role.

He has a firm focus on the mission

Bourne, who has worked in sports science for organisations including UK Sport, the UK Sports Institute and the England & Wales Cricket Board, has a clear understanding of what the LTA is trying to achieve and why. “Our mission is to be world-class and respected at player development,” he said. “The slightly longer answer to that is that we create a pathway for our most talented players to go on a journey to becoming elite professional players, whether that’s in the tennis game or wheelchair tennis game.” It requires continuous self-evaluation on both his part and the LTA’s as well as acknowledging how the challenges faced evolve. Bourne emphasised a people-first approach. “However you cut it up, we are a performance-based industry and you have to have great people to do great things.” He spoke of “passion and care”. “We have a team of individuals who deeply care about the journey these players are on”. Passion is one of the LTA’s values and the sight of others in service to players is one Bourne finds “very humbling”.

Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the LTA. (Photo by Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for LTA)

His role in driving change

In addition to being mission-focused and people-centred, Bourne places a premium on critical thinking. He also believes that having great ideas is one thing, but being able to apply them is quite another. “You can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught,” he said. “Ultimately, leadership is about being able to drive and support change.” His team bring their tennnis-specific expertise and Bourne ensures everyone is aligned around the work that needs to be done. “It gets the balance between my background and their backgrounds in the right space.”

He does not assume things will happen on their own

Bourne readily admits his expertise is not rooted in tennis. Nevertheless, the necessary traits and skills are made familiar to him through his staff. He has set up a clear chain of direct reports and basic processes, but it needs constant attention. “Don’t just trust that they’re going to happen all the time – make sure that you’re around enough and verifying whether the communication, the connection that’s supposed to be in place, is actually in place; and if you need to step in and just give the person that support or just give that reminder of what we’re trying to do to prevent those dreaded silos developing people ploughing their own furrow”.

He relishes the daily challenges

Bourne feels that his role is inherently challenging; and that’s alright. “I feel like in these types of jobs, if your job is easy, something is wrong – I don’t think they’re meant to be easy,” he said. “If they’re easy, then you’re missing something or you’re not pushing when you need to push. There’s always more.” It feeds into his attitude towards the challenges faced by the LTA. “It should be unacceptable in a high performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.” There will often be “brutal facts”, as he put it, “then it’s my job to ensure that we’re all leaning into that and in the right way in a professional way and in a safe way; having the right types of conversations that we need to have.”

Listen to the full interview below:

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A podcast brought to you by our Main Partners

Michael Bourne has a sports science background, so it is no surprise that he places a premium on critical thinking.

“It is core to me,” the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] tells the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.

Critical thinking is a skill that also served him well in roles at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board amongst others before he took the reins at the LTA in October 2020 (with Covid restrictions still in place).

“But,” he cautions, “leadership for me is about change and progress, and you can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught.”

It starts with taking stock. “As a leader, make sure that you are ensuring everybody else is confronting those brutal facts and you’ve got to be ahead of that,” he says, adding that he too must be open to feedback.

“It should be unacceptable in a high-performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.”

In the first episode of this new series, Michael explains his mission-driven and people-centred approach to helping produce British tennis players with the means to compete with the world’s best [33:10].

During the conversation, we also touch upon the challenges the LTA faces and the benchmarks set [8:30]; his belief in the unique qualities of British tennis [14:30]; why the flow of information cannot be taken for granted at the LTA [38:30]; and the enduring power of the Lion King to move him [48:00].

Henry Breckenridge X | LinkedIn

John Portch X | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Luke Whitworth

We want to start this Debrief with a big thank you to those who made it to our Sport Performance Summit in LA last month.

It is always wonderful to see the great and the good of the Leaders Performance Institute gathered to discuss the pressing performance challenges of the day.

Speaking of which, the happenings at Red Bull were far from the only opportunities on offer at the Institute in June, with roundtables and community calls packed with members sharing both challenges and best practices on a range of topics.

Many are covered in this month’s Debrief. As ever, do check out our upcoming events and virtual learning sessions, which are designed to help you to connect, learn and share with your fellow members from across the globe.

Right, let’s get into some reflections on June.

What we learned at the Sport Performance Summit in LA

We had a great couple of days with those of you who made the trip; and there was plenty of thought-provoking content for us to get our teeth stuck into (full account here). Below are a few snippets that particularly caught our attention:

Four tips for avoiding the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’

The Innovator’s Dilemma is a 1997 book by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen that explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations. It resonated with Jen Allum, from X, the Moonshot Factory and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, who understand they could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Onstage, Allum shared their four top tips for avoiding this scenario:

1. Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
2. Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
3. Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
4. Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

Allum added that X, the Moonshot Factory “rewards project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty” in the work they do.

How to optimise your energy as a leader

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.” Here are her thoughts on how leaders should show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.

• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.

• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?

• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

The biomarkers of a healthy culture

Back to the myriad insights gleaned from our June Virtual Roundtables, starting off with the latest segment of our series of learning centred around culture and change. The sessions highlight findings from a recent research project by the Premier League’s Edd Vahid titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’. The project examines the key components of cultures that have been able to sustain themselves.

Vahid posits astute leadership as a ‘super enabler’. Indeed, as Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’

What are some strategies we can consider?

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process.
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like.

Vahid’s also research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

1. Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
2. Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
3. Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

Four features of a great debrief

Effective debriefing skills was the top of conversation for our latest Leadership Skills Series session. If you are interested to join roundtable sessions centred around developing your own leadership, there are some great topics coming up around strategy and cohesion you can find on the Member’s Area.

To keep this section punchy, a section of our discussion focused on some top line considerations for what constitutes a great debrief. Are you doing these well in your environments?

1. Psychological safety and the notion of creating a calm, positive and supportive space. As part of this consideration, set people up to focus on learning, not to be defensive and model your belief in their potential to create great performance. Finally, do everything you can to reduce power differentials.
2. Get good at questioning. Use open, non-judgmental questions and a lot of follow up questions. Focus on learning more than results and allow time for reflection.
3. Strike a good balance between focus on the positives and areas for improvement. A reminder: we learn quickest by reinforcing what works.
4. Pay attention to group dynamics to get the best possible contribution from all individuals.

The pathway to better collaboration and multidisciplinary working

Finally, we wanted to highlight some interesting insights and perspectives from our topic-led roundtable on functioning more effectively as multidisciplinary teams, which is often a very popular topic of interest across the Institute when speaking to many of you.

Do check out the complete summary. Below are a handful of ideas from members on the call that they feel are currently missing or need to be given more attention in the quest to do this well:

1. How are you supporting new leaders in your teams? Often we see those in technical expertise of ‘tactician’ roles move up to leadership position but lack the requisite skills to lead effectively. The role inevitably changes, so what are you or we doing to help them ‘lead’ their teams and embed true collaboration?
2. Be intentional with feedback. It was shared that an opportunity is a robust and thoughtful feedback mechanism that have variations in their approach. The idea of thinking about detailed feedback is to support learning on a consistent and ongoing basis within your teams. It always seems to us that high quality feedback seems challenging for our teams, so this may well be an opportunity to explore.
3. Are your standard operating procedures clear? If not, they need to be to support this quest for high levels of collaboration.
4. Psychological safety and empowerment. How do we  empower people more effectively to take targeted risks within their roles, whilst still feeling safe and secure? What we are really getting at here is psychological safety in teams and a shared understanding of what that means and looks like.

By John Portch

It’s difficult to imagine Dan Carter looking awkward or out of place in an All Blacks environment so we’ll have to take his word for it.

The former first five-eighth (fly-half), who won back to back Rugby World Cups with New Zealand in 2011 and 2015, was one of a “legacy group” of former players invited in August 2023 to observe the team’s preparations and answer any questions the younger players might have ahead of their World Cup campaign.

“It’s a new bunch and you guys know pretty well that when you finish playing, you get invited back into the changing rooms or the team room and it’s quite awkward,” Carter told former England internationals James Haskell and Mike Tindall on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby podcast.

It was a changing room Carter had shared with a number of that All Blacks squad. “I don’t know if you guys feel it but going back into that environment, you kind of feel like a spare wheel.”

At no point was this the perception of the players, coaches or the All Blacks’ high performance team. In fact, two months later Carter, Keven Mealamu, Richie McCaw, Conrad Smith, and Liam Messam were invited to return at the Rugby World Cup in France, which took place in October and November.

“Talking to our team’s leaders, they got the most from the legacy group because the players are the ones who are having to drive along with that in the environment and the playing group would look up to them,” said Mike Anthony, New Zealand’s Head of High Performance, at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

Here were some of the most-esteemed guardians of the All Blacks culture coming back to reinforce the connection between all those who have worn the jersey.

Anthony continued: “That group had been through adversity. They’d lost World Cups and won World Cups. They knew what it took. The legacy piece for us is important.”

Legacy – a word long-associated with the All Blacks – is crucial in bringing to life the ambitions across the ‘teams in black’ i.e. the All Blacks, the Black Ferns (current women’s world champions) and both programmes’ sevens teams.

Their three core ambitions are:

1. To be the most dominant team in history.
2. To leave Mana in their wake.
3. To include the players in shaping the team’s vision.

These ambitions help to plot the path towards a performance culture described by Anthony as “unwavering at it’s core, it’s inspiring, it’s empowering, it’s inquisitive, and it’s responsive to change.”

The last point is critical. “How do you bring it to life day to day and how do you refresh it so that’s it’s relevant to your current group?” asked Anthony. “I’ve observed teams being successful and then they continue to run with what worked before as the group changes. It comes down to induction: how do you make sure your vision is relevant for your current group?”

Here, we unpack how the ambitions of the teams in black are brought to life through their behaviours and habits.

The building of a legacy: the All Blacks have won three World Cups; the Black Ferns have won six of the last seven Women’s World Cups. This enduring excellence burnishes their legacy year on year. “We talk of leaving the jersey in a better place,” said Anthony. “You’re the guardian for a short time, so when you leave it to the next person, you hope to add value.”

A team-first attitude: this is a challenge for New Zealand Rugby as a whole, with the growth of individual brands and the often more lucrative opportunities on offer abroad. Yet New Zealand’s best players invariably remain at home during their peak years to pull on the black jersey. The allure runs deep and it requires selflessness. “You’ve got to be selfless,” said Anthony. “You’re an All Black or Black Fern 24/7 and it’s in the little things you do when no one’s watching. You’ve all heard the analogy ‘sweep the sheds’ – it is genuinely something that our guys do. It’s not the job of somebody who’s paid to clean up after us and we take pride in how we do that.”

A player-driven environment: Anthony explains that buy-in is at “100 percent” amongst the players and that some players “never want to leave” New Zealand. This is in part because the team is intentional in its efforts to encourage players to speak up and contribute to the culture (“you have to create something pretty special to keep players here”) but it is also due to the increasingly creative ways that players are incentivised. “We give guys sabbaticals to go away because we know the money’s good; then we bring them back and that’s worked really well,” said Anthony.

Alignment: it is obvious that no two people are alike but that does not necessarily prevent them sharing a common vision. Said Anthony: “For me, ‘alignment’ is when people understand and are deeply connected to your vision.”

It is also a consequence of effective leadership, which he distilled into several traits while adding the caveat that you have to, above all else, play well. “I think we sometimes burden our leaders and they feel cluttered,” he said. “We want the spine of the team playing well first because, generally, they’re your best players. You have to get the balance right there.”

In New Zealand rugby, leaders embody…

Humility. As Anthony said, “you’ve got to be humble and vulnerable because that’ll encourage others to step into that space and contribute.”

Inclusivity. Anthony felt that although teams want everyone to have a voice, there is too little focus on schooling people in how to give and receive feedback. “If we want our players to challenge their peers, we’ve got to give them the tools”.

A growth mindset. There is always a performance gap; always a challenge. “It’s never about ‘we’ve arrived’,” said Anthony. “That gap creates that discomfort and itch that you want in a high performance environment.”

Ownership. Being an All Black or Black Fern is a 24/7 commitment. Anthony described Richie McCaw as the embodiment of that view. “It’s doing the unseen things,” he said. “It’s easy to sweat, but when you go home, what you’re eating, your sleep, how you present around your family – those are key.”

Finally… he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata

Anthony wrapped up his presentation with a whakataukī (Māori proverb):

He aha te mea nui? Māku e kii atu, he tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.

What is the most important thing in the world? Well, let me tell you, it is people, it is people, it is people.

“The price of entry is technical knowledge,” said Anthony, “but get the people right and hopefully you can build the right environment for a performance culture that supports the athletes.”

By John Portch

Jen Overbeck painted a scene for Leaders Performance Institute members.

“Here’s the situation,” she said. “You have an idea born out of your expertise; a lightbulb moment. Maybe it’s something that’s developed over time and you bring it to somebody you think is going to benefit, whether that’s an athlete, someone in your organisation or somebody who works with you.

She continued: “You’re explaining it with all your passion and they say ‘yeah, nah, I’m not excited about that at all. I don’t think I want to do that.’ Has that ever happened?”

A few individuals tentatively raised their hands in the audience at Melbourne’s Glasshouse.

“OK, good, because otherwise you should be up here teaching instead of me!”

Overbeck, a Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, was speaking at February’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

Over the course of half an hour she explored the social and psychological elements that affect how people react to requests to change and why, as a leader, that reaction can depend on your power and influence.

Power v influence

Overbeck used the example of Phil Jackson as someone sports coaches and practitioners might aspire to emulate. She lifted a passage from his 2013 book Eleven Rings where he wrote about ‘benching the ego’:

‘After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team’s vision.’

Jackson came to recognise that power and influence sit on a spectrum. As such, the NBA’s most-decorated coach, provided the perfect case study for Overbeck to define those terms.

“‘Power’ is your ability to get somebody to do something that they don’t want to do,” she said.

This is set in contrast to ‘influence’. “You could also call it ‘persuasion’,” she added. “This is all about how much credibility and persuasiveness you have to influence people to go where you want them to and they’re going there willingly.”

There are few coaches in the high performance community that would prefer to increase their power at the expense of their influence and Overbeck stressed that you are free to make your choice.

“When you understand the differences and what drives them, you can make those choices deliberately – and that’s generally better for ourselves, our athletes and our organisations.”

How to elicit change

Overbeck explained that there are three types of behavioural strategy:

1. Dominating

She says: “That’s when you’re using a great deal of power; you’re not using a great deal of influence. You’re basically trying to make the person change.”

2. Negotiating

This emerges in a space where a leader has more moderate power and influence. “We’re giving people some choice, but we’re not giving up on our power altogether.”

3. Supplicating

“This is a very big word,” said Overbeck, “because it means you’re completely leaving it in the other person’s  hands; you’re exerting no power whatsoever.”

The best scenario for a leader, as Jackson understood, is to be negotiating. Overbeck posed a series of questions that leaders can ask themselves when moving away from either dominating or supplicating:

• Do you typically believe that you have the skills and ability to bring people into alignment with yourself?
• Is it more your experience that you end up fighting them?
• Do you tend to lean more on power? Or do you lean more on your persuasion and your credibility? And what informs your response? Do you know why you’re doing that?
• Which of these three behavioural strategies is your go-to?

The tactics available to a leader

Overbeck ran through some of the tactics available to ‘negotiators’ and asked the audience to raise their hand if they’d employed any of the following:

• Sharing information about the background and context of change. Nothing unusual here and when she asked the audience at the Glasshouse most admitted they had tried this approach.
• Explaining the benefits of the change to the person. “We all here are supposed to do this,” said Overbeck and indeed the room indicated that it was a common tactic.
• Promoting your own expertise. “Letting people know why they should listen to you because of what you know.” Overbeck noted that in comparison to the first two, this approach was less common.
• Dare them, challenge them. “A bit more contentious,” said Overbeck. “‘I don’t know if you can do this one – prove me wrong’.” Again, a few hands went up.
• Make them feel like a loser if they don’t make the change. It may have been a favoured tactic of former college basketball coach Bob Knight, who Overbeck referenced for his draconian approach, but no hands went up in the room. “Nobody will admit it,” she said, with a smile.

The six types of capital available to leaders

None of the tactics described above are particularly unusual. “We know a lot about the tactics we’ve been told will be helpful for pursuing change,” said Overbeck, adding, “we don’t know what kind of power and influence we need to have ready and available with us in order for these tactics to succeed.”

She returned to the example of Jackson, who managed to elicit the very best from Michael Jordan during their time together at the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s.

“Phil Jackson may not have led with power but it was in what he did,” she said. “He was using what was available to him.”

He was, in essence, aware of his ‘capital’, as Overbeck put it. “Power comes from the resources that you control.” There are six kinds of resources, or ‘capital’. The first three are easily explained:

1. Financial – money, essentially.
2. Human – people, specifically their talent, strength and energy (in sporting context)
3. Material – facilities and equipment.

The final three must be used carefully because they can be sourced into power:

4. Psychological – your ability to affect other people’s mental and emotional states. “If you can inspire people and rev them up and get them excited about something then that builds your credibility; it helps to persuade them.” This can, of course, tip into the dark side of manipulation in unscrupulous hands.
5. Social – networks and relationships can be a source of credibility. “That could be encouraging team members to lean on a person or getting your coaches together to influence upwards”, said Overbeck. “That could be social capital as long as you’re controlling that relationship as opposed to abusing it.”
6. Intellectual – your expertise (separate from human capital). “If you hoard it and you only give it out when you get what you want that’s power, otherwise it can be a source of credibility.”

Social and intellectual capital

Overbeck homed in on social and intellectual capital because while leaders in sport may want to have power in the background, you probably will not want to lead with that power.

Instead, you’ll want to dial up your influence and credibility, which can come from various sources, such as trust and belief in your abilities as a coach due to your track record and reputation; that your place is not a result of political chicanery or nepotism.

“I’m going to talk about it as ‘tribal membership’,” said Overbeck. “When people are deciding whether to accept your influence, the No 1 thing they are assessing is: are you with me? Are you part of my team?” She makes it clear that ‘team’ may not be the literal team but your alignment with an individual’s personal values. Without that, they may reject you out of hand. “The first thing we have to do is make sure that we’re telegraphing to the other person that ‘even if we have those differences in terms of those things that you most cherish and value, I honour those things, and I’m not going to get in the way of them. I’m going to work with them, not against them’.”

Once you loosely establish yourself in the same tribe, you then need to demonstrate how your expertise can be of value – that’s your intellectual capital.

Overbeck said: “When we’re trying to build credibility, it’s our job to build that bridge and make sure that the other person understands.”

She likens it to a credit account. “The higher your credit limit, the more you’re able to go out and spend.” However, it must be kept topped up. “Once we’re good, we always have to be thinking: ‘am I getting over my limit?’” You have to continuously demonstrate your credibility or you will lose people.

Final questions to ask yourself:

• How much power and influence do we have in the relationship with the person or people we’re trying to influence?
• Which behavioural style – dominating, negotiating and supplicating – do you lean towards? Or is it a combination? What are the likely outcomes going to be of employing this style?
• Is it doing what we need or do you need to make adjustments?
• To the extent that either our power or our credibility are lacking, are you engaging with some of these behaviours and using some of these resources to boost them up?

An article brought to you by our Event Partners

By the Leaders Performance Institute team

John F Kennedy’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech remains a masterclass in political rhetoric.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” said the US President at Rice University on 12 September 1962.

Those words, undiminished by six decades of distance, might have become a monument to presidential hubris had NASA’s Apollo program failed to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. Instead, Kennedy’s vision galvanised his nation and, allied to federal resource, gave the program the impetus it needed.

NASA’s ‘moonshot’ has since become a byword for ingenious and audacious projects that showcase adaptive growth. That is: being adaptable in the face of change and challenges, continuously striving for growth and improvement, learning from your experiences and making strategic decisions that drive progress and innovation.

Moonshots were a theme of the recent Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Red Bull in Santa Monica, with Jennifer Allum, who is part of the leadership team at Alphabet’s X, The Moonshot Factory, taking to the stage to discuss an environment where audacity is a prerequisite.

It was a marvellous start to proceedings on the morning of day one but, in truth, other themes discussed across both days, from talent and creativity to strategic thinking and resilience, just as readily point to adaptive growth.

Here, inspired by the worlds of sport, the arts and academia, we touch upon seven factors that can help to fuel your own moonshot, whether you’re taking your first small step, sustaining your early momentum, or looking to make a giant leap.

1. Fearlessness in the face of failure

Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed that large, established organisations do not always take advantage of potentially disruptive technologies and trends, while newer and less-established organisations often do. In his 1997 book The Innovator’s Dilemma, he explores the tension between sustaining existing products and embracing disruptive innovations.

Allum discussed the concept onstage in front of an audience where ‘failure’ is a common bedfellow. She understands that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, could easily fall prey to the Innovator’s Dilemma. So while X, The Moonshot Factory performs an instrumental role in delivering ‘moonshot technologies that make the world a radically better place’, there are myriad failures that pile high on their factory floor – and Alphabet wouldn’t have it any other way because they perceive failure as a learning opportunity rather than a threat.

Allum’s top tips for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma:

• Aim for 10x not 10% – use ‘bad idea brainstorms’; practise the behaviours of audacious thinking; put everything on the table.
• Be scrappy, test early – reject the social norm of refining; find the quickest way to learn that you’re on the wrong path; have a thick skin and be OK with people thinking you’re wrong and weird.
• Build-in different perspectives – recruit for a growth mindset (high humility, high audacity; people who take risks in their own lives; who think differently and challenge the way problems are solved).
• Reframe failure as learning – you can’t solve for success, so track what you do, as failures will support future ideas.

“We reward project shutoffs, dispassionate assessments, and intellectual honesty.”

Jennifer Allum, leadership team, X, The Moonshot Factory

2. Swerve common pitfalls

Long-established teams can all do better, but what of those just starting out, particularly in women’s sport? How can a beginner’s zeal be channelled into establishing a stable, long-term concern? Those are two of the questions currently facing NSWL expansion team Bay FC and their WNBA counterparts the Golden State Valkyries.

It is an exciting time for women’s sport but there are pitfalls to be avoided:

• It’s important to understand and appreciate the differences between men’s and women’s sport – don’t look to replicate the approach. Bay have, for example, intentionally fashioned a culture that is people-first, player-centric and focused on player health.
• What skills are required in expansion environments? An entrepreneurial mindset, for one. Embrace the unknown and have empathy.
• There will be critical moments in the early days, but this is where you can shape the culture. Find moments to demonstrate what is both acceptable and unacceptable.

“Our culture and values are aligned to the name of our team. We want people to be Brave, Accountable and You; underpinned by the idea of bringing your authentic self everyday.”

Lucy Rushton, General Manager, Bay FC

“I am a believer in asking people how they are feeling in terms of a particular climate: are you sunny, happy or cloudy? It’s a simple way to help measure your culture.”

Ohemaa Nyanin, General Manager, Golden State Valkyries

3. Conditions where creativity can thrive

Is yours a creative learning environment? Either way, you’d do well to listen to the Westside School of Ballet (LA’s most successful public ballet school) and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music – what can such schools teach the world of sport about the creation of learning environments that encourage improvisation, experimentation and intrinsic motivation?

It begins with a love for the art form and a welcoming ecosystem that allows the freedom to explore:

• Open yourself to the notion of ‘winning’ in other ways; you need to allow failure to happen and experimentation to take place so that young people can find different moments in their work.
• How can you shift your environment to create more challenge and failure, but communicate it in a way, that nurtures solution-minded individuals who can respond to what’s thrown at them in the context of competition?
• Can you say you understand your young athletes’ intrinsic motivations? If you don’t, it can leave a lot of creative potential on the table.
• At UCLA, they do not speak about ‘working’ music – they talk about ‘play’.

“We want to foster a love of the art form rather than fear.”

Adrian Blake Mitchell, Associate Executive Director, Westside School of Ballet

“We work on improvisation to get to more fundamental questions – what am I trying to convey? What story is being told?”

Eileen Strempel, Dean, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music

4. Leaders skilled at optimising their energy

As a leader, strategic thinking is in your remit, but do you ever include protecting your energy as part of the equation? “An organisation can’t outpace its leaders,” said author Holly Ransom onstage in Santa Monica. “So there’s nothing more important than working on ourselves as leaders.”

How to show up each day:

• Manage your energy, not your time; and build-in moments of ‘micro recovery’ to support yourself in the moments that matter. We spend too much time in ‘up-regulation’ and we need to find ways to down-regulate’.
• Make sure your highest energy moments of the day align with your most important tasks so that your return on energy is optimised.
• Who in your corner is your supporter, sage, sponsor and sparring partner?
• Remember: you are the Chief Role Model Officer in your team – make sure you live and talk about the things that help people lead themselves in ways that manage their energy.

“Are the habits that you’re leading with still serving you, your career, role and impact?”

Holly Ransom, author, The Leading Edge

5. Collective resilience

No matter your level of success or the smoothness of your systems, high performance can exact a large toll if your stakeholders are not resilient. As Red Bull US CEO Chris Hunt explained, a leader’s first job is to engender trust amongst their team. There’s no instant solution – you have to advocate for people and stand up for your values time and again.

How can people in high performance develop their resilience?

• Celebrate examples of resilience within the team.
• You have to manage your personal and collective fear of tactical failure; allowing for the ability to test and learn from the failings and, simultaneously, build resilience. Look for dynamic interruption and get better at absorbing it.
• Leadership is not changing, but the context is. What has traditionally grounded teams in the past will still help them now.

“Marginal gains come from resilience, and victory comes from marginal gains time and again.”

Chris Hunt, CEO Red Bull US, Red Bull

6. Clutch performers

As a big wave surfer, Red Bull’s Ian Walsh is well-placed to discuss performance under pressure. He took to the stage to discuss the strategies that serve him well out on the surf.

Pressure points:

• Understand how your body reacts when under duress both in sport and beyond. From there you can maintain control.
• When your work requires you to continually return to moments of risk and pressure you have to ensure that your ambitions, drive, hunger and desire outweigh your fear of failure or injury.
• At Red Bull, Walsh and his teammates catalogue their good and bad experiences in the moments of pressure and risk – these help to create a lifetime of understanding that can be used the next time they encounter both.

“Pressure is a valuable condition for performing at your highest level.”

Ian Walsh, big wave surfer, Red Bull

7. The role of tech in decision making

Technology at its best can inform your decision making and, as Fabio Serpiello, a professor at the University of Central Queensland, told the audience at Red Bull, there are steps you can take to ensure you’re using the right technology and datasets.

Ensure you’re staying on top of tech innovations:

• Is the technology helping us to make better decisions or requiring us to make more decisions? It can be overwhelming so be sure your tech is in service of the former.
• The future lies in the ability to read and interpret context; personalise recommendations and make decisions easier.
• Consider using the Cynefin Framework.  This is a conceptual tool used in the field of leadership and decision-making. It was created by management consultant Dave Snowden in 1999 during his tenure at IBM Global Services. The word ‘cynefin’ comes from Welsh and means ‘habitat’ or ‘haunt’.

“Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean impact. We often forget about impact because of the overwhelming amount of consumer tech.”

Fabio Serpiello, Director, Sports Strategy, University of Central Queensland