At a recent Leaders virtual roundtable, Jeff Pagliano of Management Futures gave members the tools to become better adaptive leaders.
“The challenge is how to get buy-in from management and decision-makers,” Jeff Pagliano, who works with leadership consultants Management Futures, tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “How do you make the case, then build-in time to innovate so that you can adapt?”
That ability to spot the need for change and then respond effectively formed the basis for Pagliano’s presentation at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable during which he shared Management Futures’ model of adaptive leadership.
We caught up with him post-session to hear it for ourselves.
Pagliano begins by outlining the four skills of Management Futures’ model of adaptive leadership and their corresponding traps:
Pagliano acknowledges that these can be difficult to discuss in the abstract and invited participants to undertake a seemingly straightforward task to help illustrate both the skills required and the traps to avoid.
First, he asked them to draw two five-point stars on a piece of paper. The stars had to look like this:
Then Pagliano challenged each member of the group to draw a line in the narrow space between both stars while only using a reflection (provided by the screen of their mobile device) to guide them. It is, as anyone who has tried this exercise can tell you, difficult to do.
He says: “At this point I’ll ask, ‘okay, so talk me through what that process looks like’ and usually folks will say ‘I had to stop and think about how my pencil was moving in relation to where I was seeing it on the reflection of the phone’. And I say, ‘well, great. That’s actually what we’re going to focus on because that’s a key skill for adaptive leadership. We take what we call a ‘STOP moment’.”
A STOP moment is a deliberate pause that allows a leader to step back, assess the situation from a higher perspective, explore available options, and return with a more effective response:
There is also the question of what you’re actually seeing when you step back. Pagliano outlined two types of problem for the table:
He then gave the table a series of hypothetical performance problems and asked them to decide if their nature was technical or adaptive. They were:
“These are the kinds of exercises I find to be really insightful because it helps me as a facilitator get a sense of where they’re coming from when they’re approaching leadership and change management,” says Pagliano.
For the final part of his presentation, Pagliano outlined three approaches to spotting the need for change:
Sometimes a once successful strategy becomes less effective; sometimes we need to acknowledge our approach has never worked. When trying hard, our scan becomes tunnel visioned – beware of this common trap.
Questions to ask yourselves:
Look for shifts which could have a significant impact on performance, both threats and opportunities.
Questions to ask yourselves:
When something unexpected happens, consider if it’s an example of an emerging pattern.
Challenge your strategy in a hypothetical setting (free of the consequences of ‘real’ failure).
Questions to ask yourselves:
“I think sport, like any other industry, has to be adaptable and flexible, says Pagliano as we wrap things up, “but it’s difficult for any organisation to adapt when there is a legacy way of doing business and achieving success. I don’t think sport is immune from that.”
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How the British Red Cross Continuously Adapts While Staying True to its Values
In the first of a new miniseries, Basketball New Zealand GM Paul Downes explains how his organisation uses the Acumen-Allocation-Action model to ‘connect understanding to investment, and investment to execution’.
Main Image: Basketball New Zealand
In practice, leaders need more time than that to learn the system they have inherited, build credibility, and make impactful decisions that endure.
Evidence from McKinsey (1) supports this, with many new senior leaders reporting it takes at least six months before they are truly effective (62 percent of external hires and 25 percent of internal hires). This reality sits in stark contrast to the popular ‘first 90 days’ (2) narrative that often dominates thinking about leadership transitions.
That gap between expectation and reality creates a specific problem for an incoming General Manager. When I joined Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) in early 2023 to lead the High Performance (HP) team, I was aware of that there could be an expectation by some stakeholders to ‘land’ quickly. Origins of such expectations might include being the new leader who is perceived to have all the ‘answers’, declare priorities, and show early wins.
Yet the work in front of me was not a simple strategy task. I was entering a living system already in motion, with history, relationships, power dynamics, competing performance horizons, and constraints that were not always visible from the outside. Acting too fast could have made me look decisive, but it also would have increased the risk of misdiagnosing the real issues, spending political capital on the wrong battles, and locking the organisation into choices that are hard to unwind.
Having held leadership roles across various professional sports teams, I had confidence in my ability to lead, to make sense of complexity, and to learn quickly. However, confidence did not (and does not) remove the need for context. At BBNZ, that meant understanding the high-volume of HP environments spanning multiple national teams, both 5×5 and 3×3 programmes, and associated competition demands. The only credible way to do that was through listening carefully to stakeholders across the system before drawing conclusions about what needed to change, what needed to be protected, and where the organisation could become more aligned and effective.
This article offers practical insight for leaders transitioning into complex, senior roles particularly those entering HP sport systems such as the General Manager of High Performance or High Performance Director (HPD) position within a National Sporting Organisation (NSO). It is grounded in the simple proposition that strategic capability is not something leaders simply arrive with; it is something we develop as we learn to interpret our environment accurately, make disciplined trade-offs, and translate intent into consistent behaviour over time.
As a possible solution to the ‘90-day’ illusion, I introduce the Acumen–Allocation–Action (A-A-A) model (3) as a practical way to connect understanding to investment, and investment to execution. While the primary focus is on A-A-A, I also reference Michael D Watkins’ six disciplines of strategic thinking (4) to situate these ideas within broader leadership and strategy literature. Reflections draw directly from my experience in the HPD role at BBNZ.
The Basketball New Zealand performance context
Basketball New Zealand operates across a wide and demanding performance landscape. The organisation has eight national teams spanning 5×5 and 3×3 formats, across male and female programmes, beginning at Under‑15 FIBA competition and extending through to senior international campaigns. BBNZ pathways look like this:
Across a calendar year, the FIBA competition schedule frequently involves multiple national teams participating in overlapping tournaments and qualification events, interspersed with domestic programmes, assembly camps, and select team activity. For example, in 2026 BBNZ teams were involved in a combination of Oceania Cups, World Cups, Asia Cups, qualification windows, international tournaments such as the Albert Schweitzer Tournament, Nations League series in 3×3, and senior global events including World Cups and the Commonwealth Games. You can see a snapshot here:
This density of competition creates continual pressure on people, financial resources, and decision‑making capacity, while also amplifying the need for clarity of purpose across different performance horizons.
The transitioning leader: what is inherited?
A useful starting point for leaders entering new roles is to recognise that they rarely inherit a blank slate or a simple ‘strategy problem’. More often, they step into systems that are already active, shaped by history, cultural norms, power dynamics, and existing narratives about success and failure.
Research on leadership transition highlights that how leaders learn, listen, and position themselves early in their tenure can have disproportionate and lasting effects on credibility, expectations, and influence. Transitions are also periods of heightened vulnerability, where early actions, particularly premature action, can create consequences that are difficult to unwind.
There is therefore substantial value in organisations approaching onboarding for senior leaders as a deliberate and extended process, rather than a brief initiation. For new leaders, this includes being supported to understand what questions to ask, who to listen to, and where critical knowledge sits within the system. Tools such as stakeholder maps can help leaders remain attentive to where influence, information, and informal authority reside. Importantly, these early stages reward leaders who resist the urge to act quickly in favour of those who prioritise listening, observing, and reflecting. Time spent collecting data, connecting perspectives, and building relational foundations creates conditions for more effective decision‑making later.
The A-A-A framework
When I stepped into the HPD role at BBNZ, and particularly as someone coming from outside the sport, it was essential to first understand both current and historical operating contexts before attempting to drive change. Gaining clarity about the experiences our people carried, the pressures they perceived and faced, formal and informal power structures, cultural norms, and the strategic direction already in motion helped define what was possible. This emphasis on context shaped not only early decisions, but also how the leadership team approached longer‑term system development.
To support this work, we deliberately adopted the Acumen–Allocation–Action (A‑A‑A) framework (3), developed and popularised by Rich Horwath, as a discipline for thinking and operating. The framework helped us slow down decision‑making where needed, prioritise deliberately, and execute in a way that was aligned with our resource constraints and competitive environment. Rather than treating strategy as a document to be written and implemented, the A‑A‑A model encouraged us to build a living system that connected insight to investment, and investment to behaviour and performance. I will explore each in turn.
Acumen
Acumen can be understood as the capacity to gather insights, make sense of complexity, and identify what truly matters. Research on sensemaking (5) and strategic cognition suggests that effective action is closely linked to how leaders interpret cues, construct meaning, and reduce ambiguity. From this perspective, acumen sits at the bridge between uncertainty and purposeful action.
For leaders in transition, value is initially created not through visible action but through disciplined sensemaking. This requires intentional collaboration with a range of individuals and groups to develop a grounded understanding of the operating environment before decisions are made. Acumen, in this sense, goes well beyond raw intelligence. It is a disciplined and patient process supported by humility, curiosity, and authenticity. Leaders who fail to invest sufficient time and attention at this stage risk developing incomplete or distorted views of their environment, which increases the likelihood of misdirected resources and weaker execution downstream.
In practice, developing acumen involves gathering insights from multiple directions: inwardly from the HP team, outwardly from external stakeholders, upwardly from CEOs and boards, and downwardly from national team staff and programme leaders. Active listening, coupled with deliberate efforts to surface and test assumptions, enables evidence‑informed discussion about shared purpose, language, and expectations across the HP ecosystem. In complex, decentralised HP systems, this process is essential for aligning understanding across diverse programmes and contexts.
At BBNZ, this meant engaging in honest introspection about our core competencies, our constraints, and where New Zealand could be genuinely competitive in both the short and long term. Rather than relying on a single generic performance model, we adopted a layered, evidence‑informed approach to defining What It Takes To Win (WITTW) at different levels of the pathway. Practically, this involved structured feedback processes, including small‑group and one‑to‑one conversations supported by scaling questions designed to surface confidence, alignment, and perceived gaps. Beyond generating data, these processes also supported relationship building, trust, and psychological safety – critical enablers in HP environments.
Three of Watkins’ six strategic disciplines (4) align particularly well with the Acumen phase: pattern recognition, systems perspective, and mental agility. Applied practically, these disciplines prompt leaders to ask whether they have identified emerging trends and risks, developed mental models that acknowledge interdependencies rather than linear causality, and maintained the ability to shift perspective across different levels of the system. At BBNZ, this translated into challenging conversations framed by questions such as: What are we genuinely good at? Where are we exposed? If resources doubled, or halved, what would change? Where does international comparison add value, and where does it distract? This discipline supported a more shared and objective understanding of our performance realities and laid the foundation for disciplined decision‑making.
Allocation
Insight without trade‑offs has limited value. Allocation represents the shift from sensemaking to commitment. For leaders new to a system, allocation decisions are often the first moments where intent becomes visible through choices about time, money, people, and attention. Good strategy demands saying no as often as saying yes, and allocation decisions therefore require clarity about performance expectations, risk tolerance, and long‑term sustainability.
Within the BBNZ HP team, we approached allocation with explicit discipline. Tools such as pre‑mortems were used to test assumptions before committing resources. For example, prior to appointing a HP Wellbeing Advisor, we imagined a scenario six months into the future where the role had not been filled and explored the likely consequences. This enabled us to surface risks, classify them, and evaluate decisions based on consequence rather than intention.
We also made use of impact‑versus‑effort matrices to test proposed initiatives, categorising activities as quick wins, major projects, fill‑ins, or low‑value work. These assessments were repeatedly challenged through diverse perspectives to reduce bias and over‑optimism. In this phase, two further strategic disciplines described by Watkins become particularly relevant: structured problem‑solving and visioning (4). Structured problem‑solving helps ensure assumptions are tested and options assessed rigorously, while visioning keeps allocation decisions anchored in longer‑term direction rather than short‑term optimisation.
Ultimately, allocation is where strategy becomes tangible. Across sectors, performance outcomes are strongly shaped by how leaders allocate scarce resources (6, 7). Misalignment between stated priorities and budgets, cultural inertia, and political capture of resources can all result in systemic underperformance. Research beyond sport has consistently shown that what leaders allocate attention to is what ultimately gets resourced. In this sense, acumen and allocation are inseparable.
Action
Deliberate investment in acumen and allocation reduces the risk of misdiagnosis, a common challenge for HP leaders entering complex systems. At BBNZ, action within the HP strategy (HP Plan 2028+) has been treated as intentional experimentation rather than blind execution. Clear communication and expectation‑setting have been central, acknowledging that while not all initiatives will generate immediate performance outcomes, every action must produce learning.
Projects have been designed to be scalable, testable, and directly linked back to insights generated through Acumen and priorities set during Allocation. Campaign planning, assembly camps, and tournament objectives are structured around multiple performance horizons, with review processes embedded as part of normal operations. Importantly, action is never separated from reflection. Learning loops ensure that outcomes from each campaign inform future decisions, shifts in resource allocation, and capability development.
Bringing existing stakeholders into feedback and review processes has required a deliberate shift from compliance to contribution. This aligns closely with the strategic discipline of political savvy (4). In practice, this has meant investing time in building coalitions, navigating pathways of influence, and generating commitment rather than relying on authority alone. Feedback is framed as a developmental tool linked explicitly to shared understanding of WITTW, not as a judgement mechanism.
At BBNZ, we often describe feedback using the metaphor of a bank account: consistent positive deposits are required before more challenging withdrawals can be made. Leaders are expected to model humility, curiosity, and self‑awareness, naming what they observe and asking better questions before rushing to solutions. By prioritising transparency, fairness, and accuracy, we have worked to create conditions where feedback is experienced as enabling both performance and wellbeing rather than provoking defensiveness.
Reflection: how strategic thinking is developed
Strategic thinking within the BBNZ HP team has evolved through repeated cycles of listening, testing, and recalibrating. Over time, a developmental arc has emerged: reducing contextual blindness through acumen, building shared understanding around trade‑offs through allocation, and arriving at aligned, disciplined action. Seen through this lens, the first 90 -100 days (1, 2) of a new leadership role are most valuable not as a period for decisive intervention, but as a critical window for sensemaking, relationship building, and establishing credibility.
Strategy does not emerge at a milestone. It develops through repeated iterations of Acumen, Allocation, and Action over extended timeframes. Leaders do not arrive fully formed as strategic thinkers; they become strategic through sustained effort to interpret their systems accurately, make disciplined trade‑offs, and translate intent into consistent behaviour.
The A‑A‑A model now operates as a repeating loop in the BBNZ HP team. Attention is directed to what matters most, shaping how resources are allocated, which in turn determines what actually happens. Reflection on those actions then reshapes understanding of the system and informs the next cycle. Through this approach, we are continuing to develop a coherent, adaptive HP system capable of sustained improvement across performance pathways.
References
Chris Davies, the BRC’s Head of Emergency Planning & Response, explains that his organisation has adopted a ‘when not if’ approach to the increasingly complex world of humanitarian crises.
Main Image: The British Red Cross / YouTube
In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire at the residential tower in the North Kensington area of west London killed 72 residents, injured a further 70, and left many more homeless and bereaved.
In the aftermath, the British Red Cross worked to support the survivors but as Chris Davies, their Head of Emergency Planning & Response, said, “one of the challenges we had is there were an awful lot of people in the community who didn’t trust us and didn’t necessarily want the Red Cross in the room”.
Davies, a former infantry officer in the British Army who joined the British Red Cross in 2022, was speaking at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. He explained during his presentation that this mistrust was born of their lack of local understanding.
Three months after the fire, in September 2017, the organisation’s then CEO, Mike Adamson, wrote: ‘it took us too long to reach out to the real grassroots groups and that cost us in terms of trust through the process. We are still trying to address this.’
While noting his pride in some elements of their response, Adamson acknowledged that ‘there is a real lesson here about how we engage with a community that we do not know. We need to add people with different skills to our response and recovery teams. We also need to explore the extent to which our scale and brand give us convening power to help bring organisations together and respond dynamically to need.’
It was a chastening experience, but one that has not been repeated as the organisation adapted. “In the past, there has always been a sense of organisations like ours knowing what’s best and that’s wrong. We don’t,” said Davies onstage. “That humility is really important.”
Chris Davies, the Head of Emergency Planning and Response at the British Red Cross, onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit.
Here, we explore how the British Red Cross, as part of a wider international movement that is more than 160 years old, adapts as the character of crisis response changes.
Spot the need for change
“The mission is critical in our world,” said Davies, “but the mission is only as good as the individual’s understanding.”
He shared the British Red Cross’ mission with the room:
Their mission is simple but powerful; their vision and values provide scope for interpretation. Combined, they enable the organisation’s leaders to spot the need for change when something is off and then do something about it, as happened in the aftermath of the Grenfell response.
“The nature of humanitarian work is unchanging,” said Davies, specifically referencing the core human need for connection and support. “However, the character of that work is constantly shifting.”
That character had been misunderstood at Grenfell, but they fared better when severe flooding hit the town of Brechin in eastern Scotland in October 2023.
“The team I deployed were a local team who had to self‑mobilise and respond alongside the local authority,” said Davies. “We had essentially taken it to that point of how you build the mission into teams so they can respond and have the right response. I didn’t need to phone them up and tell them to do that; they operated independently with the right resources at the right time because they had already won the trust of that community in Brechin because they were from that community and they knew there was a high risk of flood.”
Adopt a ‘when, not if’ mindset
In Britain, climate change is currently the biggest humanitarian threat. “One in four homes by 2050 will be impacted by climate change, according to the UK government,” said Davies. “Are we ready for that? No. We’re not as an organisation, but also as a country, we’re not ready for that scale and impact is coming down the road due to climate change.”
That work is already underway, with the British Red Cross, as an auxiliary to government (“we’re not an NGO”), trying to build its readiness through community connections, by liaising with the relevant authorities, and using technology such as AI where suitable (e.g. a flood monitoring app is in the pipeline).
On top of this, crises and disasters grow ever more complex, which necessitates sending junior leaders into the fray ever earlier.
It is not a decision taken lightly given the gravity of the work and the blend of paid staff and volunteers. It can be a tricky dynamic to manage and there often isn’t time for adequate training. “We are putting immense expectations on them because of the changing environment; the world in which we operate.” It’s a challenge they haven’t yet nailed.
A key leadership skill in that regard is the ability to sustain a ‘when not if’ mindset. Davies illustrated this with a slide:
Trust is critical to mobilising people in complex environments
Davies described the UK as “one of the most complex environments in the world”. To make his point, he spoke of Britain’s “increasingly polarised society” and high poverty rates, which help explain why “trust in the UK Government is the lowest it’s been for decades.” He quoted the British Office of National Statistics, which put the figure at less than 25% of respondents in late 2025.
This has implications for institutions of all hues. “An organisation like ours, which is a large institution, your brand is globally recognised, you also have to work hard to earn that trust.”
They understand that adaptation requires leaders to let their people in the field act, adjust and learn in real time from the people whom they are supporting.
To help illustrate that point, Davies presented the British Red Cross’ ‘Trust Model’:
Essentially, as the graph above aims to explain, they treat complexity as a given and trust (built on dignity, choice, safety and connection) as a requisite that enables the kind of decentralised decision-making and coherent action witnessed in Brechin.
“Ultimately a model like this puts the dignity and choice of those communities at the centre and ensures that we’re supporting them in the way that they need as those demands evolve over time.”
What to read next
Adaptability: ‘Change Is Everywhere and Leaders Must Respond All the Time. It’s No Small Ask’
Strategy, skill acquisition and change management were just some of the topics on the agenda at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.
“I joked last week that this place feels like my home course,” he said. “I haven’t played anywhere else in the last two or three weeks really. I felt prepared in that way. I felt prepared that wherever I hit it on the golf course, I sort of know what to do. I know where to miss. I’m pretty comfortable with all the shots around the greens.”
McIlroy, a six-time major winner, disregarded other PGA Tour events and even chose to ignore a back injury that had been hampering his performance. At one point he even carded a score of 29 on the front nine at Augusta.
“It’s a good blueprint,” he continued. “I’m not going to take three weeks off before every major, but to get to the major venues early, do your preparation, play. And not just play and look at things, but actually play. Go out there with one ball, shoot a score and try to do it that way.”
McIlroy’s successful strategy came not long after our Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy event at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where a range of guests, including Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and Lawn Tennis Association Performance Director Michael Bourne discussed how to build, stress-test and execute an effective performance strategy.
We know McIlroy wasn’t there because he was in Georgia, but he, much like yourselves, can check out the chief insights here.
And now on to other happenings at the Leaders Performance Institute in April.
Quote of the month:
Personally, I don’t believe in skills coaches.
These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.
A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.
“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”
Read the full story here.
We also addressed some of the common tensions, challenges and opportunities in skill acquisition here.
Insight of the month:
British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information at hand.
As Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, they are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.
Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:
It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.
Reay-Kemp was one of six guests who brought the day’s proceedings to life.
Shock of the month:
We often hear informally of ‘bad’ environments, but we don’t necessarily expect them to be amongst those considered the very best.
Yet that was the experience of Alexander Campbell, the former principal dancer at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet when he attended the Royal Ballet School in the early 2000s.
“I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.
He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.
“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.
When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”
His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’
Campbell, now the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Dance, shared his full story here.
Good to know:
What’s the difference between a ‘change’ and a ‘transition’?
A ‘change’ is simply that, but a ‘transition’ refers to the human adaptation required in the face of change.
That is according to John Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, who posed this question at a virtual roundtable for members of the Leaders Performance Institute where the topic of the day was ‘what makes change stick?’
In simple terms, as Bull explained, change initiatives fail not because the change itself is wrong but because the human transition is misunderstood, ignored or rushed.
“The object of change is quite straightforward; transition can be super complicated,” he said, “and what we tend to do in organisations is not pay nearly enough attention to managing transition. We forget about that.”
To help the virtual room in this regard, he introduced attendees the three phases of transition:
Bull brought these three phases of transition to life by describing how he went through each in response to a postponed work project:
The key thing about stage one is I am still really frustrated and annoyed with certain individuals that have led to that happening. Now, I would say on one level, that’s really understandable. It’s a significant project that we were really excited about; but here’s the key point: it is useless and doesn’t help me one bit. So all the energy that I’m investing in the frustration is not going into the adapting; and what I should be spending much more time on is focusing on what do we need to do to adapt now that change has happened.
Finally…
Four common causes of tension between business and performance… and four opportunities for increased collaboration.
Coming up for Leaders Performance Institute members
We bring you five factors to consider as discussed at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy this year by guests including Michael Bourne of the Lawn Tennis Association, Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and the UK Ministry of Defence’s Aneaka Reay-Kemp.
Main Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
“In order to build the right bridge, you need to understand those two things.”
Bourne, the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA], was the first to speak at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, which took place at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London in late March.
Members of the Leaders Performance Institute travelled from far and wide for a day that challenged assumptions and provoked some of the sharpest minds in the sports industry to rethink how strategies emerge in high-performance environments.
Bourne was joined on the bill by Milano Cortina mixed skeleton gold medallist, Tabby Stoecker, and speakers from organisations including the Football Association, luxury retailer Selfridges, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Together, they explored how strategies are built, stress-tested and executed by the best in the business.
Below is a snapshot of the day’s proceedings; five fresh insights to help strengthen your own planning and execution.
1. A strategy starts with a brutally honest discussion
Bourne joined the LTA in 2018, when they were two years into their ten-year performance strategy designed to tackle the lack of players coming through the British tennis system.
Yes, Andy Murray had won three majors in recent memory, but the sense was that this was “despite the system, not because of it”.
“In essence, between 2016 and 2017, the organisation undertook a diagnosis of the situation,” said Bourne, “and they came up with a number of different issues”.
This diagnosis, which included a lack of coherent pathways, limited programmes for talent ID, and resources spread too thinly, enabled the LTA to have a long, hard look at itself without pointing fingers at individuals. It lowered stakeholder defensiveness and provided the foundations for what they needed to do next.
Bourne was not present for the diagnosis, but he was recruited shortly after to ensure the LTA adopted the right approach and a coordinated set of actions. But they could not jump ahead. As he said:
I believe that you have to have that first element of the diagnosis and your guiding policy right first.
Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
2. Your strategy must be co-created
At luxury retailer Selfridges, Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding, Sharlene John, faced the challenge of trying to tie her work to commercial outcomes while challenging the idea that DEI is “fluffy” and irrelevant.
The result was Selfridges’ award-winning DEI and culture strategy Open to the World. On John’s watch (she joined Selfridges in 2021), female leadership within the organisation has grown from 32% to almost 70%; Selfridges is also an industry leader in ethnic representation.
Open to the World flourished because of John’s efforts to ensure it was a co-created initiative from the start. She said:
Before we even put pen to paper, it was going out and speaking to my teams, but also my leaders, to understand what does DEI or culture mean to you? And where there was that missing voice, it was bringing people into the room. So not just relying on those senior leaders where we don’t have representation, it was ‘OK, we’ll go down a layer’… I was talking to people across our business with a headcount of around three and a half thousand… We’ve got stores in Manchester, Birmingham, a tech suite in Leicester, and then the flagship in London. I went to every site speaking to people from grade 2, which is our junior role, up to our grade 7, which is exec positions, to understand what Open to the World actually means to them.
Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, describes her organisation’s award-winning Open to the World inclusion programme, which was built by a plurality of stakeholders. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
3. Evaluation (and re-evaluation) is continuous
“If you don’t get it right when you’re there in the moment, doing a review process at the end is worthless.”
So said Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association [BOA] who recently joined English Championship side Norwich City as Performance Director. He spoke alongside Tabby Stoecker, the mixed team skeleton gold medallist at the Milano Cortina Games alongside her teammate Matt Weston.
When it comes to in-the-moment tweaks, Ford has a point. The BOA must work with national governing bodies, coaches and athletes continuously throughout a four-year cycle. “It’s making sure that we are doing it hand in hand with our sports as frequently as possible,” Ford added.
A macro ‘plan-do-review’ alone is not adequate. Of competition time itself, he said:
It’s on a daily cycle during delivery mode at a Games. [We ask] what are you planning for this day? What are we doing this day? How has this day gone? Because if you don’t make the most of that experience in the moment, it’s not going to happen for another four years.
Stoecker benefited from this approach, as demonstrated by her success. She said:
There wasn’t just the review of that specific race, but also ‘what are you taking from this that you’re going to change or carry forward for three years’ time, two years’ time, six months’ time?’… you can get quite swept up in what you’re doing and you have these extreme highs and lows. So I think staying focused, and when you’re then doing that and being so process-driven, the results just come.
British Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker is deep in conversation with Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association, as they discuss Team GB’s strategic approach to Olympic cycles and, more specifically, Stoecker’s path to gold in the mixed skeleton at the Milano Cortina Games. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
4. Be ready to act on incomplete information
You and your team may enjoy clarity and alignment of purpose, but optimal operating conditions are likely to be elusive whatever your efforts.
With this in mind, Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience how British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information. They are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.
Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:
It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.
Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence (centre), in conversation with moderator Iain Brunnschweiler (left) and Football Association Head of Strategic Development & Operations, Paul Cleal (right) as she explained what it takes for military personnel to act with incomplete information. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
5. What are you ready to discard?
New initiatives, new processes and new ways of thinking are great, but what are you prepared to discard?
“One of the things about strategy is making choices,” says Paul Cleal, who spoke alongside Reay-Kemp in his capacity as Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association. “If you’re trying to change something, it almost always involves stopping doing something else.”
However, as he has experienced, this is often easier said than done. “If things involve stopping doing something for the new thing you need, a lot of organisations struggle with that.”
Evidence, he explained, is critical in making those choices:
When I walked in three years ago, my job was not to throw things in the bin and do them differently. It was to ask: is what we’re doing now meeting the strategic aims and to what extent do we need to get closer to our strategic aims and what is it we can change?
Paul Cleal, the Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association, explains why it’s important to discard programmes and processes when they no longer serve the collective. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
See you at the Sport Performance Summit in New York?
Here are a selection of best practice tips from members of the Leaders Performance Institute.
Former US President Dwight D Eisenhower wrote that line in a letter to a US diplomat in 1950 and repeated the sentiment throughout his eight years in the White House.
The line was quoted by Patrick Mannix, the Sports Science Senior Manager at US Soccer, at a presentation to Leaders Performance Institute members in 2025.
“The idea behind this quote is that high-performance teams don’t necessarily have a static plan,” said Mannix.
“The plan is constantly evolving as new information comes to light, whether that’s in relation to the tournament that we’re playing in, the players that we’re working with, and a variety of other contexts that are relevant to the world of international soccer.”
With a considered plan, a leader can align their people and allocate their resources effectively. With a structured review process, improvements can be sustained.
That is the message at the heart of a forthcoming case study virtual roundtable hosted by Mannix’s US Soccer colleague, Teena Murray, who will speak in her capacity as the organisation’s Director of Performance and from her experience of leading performance programmes at the NBA and NHL.
Here, we foreground Murray’s presentation with a selection of five best practice insights in the realms of planning and reviewing delivered by members of the Leaders Performance Institute.
1. The VMOST framework
‘The organisations that perform most consistently are not those that plan less,’ wrote James Thomas. ‘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.’
Thomas, the Performance Director at Warwickshire County Cricket Club, wrote these words in February.
He argued that while planning is often perceived as control, he believes it to be the opposite:
When the direction is clear, planning is decentralised. 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.
Thomas then introduced business strategist Rakesh Sondhi’s VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy and Tactics) framework, which ‘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,’ Thomas continued. ‘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.’
Finally, ‘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’.
2. Find the right time for athlete education
Paul Ford, the outgoing Head of Performance at the British Olympic Association, explained in a recent article that an Olympic Games environment ‘is the worst possible place for trying to get people to peak and perform to the best of their capabilities’. He wrote:
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.
The key, he argued, is tapping into the bits of the Olympic experience that build you up and not the elements that can detract from your performance. Athlete education is a critical element of the BOA’s fixed Games plan and comes in the form of discussions. ‘When to land these discussions is the next question,’ wrote Ford, before adding:
[Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics] 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.
3. It is critical to learn from failure
In October, Everton’s Head of Sport Science, Jack Nayler, penned his thoughts on what it takes to look at a failure and ensure lessons are learned (primarily in the context of complexity in sports high-performance systems).
He shared his reflections on the late Richard Cook of the University of Chicago, specifically his treatise entitled How Complex Systems Fail.
Nayler wrote:
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).
4. Embed review mechanisms
Mannix and his colleagues at US Soccer continually face the club vs country balance. In his aforementioned presentation, he spoke of the process that takes place when American players report for international duty.
“Building rapport and trust with those clubs is massively important because that helps us drive a lot of the exchange of information,” he said. “We need to know when our equipment and staff are arriving and where our players are coming from.”
Some may be in better shape than others, which underlines the need to review ahead of a session. Mannix said:
When a coach is trying to build out the session plan, the right hand is a good sports scientist or a performance coach, and the left hand is the first assistant, and those three individuals are working very closely to ensure that there’s a good plan in place for every training session. There’s good understanding as to what the availability of the players is going to be, particularly in the first two days of training, because what we’ve found through communication with clubs is we sometimes have to be flexible when players are coming into our environment simply because although Europe observes FIFA windows, we have to work with our partners in MLS on when players are released to come and join our environment.
Mannix and his colleagues understand the range of fixed and dynamic constraints they face. They use that understanding to find ‘optimization indicators’:
5. Pursue collaborative planning where possible
Where can you pool your resources with others for the collective good?
In 2024, the UK Sports Institute, US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Australian Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand formed the Global Alliance, which enables them to share sports science research and best practice when it comes to their female athletes.
The Global Alliance is a case study in what can be achieved in time and resource-limited environments when organisations collaborate in areas with little impact on competition itself (they still want to beat each other).
The Alliance’s main objectives, as explained on a Leaders Community Call in November 2024, include…
Additional reporting by Sarah Evans, Rachel Woodland and Lottie Wright.
