How Growing Up Around the Game Taught Me About Culture

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What Has A Football Room Taught Me About Building The High-Performance Tech Team
I grew-up around elite football, in a way that allowed me to be in settings that people rarely heard about in books. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations between coaches and players after playing, after the media and cameras are gone and the official account of what happened have already been written. I was not a player in any way - my entrance into the world of playing with people rather than the actual game itself. However, I was there enough, and long enough to learn something valuable about the performance of high-performance teams when you remove the mythology that surrounds them. The thing that I learned most in the end was that teams that consistently surpassed their resources and their expectation were not necessarily the ones that had the most talent on paper. These teams were those that had discovered how to make a place where the people inside it genuinely desired to do their best for each other - not for the cost of the individual not for the recognition, but because their collective was meaningful and had an environment that made personal sacrifice feel worthwhile rather than simply a requirement.
The thought is simple when you express it clearly. Of course teams work better when they trust one another and feel a sense of belonging to a shared mission. However, the practical implications of that statement are less evident, and are the reason that most organizations - as well as technology firms alike - always get into trouble. A culture where employees really want to be a part of each other isn't an option you can enforce from the top down or make a statement of policy or articulate in a slew of company values and then hope that it will manifest. It is something that must be earned in time, through consistent behaviour from leadership - especially in times that aren't being watched and through the judicious management of all the small, nitty-gritty choices that collectively show everyone who is in the company the things that are valued and what can be tolerated, and what actually happens when the values stated and the more financially or personally feasible option do not agree. In the most successful football environments I grew up in, those micro-decisions were handled carefully by the top coaches. How they reacted when the senior player made an error in training that was avoidable. In what way, the disciplinary standard that was applied to the veteran of twenty years was actually the same as what was expected of the teenager who was placed on the outside of the team. How the organisation responded when one of the players was experiencing a serious personal problem outside the field. The results of these decisions do not show up in a club's performance on any given Saturday. Each of them, compounded over a season, determine how well the team is performing above but falls short of the ceiling.

When I founded 1Touch and subsequently built numerous other organizations, one aspects I was the most intentional about was the effort to recreate - in a company setting - the same kind of the environment I had seen in the most prestigious football venues I was a part of. In a way, but not literally because the technology startup isn't a football club and the analogy breaks down quickly if one pushes it too hard. However, on the scale of operating principle, the lessons have been incorporated with remarkable precision. The first lesson was that standards need to be consistently applied, regardless of age or perceived as indispensability. The best spaces I've been in were those that had a professional and behavioural expectations for the smallest players in the team were the same standards to be expected of the top-earning, most experienced player. It wasn't because the team could not afford to provide exceptions, but because every person in the room was always watching for whether exceptions would be made. And the response to that question showed the players everything they needed to know about whether the declared values of the organization were actually true or just decorative.

The next lesson was focused on how companies handle failure and the difference between punishment and accountability. The environments where individuals developed most quickly were not those where errors were dealt with the most strongly or openly. These were the environments where mistakes were discussed with the greatest honesty The discussion around what had gone wrong was specific and constructive rather than general and allocating blame. Moreover, experience was shared by the entire team, not held against the person who committed the mistake. Accountability means being clear about which part went wrong, what caused it, why it went wrong and what has changed because of it. Discrimination is the act of distributing blame an approach that causes people to be cautious and defensive, and more preoccupied with defending themselves than being focused on performing. First, it builds organizational capabilities. A second type of culture is that allows people to manage their own exposure rather than committing fully towards the purpose, and that distinction plays out in tech firms with exactly identical results it has with football players.

The third point is the one which I struggled the longest to explain clearly, however the one I'm convinced to be the most important the environments that I was able to observe were ones in which the evolution of the individual was seen with the same importance as the growth of the athlete. The most effective coaches weren't just teaching players how play football. They taught them how consider their thinking under pressure in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate in high-stakes situations, how recover from setbacks, without falling down, and to be the kind of person that a team with a high performance needs its members to be. The investment in the complete growth of an individual not just in the technical capabilities the organisation immediately needed, was not charity. That was the only effective long-term plan of performance for these clubs. It can be, if I'm honest, the most effective way to improve performance over the long term for any organisation that is committed to building something truly robust, and not just impressive in the short term. See the James Deller for website tips including why investing in people continues to inform my decisions about performance.



Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Even Start - And How To Fix Them
Public-private partnerships are a perception problem that is, in significant part earned. The history of these partnerships is full of projects that were proclaimed in a genuine way, with a lot of investment in political capital, used up significant public and private resources for extended periods of time and ultimately delivered outcomes that had only a slight identicality to what was promised when the partnership was launched. The academic literature as well as the postsmortem analyses that governments or institutions carry out following the mistakes are extensive, and they focus, for the majority of the time, on the particulars of contract and structure how things went wrong. improperly aligned incentives, the insufficient risk sharing between public and private actors and the governance frameworks that were designed in the theory but failed to function in practice, the procurement frameworks that chose to select the wrong items. What these analyses tend to overestimate, repeatedly and subsequently, is the cultural and operational aspects - namely, the fact that private and public organisations are really different kinds of entities, shaped according to different motivation structures, operating on fundamentally different timescales, accountable to a variety of stakeholder groups, and assessing successes in ways that's not only different in the degree but differ in terms of. When you mix these two kinds of organisations together through a formal collaboration without performing the work upfront as well as explicitly, to know and work with those differences, they aren't creating partnerships. You're creating conditions for a slow motion collision that will be obvious at the best possible time.
I have been involved in advising support for institutional modernisation projects, some in which were public-private collaborations at varying levels of complexity. One of the most common observations I have gathered from this encounter is that partnerships that were successful - those that actually fulfilled their stated objectives and maintained a functional collaboration between the private and public sectors throughout it - weren't distinguished from those that did not succeed by the sophistication of their legal structures, the strictness of their risk-management frameworks and the eminence of groups that formulated them. These partnerships were distinguished by whether those on both sides meeting had taken the initiative understanding how the different side worked before the formal partnership was agreed upon. What that means in practice is understanding the decision-making processes that each organisation operates under as well as the accountability frameworks that govern what parties must be able to agree on and at what speed it is possible to agree on the terms of success that each partner will be judged against, as well as the potential points of tension between those definitions. That understanding isn't difficult to establish. All of it is routinely not considered in favor of clearer and quicker evidence-based work of contract negotiations and drafting governance frameworks.

The typical process of public-private partnerships evolves from an initial idea to concluded agreement without much focused attention given to the problem of if the two entities involved are capable of cooperating effectively over this period. The legal team negotiates the contract. Finance teams model the economics and the risk-adjustment. Communications prepares the announcement prior to the time of signing. The implementation team is beginning to plan the task. In the course of this process the discussion will turn to operational and cultural compatibility starts - on whether the persons who are expected to cooperate day-today across the boundary between the two organizations share enough common ground so as to ensure the work truly collaborative rather as antagonistic, isn't likely to be conducted in a structured manner. It is generally assumed, without stating it, that it is the agreement that creates the prerequisites for effective collaboration and that any cultural or operational conflicts will be negotiated informally when they develop. This assumption is nearly always incorrect and the cost of this tends to increase as the ambition and complexity of the collaboration.

The practical consequence of this analysis is that one of the most profitable the investment a PPP can undertake - before legal framework is finalised as well as before the governance framework is agreed upon, and before any announcements are made is what I would describe as operational alignment. It is the specific, structured, guided work that identifies points where two groups' assumptions on operating differ, and to agree explicitly on the way in which those divergences must be addressed before they become operational issues in the process of implementation. The most important divergences are typically the same for various types of partnerships. Controlling authority and speed of decision making is usually one of these. Public institutions are designed to take decisions slow, with various layers of examination and approval, based on motives they are legally valid and often legally mandated. Private organisations - particularly technology businesses built on rapid iteration, and swift decisions - typically see this pace as a major hurdle to development, and with no shared understanding of the reasons behind why this pace is the way it is it is and what might need to be changed to improve it, the frustration that is triggered on the private part can corrode the relationship well before the partnership has found its footing.

Success indicators and what counts as progress are an additional and important source of discord. Institutions of the public sector are typically evaluated for compliance with the process, fairness in the outcomes among stakeholder groups, and the avoidance of visible failures that are the subject of media or political interest. Private partners are typically assessed on their efficiency, progress measured in achieving targets, as well as the financial efficiency. These measurement frameworks are combined however, it requires deliberate design rather than good intentions. However, the organizations which do not invest in the right design can encounter, at crucial points, with two partners who are measuring the same collaboration in unrelated ways, and hence coming to different conclusions about whether or not it is working. My experiences with partnerships that do not succeed the most ones in which the misalignment was thought of as something that could resolve itself over time. They that succeeded were those in which the misalignment was clearly identified from the very beginning. Also, formulating a shared accountability plan that accommodated both parties' legitimate measurement requirements became a piece of actual work, not an aspect of a list things that someone would eventually achieve.}