SimonHarlingBlog Posts

A recent poll by YouGov asked people: If you had the choice, would you take £50k, no questions asked, or take the chance to win a million pounds on the flip of a coin?

Most said they would take the £50k.

If you have read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you’ll know we think quickly, go with what feels right, then justify our thinking to fit our decision. Think slow, and you know the expected value of the bet is £500,000 (probability x the value of the bet). Based on probability alone, you should take the bet every time – turning down a favourable outcome like that doesn’t make rational sense.

Only, that’s not how life works.

We pay attention to where we are, what feels right, and what’s urgent. A likley pay off tomorrow might not be as attractive as paying off your credit card debt, or taking the holiday that you have always wanted – context matters.

It’s why coaching is so important. And anyone can do it. All you have to do is be interested in the worldview of the person in front of you.

Probability matters. Rational decisions matter. But only if you can see the information in front of you – and isn’t that the whole point of coaching?

To point at something and say, I think this matters. What are you noticing?

This week we went barefoot in Sprint Social, because I wanted to give the parents and kids who showed up a new experience – what do you notice?

That’s the job, really. Not telling people the value you can see, or the expected value, but helping them see what they’re actually choosing.

(If you want the fuller version of the “why does context change the maths” idea, I wrote about it here: How scale changes the rules.)

Coach education providers want coaches who know what they’re doing. Or, more precisely, coaches who can pick up jobs — because that’s good reading for the next intake

National Governing Bodies want coaches who help people get good at their sport. Ideally good enough to win medals. Not necessary, but it’s helpful.

Coaches want to be good at what they do: hold the attention of the people in front of them, and help them move toward competence at the task in hand.

Coaches who chase the next badge are responding to what the system rewards. Get the badge, get the job. That’s the theory;

What about in practice?

In practice, scaling education is tricky:

Pay attention to how many, and you lose the practice.

Pay attention to how much, and you lose the point.

Pay attention to what changes, and you might just change the system.

I’ve taken to barefoot walking recently.

Feeling the ground at my feet — whether it’s dry, damp, or coarse.

Noticing 

The wind, the sun, the shade that follows.

Tuned into my environment.

Just as the texture under your feet passes, so too your attention; all you need to do is put one foot in front of the other.

A company at scale doesn’t act as it did when it was a start-up; it just doesn’t work. In short, bigger systems don’t carry the same properties.

To quote Nassim Taleb — “I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.”

The more kids play grassroots football, the more opportunities there are to play; that works — the network effect.

Yet at a club level, where affiliation, status and culture are important, more doesn’t add, it dilutes. Replace “this is who we are” with “we are for everyone,” and you are everyone — and you can see my point.

A tight-knit club team, an elite squad, a specific coach’s group that prides itself on how it trains — those run on affiliation, not capacity. “More people” there isn’t obviously better; it can dilute exactly the thing that made people want to belong to it in the first place.

More people playing a sport is just that, a fine thing; more medals, well, that’s for people who understand that what works in one environment won’t work in another.

This week I’ve been trying to access online accounts, find old paperwork, and generally get my ducks in a row, only I can’t find half of them.

It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine who inherited his next-door neighbour’s house, completely out of the blue. The old fella was getting on and not in the best of health, but still, my friend was not expecting what came next — all of the neighbour’s affairs.

Oh Shit I’m Dead is the book that helps you not only get your ducks in a row, but find most of them, and then line them up.

It got me thinking about how many coaches have their own version of this — not paperwork, but the unresolved stuff. The development conversation you’ve been putting off. The direction you keep meaning to figure out. The bit of your practice you know needs sorting but never quite get to.

That’s exactly why Coach Camp exists.

If you are in the Cardiff area, I’m also back with Sprint Social each and every Friday at 6:30 pm. Last week, I had the pleasure of one of the parents who had been standing on the sidelines joining in. It was a big deal for them and me. Creating an experience that people feel like they can join is something I’ve always wanted to build — and it’s the same thing that happens at Coach Camp: coaches who’ve been on the sidelines of their own development finally get involved.

Life has a habit of providing you with unexpected moments; don’t wait to be asked, don’t wait until you have no choice, or it’s too late — get involved, take part, and above all, be good.

The next Coach Camp is Saturday 29th August. Grab your free ticket here.

Here’s what one coach said after attending June’s event:

“I liked the confidence I gained from talking and listening to others about coaching young minds. I wish I’d done this sooner.”

What are you waiting for, and don’t say “to get all my ducks in a row!”

I recently found myself in a conversation with someone who, I later realised, was saying one thing to me and something else entirely to someone else.

It’s more common than you think.

People get caught in the middle, saying whatever they think will please the person in front of them.

Same in business too. We tell the customer we are customer-focused, only to focus on the business metric that matters.

The same pattern shows up in liars, in cheats, in people who say “I don’t know” when they know exactly what they think — they just don’t want to be pinned to it.

Courage is the solution.

We don’t want to hear no. So we shift the story, soften the position, tell each person the version they want. And in shifting, we lose — not the argument, but the thing that actually matters: trust.

What we bring to the table might not be as important as what you take off it.

I meet plenty of coaches who coach for free. I also meet lots of coaches who would like to get paid to coach, and of course, coaches who are in the coaching business.

Some work for free to prove to themselves and maybe others that what they do works. Others bolt on a business to what they know and call it their practice. Some build a practice from the ground up, not as two feuding, competing partners.

By accident or design, you get to choose.

Tx you to Ayesha for the reminder.

Ernest Hemingway writes in The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

This week in the Sprint Social I had:

6 footballers

1 mum

1 Rugby player

2 Dads

3 Squash players

For a session that started just 9 weeks ago, I came away from the session feeling happy. By most measures, that’s success. After all, there were 13 people in a field, learning how to move quickly. Yet, for the Sprint Social, the mission has drifted; it’s failure dressed as success.

Sprinting is not social – it’s usually people running away from everyone else as fast as they can. The Sprint Social is designed differently. It’s not really about sprinting; it’s about what happens when people gather around the idea of doing something they haven’t done before.

The Sprint Social is not a dump and run; it’s a come and run.

Fear not, it’s the last of 10 sessions next week, and before we come back, we’ll take a look at how we hold up what makes Sprint Social the thing it is – a counterintuitive gathering, it may be, but perhaps that’s the point.

It might fail, but it will never go bankrupt.

If you, like me, are from the valleys. “What are you looking at?” is less a question, more a challenge. Rutting stag, don’t move; they stand their ground.

What will it take for you to decide it’s time to move to new ground?

The immovable force of the dominant stag, for me, is the system that is Long Term Athletic Development (LTAD), and I’ve been banging my head against it for longer than I should have.

When you, the underdog, are done banging your head against the wall, acceptance is a game-changer. Two questions worth asking:

What are you gathering around?

Who are you gathering with?

What are you gathering around? The equivalent of “what are you looking at?” – since that is arguably the coach’s job: to point at something of interest and say, “hey, this thing over here, I think it’s worth our attention.”

Who are you gathering with? Think about who, if brought together, would bring value to the group. The sprint social brings kids and parents together. Why? Because kids are learning skills like skipping, and their folks are losing the very skills, like skipping, they need to keep.

As Nicholas Taleb reminds us: “When you observe people dynamically, what you detect as ‘aging’ is not appearance, but the loss of power and strength as they move around.”

Sprint Social is a gathering that has changed my mind about what is possible; it’s also changed the minds of parents who thought it was no longer possible, and of the kids who didn’t think they could go much faster.

You don’t always have to bang heads. What are you going to gather around?

Taken from this week’s newsletter: Build A Practice Where You Belong.

Yesterday I wrote a little piece about the artist David Hockney –https://simonharling.blog/do-you-see-what-i-can-see/

Today I wrote a skit around coaching, athletic development, and longevity, and I wonder if you can see what I can see.

Come join the conversation:

Coach Camp: https://simonharling.blog/coach-camp/

Sprint Social: https://simonharling.blog/one-aim-three-jumps-plenty-of-information/

No one understood that better than the artist David Hockney — that two of us could be looking at the same thing and yet see different things.

His work reminds us that art is a way of interpreting our life and experiences, not how life is.

Well worth a look.

Not a bad place to start, I think you will agree.

My love of 6-word stories knows no bounds.

Here are a few more:

Take Part, Take Apart, Take Home

Build A Place Where You Belong

Create Tension that you can tolerate

Let me tell you a story

And the one I’ve fallen for a few times: Build it, and they will come.

The thing with narratives is that you can always write another one – just make it memorable.

We’re usually too busy managing the session to be in the middle of it. Coach Camp is a chance to change that.

Saturday 27th June, Cardiff. Free.

If you’ve ever watched a session and thought — I can do better than that — come and talk to us about what you notice.

Hope to see you there – tickets

For regular updates on Coach Camp: https://sendfox.com/lp/3q8vel

NEW: A few more dates:

Sat 25th July

Sat 29th Aug

Between performance and play lies the question: What can you do now that you couldn’t do before? Sprint faster — sure. Jump onto that tree stump — sounds like fun. You get the idea. You get to choose.

Last night at Sprint Social, I asked the adults and kids if they could jump their own height, measured with sticks. Then, could they jump three times their height, using three repeated jumps, and more sticks?

One aim, three jumps, and plenty of information.

Some could jump their height. Others caught up on the three jumps. And everyone gave it a go.

Measure twice, cut once – we return to hops, skips, and rhythm.

If you are renting an asset, such as an office or a house, it’s obvious who the landlord is.

A friend of mine is a barber — you can hire one of his chairs. Another friend creates courses and posts them on Udemy. Again, it’s pretty clear who your landlord is.

Now think about the email list you own versus the followers you’ve accumulated on social media. The in-person event you run versus the platform you post on. Are you building something, or renting someone else’s infrastructure?

Most of the time, you’re the tenant.

If you’re a coach, trainer, or instructor working in health and wellbeing, you’re an Athletic Entrepreneur. And it pays to know exactly who you’re paying rent to — because the landlord doesn’t care how good your coaching is. They’re just collecting.

The system reports up, and just maybe, you need to be working at ground level.

A friend of mine has a very solid argument for using AI prototyping. Build it, and see if they come, is a little easier on resources than “Build it and they will come.”

Plenty of entrepreneurs have solved their own problem, found the others, and bootstrapped their way to success.

However you start, before you start, it’s worth asking who you seek validation from.

“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” Gandalf

The difference between a reactive coach (always slightly late or scrambling), a performative coach, because all the world is a stage, and the coach who arrives when they mean to – wizard energy.

Something to aim for.

Is to know their contradictions.

If it’s true that we are more often kind than cruel, or wise than rash, then it’s on us to seek the conditions under which the best of us is available to the rest of us.

If you know the question you are trying to answer, then you’ll know which way you are facing. If not, that’s a good place to start.

Let me give you an example:

If the question is “What’s on the test?” then you want to know what’s coming next.

If the question is “What can you do now that you couldn’t do before?” that’s about paying attention to what you are doing, not what hurdle someone is about to put in your way.

The question is, where do you want to go?

I know that!

The opposite of which is: I don’t know that. Which, of course, is a much more likely than “I know that!” Bloom’s taxonomy reminds us that performative knowledge is low-level and abundant; Practitioners, not so much.

Honestly, you couldn’t make it up. I had the session ready to go, with vaults, leaps, and squat pattern work. Only, when I got there, I found two men smoking fags and drinking rosé from a bottle. No judgement on their part, although the wine was not chilled, and they didn’t have any snacks.

If you know the area, it’s out of the ordinary, and so there it is. Put that in your coaching manual. Ready, Fire, Aim.

I had to work hard to battle my frustration and think on my feet, and yet the evening was another reminder of why physical activity as a social gathering is so powerful. Hops, skips and a game of relay noughts and crosses, on a sunny night in Llandaff Fields, was a treat.

Thanks to all who attended.

It’s in the wrong order if you’re on a rifle range, or know what you are aiming at.

Often, we think we know, and so when we miss the target, we are understandably frustrated and disappointed.

Ready, Fire, Aim sounds haphazard until you notice that Ready is where we start.

Next time you are coaching, and you notice that you lose the first 10-15 minutes of a session to the logistics of Aim, perhaps you need to Fire first, and let Aim emerge from doing.

Tonight’s Sprint Social Session has toes up running as the keystone. I’m Ready when you are.

When I started public speaking, it was by accident, not design.

As the host of black-tie gala events, I would stand up in the middle of a boxing ring and welcome the guests.

I thought it was my job to thank the sponsors, explain the order of the night, and cover the housekeeping.

Without exception, I had the room for the first few minutes. By the final few, I was managing it.

Maybe public speaking was not for me.

I see the same thing in coaching. Coaches stand in front of their audience, give a rundown of events, and then struggle to hold attention.

Connect the group to the purpose that brought them together, or a logistical run-through. You decide. 

HT: Priya Parker

This week in the Sprint Social, we were looking at body positions when you are looking to go full tilt. To see parents and kids playing a tennis ball version of American football, with one throwing the ball back to their partner before setting off to receive a pass, was a joy to watch.

Sprinting, throwing, catching, while being open to receiving a pass -fast enough to move with intent, open enough to take in what’s going on around you, that’s a posture worth working on.

I hope you can join us this week, and if not, drop me a line, and I’ll share what we are working on.

Just maybe the answer is nothing. And that can feel desperate. It’s also an opportunity, since those with more to lose than you want to keep the rules the same, and there it is. You ain’t wasting your time defending a posture.

Being the underdog is not a slight. It’s an invitation to redesign the game.

Go redesign the territory.

It’s hard to run fast when you’re looking back. If you keep looking over your shoulder, you lose your forward focus.

I can think of a few sports where it’s common to see an athlete with their shoulder turned slightly to receive a pass, catch a ball, or pay attention to what else is going on.

They are scanning for information. A change of direction, a shift in body position, anything that helps complete the task at hand.

Our decisions today shape tomorrow. If you’re looking back, make sure it’s helping you complete the task at hand.

Do you fight the emotions or feel them?

Some people want us to do more work. Other people want us to do better work. Perhaps you are doing your best to avoid work.

What relationship do you want with work?

Warm-ups are a way of preparing for a training session — an on-ramp, if you like. They are also a great way to kill some time while you put down the cones.

Of course, you can also “weaponise” the warm-up in a no-time-to-lose kind of way.

If a coaching session is a social gathering, it pays to think about the world you are entering — and how you plan to close the door on the world you just left.

Skipping might just be the transition that does both.

The instruction is simple: begin. You know what to do — find joy in moving and let the effort find you.

Your job is to notice where people are, how they are moving, and the energy they are giving off.

And then close the door behind you.

If you know the story, you’ll know that the cobbler’s child goes without shoes.

This week, I turned the tools on myself and my family.

If you know a coach who doesn’t eat their own cooking, just maybe you should look elsewhere.

I’m running a social speed session here in Cardiff, for kids and parents, over the next 10 weeks (April – June 2026).

It’s not a dump and run, it’s a come and run.

At 6:30pm each and every Friday, we start the same way, by skipping – it’s a work in. A transition, at your pace, and your way. No standing on ceremony, no lines of people waiting for something to happen, we begin and let the effort find us.

We finish with a story: What can you do that you couldn’t do before?

I hope you can join us.

A placeholder is something that marks where you are now, not where you plan to be next, and that’s worth remembering the next time you struggle to let go.

If you are still doing the hard yards of creative work, then you will know that multiple iterations come and go before you get to the point, and when you do, you need to pick it up and put it to the front. Great, now everything you wrote before is up for review.

And that’s the stuff of meltdowns.

It’s the dip, the point, of checking for insanity, the point at which you think “is this worth it?”

Which way will you go?

If you are a performance coach, your title suggests that you improve performance, maybe even take it to levels previously unimagined.

We know now that what went before was, well, underperforming.

The opposite of development is underdevelopment.

Now, whatever you may think of the title “coach developer,” one thing is for sure: it implies agency in the holder.

I think we can do better, and here’s my suggestion: “practice developer.” Someone who creates the conditions for practice.

After all, being open, curious, and willing to learn takes practice.

I’ve never been short of ideas, and I’ve had my fair share of success, too. So why turn from poacher to gamekeeper? From problem solver to facilitator. In bringing my book Good Coach Bad Coach into the world, I realised it wasn’t about coming up with brilliant content— it was about creating the conditions to ship the work.

If we intend to build a practice where we belong, we need to see the choices in front of us — and that means having the conversations that make shipping possible.

I used the following questions today, and I found them helpful; you might too:

What can I carry forward — keep doing?

What can I leave behind — stop doing?

What do I need to pay attention to?

What did I learn?

What am I going to do next?

If, as Seth Godin suggests, there are three ways to put effort into a project:

1. Chores and Tasks
2. Emotional Labour
3. Leverage

Then being tasked with getting the job done, rather than worrying about it, is valid. The alternative is to worry that the people you employ don’t care about your project, and that’s a category error, on your part, and further evidence that you need people to get shit done, not stand around worrying.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

How can you create the conditions where you worry less and people care more?

The problem with overzealous parents on the sidelines is that they want it more than their kids. It’s frustrating to watch your child not do the thing you know they can do. If only they tried a little harder — then we would feel a lot better.

Emotions, aye, who would have ’em!

Well, there is a solution to our emotions, and it’s practice design.

The Rule of Two Feet states that if you are neither contributing nor learning, go somewhere else. For a child standing around, struggling to get to grips with the task in front of them, this is a reasonable suggestion — and one that provides agency.

The second is the Can, Can, Can’t, Can framework, which in simple terms suggests starting with what you can do, not what you can’t. It’s simple, effective, and prevents children feeling stuck with the task in front of them.

Of course, the problem feels like overzealous parents — when it’s much more likely that agency, choice, and intentional design are lacking.

We could always blame emotions, though.

Pathways, age group squads, and development squads. There has never been more in the middle than now — grassroots to elite performance, and everything in between.

The muddle with the middle is prediction. Who is going to give us a medal, a payoff, or a headline? Who do we invest in, and who do we drop?

The tell are proxy measures. Sport is now awash with them.

And it’s a shame, because sport is simple. Life is not. Unless, of course, you are in the business of prediction, which is less about sport and more about the illusion of power and control.

If you want to know who benefits, follow the money.

It’s clearly not enough to have a great idea. It helps, but it’s not enough. In the gap between idea and execution sits validation — not the “you always come up with great ideas!” kind, or the “do you think I should do this?” kind either, but the should I, and can I commit kind.

The trap is the first two — and it’s surprising how often we mistake them for the real work. So here are a few questions worth sitting with:

Is your idea a solution or a problem?

If it’s a solution, are you sure it’s solving a problem?

If it’s a problem, do you have the solution?

And does anyone else care?

Figure that out, and the only thing left is to see if you can create the change you seek.

Ymlaen!

If you’ve built a course, event, or workshop that didn’t land the way you hoped, or you’re holding back because you’re not sure it’ll work — tell me about it in the comments.

And if you’re interested in working through it alongside others — not inside a system, but in a cohort of coaches and creatives committed to the change they want to make in the world — here is a short form to get the conversation started.

Simon Sinek tells us that we all know what we do, and how we do it, but we often struggle to articulate why. Therefore, start with “why.” The thinking goes that we should go towards the thing that we struggle with, not away from it. Of course, if we are looking for a slick answer, then it’s easy to see why we might avoid it.

Do we really know what we do, though? I mean, aside from the name badge, expectations of others, and perhaps ourselves. I’m not so sure.

A coach is working with a youth football team, and they find themselves 2-0 down with 20 minutes to play. On the sidelines are a handful of less confident kids. Do you put them on with 20 minutes to go?

As coaches, that’s what we do – we make choices.

If you struggle to communicate your “why,” start by examining the choices you’ve made and the reasoning behind them. When you can clearly “see” your choices, your coaching practice becomes intentional. More importantly, it becomes yours.

I could have kicked myself, only I would have probably missed!

The kids started their warm-up as usual for the game. Everyone lines up, then one kid leads; it’s what they know. And it gives me a good idea of what they think of when it comes to warm-ups.

It’s a pretty standard format. I’ve used it for years myself. If you are leading, it’s easy to see who’s doing what.

Only there were a few kids who were fudging the drills. Rather than going backwards, they were doing some weird movement that allowed them to keep up. When I asked them what was going on, they said: ” I don’t want to be last!”

Disorganising the girls into clusters, soon sorted that out. No one was last; everyone was moving, and on we went. What looks like chaos, to us, can give control to others.

Much like: where do you put the chairs? To you, it might make sense to put them in rows, and maybe that’s the point.

Who’s benefitting?

Freedom of speech in the UK is, in theory, available to all. In practice, that’s not strictly true. You only have to sit in a meeting for an hour to work that out.

A room with a view is deliberate in design and independent by nature.

Well worth remembering next time you want to hear what’s really going on.

The emergency chairs for when the family comes around for Christmas and birthdays live in the back bedroom. You might all end up sitting at different heights, but you’re around the same table. The message is simple: nothing is too much trouble.

Where you put the chairs tells a story. Chairs in a row tell a different story to chairs around a table.

When Wendy Woon wanted to teach museum curators about how to design a space for interaction, she jumbled a pile of chairs and left them in the centre of an otherwise empty room. The students had no choice but to participate in designing a space—where else were they going to sit?

When we design an online event, it’s worth asking: Where do you want to put the chairs?

The easiest way to lose a coaching audience is to make something look easy.

If you make things seem simple, people will pass your content by, and you’ll hear words to this effect: “Tell me something I don’t know.” In other words, stop stating the obvious and start coming up with some new material. What follows in coaching, at least, is drill dropping.

It’s an easy trap to fall into.

Yes, the gap is not in the knowledge, but it might be in the application. Which, of course, turns out to be a knowledge gap, but you get my point.

Lower the threshold, not the ceiling.

Design accordingly.

Of course, you shouldn’t half-arse things. That goes without saying. Yet, we find ourselves in plenty of situations where half-arsed is good enough, even celebrated, if turning up is all that is required.

We can’t always know when we begin that a situation will turn out to be half-arsed, but we can recognise the symptoms:

Flicking through a book, rather than being immersed in it.

Rushing to bake a birthday cake because that’s the right thing to do, right?

Daydreaming while someone is trying to have a conversation with us.

The more we half-arse things, the less time we have for the things we really care about.

If you catch yourself half-arsing something, ask: What’s really going on here? What matters?

If it doesn’t matter, quit; if it does, well, then you know what to do. Don’t half arse it.

Show me a stakeholder, someone with skin in the game, and I’ll show you someone whose values align with their actions.

In the gap between what we say we do and what we actually do, lives our culture and our espoused values.

Mind the gap.

Worth a read if you work in youth sport — I talk about risk, incentive, and development on the blog. The research is open access.

Good Coach Bad Coach started life as a manifesto, and as Julian Hanna would say, a manifesto brings thinking, doing, and being into one place; you just need the courage to bring it forward.

What feels like it needs writing, now, is a book that helps coaches see the game they are playing. We can’t change what we can’t see. Working title: The games we play

If Good Coach Bad Coach helps us see that coaching is a status game, then perhaps The Games We Play asks—Do you know how you’re playing it?

To be continued.

If you have one, are you:

Optimised? Maybe.

Automated? Perhaps.

A list ticker? You said it, not me!

What do I want to become might just be better than asking what I have become.

The particular gets lost in the general, and in general, it’s to no one in particular.

Seth Godin reminds us that The Dip is when you begin to question the decision that got you here in the first place. The initial gloss has come off, and now you are wondering if the wheels are next. Can you commit?

If you have ever written and sold a book, you will know The Dip. Friends and family have bought it, and so have the early adopters. Should you keep promoting?

Perhaps a better question is: What does pushing through The Dip unlock?

It is said that when a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king; the palace becomes a circus.

The warning is about the damage a clown can do.

But it’s much more likely to be a reflection of the palace.

Stop watching the clown. Look at the palace.

The Scottish FA has, in their own words, just published a manifesto.
https://lnkd.in/eS4GjHYm

Using the power of football and its unparalleled reach into Scottish communities, the argument goes that football can be a delivery partner for public health, child poverty, and community outcomes.

But there’s another kind of manifesto that doesn’t get written often enough.
The one a coach writes for themselves.

Not what football needs from politicians — arguably that makes it a series of “asks”, not a manifesto. What you need from yourself. What you stand for. What you won’t compromise on. What you believe coaching is actually for.

On April 9th, I’m joined by Mike Coulter, Creative Director of the Do Lectures, for an hour on why leaders write manifestos — and what happens when they do.

If you’re leading in sport, this one’s for you.

I hope to see you there:
https://luma.com/ca7pv9xo

The outcome for the Young Athletic Performance (LTAD) coach is clear. Fitter, Faster, Stronger. The incentive is to keep your job, show competence, and develop the child in front of you into an athlete.

It’s pretty simple.

“Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome” – Charlie Munger.

For those arguing for a more holistic approach to youth sports performance, a delayed focus on the numbers means the outcome is a little further away. And that’s ok, because no one wins gold at the Olympics at 12, right?

It is ok, isn’t it? I mean, you can wait, can’t you?

Hard not to imagine that the development coach is simply hiding the fact that they aren’t very good. You might tell me that you are doing all the right things, but really, aren’t you just underperforming? If the outcome is a well-rounded athlete able to adjust to the ever-changing demands, then what’s the incentive?

On what basis are you keeping your job? How do you demonstrate your competency since I can’t measure change? And, you are asking me to wait until my child is an adult to see the fruits of your labour.

I’m struggling to see the incentive, and I’ll have to wait for the outcome. Who said that? It wasn’t Charlie Munger, that’s for sure.

Of course, the argument is that what looks like incompetence is, in fact, expertise. That selling out can look an awful lot like success, and success can look an awful lot like failure. The well-drilled U-12’s team, who can’t pass a ball without the coach telling them what to do next – yes, they win, but only because the coach is playing fantasy football.

So how do you know?

The risk for the youth sports performance coach is clear – don’t get the results at the end of the season, and you could be out of a job.

And for the development coach, the risk is nowhere to be seen; it’s so far in the future, we’ll have all moved on by the time it comes around.

What to do?

For the performance coach, you can dial down the risk and lift the horizon by tracking injury and drop-out rates.

And for the development coach, you can bring the outcome forward in the form of learning stories. Not the coach’s assessment of competencies, but the athlete’s own journey of learning. A feedback loop that makes development visible.

Perhaps, you can see that when you consider risk, reward, incentive, and outcome, you no longer have a performance coach and a development coach. You have what Charlie Munger knew better than anyone—the ability to see past making a quick buck today.

If you have a chef who loves to cook and a front of house that loves to delight, you have a restaurant business.

Gym owners: find the person who loves to work with people, pair them with someone good with numbers, and you have yourself a team.

The push and pull of purpose and profit is hard to endure for one person; give the job to two people who care about what they do, and have a healthy respect for each other’s work, and the tension is bearable.

Create tension that you can tolerate.

To date, I’ve written 1,157 blog posts. Seventeen of them are about the same thing. The act of writing a manifesto.

Two things keep coming up.

The first is permission. Who am I to write a coaching manifesto? Well, who are you not to? If you don’t decide the spec, who will?

The second is what’s really behind the act. Because a manifesto is rarely about the document. It’s about identity, belonging, and authority — figuring out what you stand for before anyone else decides for you.

On Thursday, April 9th at 8:30pm GMT, Mike Coulter — Creative Director for the Do Lectures — is joining me to talk about who writes manifestos and why. I’d love you to join us here.

In the meantime, here are all seventeen posts where the word manifesto appears:

Deciding the spec

Fire starts with a flame

Coach Development: Who owns the task?

To do or not to do

Audit

Self-interest and interest in self

Asking for a friend

Teaching for tangibles

We/I

Layer Cake

Fixed

Just like that

Pick up, don’t drop off

What is it like to know you

An example, not a challenge

Who are you really?

Good Coach Bad Coach

I hope you can join us.

Coaching is a relatively new profession, and like all “new” professions, it’s fragile – Lindy Effect.

Coaching as a function, well, that’s different. The skill of seeing what others can’t see, developing others, and offering challenge and support, has been around as long as we have.

Want to know the effect of AI on your job? Take a look at skills and jobs that have stood the test of time.

There was a time when a degree was enough to signal competency. Then it was a master’s, perhaps an accreditation or two, and now it’s a PhD.

Who is benefiting?

Perhaps it’s the hiring organisation, it’s certainly the awarding organisation, but is it helping us do the work we were hired for?

I very much doubt it.

The trick is to notice the status loop, then point it in the direction you want to create change. In the case of a coach, surely it’s towards practice, not theory.

If you show me the upside, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to show you the downside. Where’s the risk? What’s the downside?

Any idiot can find a problem, right?

Perhaps a better question is: compared to what?

Howard Luks reminds us that training capacity in later life carries a risk of injury, soreness, maybe even the odd ache and pain. Yet narrowing our options, saying no when we used to say yes — that’s only going one way.

Injuries we can recover from. A sedentary lifestyle, not so much.

Off the cuff communication – without much thought, direction, or preparation.

It’s possible to think, the irony is not lost on me, that AI will do that bit for us.

But it won’t. That’s still on us.

Write for the times you doubt yourself.

Write for the times, you believe your own bullshit.

Above all, if you don’t know what to write, write the truth.

For days like these.

If you want to be a speaker, book a stage. You might not feel ready, but that’s not the point. You have a stage — now structure your talk.

What’s the one thing you need to do to unlock the thing you want to do?

The central idea of Nudge was that we are not rational. Far from it. For example, we don’t save for the future when the now is calling. We miss opportunities to act.

A well-designed nudge puts macro thinking into action at a micro level.

That idea has never been more important.

In the age of information overwhelm, competing agendas, and social pressure, one thing is becoming clear: as individuals, we are out of our depth. For some, that’s obvious — and a good reason to keep our heads down. For others, the guru position has never made more sense. Clarity where there is none is appealing.

I wrote yesterday about the choices a coach, teacher, or instructor faces with the simplest of decisions; I have a skipping rope. What happens next?

Add your own narrative about what you do. Layer on the expectations of those you serve. Then pile on the demands of schools, governing bodies, and anyone with a keyboard — and you get the picture. We are not being nudged; we are getting our arses kicked.

Initiatives come and go. The agenda of today is not the agenda of tomorrow, but what remains is choice.

Overwhelm comes in the face of competing choices; we would do well to recognise the choices we face in grassroots sports out in the open — and design accordingly.

Sometimes you need to get ideas out of your head and onto paper. It can feel like a luxury. We don’t always have the time to think it through, and when we do, working in sketches can make the idea feel naive and not worth-sharing.

Over the last few years, I’ve been using the example of skipping to illustrate some of the choices we face as teachers, coaches, and instructors.

My personal favourite is to transition kids out of school mode, into sports and physical training sessions by simply laying out ropes, hurdles, and hula hoops, and watching what emerges. See Design the environment in the drawing above.

I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Kelvin Giles about his journey in coaching recently, and he shared a simple PE lesson using just a piece of a rope and a simple prompt: How many different ways can you cross the rope? See Design the prompt in the drawing above.

He also spoke about how one of his keystones — a central tenet of his programming — was toes-up running, and how he had, over the years, figured out how to go from direct instruction to task-led.

What is clear to me is not the theoretical accuracy of this diagram. That’s not the point; it’s the choices that are available to us when designing a coaching session.

It can feel easier to drop a drill than to stop and begin to start in rough. It is, however, also a chance to remind ourselves that we have a choice.

I can do better than that, is one such choice. Go make your mark.

It’s a question worth asking if the gap between what you see and what others see matters.

It could be a metaphor, a story, a deck of cards, a data set; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it creates distance between you, others, and the idea that you are working on.

It’s not your story, your question, or even your data. So when you ask, “What do you notice?” shields are down.

With no trust in the room, where would your shield be?

When I was a kid, if you forgot your PE kit, you did it in whatever was in the lost and found box. There was nowhere to hide. If you left your magic shooting boots at home, well, it was time to find out if it was you or your boots.

We often complain about a lack of space, money, or time. Yet as Churchill said, now that we have run out of money, we have to think. When you have nothing but your craft, no magic boots, no fancy sound engineers, just you and your skills —see what you got.

You can work on the system, or more commonly you can work in the system. Same for businesses and coaching, too.

There is knowledge of the game and knowledge about the game.

The green lumber fallacy, popularised by Nassim Taleb, reminds us that we can know everything there is to know about green lumber— and still not know what’s actually worth knowing.

Knowledge acquired. Knowledge earned.

Which one are you trading in?

We don’t arrive fully formed as coaches — we develop our ideas as we go. The question is: What are you carrying that you need to put down, in order to pick the next thing up?

Taken from the Can, Can, Can’t, Can framework session with Kelvin Giles.

How do you know if someone’s done an Ironman? They tell you.

The race to be someone is relentless, a grind — and yet the prize feels worth it. An elite club, a badge of honour. We are the type of people who do this. Welcome to the club.

Athletic Entrepreneurs are coaches, teachers, and instructors who help people with their sporting and well-being goals while also making a living. Sticking it out is a helpful story. The more you grind, the longer you stick it out, the better we all become.

But if we all had the Ironman tattoo, it wouldn’t be the club we thought it was. We can’t all be someone.

So the question worth asking is: are we working against the odds, or with them?

The race to be someone is against the odds, whichever way you look at it. And that’s extraordinary. It just might not be the point.

The thing with a “no-excuse” environment is that, at some point, it starts with an excuse to convene. A reason to show up. The rituals, the connections, the habits followed. There really is no excuse not to get a study group together and advance, except for the reason itself.

Find six coaches, pick a contestable point, get in a room, and spend half an hour on it.

Don’t wait for permission.

That’s never been truer.

I realigned the headset of my bike today, following a YouTube video. Last week, I created a visual that a few years ago would have been someone else’s job.

WPP (the world’s largest advertising group) has switched to outcome-based pricing; it’s not a revenue strategy, it’s a proof-of-value strategy. It’s WPP saying, “We’ll only charge you if you can see what we’re worth.”

Perhaps now is the time for coaches not to focus on pound-for-pound comparisons. I’ll help you lose 20lbs if you give me £200 — this is fraught with issues, not least because when a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a useful measure.

Rather, to focus on social value, where health and economic benefits are more than just you or me.

A reasonable question to ask is:

What can we do together that we couldn’t do ourselves?

It’s tempting to gravitate to the “can-do” people in the group. The people who see what we see, do what we do, and in the end, get it done. They are, after all, people like us.

Of course, for coaches and teachers, that’s a trap.

Last night, while unpacking The Dot with a few coaching friends, that became obvious.

It makes sense to think about the behaviours you want to encourage and discourage in those you coach. But ask the same question of yourself, and a bigger question surfaces.

What do you want to put at the centre of your practice?

For Peter H. Reynolds, who wrote The Dot, it was courage, curiosity and collaboration.

What would your practice look like if you placed those at the centre? What would your students see more or less of? And what would they reflect to you?

Tx you so much to those who attended last night. It takes a little courage to run an hour workshop based on a 4-minute “kids’” video, but what I got back was curiosity and collaboration — and for that I’m grateful.

If you are a PE teacher looking for an inset day content, or a coach looking for coach education for your club or group of mates, you could do a lot worse than pull apart this video I had with Kelvin Giles over the weekend. The video is time-stamped. Check out 18:34 — Learning Outside the System — where Kelvin talks about the importance of self-organised study groups.

The questions worth asking when creating a study group are these:

Who do I want to spend time with and become more like? 

And in doing so, how quickly will I get where I want to go?

Kelvin talked about humility. If you are going to show your work, that makes sense. So what are you waiting for? Participate!

We start on time. That’s a reasonable assertion to make, even if it’s the boss we’re waiting for. It signals we are serious about each other’s time. Another good rule: finish when you are done, not when the agenda says you are.

We know time is wasted waiting. So start on time.

Something that works in coaching is to leave the kit out on the floor. If you are coaching kids to skip, leave ropes, hurdles, anything they can jump on or over, lying around. Start on time. Join in when you’re ready. The bonus for the coach is that you get to see where the kids are that day — making it look easy, try this; stumbling around, try that instead.

The same thinking applies in any room you’re responsible for.

Meeting people where they are is intentional. Something we design for. And it’s worth the wait.

The alternative is frustration, wasted time, or disrespecting those who showed up on time.

Design accordingly.

Join Kelvin Giles and me on Feb 21st at 8:30 am to talk about the Can, Can, Can’t, Can framework.

Bonus content from a few years back: This is where the kit-on-the-floor idea first showed up for me.

By the time Peloton realised selling fitness equipment was only the delivery mechanism— not the point — it was too late.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the point of coach education is to sell the course. But what if it were behaviour change? How the coach sees themselves, the decisions they make and how they work with others.

It might feel harder to package and sell—after all, you know when you’ve bought a treadmill, because after a few weeks, you’re either tripping over it or hanging your washing on it.

I get it.

Community, ritual, and belonging are hard to sell—that’s people and people, well, they come in all shapes and sizes and don’t fit neatly into boxes, do they? How are you supposed to put that on a spreadsheet?

Yet, that’s the practice, no?

We are told to keep the end in mind. After all, reverse engineering from the place you want to go to makes sense. So, do you focus on having fewer injuries or do you focus on being robust?

What difference does it make? 

Turns out quite a bit because the lens you look through decides what you pay attention to.

Focus on injury prevention, and the chances are you will focus on things that predict and prevent injury. And that’s reasonable because, after all, that’s the thing you want to reduce: injuries. Everything you do after that pushes you further down the road.

Focus on robustness, and you build systems that can tolerate load; in other words, you don’t focus on any one thing, you focus on redundancy and reserves rather than trying to optimise for any one marker of performance—in this case, injury reduction.

Right now, for example, there is an obsession with hamstring injuries.

The ability to withstand or overcome adverse conditions is robustness. The thing that arrives—that you just didn’t see coming—and kicks you in the arse.

Being robust is not to predict or to know, it’s to respond to the challenge and somehow overcome it.

Tokenism happens when you forget why you started.

It happens when looking the part is the point, not change.

Maybe the problem feels so big and the answer so elusive that you act like you know.

When Kevin Seinfeld ran back-to-back marathons for MND, he stood shoulder to shoulder with those it affected.

Perhaps then, the antidote to tokenism is to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other and ask: “What problem are we solving?

Why we do anything matters. So what matters to you?

If you have ever stood on the sidelines, determined to give every child equal playing time, while scrambling to find your most confident player on the sideline, because you’re losing, you’ll know what I mean.

If you catch some of the parents watching you, and decide to start visible coaching – shouting instructions, getting busy, when 5 minutes ago, silence worked just fine, you’ll know what I mean.

If you have ever found yourself playing up to the kids, to keep them entertained, dropping drills like confetti, you’ll know what I mean.

“What am I doing here?” is worth asking.

Because if you are confused, sure as shit the kids are too.

Youth sports performance pathways are subject to diseconomies of scale. The bigger they get, the less efficient they become.

Which raises two questions:

1. Who in their right mind would pursue a diseconomy of scale?
2. What would an economy scale look like in youth sports?

For example, Man City’s academy might suffer from diseconomies of scale, but when it produces players worth millions, it might just make sense. And if it doesn’t, they have an ownership structure that is willing to pay the price.

To operate at an economy of scale, the production of one player makes it cheaper to produce another; the process gets more efficient, and if not, you don’t have a system; you have yourself a slot machine.

When it comes to the development of our youth, optimisation is expensive. To control risk, narrow our options, and produce talent pathways, we have created inefficiency – bureaucracy.

Perhaps then some of the answers, particularly in health and physical activity development, lie in acceptance of risk, optionality, and social entrepreneurship.

When risk is borne by the service provider, not the consumer, you have entrepreneurship. Point practitioners in the direction of a social problem, but don’t tell them what to do, and you have social entrepreneurship. Successful practitioners generate revenue—positive feedback that pays taxes and funds further experimentation.

Optionality appears when conditions are created for risk acceptance, not prescribed delivery. Some will succeed, some won’t – that’s the point.

Performance becomes a design feature, not the point.

When you have economies of scale, the thing you produce gets cheaper the more you make of it. You benefit from the economies of scale. More makes sense.

For example, a factory making footballs: the setup costs £100,000. Make 100 balls, that’s £1,000 per ball just in setup costs. Make 100,000 balls, that’s £1 per ball. Scale drives the price down. You have economies of scale.

Producing footballers is the opposite; it doesn’t get cheaper to produce footballers the more of them you produce—it gets more expensive. The ratio of people managing the system to people actually coaching the footballers increases. Cost per footballer goes up—diseconomies of scale.

At this point, the distinction between luck and serendipity is helpful.

Luck: I need more kids in my program because more kids = more medals. Much like buying all the lottery tickets in an effort to win the lottery.

Serendipity: Create the conditions where good things are more likely to happen.

More kids in more programs (luck) and better conditions (serendipity) make sense. Who wouldn’t want that?

But scaling creates bureaucracy, and bureaucracy kills serendipity. The alternative? Recognise the role of luck and design for flexibility, not control.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that here in the UK, sport is significantly funded by the lottery, and it’s time to consider what we are paying for.

Am I gaming the system or playing the game to create a system?

In a game, you perform a task and get a result. In a system, that result loops back to influence the next task.

• The Game: I ship my book and get into bookstores to sell. How many books I sell is a simple measure of success. 

I create content most days and post it on LinkedIn. That’s a game – the more I interact with the system, the more it rewards me.

• The System: The act of writing changes my skills, which changes how I see the world, which changes what I write next. 

I set myself the challenge of creating content each day – photos of people reading my book, content from the book itself, and anything else that came to mind. A way of setting the conditions for me to interact with the content, to remind myself that it’s no longer my story;

You can launch a book, watch it go up, and count the numbers.

Or,

You can release a book and focus on how it makes you feel.

The most common question I get is: How many books have you sold? Shorthand for – are you winning? How is the game treating you?

My answer, always, is to talk about how it makes me feel. I’m enjoying it. Thanks for asking.

Games are not systems.

If you are smart, you win games. But to create lasting change, we must work on and with the systems that contain them.

“Better is the enemy of the good” is an odd thing to say.

After all, better is good, right?

Only if the thing you want to get better at creates the change you seek.

Each week, grassroots coaches coach the same kids, and it’s tempting to think that if we just run a killer drill that looks so good on Instagram, everything will be ok.

Of course, it’s not.

Training looks nothing like it did on Instagram.

The kids are confused, and you are left frustrated.

So we look for better drills.

We all want sessions that make us look good, that the kids enjoy, and are easy to put on.

Better is the enemy of the good. The endless search for better drills stops you from creating a better connection with those you coach.

Drills won’t help you – you already know more than you need. Neither will 6 different types of cones. It’s all about the people.

If you want to build connections over content, then you might enjoy this.

To be a perfect loser, we forgo the long-term game to win today, only to lose in a much bigger way later on, often unbeknownst to us.

The perfect loser keeps face today in an attempt to look, well, perfect.

Selling out can look an awful lot like success, and success can look an awful lot like failure.

Join me here for a conversation about courage, creativity, and collaboration.

I got a “D” in English, and when it came to deciding which exam I sat at 16, I moved from “O” level to a CSE. I get it—English as I knew it then was not for me. The choice was: do well at CSE or struggle at “O” level.

I still misspell words like “becuase”, have little confidence reading aloud, and the moment I don’t recognise a word, panic sets in.

Maybe I’ll never write a book, publish my research, or give keynote speeches. Oh wait! —I figured out how to get it done. My workarounds help me communicate my ideas.

Are we saying if you get a “D” in PE, then it’s not for that particular student?

Is that really necessary?

At the heart of the story of Cinderella is status. Princes are supposed to marry princesses, not maids – people like us do things like this.

The story begins when the well-worn path takes a turn. That’s the power of a great story. Curious, we pay attention, we listen.

If you could look for future sports stars in unlikely places, where would you look?

The prevailing performance pathway narrative is this: more players, more medals. The wider the playing base, the more talented players we will produce. More lottery tickets, better odds.

But we run out of money long before we can say with certainty that we will win. Only one Sports National Governing Body in Wales receives more than one million pounds in funding from Sport Wales; most receive significantly less.

Human performance—the game we play—isn’t rigged. It doesn’t work like a casino game with known probabilities. There are plenty of things we know for sure work; predicting who is going to win medals is not one of them.

If you had £20 million to spend on sport and physical activity in Wales, what would you spend it on? More programs, more pathways, more of what we already have? Or removing the barriers that keep people from being healthy, active, and in tune with nature?

What would you do? I’d love to know.

If you have a few loud, brash kids in your coaching session who dominate proceedings, you have minority rule.

Last night I offered the group I was coaching a free play session. Here is what I noticed:

The late developers came over to talk to me about other options – they weren’t seeing much of the ball.

Slowly but surely, more kids walked into a small-sided game scenario, leaving fewer players in the free play, which turned into a free-for-all.

Kids hiding other kids’ boots, arguments over incidents. You get the picture

The rule of two feet was applied. Kids had agency. When you have minority rule, the only way to combat it is to change the rules – give the underdog, which in this case was the majority, agency over their time in training.

Watch this space.

Community-building tools are cheap and accessible.

The reason to gather? That’s yours to discover.

The work of building a community is figuring out where people want to go.

What will you gather around?

A person of principle puts things in the right order.

A principal is working with an order that has already been decided.

Putting one thing in front of the other as a point of principle might not make it the truth, but it might make you a principal.

Foundational principle: Physical well-being is a basic human need in a civilised society.

Hierarchical choice: Elite performance, funding structures, and prestige come first.

Being organised around a hierarchy (sport) whilst invoking a foundational principle (well-being) is a distraction for National Governing Bodies, a money sink for Government, and a disservice to the public.

Design for success, and you will likely be disappointed.

Design for failure, and you look for what doesn’t work, so that you can fix it.

Design or desire, you choose.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

We are said to be leaning our ladder up against the wrong wall when, for all our efforts to climb the ladder, there is little to show for our efforts.

Have we improved participation in sport? No.

Have we improved the injury rate in adolescent athletes? No.

Do major sporting events create a legacy for the youngest watching? No.

The idea that a wide sports participation base benefits both society and the pinnacle that is elite sport is a fallacy.

We are leaning our ladder against the wrong wall.

Of course, we could continue to impose our adult worldview on children (not mini adults) and follow the money. Or we could leave that for professional sport, and the rest of us could turn our attention to a new wall to lean our ladder against.

Coaching at its best teaches us first to coach ourselves, and then ask how we can best coexist with others – the wall we should lean our ladder against is that of being better humans, not better at building a structure that would have the ancient Egyptians in fits of laughter.

Time to learn from history, wouldn’t you say?

Holding two seemingly disconnected or even opposing ideas and finding a way forward is leadership.

People will always champion the polar opposites, and in doing so, they clarify the edges. Yet there is a way forward in the shade—not through compromise, but through clarity.

And in doing so, we connect to new ideas and possibilities that soften once-harsh edges.

At the end of a coaching conversation, to close the loop, it’s common to ask; What does the next step look like?

It doesn’t need to be a leap; a step will do.

It also doesn’t need to be forward; it could be backward, sideways, or be still.

Onwards, is not forwards, it is onwards.

The thing with being a grassroots coach is that the audience doesn’t change from one week to the next. The kids that are in your session this week are the same kids that were there the week before, and the week before that. Nothing changes.

So we drop drills—we change the drills, skills, and games instead.

If the kids were bored, distracted, or indifferent last week, there is always another chance this week to impress, engage, and inspire.

Only what happens on the Instagram reel—slick, fun, smart-looking content—doesn’t happen in real life.

You muddle up the layout. Leave out the key information. And the kids can’t make the pass, catch the ball, or hit the shot like you hoped they would.

It looked easy on the socials.

Kids look bored, confused, or worried because you look like you are about to lose your mind. Ring a bell?

Drill dropping saves time in the moment; who has the time to sit and think about practice design?

Measure twice, cut once. Cut once, cut again after you’ve bought another length of timber. Drop drills, or build a practice where you belong. You decide how you want to spend your time.

I’m not one for daily social media posts—who has the time? Even if I did, why waste it there?

Yet, for the next 90 days, I am posting daily.

I create a post, ship it, and move on. I don’t overthink. I don’t negotiate with myself—I just get it done. Counterintuitively, while social media normally sucks up time, this kickstarts my productivity each day.

I’m not sure this habit will last past the 90-day mark. I don’t think it matters; it’s a rhythm that I need right now to ship work and move projects out the door.

Onwards.

New information?

A new way of doing things?

The weather?

There is a lot that can change our minds.

High performance isn’t about having all the answers – it’s about committing fully to a direction, learning from what emerges, and adapting intelligently.

The elite performers I’ve worked with understood this: they made plans, committed to them, and extracted learning. Those who struggled were constantly seeking the next performance edge, changing direction every session, never staying with anything long enough to discover what worked.

If you change as quickly as your feeds scroll, you might have just found the answer.

Not the number of followers. Or posts.

But the number of interactions we had with people.

Now that could be a metric worth measuring.

That’s it.

So, what gets better because you persist?

Tx Seth Godin for the prompt.

It’s hung about on my desk, while I post on social media for 90 days straight, regardless of outcome. I’m not hoping to get better at posting. I’m unlikely to get many more followers. So what gets better?

Doing.

I have the time. I have something to talk about. Why not!

If regional rugby teams in Wales are in a mess, then Gallagher Premiership Rugby clubs are looking on rather sheepishly — most are classed as balance sheet insolvent. Sure, they can point to a higher attendance, arguably because it’s a better product, but a better business model? Probably not.

Well, if the point was to transfer value to shareholders, club rugby wouldn’t pass the test.

If in Wales, we are stakeholders — we certainly are not shareholders — then optimising our way out is redundant. School kids want games, connection, and something to believe in. Efficiency is for car engines, not communities.

McDonald’s makes burgers and funds grassroots sports. Shell extracts oil and sponsors environmental programs. The WRU wants to win rugby matches, make money on a Saturday, AND act as a charitable community fund.

Profit, performance, and development are three very different things. Just ask the majority of Premiership clubs that are balance sheet insolvent.