{"id":30883,"date":"2025-08-06T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/?post_type=article&p=30883"},"modified":"2025-12-15T11:19:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T11:19:53","slug":"smart-people-make-bad-decisions-all-the-time","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/smart-people-make-bad-decisions-all-the-time\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Smart People Make Bad Decisions All the Time\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n 6 Aug 2025 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

\u2018Smart People Make Bad Decisions All the Time\u2019<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Leadership & Culture<\/a> <\/div>\n
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Greg Shaw of Swimming Australia describes four areas where his team are working to help people make smart decisions and follow hard behaviours.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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By John Portch<\/h6>\n
\u201cThe one thing I believe about high performance is that it\u2019s pretty simple but it\u2019s also really hard to do consistently over time.\u201d<\/h6>\n

The Leaders Performance Institute has just asked Greg Shaw, the High Performance Director at Swimming Australia, for\u00a0his thoughts on the growing complexity of performance environments.<\/p>\n

This complexity is both reflected in and a reaction to what Shaw calls the \u201cgrowing sophistication\u201d of performance roles. In many respects, as he noted in our Teamworks Special Report<\/a> earlier this year, Shaw perceives himself as a \u201cproject manager\u201d.<\/p>\n

Which is not in itself a bad thing. Fields such as sports science have blossomed in elite sport, but consistency of application and outcome, whether locally or at scale, has often proved elusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all make bad decisions,\u201d adds Shaw, \u201cand a lot of smart people make dumb decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, we highlight four areas where Shaw and Swimming Australia, are trying to give their athletes, coaches and staff every chance to make better choices.<\/p>\n

1. Identify the barriers to better decision making<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe heavily invested and remain interested in behavioural science and how we can help our athletes and coaches make smart decisions and follow hard behaviours,\u201d says Shaw. Swimming Australia\u2019s aim is to \u201chelp make those decisions easier and those hard performance behaviours more frequent.\u201d They enlisted the help of behavioural design experts to help identify and understand the existing barriers.<\/p>\n

Shaw himself has a background in sports nutrition and illustrates his point through the lens of dietetics. \u201cIt\u2019s the behavioural component of nutrition,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what you know in terms of, say, biology, it\u2019s if you can make the right choices and how social and cultural drivers impact those choices.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. Manipulate the environment to remove those barriers<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ideal, as Shaw says, is for the athletes to \u201cturn up, do what they need to do, and live a high performance lifestyle\u201d. This, he admits, is easier said than done. Even a disciplined athlete can inadvertently harm their health and performance. \u201cIt often leads to concerns around wellbeing, being overloaded, overworked and over-stressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The key is to \u201cmanipulate the environment and the process to help the athlete make it simpler and easier.\u201d Shaw continues: \u201cI think the future of high performance is designing things purposefully, not just the training we do but everything that fits outside of that; the life, the social environment, the club culture, the programme culture, the experts around you so you know to make the right choices and adaptations.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is clear that it is \u201cmore about environment and behaviour than it is about science and the expertise of performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is in keeping with Swimming Australia\u2019s \u2018people-first\u2019 approach. \u201cIt\u2019s understanding what\u2019s a good stress and what\u2019s a bad stress,\u201d says Shaw, who explains that there is an increasing empathy for what athletes go through to sustain high performance over extended periods of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn athlete may enter our ecosystem at 15 or 16 and leave our ecosystem at 35, so if we don\u2019t have that ability to understand how we must adapt in how we interact with and support our athletes, then they\u2019ll leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Let people refine their processes before looking for scalability<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shaw admits that Swimming Australia, when it comes to system-wide initiatives, has traditionally been an organisation that \u201cscales first and tries to find efficiencies later\u201d. However, the organisation has typically excelled when it comes to individual and group piloting. Shaw has noted the distinction and continues to learn as he goes. \u201cOver the last 18 months I\u2019ve realised it\u2019s not about adding more, it\u2019s subtracting and refining ideas to their simplest and easiest, then letting people add their flavour to it,\u201d he says, warming to the theme.<\/p>\n

\u201cOftentimes, we try to scale and have things fit within boxes, but scalability comes from understanding the fundamentals of an idea or process, making sure that happens, and then giving enough space for others to iterate and develop their own process.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Use AI as a co-pilot<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shaw sees the potential in automation, with caveats. \u201cAs we automate, we free up time to interrogate the data more and more, but that puts people behind the screens and offices we\u2019re trying to free them from in the first place,\u201d he says, adding, \u201cautomation should free coaches to spend more time on the pool deck and in performance environments\u201d. Doing this will enable coaches to \u201cbe compassionate with the athlete, to better understand what they\u2019re going through, or to understand if a piece of information is going to be necessary for them at this point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for AI, he sees the benefit as being rooted in \u201caugmented decision-making\u201d. \u201cWe want to use AI to help people make good decisions, to help strip away the noise, to make the signal a bit clearer,\u201d he continues.<\/p>\n

Such clarity helps to reduce \u201cdata hallucinations and noise, which you may not realise for a couple of months\u201d. By that point, \u201cyou\u2019ve wasted your time.\u201d<\/p>\n

That does not mean outsourcing data interpretation entirely to AI. \u201cWe believe in the co-pilot model of AI rather than having the artificial intelligence doing it for people.\u201d<\/p>\n

What to read next<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Coach and Staff Wellbeing: Five Approaches to Five Common Challenges<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n