ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, as you know and as anyone who knows me knows, I’m a huge sports fan, NBA, NFL, and of course this summer I’m obsessively watching the World Cup. You?
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, big time sports fan, a big fan of team sports. I’m very partisan so I’m very religious about the teams I love.
ALISON BEARD: So we love sports as an escape from the rest of life, but I think there are also lots of lessons in it that we can bring back to work. And I think business leaders in particular can learn from managers and coaches of high level teams.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I think that’s true. Look, it’s kind of a trope to talk about, “Oh, lessons from sports also apply to business, but it’s true. Things like competition, collaboration, staying adaptable, they are as relevant for successful teams as they are for successful businesses.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So today we’re talking to two authors who have worked with teams across professional sports leagues in U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Recently, they decided to do a deep dive into how elite coaches make high stakes decisions, how they prepare, what happens in the moment, and how they deal with the repercussions.
ADI IGNATIUS: And of course, all of this is happening under the glare of a media spotlight, right?
ALISON BEARD: Yes. And second guessing from fans and owners and sometimes their own players. So there’s so much that managers can learn from how they stay cool and make smart choices under all that pressure. My guests are Alan McCall, a sports performance consultant and founder of research and innovation for sports, who’s worked primarily with FIFA World Cup and Champions League teams and Johann Bilsborough who’s worked as a director of medical performance and innovation in the NBA and NFL. They’re co-authors along with Adrian Wolfberg and Ricard Pruna of the HBR article, How Elite Sports Coaches Make High Pressure Decisions. Here’s our conversation.
Alan, Johann, welcome.
ALAN MCCALL: Thanks very much. Thanks for having us.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: Thank you.
ALISON BEARD: So decision making is a really complicated thing to study. Why do you both think that elite sports coaches have lessons for the business world? Are there really enough parallels? Alan, why don’t you start?
ALAN MCCALL: I think we’re making so many decisions all day every day and really in different areas, working with the players, working with the staff. And we’re essentially a group of people trying to succeed at something. So you’ve got the same interactions with communication, relationships, and we all have to make these decisions, hopefully pulling in the right and same direction. So I think there’s a lot of parallels with sport, with business, and with military, with hospitals, with all walks of life.
ALISON BEARD: And Johann, why did you think that the most interesting or useful way to frame it was this idea of sort of before, during, and after?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: We’re dealing with hundreds of decisions all day, some really, really big ones, some not so big. And some of the decisions you’re making, you have to make really, really quickly, but they do become a bigger picture for us overall over time. So that’s where that whole paper started was just understanding how people perceive information and especially the people at the top of the tree and those elite coaches.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And so just to be clear, you all have worked with these elite teams across the NBA, NFL, European football leagues, but this particular study, you approached it by doing in depth interviews with specific coaches. Just tell me a little bit more about the research.
ALAN MCCALL: Johann and I are also, we’re practitioners, we work on the field, but we also understand doing research helps us be better practitioners because we can have more confidence in what we’re doing. Our background’s more quantitative, so we’re always in sports science looking at numbers and data and the more experienced we’ve got and the more conversations that we’ve been having, it’s like, “Well, the data’s not telling the full story. It’s showing some insights, but there’s something missing.” And the only way to get that is to speak to people.
So that’s why we implemented an interview qualitative approach to try and die into people’s lived experience and understand how they make decisions because then we can start to understand what that means for them and for us as well.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting because sort of in the age of AI, there’s this idea that the machines are going to be able to make the decisions for us, but this research points to the idea that the human element, the human oversight still matters.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: I’ll be honest, when I came to the U.S., and obviously lucky, Alison, I worked in Boston for the basketball team and the football team there, I had two really-
ALISON BEARD: Hooray, go Celtics, go Pats.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: And we had two completely opposite type coaches. I had not come from a basketball or I didn’t know NFL. So it was a real challenge, just American culture to start with, the sporting culture of the US of sports that I hadn’t worked in. And two coaches that were at the opposite ends of their careers, Brad was just starting, Bill was-
ALISON BEARD: Brad Stevens, now the manager, but formerly the coach of the Boston Celtics.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: Yes.
ALISON BEARD: And Bill Belichick-
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: Bill Belichick, who was well into his career and there were so many pieces on how he used the information and the data that was available. And I think there was a lot of situations where there was a lot of subjective information given to him, how they feel, how they seem, how they look. We wanted to quantify things better to give him a more informed decision-making process. And Brad, the same, very data driven to make decisions and obviously good intuition as well. But the reps that Bill had had, he’d seen a lot of these scenarios before and so he was very, very well-prepared.
ALISON BEARD: And I think in any human organization there’s the data, but then also personalities play a role. So let’s dig into your order of operations. In terms of the before, what did you see elite coaches do to anticipate their future decision needs? What does that look like?
ALAN MCCALL: The biggest thing that came out for me was the preparation and the trust that was built over time before anything needed to be done. They weren’t waiting for things to happen. And maybe early in the career when they were speaking about it, they evolved over time and they realized that they had to prepare. And so maybe you don’t come into it immediately with all of the answers. But yeah, that big part about just these small opportunities to build trust is something that I then reflected on with my own sort of just experience of day-to-day life and how we operate and how these moments help us understand if we trust them, if we don’t trust them. So I think the before decision, but for me, that was the most interesting, the preparation and the relationships, trust aspect.
ALISON BEARD: So understanding the people on your team, your assistant coaches, getting to know everyone ahead of time so in the moment you’re ready to work together?
ALAN MCCALL: Yeah. And also not just when it matters, but just in those small moments, when the NBA coaches that we interviewed, we spoke for about two hours on a four second time out that he made and it just became more clear as we were talking and as we analyzed the findings as well, that his decision in that four seconds had essentially been made prior to that because of the relationship he had built with the player. He called a call for a player. The player said, “No, I’ll give it to someone else on the team.”
And he was like, “Okay, I can actually trust this guy with this call so I’m going to go with him.” What he explained is it wasn’t this trust was built up in other matches. It was in the corridor when he’d be stopping and speaking with him or in the locker room. That was one of the bigger things for me.
ALISON BEARD: And Johann, before you mentioned working in the NBA in the NFL and about sort of the flow of information. So talk about how the coaches you interview, the coaches you’ve worked with, how they make sure to get the right information beforehand.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: There’s a lot of information that’s coming in and there’s always a data overload. Coaches are really wise to be able to understand what is the most important information so there’s not a lot of noise. If everything’s a signal, then nothing’s a signal. And so that was really important for us to understand what matters most. And when we talk about that before situation, the what if scenarios, which was both coaches that I dealt with, they would go through so many scenarios. So the preparation, as Alan spoke about, was so thorough. There was every single scenario that could happen in a game that they were prepared for. And Alan mentioned also the trust. The head coach also has so many people vying for their attention on what’s important, they had to really filter through what was the most important for that situation and be prepared really well with really trusted staff members.
So the delegation of information to provide him or both those coaches with the right information was really important. And you’d see there’s so much preparation going into a game, but also into practice sessions. We always practice how we’re going to play for each different opponent. So there was a lot of information coming through. It was just deciphering what the right information was. And as Alan said before, having the right information in front of you because you’ve seen so many different things in the past helps them narrow it down to just doing what is most important.
ALISON BEARD: So business leaders figuring out how to ensure that only the most important information comes to them so that they don’t have to do that filtering, protecting their own time, building those relationships ahead of time and then also scenario planning seems really important.
Okay. So let’s move on to the during phase. What do coaches do in the moment that business leaders can learn from? As you said, it’s often four seconds as opposed to maybe four days or four weeks to make a decision. I think the one that struck me as really interesting but also so difficult is managing emotions. So what did you learn from how people do that in sports?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: From the practical experience I’ve had, I’ve noticed that the coaches keep their emotions intact under really extreme pressure and they’re able to make really good decisions and problem solve. For me, it takes me time. I can go back and I can give them video analysis and I can show them all these really good graphs and I can do that the next day or that afternoon. They’re able to problem solve on what we know, what we don’t know and how we’re going to fix it really, really quickly.
I always looked at the coaches that I’ve worked with over the past 30 years as they are probably the best sports scientists that I’ve dealt with. They’re able to make really good decisions in a really short timeframe. And I do think no matter what decisions that they thought or circumstances they’re thrown at, they’ve got a pattern or a schema of very, very similar situations.
There’s not a lot they haven’t seen and although there might be a new occurrence, they have a very good framework of knowing and being able to solve at least 75 percent of the problems that they have and their emotions don’t come into it very much at all and they’re very dry with that kind of things. They don’t react.
ALAN MCCALL: I was speaking with a coach that I was working with who’s at the World Cup just now in the U.S. and he was saying in the moment he feels the emotions and he feels the anger or he feels the excitement, but he’s got that self-awareness to check himself as well that it doesn’t come out and maybe it’ll come out later in a more structured way, but in that moment it’s not that the emotion isn’t there. It’s just, as Johann said, they’re able to manage them really well in that moment, but they also don’t forget about them because they will resurface later.
ALISON BEARD: Is that personality or practice? If you’re someone who’s naturally hotheaded, can you learn how to regulate your emotions so that you’re not getting stressed in these high stakes situations?
ALAN MCCALL: The coach I’m talking about in the U.S., he said to me, “I know I’m a hothead.” I don’t know if that was the words he used, but it was essentially, he knows that that’s what he’s like and that’s his kind of go to, but he’s learned over time to be aware of it and then manage it. So I think that was his biggest thing is when we were talking, he just said, “Look, I’ve realized this is how I am and it doesn’t help, therefore I need to change it.”
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: Yeah, I definitely think those elite coaches, no matter what the emotion is, because there is a lot of emotion during a game of football or basketball, but they still follow process. So the outcome may be slightly different, but they’ve prepared for it so well, but they just follow process all the time. They’re able to adapt very, very quickly and so the emotions doesn’t ever get the better of them. I must say that what I’ve realized and seen over time is what a head coach says matters to so many people. So they’re very, very careful on how they deliver a message because it can affect a junior player, a senior player, a staff member who may be responsible for an outcome that wasn’t great. So they’re very, very precise and tactful on how they present information because it has ramifications throughout the whole organization during those. And I think that’s from a leadership perspective, being very deliberate with how they present information is really important.
ALISON BEARD: And then there’s sort of reading the emotions and the in the moment capabilities of other people, your team members. So how does a leader get better at doing that? I imagine that that preparation you’re talking about plays into it too. You know, that example you gave of the four second last minute NBA play and being able to look at the star player and see then what he could do in that moment, how he felt in that moment and decide whether to take his advice or not.
ALAN MCCALL: Yeah. The coach that I was speaking to then also explained within that four seconds how he was basically going through past, present, and future. He was thinking in that moment about the play, but then in the future he was thinking, “Okay, if I change and I go with the superstar player, then would the other players think I’ve just went with him because he’s the superstar?” So he was thinking into the future as well about the kind of ramifications and the consequences of the decision he made, but was able to process all of that within the four seconds to make the call. And the baseball coach we spoke to as well, it wasn’t that the outcome didn’t determine whether or not they were happy with what they went with because it was just that they went through their process and regardless of the outcome then. So it was almost like not that I’m not thinking about the outcome, but it’s like, “Okay, I’ve went through a process, I’m happy with it and we’re going to go with it and then we see what happens.”
ALISON BEARD: So in those moments, especially I think in the NFL or situations where there’s a little bit more time between plays, there is this tension right now of, do you trust what the analytics say about what should be done? Versus this sort of visceral human instinct. So Johann, how have you seen that tension play out in the moment for coaches because I’m sure it’s happening in the business world too.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: I definitely think before the game starts, there is a lot of data driven decisions on scouting and how a team plays and the familiarity things that we already know, but I do think that the experienced elite coaches are able to rely on a small percentage of their gut that backs a lot of the data driven decisions that they’re already presented with. Again, there’s only small variants of situations they haven’t seen and those small variants, they’re still able to establish the bulk of that decision is already done from past history.
And they also know that there’s several outcomes that can happen from the decision that they make because it involves so many people. And they do trust the personnel around them, their main lieutenants around them, whether it being a player or an offensive line coach or something like that. They’re all very level-headed about that purely because they know that they have followed the process. You give a player the right shot and he’s open, you want them to take that shot no matter what. And if they don’t take the shot, you’re probably more upset than if they took the shot and missed.
ALAN MCCALL: It’s not that coaches are blindly following the data, they’re also sense checking it. So they’ve put the systems in place for the things that they’ve decided is important. We’ve found ways to analyze those to give the data that’s hopefully valid and reliable and that we can have more confidence in it, but sometimes the data can be deceiving or it doesn’t tell the whole story and that’s where the coach’s eye comes in and when I started them and Johann started with the coach’s eye, I thought, “Oh, there’s no way that’s a thing.” And then as I’ve got more experienced, I’m like, “Oh, actually the coach’s eye, it is a thing.” It’s built up through experience. So when they saw the data bringing them some information, they would say, “Okay, is this actually what I’m seeing? Does it match or not?” And then they would also sense check it with, like Johann said, their kind of trusted lieutenants.
So you’ve got a few people maybe that’s on the pitch side who can see if it’s rugby, for example, because they’re looking from a pie or if it’s somebody on the touchline, they might be speaking with someone that, I used to stay in the stadium in France up high and radio down to the bench. So we had different angles to see. And it’s like, “Okay, this is what the data is showing us, this is what we all sort of see.” And then the coach can make an informed decision because he’s got a little bit more. They don’t tend to make a decision straight away based off of data. It’s, do we see the same thing a few times and is everyone seeing that same thing? And then, “Okay, maybe now we make a decision.”
ALISON BEARD: So let’s talk about the aftermath of decisions. Whether the call has been right or wrong, what’s the first step that a coach does following a big choice?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: One thing I’ve learned is that they do not blame. They ask questions, they don’t question people. Because again, as we said earlier, if we’ve followed the process, the outcome is not always perfect. We only can control one team, we don’t control the other team. And I definitely think that that postmortem is definitely not a blame situation because it’s very emotional and you have to be ready that you may be playing a game tomorrow, so you better deal with it and sort it out and address all the issues that you’ve had, work out the solutions and scenarios that we have to deal with and get better on, but there’s never a finger point, there’s never a blame. It’s that next game, let’s go, we’re onto Cincinnati. We are just moving forward. It’s that kind of mentality.
ALAN MCCALL: The thing is if you build that environment, then actually nobody needs to blame anybody because you actually just take ownership for your part in it. That kind of postmortem is always about what could have been better as an organization? What could I have done better? What could we all have done? And if you’ve got that environment, then people will volunteer those insights and you don’t need to be worried that somebody’s going to blame me for doing something, but that needs to be built. It’s not in all teams maybe.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. It’s interesting because in professional sports, there’s this mechanism of the post-game press conference where basically the players and the coaches have to either defend their decisions or acknowledge their mistakes. And is there a way to do that in the business world that doesn’t feel stressful or putative? Could you replicate that?
ALAN MCCALL: I don’t see why not. It’s a fairly straightforward process. You just need everyone to be bought into it. “This is what we’re doing. This is a process of how we are going to go through the decisions we’ve made and understand whether or not they could have been better.” It’s just really the organization and the people need to be open to it. It takes time, because initially if you get people in a room and say, “We’re going to go through all our decisions and see what we did right and what we didn’t.” The natural reaction is kind of fear. You think, oh no, they’re apprehensive, but there’s consistency. And that’s how Johann is one of the best that I’ve seen at it, they’re getting trust from people, but it takes perseverance as well. So it needs to be not just this one-off thing. It needs to be shown what’s the work-ons from it as well.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. It’s, again, a scenario where I think that sort of time compression of sports is potentially pretty useful for business, because obviously we all do postmortems in organizations or retros or whatever you call it, but it tends to be not right away, not when it’s fresh in everyone’s mind. It might be a week later or a month later. So that idea that you have to process immediately seems really useful.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: When we play five games in seven days in five different cities, there’s not a lot of time to dwell on things. Otherwise, you get a player that ends up in a slump if we don’t address it really early. So I have seen coaches deal with players because they take it very hard because they get, like you said, I’ll send a lot of media scrutiny so they have to deal with it and instill that confidence in a player that, “Hey, you made the right moves. It’s okay, let’s move on. You’re here for a reason.” And then move forward with the next game. And again, coaches are really, really good with bringing out the positive things. If you lose a game, it’s not the last shot that Jalen misses that was the reason why you lost the whole game. It’s probably 30 other decisions that happened prior.
ALISON BEARD: When a decision that a coach makes upsets people, whether it’s players or fellow coaches, owners, the media, fans, how do they repair trust?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: I think it’s having a good organization that’s already got, as Alan said, a good system and structure of trust. Trust takes time. It’s not built overnight and that’s both ways. You have to know what the capabilities of the player is. But look, I was at an organization where they let go of Tom Brady during a period. There was quite a big situation and you could definitely see there was a change within the organization. They had to replace leadership, but they had built leadership underneath Tom for a decision that affected not only the team, the ownership, the coaching staff, the playing group, but people had to understand why their decisions were made. I think explaining those things to a trusted playing group goes a long way.
ALISON BEARD: So in terms of practical steps, it’s really conversations with everyone affected by the decision who had an opinion on what choice should have been made or shouldn’t have been made and then ensuring that collective wisdom is gathered and there’s a change that’s made because of it in terms of process or protocol?
ALAN MCCALL: Yeah, exactly. If there’s no change, then it’s like, well, the next time people might just not show up for the meeting or you don’t speak up in the meeting because, well, nothing changes, there’s no point saying anything. I think that’s the biggest thing where you lose trust is somebody says something and there’s no action followed up on it.
ALISON BEARD: Do either of you have an example of good post-decision protocol that led to a system improvement or decision-making process improvement at one of the teams that you’ve worked with?
ALAN MCCALL: One of the bigger ones, not maybe with a specific organization, but over time something that we see in sport is a lot of wasted money resources and people’s time and effort on technologies and things that people buy within teams and then they just end up in a corner unused and then that basically drove a decision making model that Johann and I have used for maybe 15 to 20 years about now, when somebody wants to do something or they come to the club, it’s a technology, a strategy, or a consultant, we’ve got processes now that we can choose more confidently, but then also follow through and see, are things working the way they would or not? So that’s probably a big system change that we’ve had in sport and now it gives people an accountability.
So before it would be, “Who bought this 500,000 pounds machine that nobody’s using?” “I don’t know who it was.” And now it’s like, “Oh, it was Alan.” Or, “It was Johann.” So now we need to be careful because it will come back to us. It’s not just that you waste the money, it might be that you actually bring something in that’s harmful to the organization. So it’s also about understanding what are we doing? Why are we doing it and are things doing what we expect rather than just blindly moving along?
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I think that idea of investing in new technological tools that don’t actually improve productivity will resonate with our audience. So another thing that’s interesting about elite sports is the talent management piece. And we’ve sort of touched on that in all of the decision making phases, but you’re dealing with a lot of big egos. So how do coaches do that well and how do those tactics translate to the business world?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: Really good coaches handle the egos really, really well by good conversation. We would always lean on that star player to help us get some things done and which also always brought the egos down. But most of them, it’s the external that everyone sees on an ego perspective, but internally most of the time they love what they do. They work with their other teammates and it’s not as much of a bigger issue that maybe people see externally, but giving everyone a role and a task and responsibility according to the level of what they do has really seen I think good cohesion amongst players.
ALAN MCCALL: I’ve worked with some players who in the media, they get a really bad rap and they’re the nicest guys behind the scenes and they work hard. And yeah, there’s some that are more difficult than others, but that’s just humans. That’s not unique to football. And one thing I’ve found that people respond to is just an authenticity. You need to know when to give people space and when not to. You start to understand each person and what they respond to, what they don’t respond to, when to speak to them, when to not speak to them.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I interviewed Michael Strahan for our life’s work feature in HBR. He was a former NFL lineman with the Giants who’s now a television personality. But one quote of his that always stuck with me is that every different player needs something different from you and you also need to calibrate what they need at different times.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: 100%.
ALISON BEARD: So it does take that sort of emotional intelligence really. In general, it also seems like elite coaches really need to have a high tolerance for risk, knowing that every decision they make will result in a loss or a win, maybe that they might get pilloried by the press and fans and that they could even lose their jobs. So is that something you can develop or is it sort of natural selection that these risk tolerant people become elite coaches and is it something that executives, particularly CEOs, need as well?
ALAN MCCALL: I think with everything, it’s a mix of everything. It’s probably not just one or the other that you just learn it or you’re just kind of born with it. It’s probably some people are naturally better. Johann, dealing with people is naturally better than a lot of other people that I’ve seen, but other people can probably learn to be a little bit better. And one of the coaches we interviewed, he was a relatively new coach when we interviewed him and he explained it really well about making a decision to recruit a player, to sign a player. And he felt that something wasn’t right with this player that he was looking at, but he couldn’t quite articulate why he didn’t want to sign the player. He was a little bit fearful around the reactions if he went too strong to say, “No, no, I don’t think this player’s for us.” And he signed the player and then realized, “Yeah, this player wasn’t for us. It wasn’t the one.”
And from that, he then said, “Okay, what do I need to do in the next occasion that this comes up so that it doesn’t happen again?” And he’s like, “Okay, I need to have the data on this. I need to be able to give it to this person. I need to be stronger than myself. I need to realize that the fear isn’t good for making a decision.” So basically he learned from that one experience he’s taught himself how to not be in that position again. And maybe that’s part natural for him that he was able to develop that quicker.
I don’t know, but he’s basically realized that that wasn’t what he wants and he’s taught himself to do that, but the risk needs to be calculated. So it’s like, “Okay, the next time I go, I went with a player that I really wanted. And yes, it’s a risk because he could fail as well, but I’ve got the data, I’ve got the reasons why and I can back myself with it.” It’s all that risk management, I guess. It’s around what risk level you’re willing to go to and that you’ve done the work behind the scenes that you’re confident enough that what happens, happens.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Last question. What is the biggest hurdle to good decision making that you’ve seen in elite sports and maybe also in business that you’ve helped coaches, you’ve helped the executives you’ve worked with to overcome?
ALAN MCCALL: I think the bigger one for me is trying to convince people that what necessarily they’ve done before doesn’t mean that’s the right thing to do going forward. A lot of the time it’s, “We’ve done that at this last place and we were successful so why should we change it again?” So I think that’s one of the bigger things that I’ve come across and it’s trying to help them understand that is there a better way to do it? Is there something different?
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: I definitely concur with that, especially going to the two most successful franchises in their sporting history, why would they want to do something different? It’s having the openness to change. Change is a really dirty word for a lot of places. Sometimes they’ve been successful in spite of some of the process they’ve done. So having people that are really open-minded with that growth mindset to want to improve no matter how successful they are. I know speaking to a coach that after winning a Super Bowl, the next day ripped everyone senseless purely because he didn’t like what was going on during that period, even though they had the ultimate success. So that was still outcome, but the processes he was not happy with and insisted on change and improvement. So people have to be open to reviewing processes at the end of every season or every period, because sometimes if we wait too long, it can make a huge negative impact during a season. So you got to be able to adapt.
ALISON BEARD: Alan, Johann, it was a pleasure working with you on the article and thank you so much for joining me here.
ALAN MCCALL: Thanks, Alison. Really appreciate that.
JOHANN BILSBOROUGH: No, thank you.
ALISON BEARD: That’s sports performance consultant, Alan McCall and sports scientist, Johann Bilsborough. They’re coauthors along with Adrian Wolfberg and Ricard Pruna of the HBR article, How Elite Sports Coaches Make High Pressure Decisions.
Next week, Adi speaks with Josh Tyrangiel about unlikely ways that real people are using artificial intelligence to fix problems.
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And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
