By John Portch

Nico O’Reilly’s remarkable season at Manchester City went up a level with his winning goals in last month’s Carabao Cup final at Wembley.

The City defender-midfielder’s brace capped a perfect birthday weekend (he turned 21 on the eve of the final) and secured his club the first silverware of the English season, with a domestic treble still to play for.

Post-match, O’Reilly was asked if City’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal was a significant blow to the team with whom they continue to vie for the Premier League and FA Cup.

“100 percent. It is a blow for them and we need to build on it and get some momentum from this win now,” he said having received his first (but almost certainly not last) winner’s medal in City colours.

“As soon as the international break is over we need to kick on and fight hard. We have a game in hand in the Premier League, we have to play them at our place, we are still in the FA Cup. Liverpool is a tough tie [in the FA Cup quarter-finals] and we know that so we need to do everything we can to keep going.”

O’Reilly’s rise since breaking into the Manchester City team in 2024 represents another triumph for the club’s exceptional academy. His bullishness displays the drive and determination required to thrive in the elite game.

It calls to mind a late-March virtual roundtable hosted by Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler, who has worked on talent pathways in both English football and cricket.

When discussing the tensions that exist on talent pathways (Brunnschweiler highlighted five), he spoke of the need to develop well-rounded individuals and those with the ruthlessness required to succeed.

“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways,” he said, “and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”

It was just one of a series of talking points during a month where performance environments, strategies and alignment were top of the agenda. Read on for a complete round-up.

Quote of the month:

The athlete is undoubtedly a stakeholder with agency in their own development, but as one practitioner working in the British sports system observed during a virtual roundtable focused on performance environments, the athlete’s ever-growing involvement raises some questions:

“We’ve definitely found that when you give that space to the athletes, they then can take it a little bit too far. Sometimes they complain about everything. ‘We want to fix this, we want to fix that’. It’s not super constructive… how do we create those boundaries and expectations on what that looks like; and how can we keep it productive to the goals of the environment and what we want to do?”

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full report here.

(Photo by Matt King/Getty Images)

Insight of the month:

Former New Zealand All Blacks General Manager Darren Shand delivered a presentation where he explained how the team brought the concept of alignment to life in their weekly work.

He said:

“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.

“As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.

“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”

Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.

(Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Good to know:

Expertise only improves outcomes when structures allow it to influence decisions.

That is according to Leaders Performance Adviser Dr Robin Thorpe, who led a virtual roundtable for Leaders Performance Institute members on the question of silos.

Thorpe argues that teams should consider establishing clear decision-making rights, as the role of leadership is not to centralise decisions, but to ensure the system consistently produces high-quality decisions.

“Do we have clarity on who holds decision-making responsibility? Is information fragmented, or is it presented in a clear and accessible way that enables everyone to operate with a shared, objective understanding?”

These clear decision rights reduce upward lobbying and prevent the coach from becoming the bottleneck for every decision. This also prevents people competing for the attention of the leader. When this is embedded effectively, leaders are no longer the bottleneck, they are enabled by the system.

(Photo by Patrick Khachfe/Getty Images)

From the archives:

The Brisbane Lions have won back to back AFL premierships, but that wasn’t the environment Senior Coach Chris Fagan encountered in his first days on the job in 2017.

“I discovered that many of our players preferred to be in rehab than to be actually playing – it was safer there.”

He told the story of the team’s transformation on his watch at the 2023 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

Leaders Performance Institute members can read the full story here.

(Photo by Russell Freeman/AFL Photos via Getty Images)

What’s coming up for members

The Sport Performance Summit New York

By John Portch

Strategy is the bridge between ambition and execution.

That is according to performance specialist Darren Shand, who made that very point during his presentation at a recent virtual roundtable.

“We’re all shooting for the stars, we’re all shooting for the trophies,” he said. “Ambition is very common to all in our environments, but execution is rare. Not everybody succeeds. Execution is where the magic is found.”

The New Zealand All Blacks, for whom Shand served as General Manager between 2004 and 2023, found that ‘magic’ more often than most. They won back-to-back World Cups in 2011 and 2015; they also spent ten years in that period as the top-ranked team in the world.

For opponents, the All Blacks were the benchmark; the most prized scalp in rugby union. As for the All Blacks themselves, their ambitions were so obvious that there was little need to spell them out in a nation where, as Shand explained, rugby is part of the “fabric”.

“That wasn’t the challenge for us,” he continued. “The challenge was that bridge; and I propose that strategy is the bridge between ambition and execution.”

The All Blacks’ strategy was rooted in their day-to-day actions, standards and habits; in other words, their behaviours. This was where their ambition truly mattered.

“Ambition is meaningless unless it changes behaviour; and strategy actually lives in behaviour, it doesn’t live in documents.”

Shand went on to share his three key principles for building an effective performance strategy.

1. Learning

Your strategy should evolve with your execution or, as Shand put it, “the question is not ‘is our strategy right?’ But ‘is our strategy still relevant?’”

“An effective performance strategy,” he argued, “should invest in the pillars that will move the needle the most.”

To illustrate his point, Shand described a hypothetical environment that promotes sleep as an important part of recovery as being more valuable than a “shiny new sleep gadget”.

He said: “Let’s build some non-negotiable recovery protocols across our group that we all buy into and that we build together. Let’s think about where we stay; we can have facilities onsite so that it’s really easy to create lots of options for people to participate in recovery; and let’s educate, let’s get players to understand the science behind it rather than just slapping something on someone to gather a whole lot of data.”

2. Alignment

While Shand was working with the All Blacks, alignment wasn’t an abstract concept, it was built into how the team worked week to week.

He described a typical example where coaches would lead the program in the days after a match and then, as the next match approached, the players would gradually assume control. It was a strategy that served them well.

“At the start of the week our players were still physically recovering,” said Shand. “The coaches lead at that point where we’re starting to build clarity; we’re trying to understand our next opponent and anything new that we’ve got to develop in our game for the next week. Our players physically can’t train too hard at that stage. There is 60 hours’ worth of recovery to get them back to close to 100% physically. So they’re just absorbing, they’re learning.”

Then the balance begins to tip the other way. “As the week builds, we want to shift their focus from clarity to intensity and we want them to start to test the things that we need come Saturday. At that point we start to hand that leadership role over to the players.”

It makes sense: it is the players on the field who will need to make decisions in the heat of the moment and so the coaches need to provide the environment for the players to test themselves.

“By the time we get to our final run before a match, it’s totally player-led as we strive for accuracy.”

Then, when the match starts, the players are “clear, light and bright” and everyone is on the same page.

3. Belonging

This is not a ‘soft’ cultural element but a key performance driver.

“Strategy only works when people feel they belong,” said Shand. “People protect what they feel they’re part of; people give more when they feel connected; people are willing to sacrifice when identity is shared.”

These ideas mirror the work of lawyer-turned-performance specialist Owen Eastwood, the author of the renowned book Belonging.

The team deliberately set out to understand their legacy, connecting every single player to all those who have represented the All Blacks since 1903. The players felt accountable to the past, present and the future. This influenced how they set about their work and, just as significantly, when the moment called for discipline, the playing group policed itself without recourse to coach intervention.

As Shand put it: “The group’s sense of belonging drove the behaviour; and behaviour delivered the strategy.”

He went on to explain that this will look different at senior level and at different stages of a talent pathway. “You don’t want them to be the same,” he added, “you want your young athletes heading towards your ambition, but you want to promote behaviours appropriate to that level and that stage of readiness.”

To do otherwise risks “taking away some of the belonging and identity that those teams need”.

In any case, it comes back to learning.

“Learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage,” said Shand.

The act of learning makes alignment possible and informs an individual’s sense of belonging to a collective.

What to read next

Too Often, the Person Is a Sticking Plaster for a Lack of Robust Systems and Processes

By Dr Benjamin Kelly

The 1996 Argentine Grand Prix is primarily remembered for two major incidents involving Pedro Diniz.

The Brazilian driver, in his Ligier, collided with Luca Badoer’s Forti, which flipped upside down and ended in the gravel trap.

After some confusion, the trackside marshals belatedly deployed the Safety Car to pick up the race leader, Williams’ Damon Hill.

Diniz managed to continue and made a pit stop as the Safety Car prepared to pull in. However, his Ligier burst into flames as he attempted to rejoin the race.

Both drivers were unhurt despite Badoer being forced to crawl from underneath his Forti unaided in the confusion; Diniz subsequently abandoned his ruined vehicle without assistance too.

At a distance of three decades, footage of the Safety Car, a Renault Clio – a 150bhp city runaround – leading Hill’s 700bhp Williams and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari seems quaint.

The criticism that came the marshals’ way underlined how Safety Car deployment in the 1990s tended towards ad-hoc chaos. They were typically borrowed road cars, they improvised pace and there were no standardised rules.

Fast-forward to 2026 and we have Aston Martin and Mercedes Safety Cars bristling with telemetry and data links.

Yet while the machinery has evolved, the cognitive vulnerabilities exposed by Safety Car moments have not.

The real deficit remains: human decision-making under pressure still misfires.

The Safety Car bunches the field, resets race dynamics, and, critically, forces high-stakes strategy calls in seconds.

Data across more than 200 Grands Prix reveals a chilling pattern: 68% of Safety Car deployments trigger suboptimal decisions. This is not because teams lack talent or simulation power, but because of loss aversion (the behavioural bias where avoiding pain outweighs equivalent gains) distorts pit wall logic under yellow lights.

To underline the point, here are three F1 case studies in pressure-induced error.

1. Mercedes at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix: over-defensive pitting

When George Russell deputised for world champion Lewis Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix following Hamilton’s positive test for Covid‑19, his remarkable performance should have produced a debut victory. Instead, a sequence of communication breakdowns, tyre mix‑ups, and late‑race chaos denied Russell the chequered flag.

A late‑race Safety Car is deployed following Jack Aitken’s spin at the final corner, which dislodges his Williams car’s front wing and leaves debris on the racing line.

Mercedes is presented with two choices:

1. Switch to softs (expected value: track position gain, tyre grip)
2. Stay out (avoid perceived risk of pitting, lock in position)

Mercedes reacts by calling in both Russell and his teammate Valtteri Bottas for an unplanned double‑stack pit stop. They feel the Safety Car creates the perfect opportunity to pit with minimal time loss and finish the race on fresh tyres.

However, a radio fault means Russell arrives and is mistakenly fitted with Bottas’ front tyres, which violates tyre allocation rules. The mistake in the pit lane is mechanical, but the decision to double‑stack at all reflects a deeper bias. Mercedes immediately realises the error and instruct Russell to pit again on the next lap.

As for Bottas, with no tyres ready, the Finn is sent back out on his old hard tyres after a long delay.

Russell plummets from P1 to P9 while Bottas eventually takes P8.

What happened? This was a classic case of loss aversion. Pit crews tend to fear losing track position more than they value tyre advantage; protecting a lead trumps expected value in the calculus. It echoes golf when a player decides to lay up short of a par-5 hazard, sacrificing birdie odds to avoid the potential pain of a bogey.

2. McLaren at the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix: anchored to plan A

McLaren, with Oscar Piastri on pole and his teammate, the aspiring world champion Lando Norris, in P3, enters the race expecting a two-stop strategy based on pre-race simulations.

On lap seven, a Safety Car is deploys after Sauber’s Nico Hülkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly collide.

As this new evidence emerges, the entire grid, with the exception of the McLarens and Haas’ Esteban Ocon, pits. Pitting makes sense due to the 25-lap maximum rule for tyres on the 57-lap Lusail track; two pits stops are mandatory for each driver in any case. Pitting on lap seven allows teams to complete the race with two clean 25‑lap stints. There is also the fact that pitting under the Safety Car massively reduces the time cost.

But McLaren is anchored to the pre-race model – they’ve committed mentally. They delay the stop. Their rivals undercut. Piastri and Norris miss out on the podium.

What happened? This was classic anchoring bias. New information (Safety Car, track evolution) is discounted because the original plan feels ‘safer’.

3. Drama at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: authority collapses under dual pressure

Perhaps the most infamous in recent times, Mercedes’ Hamilton leads Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on old, hard tyres, at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He is mathematically cruising to an eighth world title just as Williams’ Nicholas Latifi crashes and triggers the Safety Car.

Mercedes faces a choice: pit Hamilton for soft tyres (risky as he’d lose track position) or have him stay out (on old tyres, but his position would be protected).

They have Hamilton stay out. It is a reasonable decision under loss aversion – avoid the certain pain of dropping position – but Race Director Michael Masi, under torrential team radio pressure from both Red Bull’s Christian Horner (“You have to race!”) and Mercedes’ Toto Wolff (“No, Michael, no! That was so not right!”), makes a call that bends the regulations. He unlaps only selected cars (just the five placed between Hamilton and Verstappen rather than all eight as per the regulations), then restarts the race on the same lap rather than the following lap, which was the rule at the time.

Fresh-tyred Verstappen blasts past the disadvantaged Hamilton on turn one and claims both the chequered flag and the 2021 world championship. The FIA later cites “human error.”

What happened? Masi faced cognitive overload, from duelling authority figures (in this case team principals) and an ambiguous rulebook to live broadcast pressure and split-second timing. He defaulted to the heuristic that felt ‘right’ under duress: let the fastest car win, ignore procedural nuance. The regulatory error is the symptom; the bias is the disease.

Why this pattern repeats: Attentional Control Theory meets the pit wall

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) explains the mechanism at play: under stress, humans shift focus from task goals to threat appraisal. On the pit wall, that threat is losing track position. Mental bandwidth narrows. Working memory floods with:

• Rival gap telemetry
• Tyre temperature data
• Radio chatter (driver, strategist, team principal)
• Live crowd noise (in-person events amplify this)
• Time pressure (decisions in 5-15 seconds)

With capacity overloaded, crews revert to loss aversion heuristics i.e. ‘protect position at all costs’. While this worked in 1996 when Clios led the field safely, it fails in 2026 when marginal tyre advantage can swing a race. Compounding hits harder.

A defensive Safety Car call leaves you vulnerable to undercuts on the next lap. Hamilton’s stay-out in Abu Dhabi was reasonable in isolation but under two-car pressure (Masi plus both team principals) it triggered a regulatory cascade. One error amplifies into a second.

The business parallel: boardrooms defend rather than attack

Replace ‘pit wall’ with ‘C-suite’ and the pattern scales perfectly:

• Earnings surprise? Loss aversion triggers cost-cutting (defend margin) rather than investment in growth (chase upside).
• Market shock? Boards freeze, anchored to old strategies, ignoring new evidence.
• Merger vote under time pressure? Leadership reverts to ‘safe’ plays – familiar suppliers, incremental moves – over optimal choices.

A 2023 McKinsey study found that 64% of board decisions during crises were suboptimal not because of information gaps, but because of process breakdown under cognitive load. It is the same mechanism as the pit wall: stress narrows focus, heuristics override analysis.

The fix: process over heroics

Elite teams and organisations beat loss aversion by building process immunity. Red Bull’s mastery of 2024-25 Safety Car restarts wasn’t luck; it was systematic.

The Red Bull playbook (which any organisation can adopt):

• Pre-mortems on loss aversion: before race day ask: ‘What’s the overreactive play? Where might we over-defend?’ Document the bias risks explicitly. Through my work with investors such a discipline slashes the disposition effect (selling winners too soon and holding losing stocks too long).  Whilst nobody enjoys selling at a loss you can pat yourself on the back that you saw this coming and through reduced uncertainty can accept the crystallisation of a loss.
• Binary decision triggers: don’t ask ‘should we pit?’ (this invites overthinking). Ask ‘Is tyre life < 5 laps AND track position < 0.8s gap?’ If YES → pit. Binary logic bypasses cognitive overload.
• Red-teaming Safety Car calls: assign one strategist as permanent contrarian. Their job: challenge plan A under yellow flags, force a 30-second debate on alternatives. Pressure forces speed; structure forces quality.
• Decision journals: log every Safety Car call (pit/stay, timing, tyre choice), assumptions made, and outcome. Over 20-30 races, patterns emerge. Feedback loops tighten decision-making.

McKinsey teams using checklists and red-teaming cut high-stakes errors by 44%; aviation proved it scales to life-or-death; F1 proves it scales to titles.

The invisible opponent

The yellow lights flash. A crash freezes the pack. Your rivals have Mercedes power units and tyre warmers. You have a pit wall under cognitive fire and a rulebook with ambiguous clauses. The invisible opponent – loss aversion, anchoring, authority bias, compounded errors – costs more points than any gap in car performance.

From Renaults herding supercars in the mid-90s to Abu Dhabi’s 2021 title reversal, Safety Cars have revealed F1’s deepest truth: the fastest car loses when humans default to defence.

Spot the bias. Build the process. Accelerate through the pack.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

What to read next

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

By James Thomas

Strategy does not have a great reputation in high-performance sport.

Often the word elicits a raised eyebrow amidst busy training and competition schedules or it alludes to scarce downtime for coaches and practitioners.

It is also associated with corporate language, long documents and theoretical discussions that feel disconnected from the daily reality of training, selection and competition. In high-pressure environments, planning (reviewing and learning) can be seen as a luxury, something to revisit once results improve or uncertainty settles.

My experience has been the opposite. I’m passionate about helping raise awareness of the importance and performance impact of great strategic planning.

Strategy: a precursor to performance

After more than two decades working across Olympic and professional sport, I have come to believe that performance strategy and planning are not distractions from performance, they are precursors to it. In environments often defined by pressure, volatility and constant change, strategy provides something invaluable: direction, connection and a level of continuity.

High-performance sport is inherently unstable. Calendars shift, athletes get injured, form fluctuates, staff move on, leaders change and external demands arrive without warning. In that context, the absence of a clear performance strategy does not create freedom. It creates noise. Decisions become reactive, alignment erodes, and short-term fixes quietly undermine decision-making rooted in the agreed long-term ambition.

The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less. They are those that build solid foundations, plan with intent, adapt with discipline and continue to stay rooted to the agreed values and behaviours when circumstances change.

Planned Olympic success

One of the clearest demonstrations of the value of performance strategy in my career came during my time as Performance Director at British Gymnastics in the build-up to, and during, the delayed Tokyo Olympic Games in 2021.

This period was defined by disruption. The global COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how athletes trained, competed and lived. Lockdowns restricted facility access. Competition schedules collapsed and re-emerged unpredictably. Athlete preparation was fragmented, and long-term planning was constantly challenged.

At the same time, the organisation was navigating a significant cultural crisis. The Whyte Review had been co-commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England in 2020 following allegations of abuse and mistreatment within gymnastics in Britain. Trust had been damaged, scrutiny was intense and the responsibility to rebuild confidence, both internally and externally, sat alongside the imperative to perform on the world’s biggest stage, the Olympic Games.

In that environment, strategy became an anchor.

It provided stability when circumstances were anything but stable. Performance strategy gave athletes, coaches and staff a clear sense of direction at a time when certainty was scarce. It reminded us of our five principles of high performance, our data informed team strategies for qualifications and finals, and created a shared understanding of what mattered most, even as day-to-day plans shifted repeatedly. This anchor also supported me during really challenging times when key staff behaviours or direction of travel didn’t align to our beliefs and approach. It gave me confidence to hold the line and make the tough decisions that leaders are so often faced with.

Rather than attempting to predict an uncertain future, the strategy focused on the team, the people, the data and practitioner-informed principles that we talked about for over three years. It established how decisions would be made, what trade-offs we were prepared to accept and those ‘what if’ scenarios that can always catch you off guard. One of these being the Head Coach breaking their leg 48 hours before heading to Tokyo. We actually had a plan for this!

This allowed the system to adapt without losing its identity.

That experience was one of the most challenging of my career, but always hugely exciting and rewarding. Three planned, but hard-earned medals secured for Team GB reinforced a core belief: strategy is not about certainty. It is about people, collaboration and coherence.

Different sports, same principles for high performance

The same principle holds true in professional football, albeit at a different scale.

During my time as Director of Performance Services at Manchester City, operating within the City Football Group, I saw first-hand how long-term strategic planning can drive sustained performance improvement across an entire ecosystem.

At Manchester City, consistent performance progression was not the product of isolated excellence or short-term cycles. It was anchored in a clear long-term plan that connected the Academy, Women’s and Men’s first teams through shared principles, aligned methodologies and a common performance language.

That plan did not seek to eliminate fluctuation. Ebb and flow were expected. Injuries, form, competition demands, squad evolution and commercial demands were all recognised as natural parts of elite sport. What mattered was that the long-term vision, the direction of travel remained consistent, even as tactics and personnel changed.

Crucially, this strategic clarity extended beyond a single team or season. It flowed across the wider City Football Group model, creating a level of coherence across clubs operating in different countries, cultures and competitive contexts. While local adaptation was encouraged, the underlying performance philosophy remained aligned.

The level of consistent on-pitch success at Manchester City over the last 5-7 years, in many ways, is unparalleled, from Academy player progression and sales to the Men’s first team treble in 2023. Long-term business and performance strategy has a lot to do with this, in my opinion.

Good performance strategy increases speed

Modern high-performance environments are defined by complexity. Multiple competitions, condensed calendars, overlapping priorities and increasingly specialised roles place constant strain on alignment. Planning in these environments is often misunderstood as control. In reality, it is the opposite.

When direction is clear, decisions decentralise. Coaches, athletes and staff can act with confidence because they understand the broader context. When strategy is absent, everything escalates upwards. Decisions slow, responsibility blurs and energy is wasted re-litigating the same conversations week after week.

The VMOST model

At this point, structures and frameworks matter.

One of the most effective ways I have seen performance strategy articulated in high-performance sport is through clear, simple models that translate long-term ambition into day-to-day action.

One such model is VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics).

VMOST was created by business strategist Rakesh Sondhi and first proposed in 1999 book Total Strategy. The framework provides a disciplined way of connecting the big picture of the future to the daily actions, tasks and deliverables required to get there.

The power of VMOST lies in its simplicity.

In high-performance environments, complexity is already high. Strategy models must reduce cognitive load, not add to it. VMOST creates line of sight. Individuals can see how their daily work connects all the way through to the long-term vision of the team and/or organisation. In my last two roles as a performance director, my VMOST strategy was etched onto a big wall, one which staff members and athletes walked passed regularly. And when curious conversations or even debates took place, we often found ourselves standing around the visual, challenging whether a new idea could really help us achieve a strategy or the mission, or was it something that could derail us and divert energy, with no clear route to helping us win. This is definitely something I am taking into my new role in professional cricket.

When applied well, this kind of structure does not constrain creativity. It enables it. People can feel empowered to adapt, innovate and solve problems within a clear strategic frame.

A new era in professional cricket

In cricket, this strategic clarity is particularly valuable and I’m living this right now as Performance Director at Warwickshire and the Birmingham Phoenix.

Across a single season, players move between formats that demand entirely different physical, technical and psychological outputs. Red-ball cricket rewards patience, control and endurance. Short-form formats demand clarity, aggression and adaptability. Players are selected for specific skill sets, yet all must contribute to a collective performance.

Without a clear strategic framework, these transitions become chaotic. Workloads conflict, roles blur and development stalls. With strategy, complexity becomes more manageable. Individuals understand their role, how it evolves across formats, and how their contribution supports the team’s wider ambition.

At its best, performance strategy connects people.

High-performance sport is full of specialists. Coaches, analysts, medics, strength staff and operations teams all operate in defined roles, and rightly so. The risk is not a lack of expertise, but fragmentation. Excellent work happening in isolation without a clear line of sight to the bigger picture, is one of the biggest risks leaders can face.

A well-articulated strategy creates connection. It allows people to see how their work links through to the final mission and vision of the organisation. Daily decisions gain meaning. Trade-offs become easier to navigate. Autonomy increases because intent is understood.

When people understand why their work matters, they can make better decisions.

Strategy also provides continuity in environments where turnover is inevitable.

Athletes move on. Coaches change. Support staff rotate. In some organisations, meaningful personnel change happens every season. Culture alone cannot carry performance identity through that level of churn.

Strategy creates continuity of thought.

It anchors philosophy, ambition and non-negotiable principles beyond any individual. It allows new people to arrive and quickly understand how performance is built, what standards matter and what success really means in that environment.

In my experience, the strongest systems are those where people can come and go without the performance identity being lost. That does not happen by accident. It happens because strategy has been made explicit, shared and lived.

This requires leadership discipline.

Performance strategy only creates connection and continuity if leaders reference it consistently, use it to explain decisions and hold themselves accountable to it under pressure. When strategy is visible in how leaders talk, select, invest and prioritise, it stops being a document and becomes a shared language.

That language matters when pressure rises.

Under stress, people revert to what they understand. Strategy provides a common frame of reference. It reduces anxiety, accelerates alignment and allows honest conversations about performance without personalising every decision.

Planning also helps organisations say ‘no’.

In elite sport, opportunity is constant. New competitions, new technologies, new interventions and new ideas arrive relentlessly. Without strategy, everything feels urgent, and every new opportunity feels like one we can’t miss out on. With strategy, priorities are clear. Resources are allocated intentionally. Energy is focused where it matters most.

Importantly, you need to find ways to stay flexible, and not become rigid, bound to a strategy you developed years ago.

The best strategies are not scripts. They are frameworks. They define principles, priorities and trade-offs rather than fixed answers. They allow adaptation without drift.

Good performance strategy answers simple but powerful questions:

1. What are we optimising for right now?
2. What are we willing to trade?
3. What will we not compromise on?

The human impact of planning is often underestimated.

Clear strategy can reduce uncertainty. It gives people confidence in decision-making. Applied well, it creates psychological safety by replacing ambiguity with intent. Athletes and staff perform better when they understand direction, expectations and how success is defined.

This is particularly important in high-performance environments where accountability is high and pressure is constant.

For leaders looking to build effective performance strategy, a few principles matter.

Competitive advantage

Across Olympic and professional sport, one belief has remained constant for me: strategy is a competitive advantage if organisations are willing to treat it as such and invest in the people who are delivering it.

In high-performance sport, change and uncertainty is guaranteed. Strategy does not eliminate it, but it determines whether change becomes a threat or can be used as an advantage.

When planning for performance connects people, aligns ambition, creates continuity and promotes curiosity, performance shifts from reactive winning to sustainable success.

James Thomas is the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club and one of sport’s leading high performance experts. If you wish to speak to James, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

More from James Thomas

Olympic Champions Often Begin Their Journey in Modest Circumstances, But it’s Not About What Those Environments Lack – it’s About What they Have in Abundance

By Richard Young PhD

As we watch the Winter Olympics unfold, it’s easy to focus on the moments that seem to decide everything. A final run. A clean landing. A time on the clock. Those moments matter, but they’re not where medals are won.

What we’re watching was shaped long before now.

The medals being awarded at these Games were formed over months and years, through daily training sessions, ordinary conversations, and leadership decisions that rarely felt significant at the time. The podium is simply where all of that work becomes visible.

That’s why medals matter. Not as a destination, but as a standard that quietly shapes everything before the starting gate.

When a team commits to gold medal quality, the question changes. It is no longer “is this good enough?” It becomes “is this gold medal quality?” That shift sharpens judgment. It makes it easier to decide what stays and what goes. It creates the discipline to say no to additions that feel helpful but dilute the work.

Winter sport exposes this clearly. Conditions move quickly. Margins are tight. There is little room for correction. When athletes perform with clarity in that environment, it is rarely because of something added late. It is because gold medal quality guided training, recovery, and conversation long before they arrived.

The honesty of this standard matters. Gold medal quality does not guarantee the result, but there is no downside to holding it. It gives a team the best possible chance because the work has been measured against something that counts. And whatever happens on the day, you can walk away knowing the system reflected your best thinking and your best effort over time.

That is important because the Games have a way of revealing the truth. They do not create pressure; they concentrate it. They do not build your system; they expose it. Under that intensity, whatever has been repeated, clarified, and aligned over months and years becomes visible. What has been protected holds. What has been left loose shows itself.

I have seen this pattern many times and have helped teams address what is almost inevitable in the lead up to major events. Good intentions turn into noise. Leaders want to help, coaches want to protect, support staff want to add value. Meetings increase, plans are revisited, reporting expands. Activity rises while alignment begins to thin. Without a shared standard, every addition can be defended. With one, decisions become easier because there is something solid to measure them against.

I remember working with a winter sport programme that, from the outside, looked ready. The talent was there, the experience was there, and the resources were in place. As the event approached, small adjustments began to appear. Plans were refined again. Extra conversations were added. Senior leaders checked in more frequently. None of it seemed dramatic, yet the clarity that had carried them started to dilute. The athletes felt it before anyone articulated it. The system became busy, and when the moment came the performances were close but the medals did not follow.

The issue was not effort; it was the absence of a shared and protected standard. When everything feels important, the essential things lose their edge. The debrief circled around marginal gains, yet the real margin had slipped much earlier.  At some point the team stopped asking whether each decision truly met gold medal quality.

Watching these Olympics, you can see the difference. Some teams are not louder or more animated, they are settled. Athletes adjust to conditions without drama. Coaches stay with the plan rather than reacting to every moment. Leaders are present and steady, not adding extra layers or distraction. That composure was built well before the Games. It came from hundreds of choices where gold medal quality decided what stayed in the system and what was taken out.

Across five Olympic cycles of research, one pattern was consistent. The best at repeat performance were also the best at saying no. They said no to late additions. No to unnecessary meetings. No to changes that did not lift the standard. They protected the gold standard when others were tempted to add. Their edge was not intensity. It was discipline around what mattered.

This is where medals matter. Not as pressure, but as a reference point.

When a shared standard is clear, alignment is not forced. A physiotherapist knows whether an intervention adds value. A coach simplifies a session without feeling exposed. An athlete speaks up because the question is not personal, it is principled. Does this meet gold medal quality? If it does, it stays. If it does not, it goes.

High performing environments stay simple as the demands increase. Winter sport tests that. Conditions shift. Schedules tighten. Margins are small. Anything extra becomes a load. Teams without a protected standard arrive still discussing basics. Teams who have done the work arrive clear on who they are, how they operate, and what they trust.

And that clarity does not sit with one leader! It runs through the system.

In environments where performances are repeated and sustained, leadership is not a title. Athletes lead themselves. Coaches lead learning. Practitioners lead their craft. Senior leaders protect the conditions. It only works when there is a standard everyone understands and can apply. Gold medal quality becomes the shared reference point. It is how distributed leadership holds together.

When leadership is shared in this way, pressure does not destabilise the system. People know what matters, decisions move quickly and conversations stay anchored. Simplicity is protected because the standard keeps pulling the work back to what counts.

Medals reflect the health of the system that produced them. Ignoring them does not remove pressure. It removes the reference point. The issue is not caring about medals. It is misunderstanding what they represent.

When medals are treated as proof of effort, people push harder. When they are treated as proof of control, people tighten their grip. When they are understood as the outcome of sustained quality over time, leaders look at the system. They ask what met the standard and what did not, and they adjust accordingly.

Across the five Olympic cycles of research, the repeat performers did this better than the rest. They reviewed their environment against gold medal quality and made decisions early. What needs lifting. What needs shifting. What needs removing. Questions that were visible as part of the daily work.

As these Games unfold, the competition is extraordinary. The margins are tight, the stakes are high, and the performances are world class. It is compelling to watch. But there is added value if we look under the hood. Beyond the podium and the headlines, we can observe the systems that hold when the pressure rises.

You can hear it in the interviews. Athletes speak with clarity about their process, not just the outcome. You can see it in their body language at the start line and in the finish area. There is composure. You can see it around the competition environment, in how teams warm up, how staff interact, how little needs to be said. None of that is accidental.

What we are watching is not only talent meeting opportunity. It is preparation meeting pressure. It is standards held over time. The best in the world are showing us what it looks like when a system has been built properly and trusted fully.

Gold medal quality is a way of deciding, leading, and working. It asks a simple question each day and requires an honest answer.

Over time, when medals matter, that standard shapes what becomes possible.

Enjoy the Games!

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

More from Richard Young

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

By Paul Ford MBE

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

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

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

However, we like to flip this as an opportunity.

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

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

A part of something bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opening Ceremony: to go or not to go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue days, white days

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

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

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

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

Our role in performance preparation

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

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

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.

What to read next

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

By 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.

Read part two

How Team GB sets the stage for British Olympians to write their Own Stories

By John Portch

Ayao Komatsu is a recurring presence on the popular Netflix series Drive to Survive.

Not that he watches it, as he told the audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.

“When I’m doing my job, if I even for a moment think about what I say or how I behave or how I’m perceived by a TV audience, then I can’t do that job,” said the Team Principal of the Haas Formula One team.

Those inhibitions, he explained, “could be the difference between me making the right decision or not” during a race.

Not that Komatsu is unaware of the influence he has as a leader. Google his name and the images that spring up tend to depict him holding a microphone at a press conference or media engagement. In that sense, Komatsu’s onstage appearance in London – just days after November’s Brazilian Grand Prix and a 12-hour flight – is no different.

“When you’re doing a media session that is an opportunity for us to tell our story, who we are,” he added.

Who they are is Formula One’s smallest team, both in terms of staff size, budget and infrastructure, but with a hard-earned reputation for punching above their weight under Komatsu’s stewardship.

In the year prior to his elevation, Haas finished tenth out of ten, which was in keeping with their size but below the expectations of team owner Gene Haas.

Komatsu, who previously served as Haas’ Chief Race Engineer, took the reins from Gunther Steiner ahead of the 2024 World Championship and led the team to seventh in the Constructors’ Standings; in 2025, they finished eighth.

He puts it down to an organisational structure that “promotes and forces communication and helps people to get to know each other”. “If we cannot work together, we’re not supporting each other, if we’re not aligned, we’ve got zero chance against organisations that are a minimum three times, sometimes four times larger”.

Ayao Komatsu onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Kia Oval in London.

Over the course of 35 minutes, Komatsu set out what it takes to manage the pressure and expectations of building on Haas’ successes while keeping in touch with Formula One’s leading lights.

Komatsu understands that you can’t chase results under pressure

Chronic pressure eventually leads to diminished performance. Komatsu found this out to his cost at the 2025 British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

“My mindset approaching the race was completely wrong,” he said. “I was really trying to force the result because I knew we should be scoring lots of points.”

Haas had spent considerable time and resource developing their car prior to Silverstone and knew that their drivers, Oliver Bearman and Esteban Ocon, could claim high finishes. Instead, the duo collided on the 43^rd lap and finished pointless.

“What happened was really instead of letting the race come to you, doing your best, focusing on yourself, you are just focused on the result.”

It was a rare misstep for a leader who tries to give his staff “breathing space” and “a chance to think more about what they do rather than chasing it, because that’s not sustainable”.

Nevertheless, he pushes people out of their comfort zone each day

Komatsu said: “Our people are not afraid of failure. If you’re afraid of failure, nobody’s going to move.”

The right balance of challenge and support can enhance both focus and motivation.

“You’ve got to give people a clear message that, ‘come on, you’ve got to take yourself out of your comfort zone every day’,” he added. This is Komatsu’s non-negotiable. “If you haven’t taken yourself out of your comfort zone once a day, actually, I don’t think you’ve done your job.”

Komatsu encourages calculated risks that build confidence

Whenever crisis strikes, Komatsu has a well-planned contingency to relieve collective stress.

One such occasion was at the first race of the 2025 season, in Melbourne, where the Haas cars just “did not function”. Ocon qualified in last position, while Bearman could not even set a qualifying time and was required to start the race from the pit lane.

“That was a really testing time,” said Komatsu. But the team had discussed this very possibility for the past four months. They knew the car would either fly, flop or achieve something in between. In the event, the car flopped.

Their response to that race weekend was governed by the new car regulations coming in for the 2026 season. Most teams began to focus on their 2026 cars not long after Melbourne. Haas, with their comparatively modest resources, had no choice but to develop their 2025 car further because, as Komatsu said, “one place in the Constructors’ Championship is worth millions”. “So to make next year’s budget work, with brand new regulations, you’ve got to keep spending money to develop the car.”

He is proud of what happened next. “We just got on with it,” he continued. “I gave the team a clear objective; what is not acceptable, what we need to achieve. I didn’t tell them how. I listened to them and they came up with the solution and took the risk.”

While the true outcome “will only be known in January or February”, the 2025 car did improve and so did the team’s standing.

“For me, more than that sporting result, more than the lap time we gained, the important thing is the confidence this gives the people of the organisation; it’s priceless.”

Ayao Komatsu and Esteban Ocon talk on the grid prior to the F1 Grand Prix of Abu Dhabi at Yas Marina Circuit in December 2025.

He has also cultivated a ‘no blame’ culture

In removing the fear, providing breathing space, and giving people latitude to solve their own problems, Komatsu has cultivated a ‘no blame’ culture.

He took public responsibility for the collision at Silverstone but later spoke to Bearman and Econ about what went wrong. He let them air their grievances and decide the future rules of engagement when their cars are in close proximity mid-race.

“I said, ‘look, until the next race, we’ve got two weeks. Take your time, you put everything on the table and, by next week, can you come to an agreement? If you don’t come to an agreement, I’ll tell you what we need to do’,” said Komatsu while fully aware that neither driver wants to be told what to do by anyone else.

“The important thing here is that full transparency,” he added. “I don’t have any other agenda than wanting both of you to perform; the team to perform. I’m not biased towards one driver or the other, but then again, sometimes I have to make a decision that will disadvantage one of the drivers, but as long as this guy knows that I was making that decision purely based on the interest of the team, as long as you’ve got that respect and transparency, it’s fine.”

When Ocon signed with Haas ahead of the 2025 season, some external observers harboured reservations due to his supposedly difficult character. Komatsu, having worked with Ocon for more than a year, is having none of that.

“I knew that it’s got a lot to do with the respect between the team and the driver, transparency, and then providing that safe space. I was very confident that we could provide that environment.”

What to read next

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

By John Portch

“Organisations face rapid technological change but often lack structured decision-making processes,” said Fabio Serpiello.

The Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University led the second instalment of a three-part Leaders Virtual Roundtable series aimed at exploring the dynamics of tech-supported innovation in sport.

As host, Serpiello wanted to “provide frameworks and stimulate discussion on how to select the right technology for performance challenges, ensuring decisions align with strategy and context.”

The Leaders Trend Report earlier this year highlighted that fewer than half of practitioners can point to a structured decision-making process within their organisation. Many have lamented this with Serpiello, which stands to reason as nearly all respondents in the report perceive such a structure as important.

It starts with a clear performance question, as a sports scientist working in European football put it.

She said: “If we’re going to make a decision, we have to have something well-structured. We need to ask what do we want from what we’re collecting or what do we want from what we’re asking the athletes to do.”

Another attendee, with oversight of several sports, recalled their own situation with problem clarification. “The solution looked like the key, but many sports were unclear on the problem.”

Serpiello presented the group with two models to address this issue.

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 had previously 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.”

A fuller account can be found here.

A general manager of a successful Paralympic programme gave an example of breakthrough innovation in their work supporting totally blind swimmers:

“We’re working with our institute partners and also reaching out to universities to understand if there’s interest in terms of product development and research in this space.”

There is a clear problem, the domain is less defined, and the organisation is piloting new concepts.

Another attendee working in the Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of an example of disruptive innovation when their team sought coaching tools, primarily:

“The piloting was done with the university [engineering department]… the final year project has to be sponsored, innovative, and they’re graded on the finish of the product and customer satisfaction… they were constantly in touch with us, so in terms of getting clear on the problem and implementing a solution, they were fantastic, these young engineers… The projects that succeeded were embedded into sport, and it was because the engineer was back and forth with the client, with us, and with the athletes.”

The Cynefin Framework

Serpiello then reacquainted the table with the Cynefin Framework.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word that signifies ‘the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand,’ as Snowden and Boon wrote in their 2007 Harvard Business Review essay titled ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’.

The Cynefin Framework, they continued, ‘helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so they can make appropriate choices’.

Source: HBR

The framework classifies decision-making contexts into five domains:

“The Cynefin Framework essentially classifies decision-making on the continuum between order and unordered conditions,” said Serpiello, adding, “because if you make the wrong decision, or if you use the wrong quadrant, you may waste a lot of time without actually getting to the right answer.”

He cited the example of tracking tech companies selling their wares as the answer to complicated and complex problems. “What tracking technology should do really well, in my opinion, is give you the ability to quickly categorise what’s happening in training and then respond properly, whether it is a load management, readiness or a recovery response.”

Other ideas

• Serpiello mentioned the Performance Innovation Groups favoured by AFL teams in Australia. These clubs hold quarterly meetings with representatives from coaching, sports science and medical. The groups aim to review emerging issues from internal processes and evaluate inquiries from external technology providers (who must submit an application).
• A performance specialist from the UK spoke of her use of the STRN Framework (Sports Technology Research Network Quality Assurance Framework). It is a methodology developed to help sports organisations evaluate and implement technology solutions effectively. Find out more on the STRN Framework here.

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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.

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