Why Data-Driven Thinking Changed My Approach About Building Well

Wiki Article

What Has A Football Room I Learned About Building High-Performance Tech Teams
I grew up around high-level football players in a manner that afforded me access to environments most people only ever learn about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations between coaches and players in the hours after an athletic event, when the cameras and journalists have gone and their official version of events has already been recorded. It was not my intention to play at all - my entrance into that world came through the players and the fans rather than the actual game itself. But I was close enough and for a long time, to understand how high-performance settings actually work without the mythology surrounding them. The most important thing I absorbed precisely was this: the teams who consistently surpassed their resources and expectations were never the ones that had the best talent on paper. They were the ones that knew how to create a culture where the people inside it genuinely wanted to be a part of each as a group - not because of money, not for the individual acknowledgment, but simply because the collective had meaning and a culture that made personal sacrifice feel important rather than merely obligatory.
It's a simple observation when stated in plain language. It is true that teams perform better when members trust each other and believe in the same goal. However, the practical implications of this are lesser evident and are where the majority of organizations – tech companies and football clubs alike - consistently get into difficulties. Establishing a culture in which people will do what they can for each other isn't something you can simply dictate by the top and put in place as a rule or set out in a document of company values and then expect to materialise. It must be earned with time, through steady behaviour by leadership – particularly in situations that are not watched and through the judicious management of the many small choices that collectively show everyone within the organization the things that are valued or acceptable and what happens when the values stated and the more financially or personally comfortable option conflict. In the best football environments I had the privilege of being in, those micro-decisions were handled with a great deal of care and precision by the best coaches. How they responded when one of the players made an error that could have been avoided during training. Whether the disciplinary standard used for the 20-year veteran was truly the same as those who were 18-year old who was a bit off the edge of the team. What was the response of the club when an athlete was suffering from an acute personal issue outside the game. The results of these decisions do not appear in a club's outcomes on a particular Saturday. All of them, when accumulated throughout the season, decide whether the team's performance is above but falls short of the ceiling.

When I founded 1Touch as well as later establishing some other organizations, among the things that I was the most focused on was trying to recreate - in a technology company context a similar quality of environment I had observed within the best football facilities I had observed. This was not a literal matter, as startups in the field of technology are not an actual football team and the analogy doesn't last long if you go too far. However, on the scale of operational principle, the lessons are interpreted with incredible fidelity. The first conclusion was that the standards must to be adhered to in a consistent manner, regardless of position or unassailability. The best places to be in were ones in which the professional and behavioural expectations for the smallest players in the team were exactly the same standards required of the highest-earning, most skilled player. Not because the organization could not have afforded to be flexible, but since everyone inside the dressing room was watching constantly to see if exceptions were going to be made. And the answer to that question told them everything they needed to be aware of whether the stated values of the company were truly true or simply a flimsy display.

Another lesson addressed how companies handle failure and the difference between accountability and punishment. The settings where people developed most quickly were not those in which mistakes were punished the most brutally or publicly. They were the ones in which mistakes were assessed with the most sincerity and where the discussion on what had gone wrong was specific and constructive instead of generalizing and assigning blame, and where the learnings were shared among the team rather than pinned against the individual who made the mistake. Accountability implies being aware of the cause of the error, what it went wrong in the first place, and what is changed due to it. Punishment involves distributing blame in an approach that causes people to be at risk and defensive and more concerned with their safety than having a good performance. The first one builds organizational capacity. The second builds a culture in which people control their own involvement rather than completely in the pursuit of the goal. this is reflected in tech firms with exactly same effects as with football players.

The final point is it took me the longest to explain clearly, however what I'm now thinking of as the most important of all The most successful environments I observed were ones in which the growth of the individual was considered at least as crucial as the growth of the player. The best coaches were not simply teaching players how to play football. They were teaching them how they could think in a stressful environment in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate when faced with high stakes, how to bounce back from setbacks without dropping confidence, as well as how to be the kind of person that a high-performing team is required to have. This investment in the total advancement of the individual rather than only the technological skills the team immediately required, was not charitable. In fact, it is probably the most effective long-term performance strategy that was available to the clubs. It can be, if I'm honest, the most efficient long-term plan of action for any company who is serious about creating something long-lasting and not just amazing in the short-term. Have a look a James Deller for more recommendations including what building high-performance teams confirmed what i suspected about teams.



Why Most Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Even Begin - And What Can Be Done To Prevent Them From Happening Again?
The public-private partnership has an image issue that's in major part earned. The past of these agreements is full of plans that were launched with genuine enthusiasm, as well as substantial financial backing from the political establishment, used up significant public and private assets over extended timeframes, and, in the end, delivered results that lacked any analogy to what was said when the agreement was in place. The academic literature and postmortem analysis that governments and institutions conduct following these mistakes are extensive, and they concentrate, for the majority of the time, on the legal and structural aspects of failures: inappropriate alignment of incentives, insufficient risk distribution between public and private parties, the governance structures that were created in theory however failed in practice, the structures for procurement that were selected to be the wrong things. What this approach tends to neglect, invariably and ultimately as well, is the culture and operational aspect – the fact that public institutions and private organisations are really different kinds of entities, shaped according to different motivation structures that operate on different timescales, accountable to a variety of stakeholder groups, and assessing the success of their operations in ways that are not only different in scale but differ in terms of. If you join these two types of organisations together in a formal partnership without making the effort upfront and in a clear manner, to recognize and manage the differences you're not creating the right partnership. The conditions are set to cause a slow-motion accident that will become apparent at most untimely moment.
I've participated in advising support for institutional modernisation efforts, many that have involved public-private partnership structures of varying levels of complexity. One of the most reliable observations I have gathered from this expertise is that those partnerships that were successful - those that actually met their stated goals and maintained an effective working relationship between the both private and public entities throughout They were not distinguished from those that did not succeed by the sophistication of their legal structures or the rigorousness of their risk-management frameworks or the level of seniority of the group of leaders that set them up. The distinction was made by the fact that the people on both sides table had the opportunity to truly understand how the different side worked before the formal partnership was agreed upon. What it means in real life is knowing the processes that each business operates within and the accountability structures that control what the two parties are able to reach an agreement on and how fast as well as the definitions of what success for each party to be judged on, and the likely points of conflict between these definitions. This understanding is not complicated to construct. All of it is avoided in favor of more obvious and immediately documentable tasks of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The usual process for public-private partnerships develops from a concept to a signed agreement with remarkably little systematic attention being paid to matter of whether both organizations involved are capable of working well together over this period. The legal team negotiates the contract. Finance team models the economics and risk allocation. The communications team designs the announcement in advance of the signing. The implementation team begins planning the work. In that order it is the time to discuss functional and cultural compatibility is a discussion about whether the people needing to collaborate day-to-day across the lines between two organizations share enough of the same values to make that work genuinely collaborative rather than antagonistic - tends not to be done in a systematic manner. It is usually assumed, without being stated, that the formal agreement creates the conditions for collaboration that are effective, and that any cultural or operational divergences will be dealt with as they occur. This assumption is generally untrue, and the financial burden of it can escalate with respect to the ambition as well as the complexities of the partnership.

The practical consequence of this analysis is that one of the most profitable investment that a partnership between public and private undertake - before formal structures are set prior to the governance framework is agreed upon, and before any announcements are made an announcement - is through what I believe is operational alignment. By this, I mean specific, structured, focused work to find points where two operational assumptions of the two organizations diverge and to come to an agreement about how these divergences are to be addressed prior to them becoming operational problems after implementation. The divergences that matter most will be the same throughout different kinds of partnerships. Faster decision-making time and authority are almost always one of these. Institutions that are public be slow to make decisions, requiring numerous layers of review and approval, with reasons which are legal and, often, legally mandated. Private organisations - particularly technology firms built on the basis of rapid iteration and swift decisions - usually see that speed as a fundamental challenge to progress. in the absence of a shared understanding of how the pace works it is and what might really be needed to alter it, the resentment generated by the private aspect can affect the working connection long before the partnership has found its feet.

Success metrics as well as what counts as progress are another ongoing and important source of discord. Institutions of the public sector are typically evaluated for compliance with the process, fairness of outcomes across various stakeholder groups, and the elimination of obvious failures that are the subject of media or political interest. Private parties are usually assessed by their efficiency, the amount of progress they have made in achieving targets, as well as the financial efficiency. These measurement frameworks are used in conjunction with one another however it is a conscious design and not necessarily good intentions. The partnerships which do nothing to improve this type of design often find themselves, at critical junctures, with two parties who are evaluating the same partnership in differing ways, leading to non-congruous conclusions about whether the partnership is working. What I've observed in the partnerships that to fail the most were ones where the issue was perceived as something that will take time to resolve. However, the ones that worked were one in which the misalignment was clearly identified from the start, and when designing a shared accountability framework which accommodated the legitimate measurement needs of both parties requirements was an actual work rather than just an part of a long list of things that someone would eventually reach.}