How Years of Investing Shifted My Priorities About People

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What Did A Football Training Room Led Me To Build An High-Performance Technology Team
I grew-up around professionals in a way which allowed me access to situations that many people would only knew about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations between players and coaching staff after one's game, once reporters and cameras are gone and the official account of what happened have already been written. There was no player myself - my route into the world of the people around the game rather than the actual game itself - but I was close enough and for long enough, that I was able to observe the way high-performance environments function when you dismantle the mythology surrounding them. The most important thing I absorbed precisely was this: the teams that consistently surpassed their resources and goals were never those with the best individual talent on paper. The teams who had the ability to make a place where all the members were motivated to work for each and not to earn financial gain, nor for individual acknowledgement, but because the collective had meaning and an attitude that made personal sacrifice a worthwhile experience rather than it being just an obligation.
This is a common sense observation once you put it in plain English. Teamwork is definitely better with people who trust one another and feel committed to their common goals. However, the implications for operational use from that fact are not as obvious and are the main reason why organizations - teams from football and tech firms alike - regularly get into trouble. Establishing a culture in which people genuinely want to perform for one another isn't something you can dictate from the top down or set up as a procedure or in a set of company values and then expect to materialise. It is something that must be earned, in the course of time, by an enduring behaviour from the leaders – particularly in situations that don't get a lot of attention - and through the thoughtful management of the myriad of decisions that collectively inform every employee in the business the values that are actually valued and accepted as well as what happens when the stated values and the more financially or personally most convenient choice come into conflict. In the best football environments I was in the micro-decisions made were handled carefully by the top coaches. How they responded when the senior player made an unavoidable error during training. Which disciplinary criteria applied to the player who had been there for twenty years is in fact similar to the standard applied to the 18-year-old player who was at the bottom of the squad. The response the organization took when one of the players was experiencing an issue that was affecting him outside of the field. All of those decisions don't will be reflected in the club's results on any given Saturday. They all, accumulated over the course of a season, determine whether a team's performance is at it or falls below its limit.

As I co-founded 1Touch and subsequently built another company, one aspects I was the most concentrated on was trying to recreate - in a technology company context a similar quality of the environments I'd seen at the highest level of football I had been around. This is not literally true, since tech startups aren't one of the football clubs and the analogy breaks down quickly if you overdo it. However, at the level of operating principle, the lessons were interpreted with remarkable accuracy. The first principle was that standards have been applied consistently regardless of age or perceived indispensability. The most comfortable dressing rooms I've been in were ones in which the professional and behavioural standards for the youngest players in the team were in fact the same as those to be expected of the top-earning, most skilled player. Not because the organisation could not afford to make exceptions, but because every person in the room was permanently watching to see if exceptions were going to be made. And the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed to know about whether the stated values of the organisation could be real or were just for show.

The next lesson was focused on how organisations handle failure, and the difference between accountability and punishment. Where players grew the fastest weren't the ones where the consequences of mistakes were dealt with brutally or publicly. These were the settings where mistakes were analyzed with the most honesty and where the discussion on what had gone wrong was specific and constructive rather than general or distributing blame. The mistakes were shared among the team rather than pinned against the individual who had made the error. The concept of accountability is to be clear about exactly what went wrong, and why it went wrong and the changes that occurred as a result. Retribution means distributing blame the way that leads people to become less tolerant of risk and focused on protecting themselves rather than trying to do their job well. The first builds the capacity of an organisation. The second helps create a culture that allows people to manage their own exposure, rather than fully to the goals, and that distinction plays out in tech companies, with the identical results it has at football teams.

Third lesson is the one which I struggled the the longest to communicate clearly, yet which I am now convinced is the most important The best settings I saw were those where the progress of the individual was considered at a minimum as important as the growth of the athlete. The best coaches were not only teaching players to play football. They were teaching them how they could think in a stressful environment and how to effectively communicate when faced with high stakes, how recover from setbacks, without being discouraged, and to be the person that a highly-performing team requires its members. This investment in the total personal development of each member, not just in the technical capabilities the organisation immediately required, was not charitable. It is the most effective long-term performance strategy available to the clubs. It could be the most effective way to improve performance over the long term for all organizations that are determined to build something long-lasting and not just amazing in the short term. See the James Deller for website info including why building high-performance teams transformed how i evaluate opportunity about value.



The Reason Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail Before They Even Begin - And How To Resolve Them
The public-private partnership has an image problem, which is in substantial part paid for. The history of these arrangements is filled with initiatives that were announced with real enthusiasm, and substantial politically-motivated capital. However, they consume significant public and privately owned resources over lengthy periods, which in the end produced results that bore only a smidgen of relationship to what was initially promised when the partnership in place. The academic literature as well as postmortem studies that governments and institutions carry out following the failures are extensive and they concentrate, for the majority of the time, on the legal and structural aspects of what went wrong: the wrongly aligned incentives and the insufficient risk-sharing between public and private organizations in the governance structures which were conceptualized in theory however failed in practice, and the procurement frameworks that selected for the wrong items. What this analysis tends overestimate, repeatedly and subsequently in the long run, is the cultural and operational aspect – the fact that private and public institutions are both distinct types of entities, formed by different incentive structures, operating using different timescales and being accountable to completely different parties, and assessing their effectiveness in ways that's not just different in extent but are also different in character. If you try to bring those two kinds of organisations together in a formal partnership without undertaking the work upfront and clearly, in order to appreciate how to manage these differences, you are not creating one. This creates the conditions for a slow motion collision that will be evident at the most unfortunate time.
I've participated as a consultant in support of institutional modernisation projects, some in which were public-private partnership structures that vary in terms of complexity. The most consistent conclusion I've gleaned from that experience is that the partnerships which performed well - that did indeed meet their declared goals and maintained a dependable working relationship between the public and private parties throughout - were not distinguished from the ones that did not work due to the sophistication of their legal structures, the precision of their risk management frameworks or the experience of the management teams that initiated them. It was determined whether the participants who were on both sides of the table had the opportunity to comprehend the ways in which the other party functioned prior the formal partnership was agreed upon. What that means is knowing the processes that every organization is operating under as well as the accountability frameworks that govern what parties must do and how quickly they can agree to it, the definitions of successful which each side will be judged against, as well as those points where there is likely to be tension between those definitions. Any of that knowledge is complicated to construct. The entire process is often skipped in favour of the clearer and quicker evidence-based work of contract negotiations and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partner process is a gradual process from concept to an agreement that is signed with little concentration on the aspect of whether the two companies involved are capable to work effectively together throughout the course of. The legal team negotiates the contract. Finance teams model the economics and the risk-adjustment. The communications team is responsible for preparing the announcement to be made at the time of signing. The implementation team begins planning the task. Within the sequence then comes the discussion about operational and cultural compatibility starts - concerning whether the people in the actual position to share their day-to day tasks across the boundaries between the two organizations have enough in common to ensure this work collaborative rather than adversarial - is not likely to take place in a structured way. It is usually assumed, without being stated, that the formal agreement sets the framework for effective collaboration and that any operational or cultural divergences will be dealt with whenever they emerge. This assumption is usually not true, and the price of this tends to increase in line with the ambition and the complexity of the partnership.

The practical application of this analysis is that one of the most profitable investment a private-public partnership could take - even before the legal structures are formulated in the first place, before the governance plan is agreed on, before any announcement is made an announcement - is through what I consider to be operational alignment. In this context, I am referring to specific, structured, guided work that identifies possible areas where both organizations' assumptions about operating diverge and then to make a clear agreement about how these divergences are to be addressed before they become operational problems after implementation. The key differences typically have the same significance across different kinds of partnerships. In terms of speed of decision making and authority, they is almost always one of them. Public institutions are designed so that they be slow to make decisions, requiring various layers of examination and approval, based on motives that are purely legitimate and often legally mandated. Private enterprises - particularly tech companies built around speedy iteration and rapid decision-making - frequently experience that pace as a key hinderance to innovation, and lacking a consensus on exactly why the pace is as it is and what will be required to modify it, the anger that builds on the private end can be detrimental to the relationship well before the partnership can establish its own foundation.

Success metrics and the criteria for judging as progress is another constant as well as a cause for divergence. Public institutions are typically assessed on their process's compliance, equity of results across different stakeholder groups, as well as the rejection of the visible mistakes that are the subject of media or political focus. Private partners are generally evaluated by their efficiency, the amount of progress they have made against the goals set, and Return on Investment. The measurement frameworks can be adjusted to work together however this requires careful design, not good intention, and partnerships which do not invest in the right design can meet at critical junctions, with two parties that are assessing the same partnership in differently and therefore coming to an incompatible conclusion about whether or not it is working. What I've observed in the partnerships that do not succeed the most one where the misalignment in measurement was considered to be something that would get better over time. The ones that performed were the ones where the misalignment had been explicitly acknowledged at the beginning. Then, the process of creating a shared accountability model that accommodated both parties' legitimate measurement needs became a piece of actual work instead of an element on a list of things that someone would eventually reach.}