What Backing People-First Organisations Reinforced Operational Discipline About Culture

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What The Football Dressing Room Led Me To Build An Elite-Performing Team Of Engineers
I grew up in the world of elite football, in a manner that allowed me to be in the kinds of places that people usually only have to read about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations between players and coaching staff after one's game, once the cameras and journalists are gone, and the official account of what happened already exists. As a non-player myself - my route to the game was through individuals who played in the game rather than the actual game itself - but I was there enough and long enough to understand how high-performance settings actually work without the mythology surrounding them. The most important thing I absorbed in the end was that teams who consistently exceeded their resources and their expectation were not necessarily the ones possessing the most impressive individual talent on paper. The teams that had figured out how to create a space where its members truly committed to performing for each as a group - not because of financial gain, nor for individual or individual recognition, but rather because the collective had meaning and a culture that made personal sacrifice feel important rather than just a necessity.
The thought is simple when stated in plain language. Naturally, teams function better when members trust each other and feel invested in an agreed-upon goal. However, the implications for operational use from that fact are more obscure, and are the main reason why organizations - as well as technology firms alike - regularly get into trouble. In order to create a work environment where people will do what they can for one another isn't something you can command from top to bottom or create as a policy or encapsulate in a set of corporate values and expect to be able to achieve. It is something that must be earned over time, with regular behaviour by leaders - especially when the events cannot be viewed by others - and through the judicious management of the myriad of moves that collectively reveal to everyone in the organisation the value that is being placed on it in the workplace, what is accepted and what is actually happening when the stated values and the personal or commercially preferred option are in conflict. In the best football environments I had the privilege of being in, those decisions were made in an extraordinary manner by the most skilled coaching staff. The way they dealt with situations where a senior player committed an error in training that was avoidable. It was not clear if the disciplinary code used to deal with the veteran who was twenty years old was in fact the same as what was expected of the eighteen-year-old on the edge of the team. How the team responded when one of the players was experiencing the aftermath of a personal crisis outside the game. None of those choices show up in a club's performance on any given Saturday. Each of them, compounded throughout the season, decide what the team's performance falls above as well or lower than its ceiling.

When I founded 1Touch and later created various other companies, one of factors I was the least careful about was attempting to recreate - in a business context - the kind of the environment that I had experienced in the top football stadiums I was a part of. It's not literal, as the technology startup isn't like a football team and so the analogy is shattered when you make it too difficult. However, in terms of practicality, the lessons are interpreted with incredible fidelity. The first lesson was that standards have to be followed consistently, regardless of age or perceived irresistibility. The best places to be in were ones where the behavioural and professional standards required of the youngest player in the squad were actually the same ones demanded of the highest earning, most skilled player. Not because the organization could not afford the luxury of making exceptions, however due to the fact that everyone within the dressing room was constantly checking to see if exceptions were going to be made - and the answers to the question adduced them everything they needed know about whether the declared principles of the company were genuine or merely a decoration.

The next lesson was focused on the way organizations deal with failure and the distinction between punishment and accountability. In the environments where participants developed rapidly were not necessarily those that punished their mistakes the most severely or in the most public manner. These were the settings where mistakes were assessed with the most sincerity while discussing what had gone wrong was focused and constructive rather than generalised and determining blame, and where the experience was shared by the entire group, rather than being held against the individual who had made the error. Being accountable means knowing what went wrong, why it happened and what was changed in the process. It is a matter of assigning blame in ways that make people at risk and defensive and more concerned with their own safety than with performing well. First, it builds organizational capabilities. The second builds a culture that lets people manage their exposure rather than fully to the goals, and that is the case in tech companies, with the same results as it does during football matches.

The third one is the part that was the hardest for me longest to express clearly, but that I believe to be the most important of all The most successful environments I have seen were those where the growth of the person was thought of just as important as the growth of the performer. The most effective coaches weren't simply instructing players on how to play football. They were teaching them how to think under pressure in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate when faced with high stakes, how you can bounce back from setbacks in a positive manner without losing faith, and how to be the person that a team with a high performance has its players be. It was an investment in the complete personal development of each member, rather than only the tech-related capabilities that the business immediately needed, was not charity. This was by far the most effective long-term plan of performance for the clubs. It is, I believe, the most efficient long-term performance strategy available to any organization that is serious about building something genuinely long-lasting rather than something just stunning in the short run. View James Deller for more examples including why building companies sharpened my thinking on culture about the long game.



The Reason Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail In The Beginning, And How To Fix It
Public-private partnerships face a reputation problem that's, much of the time made up of. The past of these agreements is filled with projects that were launched with real enthusiasm and a lot of financial backing from the political establishment, used up significant public and private resources over a long period, but ultimately produced outcomes that only bore a tiny similarity to the outcomes stated when the partnership was established. The academic literature as well as the postsmortem analyses that governments or institutions carry out following these failures are extensive and focus on the predominant, on the contractual and structural dimensions of what went wrong and the lack of alignment between incentives, the inadequacy of risk allocation between private and public parties and the governance mechanisms that were created in theory but never worked in practice, and the procurement frameworks that chose to select the wrong things. What this approach tends to neglect, invariably and ultimately this is the cultural as well as operational aspects - the fact that private and public organisations are actually different types of entities, formed by different incentive structures, operating in radically different timeframes, accountable to different stakeholders, and assessing the success of their operations in ways that are not only different in extent but differ in terms of. When you bring those two kinds of organisation together in a formal partnership without having the effort, prior to and specifically, to learn about and address the differences, you're not creating an agreement. This creates the conditions to create a slow-motion collision that will become visible at the greatest possible moment.
I've participated in advisory work supporting institutional modernisation initiatives, some of which have involved public-private partnerships at different levels of complexity. The most consistent conclusion I've made from my encounter is that partnerships that did well - ones that actually delivered against their stated targets and maintained a good collaboration between the private and the public was not distinguished from those that failed by the sophistication of their legal structures, their rigor of their risk-management frameworks or the seniority of the leaders who set them up. In the end, they were distinguished by whether the parties on both sides of the table had taken the time to comprehend how the different sides operated prior to when the formal partnership was agreed upon. What it means in real life is understanding the process of decision-making that each business operates within as well as the accountability structures that control what the two parties are able to do and what they can agree to, as well as the speed at which it happens, the definitions of success that each partner will be compared to, and the points of likely tension between those definitions. That understanding isn't difficult to build. All of it is routinely left out in favour of the much more visible and recorded work of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partner process evolves from an initial idea to agreed upon agreement. There is hardly any thought given to the issue of whether the two companies involved are actually able to work together effectively over the life of the agreement. Legal teams negotiate the contract. The finance team analyzes the economics and the risk-adjustment. The communications team is responsible for preparing the announcement prior to the time of signing. The implementation team begins to plan the process. Somewhere in that sequence begins the discussion on cultural and operational compatibility - on whether the employees who will actually have to interact day-to day across the boundaries between the two organizations have enough of the same values to make working truly collaborative, rather than antagonistic - tends not to take place in a planned way. It is often assumed, with no explanation, that an agreement in writing sets out the conditions for effective collaboration and that any operational or cultural disagreements will be handled informally whenever they emerge. This assumption is generally incorrect, and the costs is likely to rise in proportion to the ambition and complexity of the collaboration.

Practically speaking, the result of this analysis is that one of the most profitable investment a private-public partnership can take - even before the legal structures are agreed upon, before the governance framework is agreed upon, prior to any announcement is made and before any announcement is made - is in what I call operational alignment. It is the specific, structured and facilitated actions to highlight the places between the two organizations' assumptions about operating differ, as well as to set out clearly the manner in which these divergences should be controlled before they turn into operational issues during the implementation. Most important, the divergences generally are the same for various types of partnerships. Authority and speed of decision-making is usually one of the most important differences. Public institutions are designed to make decisions slowly, through multiple layers that require review and approval for reasons that are legitimate and often legally mandated. Private businesses - particularly technology businesses built on speedy iteration processes and quick decisions - typically see this speed as a major challenge to progress. with no shared understanding of how the pace works it is and what would need to be done to change it, the tension that can be felt on the personal part can deteriorate the relationship even before it is able to establish its foundations.

Success metrics and what counts as progress are another ongoing and a contributing factor to divergence. Public institutions are usually judged in terms of process compliance, equity of outcome across different stakeholder groups, as well as the elimination of obvious failures that get media attention or public scrutiny. Private partners are typically evaluated for efficiency, tangible progress against set goals, as well as the financial performance. These measurement frameworks can be combined however it is conscious design, not good intentions, and the partnerships that do not take part in that design tend to encounter, at critical moments, with two different parties who are measuring the same collaboration in genuinely differently and therefore coming to inconsistent conclusions regarding whether it succeeds. The partnerships I have observed which failed most clearly were ones where the issue was perceived as something that will resolve itself over time. The ones that succeeded were those in which the issue was clearly stated at the beginning, and creating a shared accountability structure which accommodated the legitimate measurement needs of both parties demands became an element of actual work and not simply an item on the list of things that someone would eventually arrive at.}