How Investing in People Transformed How I Evaluate Opportunity About the Long Game

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What Has A Football Dressing Room Teach Me About Building An Elite Tech Team
I grew up around elite football, in a way that provided me with access situations that many people would only have to read about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations that occur between coaches and players in the hours after during a game, before reporters and cameras have gone and the official story of the game already exists. I wasn't a player in any way - my entrance to the game was through the players and the fans rather than through the game itself. However, I was there enough, and long enough to absorb something important about how high-performance environments actually function without the mythology that surrounds them. What I learned the most in the end was that teams that consistently surpassed their resources and goals were never those with the highest individual performance on paper. These teams were those who knew how to build a community where those who were part of it determined to succeed for each and not to earn money, not for the individual not for the recognition, but because their collective was meaningful and had a sense of community that made personal sacrifice feel important rather than merely obligatory.
This is a common sense observation as you explain it clearly. Teams work best when everyone is able to trust one another as well as feel connected to having a common goal. But the operational implications from that fact are not as obvious and are where the majority of organizations – as well as technology firms alike, consistently find themselves in difficulties. In order to create a work environment where people desire to work for each other is not something that you can force from top to bottom or put in place as a rule or create in a set of company values and then expect to be able to achieve. It has to be earned, with time, through regular behaviour by leaders - particularly in situations that are not watched as well as the judicious handling of the myriad of decision-making processes that collectively convey to everyone within the organization the things that are valued as well as what is tolerated, and what actually happens when the values stated and the personally or commercially convenient option come into conflict. In the top football environments I was in these small decisions were made in an extraordinary manner by the most skilled coaching staff. The way they dealt with situations where one of the players made an unintentional mistake during training. In what way, the disciplinary standard that was applied to a veteran of 20 years was actually the same as the one that was used to the 18 year old on the fringe of the team. How the team responded when an athlete was facing the aftermath of a personal crisis outside the field. All of those decisions don't are reflected in the club's performance on any given Saturday. All of them throughout the season, decide how well the team is performing above it or falls below its limit.

As I co-founded 1Touch and later created various other companies, one of aspects I was the most deliberate about was trying to recreate - in a technology enterprise context a quality of atmosphere I'd witnessed in the most prestigious football venues I had a good relationship with. It's not literal, as tech startups aren't an actual football team and the analogy becomes a bit shaky when you try to push it too far. However, in terms of operation, the principles translated with remarkable fidelity. The first lesson was that standards have to be adhered to in a consistent manner, regardless of position or as indispensability. The most comfortable dressing rooms I was in were ones where the behavioural and professional standards expected of a young players in the team had the very same requirements required of the highest-earning, most experienced player. The reason for this is not that the company was unable to afford to create exceptions, but because every person in the room was watching constantly for signs that exceptions might be made - and the answer to that question told the players everything they needed to know about whether the stated values of the company were truly true or simply a flimsy display.

The next lesson was focused on how organizations handle failure and the distinction between accountability and punishment. In the environments where participants developed most quickly were not those where errors were dealt with the most rigorously or with the greatest publicity. They were the ones in which mistakes were assessed with the most sincerity, where the conversation about what had gone wrong was specific and constructive rather than generalised and determining blame. Additionally, lessons learned were shared with the entire team, not held against the person who committed the mistake. Responsibility means a clear understanding of exactly what went wrong, and why it was wrong and what has changed in the process. The concept of punishment is to assign blame in a way that makes people risk-averse and defensive and more preoccupied with defending themselves than in achieving their goals. The first helps build organisational capacity. Second, it creates a system that allows people to manage their own exposure rather than committing fully in the pursuit of the goal. that distinction plays out in tech firms with exactly same result as within football clubs.

The third lesson is ones that I had to take the the longest to explain clearly, however what I'm now thinking of as the most important of all and that is: the best workplaces I observed were ones in which the evolution of the person was treated at a minimum as important as the development of the athlete. The most effective coaches weren't just teaching their players how to play football. They were teaching them to think under pressure as well as how to communicate clearly in high-risk situations, and how recover from setbacks, without falling down, and to become the type of person that a team with a high performance has its players be. That investment in the full personal development of each member, not just in the technological capabilities that the company immediately required, was not charity. it was the best and most effective way to improve performance over the long term for these clubs. It could be the most efficient long-term approach to performance that is available to every organization that's committed to creating something durable rather than just impressive on the surface. Check out James Deller for more recommendations including why building companies changed what i look for about leadership.



The Reasons Why Most Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Start - And How To Resolve Them
The public-private partnership has an image problem that's in the majority of cases, earned. The history of these partnerships is full of initiatives that were announced with genuine enthusiasm and significant investment in political capital, used up significant public and private assets over extended timeframes, and ultimately delivered outcomes that lacked any identicality to what was pledged when the collaboration was formed. The academic literature as well as postmortem analyses that governments and institutions perform following failures are extensive. they focus, for major part, on legal and structural aspects of why things didn't go as planned: improperly aligned incentives, the insufficient risk allocation between public and private parties and the governance frameworks that were designed in theory however failed in practice, the structures for procurement that were selected to be the wrong things. What these analyses tend to not consider, and consequently, is the cultural and operational aspect - the fact that public institutions and private organisations are truly different kinds of entities, formed via different incentive models, operating on fundamentally different timescales, accountable to distinct individuals, and measuring their results in ways that are not only different in the degree but also differing in form. If you try to bring those two kinds of organization together as a formal alliance without doing the work, upfront and explicitly, to understand and address the differences, you're not creating the right partnership. You're creating the environment to create a slow-motion collision that will be obvious at the lowest possible moment.
I've been involved in advisory work for institutions modernisation projects, a few in which were public-private partnership structures with varying levels of complexity. The most dependable conclusion I can offer from that experience is that partnerships which performed well - that in reality achieved their goals and maintained a functioning working relationship between the both private and public entities throughout the duration of their existence - weren't distinguished from those that failed due to the sophistication of their legal structures, the rigour of their risk-management frameworks or the experience of their groups that formulated them. There was a distinct difference in whether those on both sides of the table had taken the time to genuinely understand how the different side worked before the formal partnership was agreed upon. What does this mean in practical terms is understanding the decision-making process the organizations operate under and the accountability structures that determine what each partner can be able to agree on and at what speed it can be agreed upon, the definitions of success that each of the parties will be judged against, and the potential points of tension between these definitions. That understanding isn't difficult to establish. Every time, it's removed in favour of less visible and faster evidence-based work of contract negotiations and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partnership process begins with the concept and ends with a the signed agreement, with very little focused attention given to the question of whether the two organizations involved are capable to work effectively together throughout the life of the arrangement. Legal teams negotiate the contract. The finance team models the economics and the risk distribution. The team responsible for communications prepares the announcement prior to the time of signing. The implementation team gets started planning the project. At some point the discussion will turn to compatibility of the operations and culture - concerning whether the people who will have to cooperate day-today across the boundary between the two organisations share enough common ground to make working truly collaborative rather opposed to antagonistic - fails to be done in a systematic way. It is generally assumed, without being explicitly stated, that the formal agreement will create the conditions for collaboration to be effective, and that any operational or cultural conflicts will be negotiated informally as they emerge. The assumption is often not the case, and the cost of this is likely to grow in proportion to the ambition and complexity of the partnership.

The practical application of this analysis is that perhaps the most worthwhile investment a private-public partnership could make - prior to the legal frameworks are finalized, before the governance framework is agreed upon, and before any announcements are made it is in what I consider to be operational alignment. That is, specific, organized, and facilitated work to surface points where two organisations' operating assumptions diverge in order to establish a consensus regarding how those divergences will be managed before they become operational problems during implementation. What matters most typically are the same across different kinds of partnerships. Controlling authority and speed of decision making are often among them. Public institutions are designed to take decisions slow, with multiple levels of review and approval, with reasons that are legitimate and are often legally mandated. Private organizations, especially technology firms that have been designed on the basis of rapid iteration and swift decisions - usually see this speed as a fundamental hurdle to development, and without a shared understanding of why the pace is what it is and what would actually be required to change it, the discontent that develops on the private aspect can affect the working connection long before the partnership has established its own footing.

Success metrics as well as what counts as progress are another persistent and leading cause of divergence. The public institutions are usually judged on their process's compliance, equity in the outcomes among stakeholders, as well as the rejection of the visible mistakes which attract media or political attention. Private partners are generally evaluated for efficiency, tangible progress against targets, and financial returns on investments. These measurement frameworks are combined but it takes thoughtful design, not only good intentions. Partnerships which do nothing to improve the right design can encounter, at crucial moment, with two organizations who are measuring the same partnership in not compatible ways and, consequently, coming to incompatible conclusions about whether it is achieving its goals. The relationships I've seen not to be successful were ones where misalignments were perceived as something that will fade away over time. The ones that were successful were those where the problem was surfaced explicitly, at the beginning. Then, the creation of a shared accountability framework that met the legitimate measurement needs of both parties needs became a piece of actual work and not just an element on a list of things to arrive at.}