By Paul Ford MBE

As Team GB prepares to deliver a successful Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, the British Olympic Association also has a firm focus on the future.

We have long since secured Stanford University as our main team preparation base for Los Angeles 2028. We did the groundwork starting in 2023, and planning is well underway with our sports to do warm weather camps there this year. Likewise, we are on the cusp of announcing our in-competition High Performance Centre in LA to support us at Games-time as well.

We believe that securing the best multi-sport facilities is an essential component of helping British Olympians to perform at their best, as I hope to explain below. And its importance is why we’re already underway on Brisbane 2032!

Creating a home from home

Much has been written and said about British athletes enjoying their tea, baked beans and tomato ketchup in Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Paris outside of the Olympic Village bubble within our Team GB exclusive Preparation Camp and in-competition High Performance Centres, but there is a clear performance benefit in having access to these bare necessities.

The media understandably focus on those elements because it forges a connection between the athletes and the public they represent. These may be highly skilled performers, but they are regular human beings too; and if people feel safe, happy and comfortable, they tend to perform better when it matters most. Support staff just as much as the athletes. Everyone on our team has a role to play, and we need them to all perform their best.

It dawned on us ahead of the 2012 London Games, where we, as hosts, were afforded a huge opportunity, but equally given a broader challenge too. We took 541 athletes, which was approximately two-thirds more than we would normally take. We had to find a way of uniting this extended team above and beyond what we would normally do.

One element is our belief that all our athletes and sports come together as ‘One Team GB’ (which conceptually we’ll explore in the second article). Another element is more structural: we needed to find a space where we could be exclusively just who we were: Team GB. Extending our normal multi-sport pre-Games Preparation Camp at Loughborough University was one thing, but we needed an exclusive in-competition hub as well beyond just our residential space in the Olympic Village during competition.

It is still largely unknown that we were able to build our own hub within the London Olympic Village (very much a host nation benefit) as we traded off space for our full bed allocation within the main accommodation blocks. So while we were able to pull strings with the Organising Committee (as all host nations do) when we finished in London we looked and thought: ‘it’s not home advantage necessarily, we just need to be more creative’.

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

The benefits are significant. When athletes arrive in the Olympic Village, they are greeted by chaos. With all those different nations in the same place at the same time, it is not conducive to rest and relaxation. Our in-competition High-Performance Centres in Rio, Tokyo and Paris provided a stress valve; a haven that removed British athletes from the chaos and the noise. Our ‘Performance Lodge’.

At each of those games we set up the Performance Lodge in local schools, near the Village. These are multi-purpose spaces that no-one is using in the periods in with the Games take place, as it’s the summer holidays. We can effectively go in and do a ‘DIY SOS’ for 72 hours and flip around several classrooms into, say, medical spaces, lounges or meeting areas for family and friends; we can build boxing rings in their sports gymnasium; we can install our own catering services for the team. It creates an in-competition environment to support performance readiness for GBR athletes and staff only. It complements and cultivates the team feel and supports optimal recovery & regeneration at the same time.

Nothing left to chance

We go by the name British Olympic Association most of the time as the National Olympic Committee for Great Britain & Northern Ireland, but when it comes to competition we flip into Team GB mode.

We know our place in the congested British sporting landscape: we are solely concerned with delivering the team to the Games. We try to take the other stakeholders on a journey, including the National Governing Bodies, UK Sport as the funding agency, the UK Sports Institute and home countries sports institutes. To ensure everyone is clear what the plan will be. Crucially, we aim for no surprises at the Games.

We plan and deliver nine Games and Youth Festivals every four years. As illuded to above, whilst we could just plan one at a time, in chronological order, we do it concurrently, as to achieve what we want to we need to work ahead of our competitors.

As mentioned, we have secured Stanford University as our primary preparation base for the 2028 Olympics. We believe this is a massive coup, again, because we’re going to be able to transition our athletes through the nine-hour time zone shift, get over the 12-hour flight fatigue, adapt to the California summer heat, and do final technical training in a world class environment. They’re going to be able to do that in our exclusive controlled bubble and be forged as a united team. Critically, they’ll be comfortable and familiar by the time they go into the Olympic Village with being around each other from other sports, which only happens once every four years. For many this, if not planned for, can be a massive derailer, a shock to the system, and scupper performance.

But for us to have confidence in that Preparation Camp, we must test it. We must run that Camp environment multiple times as best we can beforehand because we’re working with a university that has never hosted an Olympic team before and new hotels who have never had such an array of requirements. The Camp alone in 2028 will be a five-week performance operation. We’ll have individual sports go there this summer, and in 2027 where we’ll run a bespoke multisport camp too. We don’t leave anything to chance. We simulate and test. Hopefully we flush out as many things that could go wrong as possible. The east coast of Australia will get the same treatment ahead of 2032.

‘The most-local non-local team’

Yet things can and do go wrong, which is where our planning and diligent solutions-oriented mindset comes into its own. In Paris, there was, as widely publicised, some challenges with the athlete dining experience in the Olympic Village. It’s complicated to cater for ~16,000 people in one dining hall. Local Organising Committees are almost setup to break at points given the enormity of the task they are given. Yet it’s the most important moment for an Olympian to have everything just perfect. That’s where we must be solutions based and see the opportunities, have the Plan B and C ready. So, in Paris, when this became tricky, rather than just moaning and complaining, we went into action, and that’s where our Plan B came in. We worked with the affected sports and transported athletes to our Performance Lodge and double our services covers to supplement the affected athletes performance nutrition to aid recovery. It came at a significant additional cost to us, but we had to do it.

Though not the same issues, this was not a first. There is always a curve ball at a Games. And truth be told we like it. As we have always thrived in adversity and used it as a performance opportunity. In Tokyo, the obvious one, we had to manage the pandemic and layered COVID complications at the Games. It remains a point of pride that we were the only ‘big’ nation to get every athlete who travelled to the Games to make the start line of their event, and to perform. The results spoke for themselves.

As an example, there were restrictions on numbers in the Olympic Village, and a limitation on how early teams could bring athletes into the Olympic Village. For nations travelling across multiple time zones, from climates not like the intense heat and humidity of a Japanese summer this was a performance inhibitor. But we did get in early. That’s because of some solid groundwork and efforts with the locals in the years in advance. We achieved special dispensation and were able to bring the Team into country to acclimatise and prepare in our own unique bubble in the city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. It gave us, again, a massive performance advantage. It was not by chance (though we couldn’t predict the pandemic obviously), but we achieved this exemption because we had worked so hard in advance to win the hearts and minds of our hosts beforehand. They saw us as their local team.

In 2019, a year before the originally planned Tokyo Games, we held a series of community engagements at our Preparation Camp base in Yokohama, to test things, and connect with the locals. Swimmers Adam Peaty and Duncan Scott, for example, brought their medals from Rio and put them around kids’ necks at an open swim session. That was a ‘money can’t buy moment’. We are incredibly privileged with what we represent and are custodians of the Olympic values. Bringing it to the communities that the Games affect is so important. Yokohama city officials saw and truly felt this, which is why they were so supportive of us still going through the Preparation Camp in 2021, ahead of the rescheduled COVID Games. That’s not something we had planned for but was a consequence of undertaking that process properly.

Similarly in Rio, we set ourselves a challenge: when Brazil isn’t cheering for Brazil, how can we encourage Brazil to cheer for Team GB? Again, this was off the back of a Home Games and seeing the power of what having loud and enthused crowds could do for our athletes. We approached that in two ways. At our Preparation Camp in Belo Horizonte, one hour north of Rio, we invited local children to Athletics and Rugby 7s training sessions prior to the Games. It built that connection and was reported in the local media. We were seen as ‘the most local non-local team’. We also did a series of community engagements, including sending our boxing, judo and taekwondo athletes into favelas within the greater Rio area. It carried an element of risk, but we had the mindset of this work being the right thing to do. When adversity ensued in Rio as the system creaked during the Olympic Games, the locals supported us with whatever we needed.

And so, wherever Team GB athletes go, whenever they attend an Olympics, we plan, prepare and deliver an all-encompassing home from home model. Everything is centred on the athletes.

Through following the principles above, all the athletes need to do is arrive and execute their best performances when it matters most. The results take care of themselves.

Paul Ford is the Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association. If you would like to speak to Paul, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

By John Portch

When the Leaders Performance Institute trend survey asked practitioners for their team’s greatest barriers to tech-supported innovation, nearly 45 percent cited cost and human resources.

The figure surprised both the Leaders team and Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, because most of the survey’s respondents work for well-resourced professional teams. It was reasonable, we felt, to assume that they’ve progressed beyond such concerns.

“We thought this warranted further discussion,” said Serpiello, who led the first of a three-part virtual roundtable series aimed at exploring the dynamics of tech-supported innovation in sport.

We must point out that none of the Leaders Performance Institute members in attendance contradicted the survey’s findings (which you can read in our Trend Report). Some recounted the type of problems they encounter when it comes to innovation.

“Some problems can definitely be too big,” said one experienced high performance specialist working with military units in the US.

“You may not get support because of the priorities of the major decision makers that control the purse strings.”

What is ‘innovation’?

Serpiello believes the first step is simply to define ‘innovation’.

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

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

Serpiello himself likes the definition proffered by Scott Anthony in his 2011 Little Black Book of Innovation: ‘Innovation is something different that has impact’.

He then asked the practitioners and coaches at the table for their definitions. Answers ranged from the refinement and optimisation of processes to the value of novelty and pursuit of greater efficiency.

“These are all linked to a practical outcome,” said Serpiello.

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

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

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

Serpiello then shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

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

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

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

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

There were three areas in particular where the table thought Satell’s model could prove useful:

1. For clarifying expectations. “I like the idea of using this model to frame leadership’s expectations for innovation,” said a director of performance working in the US. “They say they want innovation but they may not know what that means and they may not understand the differences between basic research that requires long timeframes versus continuous improvement.”
2. For working out who can contribute. “Often you get the best answers from within and you often get the best solutions when you use the power of the people working on it,” said a high performance specialist based in New Zealand. Others agreed, including a sports scientist from Australia. “I think it’s everyone’s role, particularly in high-performance sport, we’re solving problems every day.” While the wisdom often lies within, the opposite may also be true. The New Zealander added: “This model also helps you think about where you need to go outside.”
3. Long-term planning cycles. This facet is pertinent for teams, federations and confederations alike, as a representative from a world governing body explained. “We’re trying to build some more of that collaboration to actually understand,” they said. “Not just trialling things for the sake of it, but if there is a genuine area of the game we want to try and improve.”

As Serpiello wrapped up proceedings, he set the scene for session two, which will focus on decision-making frameworks in the context of technology-driven innovation.

What to read next

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By Jack Nayler

In part one, I set out the idea of complex environments using the analogy of a car in traffic. This time around I want to bring it into a more relatable context – the game, and what I believe operating in complex environments means for how we prepare athletes.

As our metaphorical car entered the complexity of a city, a player enters a match. All team sports are complex in nature. The degree of complexity in each sport varies depending on the number of players and the structures inherent through the laws of each game. Football is one of the most complex of team sports. Whilst it is continuous like basketball, it has more players. And although rugby and American football have as many or more players, there are fewer set plays in football, so it flows more. Couple this complexity with the low scoring and there is more uncertainty over results in football than in other sports; a factor that contributes to its global popularity.

The complex nature of team sports means that the generalities of complex systems also exist within the game. The player on the ball is closest to the action so has the greatest chance to influence the game at that moment. As the ball moves, so does the influence of each player, in proximity to the ball.

The future is also uncertain. Once the referee has blown the whistle to start the match, we have no idea what will happen next or even how long exactly the game will last.

Team sports: a microcosm of life

Team sports are all extremely popular as their complexity creates a microcosm of life. The tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands are all wrapped up together and it is difficult to break them down into discrete buckets. The performance of each individual player will emerge from the interaction of all these components.

Remember that complexity is fractal, so whilst the performance of each player on the team will emerge from the interactions of these four components, the performance of the team will emerge from the interactions between each player, and the outcome of the match will emerge from the interactions between the teams, the fans, officials, weather etc.

This has implications for how we prepare our teams to perform. Once a player sets foot on the field of play, our ability to influence the outcome as coaching and support staff diminishes. We need to provide our players with the skillset to deal with whatever emerges in the game. Because the game is constantly evolving in real time, our players need to be able to make sense of what is happening in front of them and find solutions to the puzzles presented within the game.

Remember that the more we try to control a complex system and add safety, the more we can leave ourselves open to bigger problems. Coaches of all levels appreciate this. If all training consisted of each week was the starting line-up vs an opposition with the coach dictating 90 minutes of match play pass-by-pass, the team would very quickly come unstuck in the game at the weekend.

Nassim Taleb talks of Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility (1). Whilst the robust team is able to repel the challenge posed by another team, an anti-fragile team will have the toolkit to assess their opponent in real-time and exploit their weaknesses.

This is one of the reasons why we now recognise the power of games-based approaches in skill acquisition and developing fitness (2, 3, 4). I have seen through in-house research over the years the more beneficial hormonal response of games and competition for adaptation in players.

This does not mean that there isn’t space for isolated physical and skill-based training in sport. Developing running technique can positively alter factors associated with increased injury risk (5) and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has a beneficial effect on a variety of underpinning physical performance factors in football (6). These are key pieces of the performance puzzle. The art comes in how and when they are deployed as well as how they are blended together effectively with the technical and tactical training, to greatest effect.

Raising a player’s ceiling

What we need is a variety of complementary practice spaces to allow players (as individual complex entities) to develop capabilities themselves before then applying them in context.

In complex environments, we want to try and expand the ceiling of a player’s capabilities, so as the vast majority of the fluctuations in the system (the game) come within their physical limits. Hamstrings are the most injured area of the body in football, and most hamstring injuries occur during sprinting. It would be tempting therefore to try to reduce risk by minimising the exposure a player has to sprinting. However, as soon as the game demands that the player sprints, their risk is much greater as we haven’t prepared them properly to do that. We believe now that regular sprinting exposure (appropriately placed in the training week) will confer protection from hamstring injuries (7).

As discussed, an individual player is their own complex system. Their performance will emerge from the interaction of their technical, tactical, physical and cognitive capabilities, which are all intertwined. We need to treat each player within our squad as an individual and design their training programme accordingly.  This should develop their capabilities in line with the demands that will be placed upon them by the playing style/game model and the competition, whilst considering their own personal history (injuries, training age, maturation status etc).

The on-field training should then reflect the game model, and competition demands sufficiently to allow the player to apply, develop and exhibit these physical capabilities in context of, and interwoven with, the cognitive, technical and tactical demands. Again, through research conducted in-house, I have seen the importance of training at match intensity during the week for reducing risk of injury and increasing performance; come the weekend and the research shows that maintaining higher chronic loading will help to reduce injury risk (8).

The growing appreciation of these factors have led to moves away from more traditional periodisation models first developed in individual Olympic sports where physical qualities were trained in an isolated but sequential manner. The rise of Tactical Periodisation models (9) has attempted to address team preparation holistically during the on-field training itself. Different constraints are placed upon the design of the practice on a day-by-day and week-to-week basis that provide affordances for technical, tactical, psychological and physical attributes to be overloaded on any given day.

When sports science and performance blur together

The support staff around the players need to understand this process and the underlying motivation for it each day from the coaching staff. Physical preparation, therapeutic work, psychological skills training all need to be complementary to this process and not detrimental.

As each player is their own complex system, they are themselves closest to the action. No one should know the player’s body and how it feels better than them, though admittedly this takes time to learn as a professional athlete.

I believe that a player-involved as opposed to player-centred approach is vital in developing this knowledge. Although the difference is subtle, it is an important distinction to make. In a player-centred model, the team of practitioners, ologists and experts discuss the player and develop a plan, drawing on all their expertise. A player-involved model brings the player into that process, involving them in the decision making and design of their training. The player needs respecting as a key member of the interdisciplinary team. Not only will this help to develop the player’s understanding of their body and the training process, but also their investment and trust in the programme. This is key in a sport such as football where the link between doing physical work and performance isn’t always immediately obvious and the talent pool is global; from different cultures and backgrounds.

The whole programme therefore needs careful management in a trans-disciplinary manner. When sports science first entered football around 30 years ago it was perceived as a standalone service where players spent time separately to the coaching team. This then developed into larger multidisciplinary teams of practitioners working within their field of expertise, but they were still often siloed. The rise of the Head of Performance brought distinct disciplines together to form interdisciplinary teams operating in a more integrated manner.

These lines are now blurring further. Technology has allowed S&C coaches to do many of the things that were previously the domain of the sports scientist (e.g. analysing jump tests). The rehabilitation process starts with the doctor or physio but ends with technical coaches delivering elements. Analysts and sports scientists co-create drills that match the technical, tactical and physical demands for a player completing some additional conditioning work.

What needs placing around a complex system, as a way of helping to manage and steer it in the direction we need, is a framework that guides those within the system in their decision making.

Psychology is a case in point.  There is a clear need for performance psychology to help develop the toolkit of capabilities that players have at their disposal, and the wider training should help to develop and test these capabilities in a realistic manner. However, everyone in the organisation has a brain between their ears and is interacting with one another so is, to a greater or lesser extent, doing psychology in some way. A framework, or Psychologically Informed Environment (PIE) is essential to ensure that as far as possible all the interactions happening within an organisation are in service of the performance (and I would consider wellbeing intrinsic to performance) and not detrimental to it.

So, we return to the fractal nature of complexity and the different scales at which complexity exists. The sporting organisation itself is a complex entity and each person within it will exert different levels of control at different times.

This has implications for the way that we lead these environments, and this is what I want to delve into in the third and fourth parts of this series.

Summary

• Performance in sport emerges from the interaction of the tactical, technical, physical and cognitive demands placed upon the player, and then the team.
• When preparing teams, we need to give the players the combined skillset to recognise and solve problems on the field of play in the moment, as practitioners trying to place more control will only result in bigger errors and problems.
• Instead, constraints should be placed around the practice space to allow the desired response to emerge.
• As much as possible, practices should then be designed in a complementary manner, with one eye on the whole.
• Including the player in the process has a two-fold positive effect. It educates the player and increases buy-in to the programme.
• Can you create a clear framework for performance in your environment?

References

1. Taleb, N.N., 2012. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. New York: Random House.
2. Gabbett, T., Jenkins, D., & Abernethy, B., 2009. Game-Based Training for Improving Skill and Physical Fitness in Team Sport Athletes. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 4, pp. 273 – 283.
3. Kinnerk, P., Harvey, S., MacDonncha, C., & Lyons, M., 2018. A Review of the Game-Based Approaches to Coaching Literature in Competitive Team Sport Settings. Quest, 70, pp. 401 – 418.
4. Manninen, M., Magrum, E., Campbell, S., & Belton, S., 2024. The effect of game-based approaches on decision-making, knowledge, and motor skill: A systematic review and a multilevel meta-analysis. European Physical Education Review, 31, pp. 18 – 32.
5. Clemente, F., Ramirez-Campillo, R., Nakamura, F., & Sarmento, H., 2020. Effects of high-intensity interval training in men soccer player’s physical fitness: A systematic review with meta-analysis of randomized-controlled and non-controlled trials. Journal of Sports Sciences, 39, pp. 1202 – 1222.
6. Silva, M., Fonseca, P., Fernandes, R., & Conceição, F., 2024. Is Running Technique Important to Mitigate Hamstring Injuries in Football Players?. Applied Sciences.
7. Edouard, P., Mendiguchia, J., Guex, K., Lahti, J., Prince, C., Samozino, P. & Morin, J., 2022. Sprinting: a key piece of the hamstring injury risk management puzzle. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 57(1), pp.4–6.
8. Morgans, R., Oliveira, R., Mandorino, M., Zmijewski, P., Ryan, B., Modric, T., Teixeira, J. & Moreira, A., 2026. The loading impact of training and match-play on non-contact muscle injuries in elite male soccer players: A seasonal analysis. Biology of Sport, 43, pp.107–114.
9. Delgado-Bordonau, J.L. & Méndez-Villanueva, A., 2012. Tactical periodization: Mourinho’s best-kept secret? Soccer Journal, May–June, pp.28–34.

By Jack Nayler

I first stumbled across the concept of complexity a little over ten years ago and it was a watershed moment in my career.

However, in a truly complex manner, it was the combination of my lived experience to that point, my educational background and the reading I was doing in my own time around the subject that led to my appreciation of complexity and its implications for those concerned with sporting performance.

Over the course of four articles, I want to explain how I see the world of elite sport, the complex system at its heart, and the most effective way I currently see of managing performance within that context.

I will delve into the implications for sports and the operations within teams before outlining what this all means for leaders in this space.

But first, I want define what a complex system actually is and set out its characteristics.

Learning from failure

My real understanding came, inevitably, in learning from failure.

The white paper by the late Dr Richard Cook of the university of Chicago entitled How Complex Systems Fail was instrumental in helping me to understand the ramifications of complexity on the undertaking of performance in a sports setting.

Dr Cook was an anaesthetist and simultaneously and internationally respected researcher. His short treatise is regarded as one of the most influential works in the field of patient medical safety. It was this understanding of how systems fail that brought together everything else I had seen and learnt and began to change the way I saw performance management in professional sports.

Around this time, I was challenged by a friend in the industry to put together my thoughts on building a performance department for a sports team. I found it challenging just to make an org chart and list positions without giving the background and rationale for why and how the department existed in that structure as well as its philosophical construct. This exercise of transferring ideas from my head on to paper forced me to critically confront my assumptions and crystallised my thoughts on how I believe we need to operate in the complex environment of elite professional team sports (specifically football as this has been my professional experience).

So, what do we mean by complex?

Dave Snowden is a researcher in the field of knowledge management and is the creator of the Cynefin Framework that helps us to make sense of the different types of environments in which we operate.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word explaining there are multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand.

The model contains five domains, all of which can exist at any given moment, and we move between them:

Source: HBR

The clear domain has obvious cause and effect and well-established best practice. There are many examples of this in elite sports, for instance, data hygiene when downloading and analysing GPS data or packing medical equipment for an away match.

In the complicated domain, there are correct answers to problems, but they may take some expertise or understanding to deliver and there are governing constraints within which the answer will lie.

An example from sport would be developing a fuelling strategy for a player in a match. We need learned expertise in nutrition and we need to do some analysis on the demands that player faces in match play, as well as understand how their physiology responds to those demands. There are then governing constraints (carbohydrate is the main fuel source in performance) but within those constraints, the solution will be different depending on the sport and the athlete, but the solution can be determined.

I find the easiest way to consider the difference between a complicated and a complex environment is by using the analogy of a car.

A car is an extremely complicated piece of technology. The first practical automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1885 and had several hundred components. The modern family car by comparison contains over 30,000 parts on average.

Despite this huge number of component parts, should one of them fail and the car stop working, the defective component can be replaced and the performance of the car restored. The performance of the car in this case is its ability to move with you on board and there is a linear process from depressing your foot on the accelerator to make that car move. A skilled technician should be able to completely take the car apart, rebuild it and restore its performance.

Take that same car and ask it to transport you across a city such as London and it enters a complex system where the performance of the car (the time it takes to transport you from point A to point B) is no longer determined by the car itself (it would make little difference if you drove a Ferrari or a Fiat), but in the interaction of the inter-connected parts that make up the complex system. These include the status of the driver (in how much of a hurry they are and their relative stress level), the other cars and their respective drivers, traffic signals, roadworks, cyclists, pedestrians, emergency services, major events going on that day, the time of day and the weather etc. There are many other potential components to the system, not all of which are obvious when sat in the car itself.

The performance of the car (how quickly it reaches its destination) will emerge from the interaction of all these components and each one is concurrently performing at the centre of their own complex system.

So, the first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation.

The next part to understand about complexity is that it is fractal. Fractals are geometric shapes that contain the same detailed structure at ever smaller scales. This means that complex systems exist at smaller and larger scales and nest within one another. They simultaneously are affected by the scale below and affect the scale above.

Below the scale of our car, the driver is their own complex system, and their performance is determined by (amongst other things) their genetics, upbringing, education, wellbeing, as well as how well they have slept last night, what they had for breakfast and whether they are running late or not.

At a larger scale, the performance of the traffic system designed by city planners is affected by the performance of all the cars on the roads.

The person closest to the action in the complex system has the greatest chance to affect it at any given moment, in this example it is the driver of the car. Each decision they make will create a new reality and alter the course of the complex system (for reference see the film Sliding Doors). The decision to put your foot down to get through an amber light rather than braking in anticipation of a red light will affect the course of the complex system and other components within it.

This person closest to the action may have the greatest chance to influence the performance of the system, but they also have the narrowest focus and least ability to see the big picture. This is where external information can help inform their decision (SatNav, Waze or radio traffic reports). Ultimately though, it remains their decision.

Because performance emerges in real time as we navigate through the city and react to what we encounter in front of us, we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future as we set out on the journey, or how good our performance (the journey time) will be.

All decisions taken by the driver therefore contain an element of risk and are (hopefully educated) gambles. These decisions are being made on a moment-by-moment basis are determined in part by what has already happened and will influence what is to come.

As all the components in the system are simultaneously operating in their own individual complex system, agreement between them isn’t perfect. Thus, complex systems are never perfect, they operate in a sub-optimal mode. No route across London provides a perfect path where you will be able to drive without braking or even coming to a stop. The challenge is that we cannot know exactly where the imperfections will lie.

Once we have finished our journey and the performance is determined, the impact of all our decisions is laid bare. With hindsight our choices take on a sequential profile and we can fall victim to a narrative fallacy, where each decision makes sense in context of what came after it. What we need to remember is that at the time we made each decision, we were blind to the future and couldn’t know exactly the outcome. That left turn that led to roadworks suddenly becomes a disaster that caused all our problems, whilst the decision to cut through the backstreets, a moment of genius. However, we will never know the alternate realities of the other options we could have selected.

The last part of complex systems I wish to convey is that the more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term.

By control I mean to attempt to force or determine an outcome. The decision to jump a red light or speed along a section of road can lead to being pulled over by the police, which will cause a delay that greatly outweighs the seconds saved through our actions. The right way to operate in the system will emerge by experimentation, trying different routes, times of day or even modes of transport to complete the journey.

To bring us out of an over-extended analogy and back into the real world I want to emphasise that we should not be fatalistic about complexity. I don’t want to come across like the system will determine the outcome, regardless of what we do to affect it. I believe we are an integral component in any system with the chance to affect its direction and outcomes (just remember they might not be perfect).

If we are also able to step back and appreciate the interaction between systems at larger and smaller scales than that in which we are currently operating, we can be very powerful.

Chaos and Confusion

The final two domains in the Cynefin framework are Chaos and Confusion. Chaos is where there are no clear rules or cause and effect at all, even with hindsight, and it is better to act now and think later, shooting more from the hip.

Confusion is the dark centre of the framework, when you aren’t sure which of the other four domains you are currently in.

Most of the time in elite sports I believe we deal with complexity and thus I think it is the most important to try and understand. In the next two parts I will go on to discuss the implications of operating in this domain for sporting organisations, and what that means for leaders in this space.

Summary

• In a complex environment, performance emerges from the spaces between the components in an inter-dependent manner.
• Complex systems are fractal – they exist at smaller and larger scales and nest within each other.
• The person closest to the action in a complex system has the greatest chance to affect the outcome.
• Our knowledge and expertise are constantly changing in complexity.
• We cannot predict the future with complete accuracy, so any decisions made are essentially gambles.
• Complex systems are not perfect.
• Adding in control can lead to greater problems in the future.
• We are an integral part of the complex system, so can affect it greatly.

References

Cook, R.I., 2000. How Complex Systems Fail. [online] Available at: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ [Accessed 29 September 2025]

The Cynefin Company (n.d.) The Cynefin Framework. The Cynefin Co. Available at: https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/ (Accessed: 1 October 2025)

A podcast brought to you by our Partners

You may have a great performance structure for your men’s team, but simply cutting and pasting that to your women’s team does them a disservice.

That is the view of Arianna Criscione, the Head of Football Operations at Mercury/13 and Como Women. “It’s not enough,” she tells this Kitman Labs podcast. She explains that there are a range of services, from nutrition to psychology, that need to be tailored to women players.

Criscione continues: “You also have to have access to medical [support], but a lot of clubs don’t have access to a gynaecologist, which is a major part of the female body and really needs to be addressed a lot more.”

Dentistry is another area of oft-neglected consideration. “If you have an off-bite, that can actually affect your structure and how you’re running, which could cause injury.”

It is, as Sarah Smith says, about “making sure that we have a good foundation of support around our athletes.” Smith, who is the Director of Medical and Performance at Angel City FC in the NWSL, joins the conversation alongside Stephen Smith, the Founder of Kitman Labs.

In addition to discussing holistic female player development [10:45], the trio delve into bridging the gap in data and understanding in women’s football [15:45]; how talent identification is evolving [20:15]; as well as the existing disparities in data collection [28:10] from club to club and league to league.

This is episode two of a three-part series. Please go back and check out episode one, where the Leaders Performance Institute and Stephen Smith spoke to Paul Prescott of the International Football Group and Morten Larsen of Danish Superliga side Aarhus discussing talent pathways in the Premier League and beyond.

Further listening:

Kitman Labs Podcast: What Factors Drive Talent Development in the Premier League and Beyond?

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

By Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland & Lottie Wright

You might have thought that UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand were the fiercest of rivals and would be unlikely allies in sharing high performance practice and intelligence.

However, the quartet have formed an unlikely partnership for the good of female athletes across the globe and with the aim of pushing forwards advancements in female health research and practice.

The result is the Global Alliance and, on our most recent Women’s High Performance Sport Community call, we were joined by Dr Helen Fulcher from HPSNZ, Dr Amber Donaldson from USOPC, Dr Rachel Harris from the AIS, and Dr Richard Burden from UKSI, to discuss how it works.

All four institutes have made their own way in providing additional focus and resource for female athlete health, starting at different points in time across the last ten years.

All four have focused on education. The AIS, UKSI and USOPC have had further branches into research. HPSNZ have looked at processes and systems linked to technology; and the USOPC have had to consider partnerships that help navigate a geographically large country and complex health system.

However, all four acknowledge that despite their positions of privilege there are limits to time and resource in this area, and all four are aware of what improving health for females, who typically suffer more injuries and illnesses than males, could do for raising levels of competition. The opportunity the group of four are close to bringing to reality is for an alliance to support globally with raising minimum levels of understanding when it come to female athlete health.

The formation of the Global Alliance

The world of elite sport is quite small, so when travelling to conferences and talks on these spaces, the group realized that they are all doing the same things, with limited resources and time. So the premise of the Alliance is to combine resources and save time across the group. After all, as Burden asked, “what’s the point in spending lots of money people don’t have on education resources when it already exists publicly?” Whilst bumping into one another, the group organically had conversations on how they can work together to increase efficiencies without crossing boundaries of competition. “We are all under-resourced, we’re overstretched in terms of the time that we’re wanting to spend in this space,” said Harris. “We really wanted to try and allow the people that are working in our sporting organisations to be more proactive.”

Traditionally seen as rivals, these organisations are now collaborating for the benefit of female athletes across the globe. The primary goal is to collaborate on female health initiatives, leveraging each organisation’s expertise and resources. This collaboration aims to enhance the health and performance of female athletes by sharing knowledge and best practices across regions.

The Alliance’s main objectives include…

• Sharing best practices and resources: “You can’t do everything on your own,” said Burden, “or your organisation can’t be everything to everybody.” By pooling their collective knowledge, Alliance members can develop and implement the most effective health initiatives and signpost others towards the best practice or research already implemented by their colleagues in different regions. The dream is to be able to give people one place to come to, and then to be directed to other places. Ultimately, no individual person can be an expert in everything, and we should always remain open to the idea that someone might know more than we do.
• Benchmarking and baseline efforts: The goal, as Fulcher explained, is to “create a baseline that is higher”. Members of the Alliance will regularly assess and combine their efforts to ensure continuous improvement which, in theory, should result in healthier female athletes and higher levels of competition.
• Addressing misinformation: Simultaneously the alliance would ensure that accurate and reliable information about female health has the potential to reach all athletes, especially those in regions with limited access to such information. The group are passionate on making sure that the information available would be representative of the global athlete population, and therefore diverse, whilst being evidence-based. You want to be able to say “‘as of now, this is the best way to treat X’,” said Donaldson. Athletes from different nations will also help spread accurate information about health topics, such as menstrual cycles and nutrition, through their platforms. The Alliance recognizes the influence of social media and aims to create content that can be shared widely to reach a broader audience.
• Speeding up progress: As a collective the alliance can move practices along more quickly, be that through raising baseline levels faster, or by being able to increase sample sizes.  The group have an inherent belief that the collective is greater than the individual. They also want to make sure that as relatively well-resourced nations with greater access, they welcome in their colleagues in countries where access and resources may be more limited.
• Conducting collaborative research: One approach to speeding up progress would be to continue the research work that is currently happening in silos. There is potential in multicenter research projects, as Burden explained. He said: “If you can combine multicenter research, with those multicenters being in different countries around the globe, then you are naturally going to get a more diverse, rich database and, therefore, the insights that we’re going to be able to get from that are going to be just way more valuable for everybody”. It’s still a competitive environment. “We still absolutely want to beat all of the other people in the Alliance that we’re forming here on the medal table,” said Harris, “but we certainly see that the things that we’re doing in this space are not about state secrets.”
• Providing a blueprint: The aim is to develop a central repository of trustworthy information to which athletes, stakeholders, and organisations can refer. It’s not often that cross-country collaboration happens but, by bringing this Alliance together, a blueprint for collaboration, and how to ‘do’ it, can be created; from ideation to doing; sharing learnings as they emerge, especially when they are collaborating on an important topic area. They want to show how a collaboration can start and, ultimately, how to ensure longevity beyond the four current members.

The Alliance faces several challenges, including:

• Getting things through layers of bureaucracy. The solution is commitment to sticking with it, but then being inventive with methods of information dissemination.
• Ensuring that the resources and information generated are visible and accessible to athletes and other stakeholders globally. This involves understanding and appealing to the way in which athletes take on and digest information. It will also require strategic communication and collaboration with local leaders and organisations.
• The need to combat misinformation. The alliance will provide rigorous, trustworthy information that cuts through the noise of inaccurate or misleading content. It will be able to share aligned messaging globally.
• Resources are not limitless. Hence the need to come together to collaborate and combine resources for a scale of economies effect.

• Time is precious. In addition, the numbers of athletes going through some of the specific female health experiences can be quite small, so to learn and provide advancements could take much more time if each institute tried to do so on their own. The multicenter research projects should counter this.

• To be truly representative globally, the Alliance will have to grow to be culturally diverse and account for different languages and time zones. The group recognize that this will be a challenge and it might take grit and determination to make it happen.

The alliance is committed to overcoming all of these challenges by building robust, reliable resources and ensuring they are effectively communicated and accessible to all athletes.

A proactive and inclusive strategy

The Global Alliance is a comprehensive approach to enhancing female athlete health that prioritises:

• Collaboration: The Alliance is built on shared values, humility, and a commitment to improving female athlete health through collective effort. “We’re all in exactly the same position and we’re all really wanting to do the same thing,” said Harris.
• Education and resources: A key focus is on creating and sharing educational materials that are accessible and evidence-based. As Harris said: “We felt that by ensuring we could create some of these resources, they could put more of that time into looking after their athletes.”
• Future vision: The Alliance is aiming for a sustainable, impactful approach that can adapt and grow to meet the needs of female athletes globally and improve female health for athletes. It wants to raise the standards of competition along the way and, through its multicenter research, increase the number and diversity of research participants and insights. The Alliance may not be everyone’s answer, but could be a connector, with a central platform for sharing information gathered across the board.

Top tips

Just start! If you’re working in a small organisation where you can’t produce education modules or you can’t fund research, there’s no harm in just starting a conversation. Build your own networks, forge connections, and don’t be isolated.

Find people with the same values and intent. “And that’s not to say that there is no kind of diverse thinking within our group,” said Burden. “But the underpinning values within the Global Alliance and the work that we’re trying to do are all shared.”

It’s not about ‘us’ but a bigger purpose. Fulcher spoke of building communities within your area of expertise or within your own nation, but then taking that further. “That’s within your specialty, within your area or your nation,” she said. “I think it’s a natural step to build an international community; and we do have them, but they’ve been a bit ad hoc.” The Global Alliance is, as she added, an opportunity to raise standards across female sport. “The focus is not just on individuals having great connections but what can we collectively do better for this group of athletes that we all care about.”

Stay curious and be friendly. “One of the biggest things is to be humble,” said Donaldson. “Really coming to this platform being  humble and wanting to learn, wanting to contribute is key.”

Find out what works for you. You can learn from others but try to ascertain what works for you in your context too. Donaldson said: “I can tell you exactly what we do, but you’re not going to be able to replicate it like for like.”

Those in-person moments can be critical. “Those in-person conversations can help build relationships,” said Donaldson, who explained that the Alliance meets periodically. “You can also get more done when you have those conversations.”

Involve coaches in the education piece. Fulcher said: “Make sure coaches feel comfortable enough so that if a certain issue is brought up, they know where to direct traffic and tell people where to go for help.”

By Aaron Walsh

What do we believe to be the most effective way to develop our people?

Do we focus on increasing capability or reducing interference as a primary strategy?

In theory, most would agree with increasing capability but, in practice, our coaching models are often dominated by reducing interference.

There’s a time and a place for work-ons but, from a mental perspective, when we overfocus on weaknesses, players can become oversensitive to threats that could impact performance. Their thoughts drift towards what could go wrong and how those weaknesses could be exposed.

When we focus on their strengths, they are more likely to look for opportunities to express those positive points of difference. Rather than being anxious about performing, they are excited.

Your mental performance work should align with your overall performance philosophy and beliefs about how we get the most out of the people we leads, but once a team has decided on an approach to increasing its mental performance, there needs to be some strategy around the work. To do this, there are three questions to guide us:

1. What is the vision for the work?
2. What philosophy will drive the work?
3. What framework will we build the work upon?

Creating a vision for the work

Let’s start with the end in mind. What would success look like if we nail this work?

This question lets us capture something tangible and provides strategic direction with clear outcomes. It anchors us in reality while buffering us from the temptation to be reactive when various challenges arise.

Here is an example of a vision statement we can use:

‘We want to produce self-sufficient athletes who can embrace the demands of being a professional athlete while delivering their best when it matters the most.’

Success is clear. There is no ambiguity, and everyone involved in the program can align around this vision.

Capturing your philosophy

Secondly, having a philosophy about how we will achieve the vision is vital. This is more about ‘how’ we will approach the work and what will guide the delivery of the program. This should capture and reflect our broader high-performance beliefs around growth and development.

There is an equation we can use to help us define this.

High Performance = Capability – Interference

This definition poses a critical question for everyone in the performance space.

As asked above, when finding the most effective way to develop our people, do we focus on increasing capability or reducing interference as a primary strategy?

We can all think of coaches who start a review with clips about poor aspects of the team’s performance and it is normal for players to have those aforementioned work-ons at the beginning of each week.

This is not to say that there is no place for this, but we select players because of what they can do. It’s their strengths and their ability to impact the game that make them valuable members of a team. Furthermore, if all we give them are areas of their game to work on and if they change week by week depending on their game, then we endanger development through inconsistency.

Whatever your agreed approach to mental performance, it should align with our overall performance philosophy and beliefs about how to get the most out of the people we lead.

The right framework

With the vast nature of subjects and focus areas within sports psychology, it is often daunting for providers and teams to know where to start. However, a simple framework can create a strategic approach that brings clarity and direction to the work. This prevents the provider from bouncing around different subjects weekly and not building anything of substance.

The framework above is anchored in the philosophy introduced previously, which states mental skills exist to help people grow and maximise their capability. It intentionally starts with foundational subjects that build upon each other. The reason for this is linked to the growing prominence of the mental side of performance. With more discussions occurring, more articles being written, and the emergence of social media, there is a danger of replacing foundations with tools.

Here’s what I mean: subjects like mindfulness, breathing, and visualisation are helpful and, in some cases, necessary. However, they are just tools that can help under pressure. Dealing with pressure will be much more effective if these tools are married to other critical mental skills. This framework aims to introduce these skills systematically and purposely so the athlete is well equipped for the various challenges they will face. From experience, athletes who know how to grow themselves and their mindset find pressure, something they can face and overcome. Giving a few tools won’t accomplish that.

Grow yourself

The first aspect of the framework lays the foundation for mental performance. When discussing this with an athlete, we can introduce and define it by asking five questions.

1. Why do you play the sport? (Purpose)
2. What are you trying to accomplish? (Goals and aspirations)
3. How will you get there? (Creating a performance plan)
4. When will you do the work? (Self-management and Ownership)
5. Who is in your circle? (Support)

Purpose: We want athletes connected to a purpose that fuels their performance. Every athlete will face challenging periods throughout their career, whether it’s injury, non-selection, or a loss of form; there are moments where doubt emerges that can potentially derail their journey. Being connected to why they play the sport and accessing that passion provides perseverance and focus during these difficult times.

Goals: Knowing what you are trying to accomplish is vital for any athlete. To understand this, here is a simple analogy. When we want to get somewhere in our vehicles, we set the destination in our GPS. We do this so we don’t get lost and waste time getting to where we want to. This is the same for an athlete; without clear goals, they can spend much time going in different directions and not get closer to their desired destination.

Planning: Once we know where we are going, we must understand how we will get there. This is where a good plan is invaluable. To continue the analogy above, a GPS provides clear steps so we arrive at the right place at the right time. Many athletes set goals and fail to determine what they must do to get there. A performance roadmap creates a focus on the right areas of development that will be critical to achieving what the athlete has set out to do

Ownership: I was recently asked what characteristics are shared among the best athletes I have worked with. Though there are many that they share, one sticks out. They take ownership of their careers. They drive the different aspects of performance and see those around them as key supporters. They don’t make excuses or play “victim” if things don’t go their way. One key aspect of this is how they use their time; they have a weekly schedule that is linked to the goals they have and the plans they have in place. They are purposeful and hold themselves accountable.

Support: The final aspect of growing yourself is about support. Throughout their career, athletes will have numerous and different perspectives offered by coaches, support staff, and agents. They need to be clear about what voices are essential. Having a clear support circle is critical so they stay on track and have the encouragement to get where they want to be.

Grow your mindset

The second aspect of the framework is grow your mindset. American psychologist Michael Gervais defines mindset as “how we see ourselves and the world we live in.” This is critical for athletes. Here are a few examples of the power of the mindset

Constant Improvement: Are athletes focused on getting better every day? Do they have a process in place to achieve this? Can they be consistent regardless of what happened the day or week before? Can they manoeuvre through the highs and lows of the game and remain anchored to their pursuit of being their best? They can reduce all the noise of competing by returning to a simple question: “How do I get better today?”

Opportunity-focused: Do they view themselves as competent, and is it an opportunity to express themselves? Or do they see themselves as imposters, and is the game a place where they get exposed? One mindset produces trust and excitement, while the other produces doubt and anxiety, both significantly impacting performance.

Antifragile: Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines antifragility ‘as something beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.’ This is particularly relevant for athletes, as adversity, disappointment, and failure are common obstacles they will face. Do they see this as something that destroys them or something they can learn from and be better than ever? Their mindset towards challenges is a significant indicator of future decline or growth.

Growing under pressure

The final aspect of the framework is how we deal with pressure. Most people see pressure as something to be avoided at all costs. Certain situations cause deeply uncomfortable feelings. Without the right strategy, pressure can feel unmanageable and, at times, paralysing. For athletes, there is no option to avoid pressure if they want to be successful. Therefore, they must have the tools to approach it confidently and believe it is a place where they can succeed.

As mentioned above, there are many practices and tools related to pressure. Once we have the foundations in place, they are valuable. For the sake of brevity, I won’t go into all the tools, but there is a clear outcome no matter what we use.

We want to be able to deliver our best when it matters the most.

Below are three things we can focus on to help our athletes be at their best in the big moments

1. Get calm: Under pressure, the nervous system can cause chaos. Our minds begin to race, and our bodies react. Our first port of call is getting calm so we can deal with the moment in front of us.

2. Get clear: Once we are calm, we need to manage our focus. Often, under pressure, there is a temptation to go to the outcome of a game or the consequence of getting things wrong. We want to eliminate that distraction and focus on the task at hand.

3. Let go: The final reality that can help us when pressure is present is letting go. This requires us to trust what we have at that moment and surrender. The more we try to control, the less instinctive we will become. Athletes are at their best when they are free, trust their skillset, and play what’s in front of them.

In conclusion, a mental performance program will only be effective if there is a clear strategy behind it. Here are a few questions to help stimulate this:

1. Do you have a clear vision for the program?
2. What philosophies will undergird and guide the work?
3. What framework is best for your team?

Further reading from Aaron Walsh:

Why the Upswell in Demand for Mental Skills Is Not Being Translated into Effective Work

By John Portch

When Great Britain’s wheelchair rugby team came off the court in Paris, their disappointment was mixed with immense pride.

The team narrowly lost their bronze medal match at the Paris Paralympics 50-48 against Australia, but captain Gavin Walker was positive.

“If you’d have asked me two years ago, I’d have probably snatched your hand off for the experience of playing for a bronze medal,” he said, mindful of the transition the team has been in since winning gold in Tokyo.

“We go into another rebuilding process, another four years ahead of us and looking towards LA now,” he continued. “[We will be] growing the sport, putting time into grassroots and developing the team going forward.”

Not that any stone was left unturned in the build-up. “Our performance in Paris highlighted the progress we are making and confirmed that we remain at the forefront of wheelchair rugby,” says Lee Stutely, Great Britain’s Team Manager.

She is speaking to the Leaders Performance Institute about Great Britain’s two team camps that took place at St George’s Park in Staffordshire before the Games. The first, a seven-day visit in January, focused on their continuing preparations; the second, a four-day camp in August, represented the final taper towards Paris.

Both were a result of smart planning, with Stutely taking a lead on the logistics of the camps. “We came and rec’ed, just me and our Head of Performance Support & Science Barry Mason,” adds Stutely. “Then the coaches came with some athletes to check the playing surfaces.” From there, the coaches and performance team came together with Walker and vice-captain Stu Robinson to map out the sessions and structure.

All reflect with satisfaction on the work that was done in the last cycle. “The team’s trajectory is clearly on the right path toward further medal success,” says Stutely, “and we are driven by our commitment to high standards and continuous improvement.”

The team will conduct a post-Paris debrief to identify its strengths and weaknesses. “We will be hoping to learn if the systems and processes in place were effective,” adds Stutely, who emphasises how important it is to retain and refine successful strategies. “We will also examine what can be improved and what we should stop doing. As Paris showed, there is little between the top teams. We need to identify where can we get our marginal gains and what can increase our competitive edge in the next cycle.”

Chris Bond of team Australia is on the ground after a clash with Aaron Phipps of Team Great Britain during the Wheelchair Rugby Group B game Australia vs Great Britain. (Photo: Marco Mantovani/Getty Images)

The home of England

Great Britain qualified for Paris by finishing runners-up at the 2023 European Championships.

With their passage secured, the team could step up their preparations. While happy with their usual training facility at the Lilleshall National Sports Centre in Shropshire, Stutely and her colleagues felt that a change of scenery could reset minds and take players out of their comfort zones.

The 330-acre facility at SGP fitted the bill. Stutely says: “It made them more aware that they were moving onto a competition and preparing for something special rather than just being their home from home training environment.”

SGP is also the home of 24 England football teams. “We have quite a few football fans within our team so they were excited,” adds Stutely. “It’s historic and other senior teams have trained here, such as the England women’s rugby team. The venue is awesome for us because it’s accessible; and everything – training facilities and accommodation – is in one location.”

In addition to an onsite Hilton Hotel, the complex boasts 14 state-of-the-art football pitches, which can be configured for a variety of sports, as well as a range of indoor facilities including a full 3G pitch, a multifunctional sports hall, gym, hydrotherapy pools and a cryotherapy chamber.

The SGP team were on hand to allay any concerns. “Kevin Sanders was very good to us,” says Stutely of SGP’s Elite Sport & Partnerships Manager. The team could count on court time, gym time, meeting rooms and private dining rooms. “The Hilton were also very good at making sure we had as many accessible rooms as possible and that everything was suitable for our athletes’ needs.”

SGP is the home of England’s Para football teams and has long been committed to ensuring that the nation’s disability and impaired teams have equal access to the complex’s high performance facilities. It’s a point of pride for SGP, even if this process remains a work in progress, as Becky Bullock, the SGP Customer Account Lead at the Football Association, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“We acknowledge there is always more we can do,” she says. “We are continually learning, listening and striving to improve, and we remain dedicated to incorporating best practice into the future design and development of our facilities to be accessible for all.”

Aaron Phipps of Team Great Britain competes during Bronze medal match between Australia and Great Britain. (Photo: Aitor Alcade/Getty Images for IPC)

The future

The Great Britain team is aware of its legacy beyond the court, with Walker taking the opportunity after the bronze medal match to address the audience watching at home in the UK.

“For fans out there and people who are watching this, we’re all playing this sport after starting life with a disability or going through some sort of traumatic injury,” he said. “The fact that any athlete in the Paralympics is competing shows they’ve overcome adversity and everyone should be proud of any performance. I guess that’s the main message for anyone out there that is struggling – this is something that can get you out of those dark times.”

Wheelchair rugby, as Walker alluded to, is an egalitarian sport. It is built on ensuring that players with different care needs can compete together. Players are assigned a points-based value based on their functional ability ranging from 0.5 (those with the highest support needs) to 3.5 points (those with the fewest). The total point value of a four-player team cannot exceed 8.0 points unless it includes a female player, which affords a team an extra 0.5 points, taking the maximum total to 8.5 points.

“Some team bonding happens because of accessibility issues, the whole ‘no-one is left behind’ thing,” says Stutely. “They always look after each other.”

The British Paralympic Association works with Games authorities to ensure that athlete accommodation at all Paralympics is suitable for their teams’ needs. Stutely, who took part in her fifth Games in Paris, believes that environments have generally improved since the London 2012 Games raised the bar.

“As staff and athletes, we spend a lot of time being adaptable to the environment we enter,” she says. “Overcoming any challenges and learning how to control people’s mindsets when things are not going the right way is so important.”

Looking further ahead, Stutely is excited for Great Britain’s prospects. “We also have a promising depth of young and talented athletes. This blend of experience and emerging talent positions us well to continue competing at the highest level and achieve even greater accomplishments on the world stage.”

Further reading:

Pre-Season Preparations: Why a Home from Home Can Make All the Difference

By Esther Goldsmith & Dr Natalie Brown

Talking to female athletes can feel challenging and uncomfortable; and sometimes concerns of safeguarding practices can exist.

This results from historic perceptions of the menstrual cycle and female-specific factors such as pelvic health being personal, secretive and related to feelings of embarrassment, shame and uncleanliness.

However, female health and topics such as the menstrual cycle are normal biological functions related to hormonal control, the same as heart rate, breathing, and appetite.

From speaking to practitioners and coaches, as members of the Sport Wales Female Health & Performance Team, we know there are additional influences on comfort levels when having conversations with female athletes about the menstrual cycle. For example, knowledge of the topic, appropriateness, gender of practitioner, experiences (professional and personal) and perceived relevance (both to athletes and performance).

Previously reported barriers to conversation include:

• [Male] coaches feel that it’s inappropriate or an invasion of privacy
• Cultural taboos resulting in shame and embarrassment
• Confusing messages in the media
• Not having resources or education to know what to say and when
• [Female] coaches’ previous experience of menstrual cycles not affecting performance/training
• Perception that discussion of menstrual cycles and hormonal contraceptives are outside of the coaching role
• Lack of a female practitioner
• Lack of structure in place for education or support
• Lack of time in a season for proper education
• In addition, practitioners and coaches are sometimes paralysed because they don’t know the right questions to ask, the right language to use or how to start the conversation with the female athletes that they work with

Here are our top tips…

1. Acknowledge that everyone feels different

It is important to acknowledge and have awareness that some athletes may feel comfortable to talk openly about their menstrual cycles whereas some may feel like it’s the worst thing in the world to start with. This could be influenced by their culture, age, family, and social surroundings.

2. Think about language

One thing that is important to be aware of is the language that you use. We’ve all grown up using euphemisms for lots of different things, whether that is for parts of the body or biological functions that we are embarrassed to talk about. There are lots of period euphemisms or ‘code words’ but using these can reinforce the perception of awkwardness, embarrassment and the negative stigma that is historically related to menstruation. We encourage using the terms menstrual cycle, menstruation, periods, and period products.

3. Consider the who, what, where, when and how

Before initiating conversations with female athletes about their menstrual cycle or other aspects of female health, have a think about the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ and ‘how’…

Who – Who is best to have the conversation? Do you want support from another coach/team member to improve comfort of the first conversation e.g. is there someone the athlete is familiar with. Dependent on the age of the athlete, this may be a parent or guardian.

What – It’s OK to let the participant know that you’re not an expert. Explain the reasons why you want to talk about menstrual cycles – that they are key factors in health and wellbeing and may also affect training and performance. Avoid statements such as ‘don’t need to know any more detail’. Remember to be clear, to use evidence and to listen to what they are saying back to you.

Where – Be aware that there may be cultural barriers that prevent people feeling comfortable talking about these topics and let them know that they are in a safe space outside of these barriers. Try to avoid it being an afterthought to a conversation that you’re already having that might be interrupted or have a time limit to it.

When – Is there an opportune moment to bring it up rather than a formal conversation? Think about when you approach an athlete to talk, when is the best time? When they’re tired and hungry after training?! Probably not, but don’t just ignore it! Remember that it is important for long-term health and performance of the athlete.

And finally, here are some ideas for ‘how’ to start the conversation:

• ‘Do you think your training is affected by your menstrual cycle/hormonal contraceptives?’
• ‘Do you track your menstrual cycle?’
• ‘Do you experience any symptoms such as menstrual pain, lower back pain, fatigue related to your menstrual cycle that affects you in training or competition?’
• ‘Have you got any management strategies in place for bleeding on competition day or to manage any related symptoms that are associated with the menstrual cycle?’

4. Think about actions

Following on from a conversation with a female athlete about their menstrual cycle, how could you action outcomes of the conversation and improve support? You don’t have to have all the solutions, but following up on actions promptly is important. This will help with positive experiences of talking openly about female specific factors. An example of this could be an athlete with heavy periods is extremely worried about leaking through the white shorts, so you put motions in place to change the colour of the kit.

5. Consider all the stakeholders

Whilst conversations with female athletes are the first step engaging all stakeholders in that athletes’ support network is important. This includes parents/guardians/carers, other coaches, support staff, teammates and medical practitioners.

Sometimes athletes respond better to an older athlete talking about their experiences with their menstrual cycle. Encouraging senior athletes to talk to junior athletes may be helpful in your sporting environment.

These approaches and principles can be applied to other female specific areas such as sports bras, pelvic floor health/incontinence and menopause. For further advice on conversations with female athletes, complete our Menstrual cycle openness and conversations e-module.

Further reading:

How Sport Wales Is Enabling Female Athletes to Succeed on the World Stage

An article brought to you in collaboration with

By Luke Whitworth

While it is important for analysts to have a minimum technical skillset, it is not the be-all and end-all – emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills are just as important.

This is just one of the misapprehensions that continue to dog the world of performance analysis; a range that spans from data collection and reliability to value capture and integration.

All were addressed in the third and final session of a virtual roundtable series hosted by the British Association of Sport & Exercise Sciences [BASES] and the Leaders Performance Institute.

Dr John Francis of the University of Worcester and Dr Denise Martin from Atlantic Technological University in Ireland were on hand to lead a discussion titled ‘Advances in performance analysis: what the research is telling us’ that sought to provide insightful tips for attendees.

Integrating practitioner and academic expertise

In a straw poll, more than half of attendees declared that use academic resources to support processes and projects. It’s a promising start, but Francis was in no doubt that the applied world and academia can and should work closer together.

He and his colleagues surveyed 175 analysts on the time they spent collecting good, accurate and meaningful data and how they tested that data before providing key insights to the end user. The cohort delivered several insights:

• Experienced practitioners excel in aligning KPIs, team goals, data systems and accuracy due to their expertise.
• That said, both experienced practitioners and those early in their careers need refined operational definitions and firm reliability checks to ensure KPIs reflect true performance and provide actionable insights.
• System familiarisation and reliability checks take time – streamlined processes and adequate time are both crucial.
• The same system familiarisation and reliability checks differ from user to user. Standardised training and reliability testing methods could improve consistency and accuracy.
• Regular data checks could make data clearer and crisper – too many teams test only at the start or end of the season.

The PRECISE Framework

Francis and his colleagues have devised a framework aimed at delivering recommendations related to validity, familiarisation and reliability. Their research is currently subject to peer review but does shed light on the question of integrated approaches.

The PRECISE Framework addresses those issues listed above:

• Promote collaboration – in practice sessions; periodic manual checks.
• Rely on expertise – deliver regular feedback; rely on automated processes.
• Employ video clips – guarantee exposure time and ensure an efficient resolution process.
• Customise adaptability – encourage collaborative learning and continuous cross checks.
• Illuminate definitions – enable incremental learning; reliability standards should be individualised.
• Synthesise philosophy – provide structured learning; pursue the systematic identification of issues.
• Ensure effective software processes – set comprehensive guidelines; enhance with video.

Who writes your team’s job descriptions?

As discussed, the search for unicorns is counterproductive, but then that is often a by-product of poorly-conceived job descriptions. Is enough time being spent on positioning them in the right way?

Attendees swiftly pointed out a series of challenges:

• The HR challenge: too often there is a lack of understanding from those without the expertise. Other times, the issues is the creation of the job description and the hiring process.
• The pursuit of ‘unicorns’: it bears repeating. Emphasise soft skills – hardly any descriptions mention soft or interpersonal skills.
• Verbal and visual communication: those softer skills in action – good communication skills are integral to building good working relationships as part of a broad team.
• Who needs to be involved? It depends on the context, but you may need the performance director, technical leads, research & development and HR when hiring an analyst.

The research of Francis and his colleagues also observed that too few job advertisements provide a feel for the environment in which someone will be entering.

On this front, they have recommendations for both organisations and applicants across four areas:

1. Employer familiarity information

Organisation: outline values and goals, provide infrastructure, staffing and philosophy.

Applicant: understand the organisation’s goals and how to contribute.

2. Description of job-related tasks & personal specification

Organisation: list job-specific tasks and required skills; list specific academic or coaching knowledge and software competencies; emphasise evidence-informed processes and the need to understand feedback and learning strategies.

Applicant: gain clarity on role tasks and responsibilities; highlight relevant experiences in application and determine their fit. Identify areas for personal and professional growth.

3. Salary & renumeration

Organisation: clearly present salary bands and rewards.

Applicant: assess job value and potential rewards.

4. Opportunity for advancement

Organisation: detail career progression and CPD activities.

Applicant: make informed decisions about career path within the organisation; consider your long-term aspirations.

Ensuring value capture in applied performance analysis

Martin and her colleagues have conducted research into value capture in performance analysis and alighted on three key questions:

What? Organisational capability to generate, curate and translate data to co-create knowledge and insight.

How? Skills and contextual intelligence allow practitioners to embed effectively in the performance ecosystem.

Why? These lead to what Martin calls the ‘lightbulb moments’ – where value is added to decision-making processes and contributes to performance.

The ‘Lighthouse Model’ for practice

Martin explored her ‘Lighthouse Model’, which seeks to showcase the ‘how’ (the base of the lighthouse) and the ‘what’ (the tower). As you reach the top, the ‘light’ emphasises the learning opportunities derived from understanding and better-informed judgements.

“Developing a Framework for Professional Practice in Applied Performance Analysis”

😎Very proud to see the capstone project from my PhD published this morning.

👉We define the role of an Applied PA, the components of practice and the expertise which underpins this pic.twitter.com/32vMGSYxN7

— Denise Martin (@deniseanalysis) July 26, 2021

To do the ‘what’, you need to establish the ‘how’, which includes:

• Contextual awareness
• Building relationships
• Performance analysis and sport expertise
• Technical expertise
• Professional behaviours

Martin emphasised contextual awareness i.e. what is needed from your environment to then have an impact on athletes, coaches and executives – those you are trying to create the ‘lightbulb’ moments for.

The following are cornerstones for the ‘what’:

• Establish relationship and define roles
• Needs analysis and service planning
• System design
• Data collection and reliability checking
• Data management
• Analysis
• Report to coaching team
• Facilitation of feedback

Gaps and opportunities: how do you get the lightbulb to shine?

• Identify learning opportunities: there is a lack of knowledge and guidance on how to best design learning opportunities and environments in sport.
• Develop a ‘service mindset’: there is too little service review and evaluation, which limits value capture.
• Find ways to showcase ROI: seek ways to better develop the profession in the eyes of both practitioners and those leading performance departments.