We bring you five insights from Seth Meyers, the Brooklyn Nets, USOPC, US Air Force and Juilliard School – all of whom spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in New York.
The renowned leadership specialist was speaking just moments before she introduced Seth Meyers to the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City.
Meyers, a comedian, broadcaster and producer, instantly built on the theme, with his tales of watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis produce sketches that died a death during read-through sessions (and all too often live onstage) at Saturday Night Live.
“Watching them succeed is something you can do,” he said, “but watching them fail at the table was the real education.”
Meyers made clear his admiration for the writers and producers of SNL who, as he said, “have seen and heard more sketches than anyone in the history of the world”. “It was a reminder of how hard comedy was,” he added. “To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”
Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it.
And it was not just Meyers’ musings. Across both days, we heard from leaders in high-performance environments as diverse as the US Air Force, Juilliard School and the Brooklyn Nets, who lent us their home for two days. Together they delivered insights on how leaders can cultivate environments in which people fail cheaply, learn quickly and perform sustainably.
Below is a selection of five insights that paint a picture of proceedings.
The Brooklyn Nets have been on an exciting trajectory since the arrival of Sean Marks as General Manager in 2016. His tenure began with a question: “What are we going to stand for?” Marks believed that the Nets needed an identity that meant more than mere wins or losses and he landed upon ‘Brooklyn grit’ – a system of behaviours that extended beyond one, single individual. “It’s really important that you take the responsibility to drive a culture that everybody can observe,” he said.
Marks and the Nets have continually hired the best people, regardless of their professional background. A quick roll call of their staff would reveal people with experience in fields as diverse as soccer, baseball, finance and, of course, basketball. Each is given the platform to perform. He said:
If you give people the opportunity, you empower them to speak up, you empower them that they do have a voice, they’re motivated far more than a group that isn’t empowered to have a voice.
Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks in coversation with host Holly Ransom. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
Across both days, listening emerged as an important performance tool. Whether building an NBA franchise, leading a writers’ room or cultivating future performers, the speakers repeatedly stressed that leaders who genuinely listen create environments where trust, challenge and innovation can flourish.
Marks for one said:
I want a diverse train of thought [and] if I’m going to hang my hat on hiring the very, very best, shame on me if I don’t listen to them.
Similarly, Seth Meyers’ beliefs have been shaped by his time in improvisational comedy as well as his time as a talk show host. He said:
One of the first rules with improvising is you have to be a listener. You can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when you’re talking… and don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to.
Seth Meyers on a different New York stage. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
So what actually happened when a sketch died during SNL read-throughs? What would Meyers do? What if the sketch actually died onstage?
“You have to shake it off,” he said. “You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it with you to your next week’s effort.”
As one of the longest-serving head writers in SNL history, Meyers was responsible for managing exceptionally talented people operating under intense deadlines and, if writers carried every disappointment into the next week, their performance would deteriorate. The key was to try ambitious ideas, accept that many would fail, then learn quickly and move on.
Meyers was echoed by Evan Yionoulis, the Director of the Juilliard’s Drama Division. “If we’re worried about fear, we have to foster an environment where you can be brave,” she said. She tells her students:
‘I believe in you, I brought you into the school. You’re going to graduate, and I’m going to take you all the way there, and I’m going to be patient… I’m not judging you, good or bad’. I’m going ‘what’s the next step to take it further? What’s the next step to take it deeper?’
Evan Yianoulis of the Juilliard School. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
Dr Wendy Walsh is the Chief Learning Officer for the US Air Force, a role in which she oversees education for approximately 700,000 personnel. Her work goes beyond training to the creation of conditions that enable learning across a sprawling, complex system. She argues that high-performance environments are “complex adaptive systems made up of continuously changing people, relationships and influences. She argued that learning starts from observation:
It’s the most important thing that we do is to be present with each other… I might not agree with you, but it’s a requirement for me to understand a different person’s perspective, because that will reveal more possibilities.
Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer of the US Air Force. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
Walsh was joined onstage by Andrea Tullos, who explained why the US Air Force pivoted from focusing on factors such as strength, endurance and swimming ability in recruitment. Ultimately, they were alarmed by the numbers of recruits dropping out. They shifted the focus to factors such as resilience, learning agility, tolerance for discomfort and motivation. Tullos said:
We need to know who they are before we understand what they can do… [and] it’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better.
Andrea Tullos, former lieutenant general in the US Air Force and Founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
Team USA finished second in both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic medals table (behind Norway) and Paralympics medals table (behind China). The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee wants to be No 1 in both tables in 2030, which means creating the conditions that make future medals possible.
Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance, told the audience of her organisation’s continuing efforts towards meeting their target. She said:
We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games [Milano Cortina]. We needed to spend time building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance… We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline… [we asked also ourselves] How are we keeping athletes in sport and then the opportunities to bring new athletes into Olympic sport?
Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein
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At a recent Leaders virtual roundtable, John Bull of Management Futures explained that long-term success depends on preserving what works while embracing challenge and evolution.
He even compared some high-performance environments to a cult.
“Pete didn’t mean that as a negative thing, but he felt there was a cult of personality around figures such as the coach or the GM,” said John Bull, to whom Keen was speaking at the time. “His concern was when they leave; what would happen to performance?”
Bull, the Head of High Performance at Management Futures, recently led a virtual roundtable session for Leaders Performance Institute members that explored the facets of organisations that have sustained their success over a long period.
“Pete challenged us,” added Bull. “He said, ‘it would be great if someone did a piece of research helping us to understand, if you look at sustained environments, what are they doing differently? And what can we learn from that if we want to make a system more sustainable?’”
There are both environmental and leadership dimensions and, as Bull would go on to explain, it is something at which all leaders can work.
“How do you become very good at being a sustained leader within your own organisation? How good are you at balancing adding value for today versus adding value for tomorrow?”
He then posed another question to encourage the table to think about the topic:
If you had to place a single bet on the organisation that will be the most consistently successful over the next 50 years – in any domain you choose – what characteristics would you look for?
In response, the table proposed three characteristics:
With the scene set, Bull turned to a research project titled ‘Radically Traditional’, which was led by Alex Hill, the author of the 2023 book Centennials: the 12 habits of great, enduring organisations. Hill led the project on behalf of UK Sport and the Centre for High Performance.
In 2018, Hill wrote of the project for the Leaders Performance Institute:
Why do some teams sustain success, whilst others stumble and fall? What sets them apart? And how can we learn from them? Well, our findings suggest it’s by becoming Radically Traditional. With a stable core – purpose, stewardship, openness – and a disruptive edge – experts, nervousness, accidents.
Back at the roundtable, Bull attempted to illustrate this idea:
He then explained each element in turn.
The stable core
The disruptive edge
When it comes to finding a disruptive edge, Bull cited two leaders who proved their credentials.
Firstly, Peter Blake, the founder of Emirates Team New Zealand, the perennially successful America’s Cup sailing team.
“His founding principle was we want to combine insights from sailors and the designers,” said Bull, adding that this did not sit well with the team’s designer, Bruce Farr.
“Farr decided he didn’t want to listen to sailors messing with his design and, very courageously, Blake said, ‘well, that’s fine. Then you’re not the designer for our campaign’; given that Farr was the best designer in the world, that was pretty courageous.”
That was in the early 1990s; Team New Zealand has since gone on to win the America’s cup five times, including the last three editions.
Bull’s second example is Gene Kranz, who served as one of NASA’s Flight Controllers during the Apollo Lunar missions of the 1960s and early 1970s. Kranz made sure that his team at the Manned Space Center in Houston regularly ate meals together.
The bonds formed during those mealtimes were likely critical to the Apollo missions, especially during the successful effort to bring home the stricken crew of Apollo 13 after an explosion occurred on their spacecraft 200,000 miles (320,000 km) from Earth.
There is, as Bull explained, power in breaking bread with your peers and colleagues. “Without a doubt, the best problem-solving discussions I ever heard were when the senior team were around a table eating lunch,” he said. “And if you go back to if I were betting on an organisation, one of the things I’d do is walk into the café and I’d want to see if mobiles are out or if people are engaged in conversation and how mixed the tables are across function.”
A member from a military background told the table that he has tried something similar with his team. He said such interactions can generate “something that solves some problems that you as a leader didn’t necessarily foresee”.
He added: “that’s a major organisational decision to be comfortable with maybe a little bit less productivity with a purpose that that is an investment in future productivity based on relationships.”
As the session wound to a close, Bull steered the conversation towards four transitions to which we need to pay attention (and the risks to avoid):
1. Big success: the risk of complacency
“It can be really hard to avoid,” said Bull. However, in environments of sustained success, he has noticed “leaders are slightly paranoid when they get success; and that’s what drives them to go further.”
2. Big failure: the risk of overreaction
“The danger is that we throw the baby out with the bathwater; that we throw out some of the good as well as some of the things that we don’t need to change,” said Bull. “But there’s something about going ‘not all tradition is worth keeping’.”
3. Change in key people: the risk of losing knowledge
“One of the key things is managing handovers,” said Bull. “I think it is also looking to recruit for curiosity and humility. Sure, you want people to bring in some disruption and change, but you also want them to spend some time figuring out what has worked and not change everything.” He returned to Keen’s observation about cultish environments. “How do we make them not cults but a repeatable formula that can pass from generation to generation?”
4. Significant external change: the risk of slow or inadequate adaptation
“What’s interesting in the sustained organisations is they are often not the first to come out with a new innovation, but they are the first to start thinking about it and innovating,” said Bull, who observed that they can be conservative by nature, which does not quell their desire to test and learn. “They’re big believers in evolution rather than revolution in that sense.”
If you have any further questions around how to sustain success with your team, feel free to reach out to Management Futures directly via [email protected]
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Tom Crick, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media & Sport, explains that there is a responsibility on leaders to build environments that empower people, engender trust, and enable swift learning.
“You’ll hear things like ‘AI will replace teachers’ or ‘AI will replace doctors’ – no they won’t,” he told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.
It is more likely, he said, that “AI-enabled or AI-augmented teachers might replace teachers”; similarly, “AI-augmented doctors might be more effective from a diagnostic perspective.”
Crick believes the current discourse that paints AI as either “humanity’s destruction or its ultimate saviour” is “not very helpful for the broader conversation around technology utility and adoption”.
His words were delivered to a room full of coaches and practitioners from across the globe, all of whom have seen AI play an increasingly prominent role in their work; and, as far as Crick is concerned, sport’s leaders must simply get to grips with it.
“There’s no way you can be a leader and be digitally incompetent,” he said. That doesn’t mean one has to train as a computer scientist, but a working knowledge is essential. “I don’t understand how you would see the impacts and the challenges for your business if you just say ‘I’ll delegate that; that’s a CTO or CDO problem’.”
That said, Crick understands the anxiety around AI and tech, which he attributes to a “confidence and capability challenge”. “It can be quite exposing if you’re the senior leader in an organisation,” he continued. “You basically have to say ‘I know nothing about this stuff and it’s a massive gap in my knowledge and understanding.’ It takes humility to own that.”
Over the course of half an hour or so, Crick prompted the leaders in the room to reconsider their approach to AI.
Tom Crick onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval.
Don’t deal in blind trust – keep the human in the loop
“Lots of generative AI tools are just statistical probabilistic bullshit generators,” said Crick. “People anthropomorphise these tools far too much. [AI tools] don’t think and they don’t have an intrinsic understanding of things.”
In stating these limitations, he encouraged the audience to not just “automatically trust the system” and to look more closely at both the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.
“AI will not magically remove uncertainty, but it can reshape and augment what that might look like for you as a coach,” he added. An AI tool may help you churn through datasets at inhuman speed, but “we have to be grounded in the dangers of these tools as a shortcut to absolute certainty.”
It comes back to what Crick terms a person’s “critical AI literacy”. “We want to stay curious; we don’t want to be too complacent.”
As such, he promotes “AI with humans in the loop” because AI “augments human capability and does not replace it”; human agency, he argued, is “sacrosanct”.
Get the basics right before even thinking of scaling
Crick believes that organisations should think about the “skills, competencies, behaviours and dispositions” they’ll need in the coming years because if teams are unsure why they’re using AI, if there’s no strategy and no idea of when to invest, when to lead and when to follow, their efforts will be built on a “foundation of sand”.
It starts with the basics. “Think about good data disciplines and make sure the data is high quality,” he said. It is also a question of clarity and alignment, which he revealed is a perennial problem across the various departments of the British Government when it comes to AI.
Your structure will guide how effective your delivery is and will enable you to verify or validate datasets and practices. This is critical because AI is not a “magic black box” where you simply “crank the handle and out comes the answer”. In any case, Crick argued, such an approach would be “disempowering for coaches and people who work in sports performance.”
Design for trust and accountability
AI usage must be rooted in values that promote accuracy and trust. “Values are useful anchors and shouldn’t be seen as constraints,” said Crick, who explained that the DCMS, in defining its AI strategy, will “enshrine high level principles to provide assurance and confidence to everyone who works in the department.”
It comes down to “doing the right thing in the right way and how that comes through in legitimacy, trust, transparency, verifiability; and things such as explainability and understandability too.”
Therefore, when using AI in athlete-facing settings, coaches and practitioners should work in an open and transparent way. They should ask themselves “where’s the feedback loop? What’s the mechanism for co-design and co-creation of shared outcomes? This naturally leads back to the humans in the loop”.
Crick likens technological leadership to an art or craft, one that is particularly important when the going gets tough.
“What does that look like when you bounce human intuition around and the magic algorithm says ‘no’? [What do you do when] the algorithm says you should do x but the experienced coach says you should do y? How do you reconcile such elements, especially under pressure?”
Be curious
“I think you need to have a system and culture that rewards curiosity,” said Crick.
When teams test and learn they will fail often and he argued that leaders must accept that fact.
The key, he argued, is “to fail fast, adapt and refine very quickly”.
It comes back to the leader and those foundations. “How do you have the structure in place to recognise that?”
Crick wrapped up his session with a further series of questions to ponder:
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At a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable, Dr Robin Thorpe pondered the risk when performance teams are both too independent and overly integrated.
Thorpe, who has worked across multiple elite high-performance environments, recently led a virtual roundtable for performance directors entitled ‘Finding the Balance Between Integration & Excellence’.
He began with a short presentation in which he argued that while integration is often favourable, it is not always the case; there are times when excellence can be achieved without the collaboration of an entire multidisciplinary team.
Thorpe illustrated his point with reference to Ryan King’s research on ‘tame’ and ‘wicked’ problems. He then explained each in turn:
Tame problems can rely on specialist knowledge alone when there are clearer, more defined problems that can be solved by one discipline or a small expert group. These do not require extensive collaboration.
Wicked problems are complex, ambiguous or a consequence of several factors. They represent “challenges where having more specialist perspectives is clearly a positive method to try and answer or come up with the outcomes that we’re looking for”.
A good leader, Thorpe explained, can spot the problem and organise the correct response, with the goal being the optimum rather than maximum integration.
Too often, however, teams adopt the wrong approach; and there are several risks that can emerge as a result of too little or too much integration. Thorpe set out these risks on the following continuum:
Teams should strive for the ‘optimal’ centre ground.
Thorpe then shared two hypothetical examples of how it might look when organisations occupy the two extremes:
Example 1 – too independent
In this example, integration is not consciously ignored but simply not prioritised; the system defaults to specialist expertise with an added sense of urgency.
Thorpe said: “Generally speaking, such environments can be successful, but things may be left on the table where if there were a more deliberate understanding of how some of these things can integrate there might be even more success going forward.”
Example 2 – over-integrated
Priorities are unclear; and challenge is not always facilitated because it is perceived as a negative. “These characteristics can reduce a culture of excellence within an organisation,” said Thorpe, who emphasised that cultural barriers, whatever their source, can be significant when striving for optimal levels of integration.
That is why the key thing for a leader “is knowing when to say ‘let’s go all in on integration and collaboration’ and when to say ‘okay, this is actually the right moment that we have to focus on excellence and this is a win-at-all-costs moment’.”
Next, the assembled performance directors highlighted five of their most pressing challenges in this area, which we illustrate below in the form of direct, anonymised quotes:
1. Too much collaboration leading to slow, unclear decisions
“We had way too many opinions in the room, way too many meetings and way too many rabbit hole discussions.”
“We had two, three or four-hour meetings that should have taken 30 minutes… at times our leader just needed to make the decision.”
2. Too little collaboration leading to silos and competing agendas
“If you’re in a team where there is a lack of integration and collaboration and people are only seeing the main thing from their own lens, then we’re going to have competing interests immediately.”
3. The absence of or confusion over accountability
“Who’s the decision maker? Who is the one directing the goals for the athlete? We’re constantly sorting through who really needs to lead that. Is it the coach? Is it the strength coach? Is it the physio? There’s sometimes not a lot of clarity.”
“It really made the entire club suffer because at the end of the day, a lot of times decisions were not being made at all because the performance director wanted everyone to come to an agreement.”
4. Finding the ‘right’ balance (because silos are not always negative)
“Is it optimal for everybody to push towards the middle? Or are there scenarios in which we want certain groups to lean one way or the other?”
“I think there are certain areas where collaboration really works well and other areas where I’m still happy enough being in a silo where our job is, say, the physical performance side and we know best.”
5. Cultural and structural barriers
“The majority on this call is still being led from above; how much influence does the [executive / head coaching level] have in where we are on that continuum?”
The performance directors on the call also suggested five solutions, which, as before, we illustrate in the form of direct, anonymised quotes:
1. Introduce decision-making frameworks
“It’s been really impactful having really clear three-step, four-step decision making frameworks to help move groups from that really consensus-driven, high-support, low-challenge environments towards more of that facilitative optimal environment.”
2. Adopt systems thinking
“With a systems focus where you’re planning properly, some of the tension points become non-factors… if someone wants to raise their hand and say, ‘hey, maybe we look at this system’, I think that’s a productive way to approach it; and if nine out of ten people say, ‘well, you’re missing this point’, maybe the complexity is resolved to some extent.”
3. Clear ownership and leadership
“We look across problem-solving type, problem-solving approach and decision-making approach; and that dictates in a lot of cases whether we need to have an expert just making a unilateral decision or we need a group to discuss things.”
4. Selected, purposeful collaboration
“We’ll get to certain points where there are bigger picture discussions or the leadership or certain individuals need to collaborate on this part of this project or this certain segment of the season. As long as it’s spelled out ahead of time and those individuals are aware, it’s been much more successful for us and for me particularly.”
5. Continuous monitoring
“We have gone to a place that has been sticky for a lot of our staff around what’s mission critical for helping to try and find that sweet spot of integration, collaboration and accountability. All of these words that we’re talking about keep coming back to what’s mission critical and being a bit more intentional with the who, the why, the what and the ‘so what?’ of meetings and the people in the room.”
At the session’s end, Thorpe left the table with some questions to ponder:
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