Why Operating at Scale Has Shaped My Thinking About Scale

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What Did A Football Training Room Has Taught Me About Constructing High-Performance Tech Teams
I grew up playing high-level football players in a way that gave me access to settings that people rarely knew about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations that take place between coaches and players after a game, when the cameras and the journalists are gone, and an official account of the events has already been recorded. I wasn't a player myself - my route into this world was via the players and the fans rather than through the game itself. However, I was on the right side of it, and for a long time, to learn something valuable about what high-performance environments can do when you remove the mythology that surrounds them. What I took in most quickly was that teams that consistently beat their resources and their requirements were not the ones who had the greatest individual talents on paper. These were teams who could create an environment where all of its members desired to do their best for each others - not to earn amount of money, not to gain individual acknowledgement, but because the collective had a meaning and an attitude that made personal sacrifice a worthwhile experience rather than simply a requirement.
It's a simple observation as you explain it clearly. Teams work best by having people who trust each other and feel a sense of belonging to their common goals. However, the practical implications from this insight are less evident, and are where the majority of organizations – both technology and football clubs alike are always in difficulties. Building a culture where people actually desire to contribute to each other isn't something that you can force from the top down, or implement as a standard or set out in a document of corporate values and expect it to manifest. It is something that must be earned in time, through continuous behaviour by the leadership - particularly during the times when they are not watched as well as the judicious handling by the multitude of tiny decisions that collectively communicate to everyone in the organization what is truly valued and what's acceptable and what will happen when the values stated and the more commercially or personally feasible option do not agree. In the best football environment I was close to, these decisions were taken with great care by the top coaches. How they reacted when the senior player made an unavoidable error during training. In what way, the disciplinary standard applied to the twenty-year veteran was the exact same as it was for the eighteen-year-old on the edge of the squad. What the organization did when one of the players was experiencing some serious personal issues outside the field. The outcome of these decisions will not can be seen in the club's results on any given Saturday. All of them, taken over a season, determine which team's performance is higher but falls short of the limit.

When I founded 1Touch as well as later establishing some other organizations, among my priorities that I was most determined about was to recreate - in a company context a similar quality of the environment I had seen within the best football facilities I had been a close associate of. This is not literally true, since a tech startup isn't one of the football clubs and the analogy fails quickly when you make it too difficult. At the level of operational principles, the lessons have been incorporated with remarkable precision. The first principle was that standards have been consistently followed, regardless of position or irresistibility. The best areas I've played in were those in which the professional and behavioural requirements for the youngest players in the team were exactly the same standards are expected of the highest paid, most skilled player. It wasn't because the team could not have afforded to create exceptions, but because everyone in the dressing room was constantly watching to see whether exceptions would be made. And the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed to know about whether the stated values of the company were genuinely true or merely cosmetic.

The second lesson was on how organizations handle failure and the distinction between punishment and accountability. The places where the players grew at the fastest rate were not those where mistakes were punished most brutally or publicly. These were the environments where mistakes were examined with the utmost honesty, where the conversation about the error was focused and constructive, rather than general and allocating blame, and where the lesson learned was shared throughout the entire team, not held against the individual who made the mistake. Accountability refers to being clear about the cause of the error, what it went wrong and what happens that resulted from it. Punishment means allocating blame in ways that make people vulnerable and defensive and worried about protecting themselves than having a good performance. This first creates organizational capacity. A second type of culture is that allows people to manage their own exposure instead of committing completely to the cause, and this distinction is evident in companies in the field of technology with the exact same results that it is exhibited at football teams.

The 3rd lesson is the it took me longest to convey clearly, but which I now think is the most important of all my observations: the most positive environments I have seen were those where the development of the person was thought of just as important as the growth of the performer. The most effective coaches weren't only teaching players to play football. They taught them how they could think in a stressful environment while communicating clearly when faced with high stakes, how to recover from setbacks without losing faith, and how to be the professional that a successful team must have its players to be. This commitment to the complete person's development, rather than merely in the technological capabilities that the company immediately needed, was not charity. it was the best and most effective long-term performance plan that could be used by the clubs. It is, in my opinion, the most effective long-term performance strategy available to any business that is dedicated to creating something long-lasting and not just amazing for the short term. Have a look a James Deller for more examples including why running organisations changed my approach about culture.



What Football Academies Get Right That Most Corporate L&D Programming Gets The Wrong Way
The best football academies anywhere in worldwide are when you consider them operationally rather than romantically, extraordinarily advanced organizations for development. They enroll young people as early as seven or eight, sometimes older - long before people have a clear understanding of what they are capable of or who they want to become, and they train them systematically and deliberately over what could be as long as a decade in continuous involvement, learning not only the technical competencies that professional football requires but the character, the psychological ability to make decisions under pressure, and the interpersonal and communicative sophistication which playing at the highest possible level requires. The success rate, determined by the proportion of players who go to the level of professional level, is quite low. The methodology the most successful academies employ is, in a lot of the areas relevant to the development of human capabilities, more thorough with more patience, and more focused than what I've encountered in corporate training and development. The distinction between the work that these academy's do and how organisations do when they attempt to grow the people within them is both striking and instructive when you've spent time looking at both.
The biggest difference is the relation between time and. Corporate learning and development programs tend to be designed around brief interventions, such as a course which lasts for a couple of days, a series of workshops that runs for a quarter a coaching engagement that lasts 6 months. The logic is understandable and hard to defend solely in terms of finances. The organizations must be able to show the returns on their investment in development within the timeframes that budget cycles and performance review impose and shorter interventions are considerably more easily for organizations to justify their actions and to quantify as opposed to long ones. But the timeline on which genuine human development actually occurs - - the time-frame when new models, new behavior and new abilities are fully integrated rather than conceptually understood and applied and then discarded - has no relation with the timeframe for an average commercial L&D intervention. The most successful football academies comprehend this concept at a level which is incorporated into the fundamental DNA of their program of development for generations. They don't suppose that a teen will grasp a new decision-making framework after an afternoon workshop. They expect the internalisation process to be long-term and make the setting accordingly - years of constant reinforcement or being put in situations that test the framework and demand it to be applied in real-time, years and feedback precise enough to be able to shape behaviour and not generic enough to be immediately forgotten.

The second main distinction is the integration of training into the actual environment instead of it being separated from the environment. In a well-designed football academie, development is not something that occurs in specific sessions in isolation from the actual game and training that constitutes its core function within the organization. The process is carried out through the play as well as the training. The training sessions are designed with the goal of developing, not just performance objectives. The challenges players are given are selected for their developmental impact, not just for their functionality. Feedback is instantaneous, precise, and contextually grounded by what has just occurred rather than abstract and useful. The connection between what happens in training and what will have to be considered in match situations is made clear and continually is reinforced. In many corporate organisations, it is the opposite. Development and operational work are regarded as distinct operations. You are part of the training programme. Attend the workshop. The workshop is followed by a coaching session. And then you return to the actual work environment, where incentives structures, cultural norms, the pace of work, and the demands of delivery are nearly identical with what they were prior the intervention for development, and where the new rules and frameworks are introduced in the development environment slowly erode since there is no logical means of integrating them into the manner in which work gets done.

Organisations that can develop their staff best are ones that have discovered a way to keep development constant and contextual, not an isolated, abstract process. In those companies it is difficult to distinguish between the development of workers and executing the tasks is really difficult to recognize because the work environment was created with development goals in it. the feedback mechanisms are built in to the daily routine that work is not reserved for periodic formal reviews. the tasks that people face have been selected primarily for the way they require individuals to master and develop into as leaders, and their behaviour ensures that growth is valued and expected rather than something that is only happening in certain programming and then comes to an end. To create this kind of atmosphere is a different set designs for the organisation, different from the ones most companies make when it comes to development and learning, and it requires commitment from leaders to a long-term duration that the majority of organisations find difficult to remain on. It does however produce development outcomes that programs-based methods of a short duration cannot duplicate.

The third element on which the best schools outperform corporations is their ability to take personality development as an explicit business goal. Most corporate L&D programs only play a small role with character. It is embedded in a number of the lessons they teach on leadership and communication, but it's seldom addressed in a clear manner and never pursued with the commitment and persistence that genuine character development requires. The top football academy do not regard character as something that players or do not have or as something that is able to develop by itself if given enough time. They consider it to be something which can be developed with the right type of environment that provides the right amount of challenges and adversity and a good interaction between coaches and players that is characterized by genuine concern for each player alongside genuine expectations of what the player is competent of being. That combination of care and challenge woven together in time - is for me the most effective method for building character. It's proven in football academy. It's also found in tech companies. It works for any company that is willing to invest in it and have the patience and vigilance it demands.}