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Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring is your weekly deep-dive into the often-overlooked “softer skills” of coaching—cultural innovation, communication, empathy, leadership, dealing with stress, and motivation. Each episode features candid conversations with the world’s top international rugby coaches, who share the personal stories and intangible insights behind their winning cultures, and too their biggest failures and learnings from them. This is where X’s and O’s meet heart and soul, empowering coaches at every level to foster authentic connections, inspire their teams, and elevate their own coaching craft. If you believe that the real gold in rugby lies beyond the scoreboard, Coaching Culture is the podcast for you.
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Ben Darwin: The Science of Team Cohesion
Ben Darwin, former Wallaby prop turned analytics expert, reveals how his company Gainline Analytics is revolutionizing our understanding of team performance through the measurement of cohesion. This eye-opening conversation challenges conventional wisdom about team building, showing that cohesion (shared understanding between players) is more crucial to success than many traditional metrics.
Darwin breaks down the difference between culture (normative behaviors within a team) and cohesion (the actual on-field connections). Through analysis of 80,000+ games, he demonstrates how cohesion directly correlates with winning percentages across different sports. The numbers are striking - teams making frequent lineup changes after losses actually win fewer subsequent games than teams maintaining consistency through struggles.
Most fascinating is the revelation that different positions require different timelines for cohesion development. Inside backs and playmaking positions need extensive shared experience to excel, while wingers can adapt more quickly. This explains why championship teams often feature long-established combinations in key decision-making roles.
The implications for coaching are profound. Darwin's research shows it takes approximately 2.8 seasons for transferred players to reach peak performance in new environments. His data also reveals how the most successful teams in world rugby built their championship-winning cohesion through consistent selection, shared domestic competition experience, or stable national team development.
Whether you're coaching at elite or grassroots level, this conversation offers invaluable insights into the patience required for true team building. As Darwin eloquently puts it: "Don't panic, it's organic." The teams that understand this principle and resist short-term fixes are those that ultimately build sustainable success. After listening, you'll never view team selection or development the same way again.
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If you keep a bunch of people together for a period of time, you will start to establish normative behaviours. If you make two to three changes to a rugby team, it can basically drop your numbers by 40% 50%. I think for me, like one of the things that's actually been quite nice is, particularly when we do corporate work, employees will come to me and say now I understand why I'm finding it so hard. We know if they don't have cohesion they don't win. We know if they do have cohesion they should win. Don't always do it, but they should win. So you have to have a minimum amount to win a World Cup. There's a number we use. We can't find anyone yet that can out-coach the numbers.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Coaching Culture, the podcast about cultivating culture and leadership. I'm Ben Herring and I've been loving this side of the game for bloody ages. Today's guest is Ben Darwin, a former Wallaby tight-haired prop who unfortunately had a neck injury and had to retire from international rugby. Since then, he went coaching in Japan and Australia. Before going deep into the analytical side of the game, he set up a company, Gainline Analytics, to measure culture, to measure cohesion. Now this is something which is blowing my mind. His company puts measurement on the parts of the game that people often think are unmeasurable the culture and the cohesion and that is absolutely perfect for this show. His database is the size of the matrix, and today we're going to dive right into what it all means here.
Speaker 2:He is Great to have you, Ben Mate. What a pleasure to have you. So today is a really interesting one because we're putting a bit of measurement and a bit of data into culture and also just redefining what that looks like. So can I start off with? Today is how you define culture and particularly the difference between culture and cohesion.
Speaker 1:So culture has always been a hard one, because it's been something that people kind of talk about, but it's like a there's sort of a mystery to it, almost, and there's a lot of talk about. If you have a great coach, you'll have success. And I want to give a quick story, if that's okay. Yeah, man, I won't name names, but there was a very successful coach in Australia and he was interviewing for a job to coach a team and basically they said okay, well, tell us, you know how are you going to help the team to win. Said okay, well, tell us you know how are you going to help the team to win? He walked up to the front of the room, just wrote a C on the front of the board and then sat down to him. You get that right, you win. They're like what's the C stand for? He said, oh, that's culture and that didn't, that didn't get, didn't pan out that way. Right, they didn't win, they didn't. That team didn't.
Speaker 1:What I'm trying to, what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to measure something else with teams, which is what we're going to call cohesion, for this sake. But if you keep a bunch of people together for a period of time you will start to establish normative behaviors, right, which might be, you know, sweeping the sheds, as an example, or you know, tackling a certain way, whatever it might be. So that's that. And then that becomes an outcome of time together. But also, too, is by having that shared experience you're developing understanding of how to play together. That's the part I'm trying to measure. What the behaviors of that team are doing is not really that interesting to me, like I don't care how you play, every team will have a different, like the Bulls will play differently than the Crusaders or England or whatever, right? Yep, that's the normative behavior. Or and I'm also going off my own experiences, when we were at the Brumbies, people would say to me oh, you've got such a great culture at the Brumbies. I'm like these are the worst behaved humans I've ever known in my life. Great men, I love them, right, but we're not well behaved. I was like, okay, well then, why are we winning Right? And that's something I've driven to get to the heart of it, in a sense Like what is actually the drivers of successful teams.
Speaker 1:Now there is teams who have been poorly behaved. One example we tend to give is West Coast Eagles. So West Coast Eagles 06, won the grand final. They made the finals. 16th and 19th years won three finals. But of those guys who won 06, I think two are now currently in jail. Three have gone to jail. 10 arrests on drugs charges, assault. One guy said recently I was told by the senior players, if you're not going to smoke crystal meth for the team you're out, you have to go find somewhere else. So that's like that's pretty terrible behavior. Right, it's pretty terrible.
Speaker 1:I got the cohesion was unbelievable. The level of understanding between the guys on the field was impressive. That's the stuff we're trying to measure. And when I talked to a guy who was at the same Chris Judd, he said to me you know, I just knew exactly where Ben cousins wanted the ball. I knew he wanted his left hand. I knew how to kick it on an IFL. You know these are just terms that turn a phrase and um, and I'll give a really easy example when I was in the Wallabies I remember talking to Al Baxter and we were talking about which hooker we preferred to play.
Speaker 1:So I was at the Brumbies with Jeremy Paul and he was at the um Morris House with our, with Brendan Cano, and I was saying to him. I love Cano, but I can't get set up on him, right. I just my shoulder's never comfortable, but when I'm with JP it's not a problem. And Al said I feel the exact opposite. I cannot scrimmage with JP, I can only scrimmage with Cano Because basically we had imprinted on them, right. So my combination with JP, great outcomes. His combination with Brennan, great outcomes. Swap over terrible outcomes, yeah.
Speaker 1:So to me I was like, well, this has nothing to do with with either of the two people. Character, very different people, love both of them, but entirely different people. But I just could not get myself set in how I wanted to scrum each because Brennan basically did it differently, right, yeah. So we, you know, sometimes we talk to, you know, nick Sterzak who works with us. He talks about nine, 10 combinations. Like I just know, I see in my mind's eye exactly where this person wants the ball Right. Now, that can only come through time. Okay. So we measure cohesion as things like shared experience, tenure, positional experience. So one of the great examples might be when the All Blacks lost to Ireland. Kano was playing five, I think 2.02, was having a child, they didn't have any locks, he was playing out of position, he wasn't used to doing that.
Speaker 2:Berger Masco Flanker.
Speaker 1:They tried him at nine. For Italy, it didn't work. No, no no Right.
Speaker 1:No. So and there are certain positions we know 10, 12, 13, 2 and 5, 3 and 5. You know 2 and 4. Those are all really important relationships. 1 and 15, not so much right, they're just not spending. They need to spend time together because it completely different parts of the field. And then we've got things like system.
Speaker 1:So if I change how I want to play, um, I'm going to have time. How long have I done something for? So I've just been doing low tackles my entire life Under duress. I'll revert back to doing low tackles, whereas if a new coach comes in and says we're going to change this, some of the guys will pick it up quickly. Generally, the younger guys will pick it up faster, the older guys will find it harder.
Speaker 1:And then you've got a bunch of people, some doing one way, some doing the other. And I remember we had this um great footage of Jamie Roberts. I couldn't get that right when he went to New South Wales playing at 13 or 12 or 13 and just buddying out of the line and no one went with him and they went around him and then through the gap Right and we'd actually seen that before with Newcastle Knights Kurt Gidley, when he was like on his own with a bunch of kids, would come out of the line so hard. And if everyone else knew to do that or had done that a thousand times, that wouldn't be a problem. When you got one person doing it one way and everyone else doing it another way, and it's not, no way is wrong, it to decide how you're going to do it. And you have to do it again and again, and again and again. And, um, you know, and different things. You know one of the things too we look at as signals, like on the field that or in mine that means drive the car or go to the corners, and in another team that means I want to lie Right and then. And then the person hears that and goes, oh, so we're going to kick to the corner. Like what are you doing? Yeah, so you get these kind of mixed messages.
Speaker 1:So cohesion, as we would talk about it, is interpersonal understanding, system understanding, role understanding, but also the size of a team. So a basketball team will learn to play as fast as a sevens rugby team, but a 15s rugby team or an AFL team will take a lot longer. Different components will take longer. Your set piece will establish itself pretty quickly, your defense won't. Defense takes longer because you're doing it as a whole. So low cohesion teams tend to defend poorly right and defense tends to win titles in most 180 degree 180 degree invasive sports, except the NFL, where the offensive line is working to protect the heart, the quarterback. So in the NFL it's actually the opposite. So yeah, offense, offense is cohesion, whereas defense is cohesion in most.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, yes, yes, so, um, and then then you've also got systems. So how things are structured might be. You know, one of the things that are extremely helpful to the Crusaders was having Canterbury underneath them, just Canterbury, and the guys are coming through together, and so most of the time when guys are playing their first game to the Crusaders, they've already played with like 11 of their teammates, whereas in Australia, particularly so with New South Wales the average would be one or two. So if you've played with a guy before, you're not really making your debut, You're just debuting in a different jersey. So it's like your first game for the Crusaders. If you've played 25 games for Canterbury and 14 of your teammates, you've already played with the Canterbury. That's a pretty easy debut because, like well, all the systems are the same and all the people are the same, and I know where that guy wants the ball. So that's a huge advantage and therefore the chance of that person playing well is much greater.
Speaker 1:Whereas and we see this a lot within high school systems like you have a rep team and it's a representative of, say, five high schools, that team will do better than the one that's representing 50 high schools. That team will do better than the one that's representing 50 high schools, and then the one that has five high schools. Will you know, those guys will all go on to the next rep team because they all play well. Yeah, so it's just like but this is why England and France don't do well, except in world cups, because in world cups, the only time they get time together, like, they underperform comparatively, like. This is. The first question I was asked was like why is it that we in the Southern Hemisphere, with so few professional teams, do so well, whereas the Northern Hemisphere has so much resources? Why don't they do better? And then what's interesting is, ireland has become like New Zealand structurally, and so they've improved dramatically. You know, it's like Leinster is like Auckland.
Speaker 2:It used to be in the 90s, yeah, and that's just because the way they've reshaped their centralized program, so it's all all aligning to one now.
Speaker 1:In the in the eighties, munster would play three or four games a year. Now they play 30, you know, and if you include like Munster A or Leinster A, they're playing like 50 games a year as a system. And then they're all coming from the same schools too, right? So it's just this cog system that comes up through it and it gives them a chance, like Irish rugby. If you look at their juniors, their juniors don't do great, right. But if you look at the six nations in, if you want to look at the talent, look at how they do in women's and how they do in the juniors, which is generally dominated by England and France, because they don't get cohesion Does that make sense? Yeah, okay, if you don't have talent, you don't have cohesion, you can't win. If you don't have talent and you have cohesion, it gives you a much better chance. And if you have greater astronomically high cohesion and the talent doesn't have any, you can actually beat them. Astronomically high cavision and the talent doesn't have any, you can actually beat them.
Speaker 1:So if you look at New Zealand, you know 91, 95, 99, 03, except for obviously 95 issues. Let's put that to one side. 07 New Zealand two years after the World Cup, like Ireland do. Now they are the number one team in the world. Then you get to the World Cup and then everyone sort of gets the same point. So South Africa this last World Cup broke the record for the most cohesive chess team we'd seen since the Wallabies in 99.
Speaker 2:And is that purely on caps?
Speaker 1:No, it's on the collective of all of the cohesion they've gathered from all different places. So you don't get cohesion from just caps for your country. You get cohesion from a lot of them play Western province. Oh and, and you're able to measure it, you measure those so we have 20, 80,000 games in our system and we have the team list to every single one of those games and we develop this methodology through building that.
Speaker 2:And you measure the, the connections between key key um positional everyone.
Speaker 1:Everyone. So we have like there's two or 300 numbers per game we might look at as the defective parts of a combination and there's a great turn of phrases which is like your weakest link, like you put a bunch of sticks together and the one that's the weak one is what breaks you. You know the weakest link will break the chain. You know it's basically now to an easy one. You can have great connections across most of the team, but if you have it really bad in the wrong place, you're in deep trouble. So in the last two World Cups in knockout games Australia had new 10, 12, 13 combinations. You just never do that. You never want to end up with new combinations of knockout games in the inside backs. As much as I'd like it to be props, it'd be most important. It's just not. It's afterwards yeah, so it's got to be. So if you're going to have that, you have to be thinking about that years before. But we change coaches a year out. Right, he changed his mind two or three times leading in and that's not his fault. It's just how long he had yeah, yeah, yeah To get made and so like, if you look at when New Zealand's done its best, easiest to think about.
Speaker 1:Is Comrade Smith, ma Nottu, right? Or you look at Bunsen Little. That's the two peaks for New Zealand. When they've kind of been struggling is when they haven't figured out who they're starting 10, 12 years. Or you look at, say, 10, 12, 13. So you look at, like, how Nottu did away from the Hurricanes at the Highlanders in Auckland. Everyone's like he doesn't care about Super Rugby, but he goes back to the All Blacks and he played well with Conrad Smith. I wonder why, right, he goes to New Zealand. It's not great, but because he's playing in that position, it's extremely hard for him to perform well without continuity of the people around him, whereas wingers change codes, change teams much more easily.
Speaker 1:Because they're on the end of a chain if that teams much more easily because they're on the end of a chain to make sense. Yeah well, it's the longest introduction I've ever given you, but I love it. Oh, actually, an understanding of what cohesion is comparative to culture. Yes, ultra part is fundamentally the normative behaviors, and what I would say is the normative behaviors will come about, as through stability you'll develop certain ways of doing things and you can't have a culture without stability. And I also think it's circular. So that West Coast Eagles team I was talking about before, three years, after they won that grand final, a lot of the players left because they didn't want to be around that environment anymore. So culture can really help you to develop cohesion.
Speaker 2:And what do you think about like? Because just in particular in that West Coast Eagles example where you're telling me they were out drinking and smoking up and doing all that stuff, is that got any element to cohesion or is that even harder to measure? Like is going out drinking. You know the old school approach of let's go have a big boozy session with the team to create cohesion, the big boozy session with the team to create cohesion. Is that just, is that got any bearing, or is that even harder to measure than the connect the actual playing positions, being suppose there's, like there's?
Speaker 1:clues along the way to this. So what I would say is that whoever you're going to develop understanding, drinking together can develop off-field trust. I'm probably sure, but there's plenty of other ways to do it, okay. Okay, it's like team building exercises, right. But I remember one of the guys in the Lions tour and they were talking about how the Lions had formed a choir, right, yeah, they had a choir, and the guy was like damn, I understand we're doing this and it's great, but we need to get our light outs sorted, right, because they just hadn't spent any time with their light outs. So it's doing the things you need to do to build understanding.
Speaker 1:So one of the things we found, for example, with COVID, was in the NRL. Certain teams had to be in camp and couldn't leave, and I remember the guys down, the coach of Cowboys name's completely sketch me, I apologize he was at the Warriors at the time and he was saying they finished training, now they have nowhere to go, they don't want to go see their family, so they just stay on the field and they just keep practicing. So they were doing more detail At the Brumbies. We would live together and I remember like, with my roommate, we'd just go over the plays at night, right. So there's those kind of conversations. I know Jake White had a bit of success with keeping the guys at the training center. So it's about getting the knowledge of the understanding of how we want to be able to do something. That's the most important part.
Speaker 1:Actually, spending time together is not that, you know, important, like like, if you look at state of origin Queensland, they'll just go. They used to go just drinking together. That of origin Queensland, they'll just go. They used to go just drinking together. That was fine, that was their way of doing it. That's kind of their way sometimes of shaping the behavior. We had court sessions at the Brumbies and I was told change your go, change your behavior or go right. But I didn't start to play well until I was like 10, 15 games in with them because I could actually know when people are going to do things and get the timing right of Gregan or get the scrum shape right. So the off-field behaviors you can get sort of okay, but the actual on-field outcomes wouldn't come until I had time with them on the field.
Speaker 2:Doing what you're there to do first. Yeah, mm, mm-hmm, and it's not something which, like a lot of coaches, don't actually like in your experience.
Speaker 1:A lot of coaches value that cohesion piece, or is it often left to the side a little bit. So I've been very lucky to meet a lot of really great coaches through this experience and in other codes and in EPL and in with us in Formula One. For example, we've done work in rugby league and the guys who've been around a long time coaches who've been around a long time and they've had the good and the bad would say to you you're telling me what I've always felt, but no one's ever put a number to it. I remember Wayne Bennett was a really sort of I seem to understand it really, really quickly and one of the things I've noticed with him, if you go back and look at all the times when you know the Broncos in the nineties would lose 12 state of origin players, right, so then their community numbers would have been diabolical, um, and he would lose games by 40 and they're saying why are you happy? He's like I'm over the moon, I'm so happy with how the guys did.
Speaker 1:He didn't know what the numbers were, but he seemed to inherently understand that it just wasn't going to be possible for that group to do well. But he was looking for outcomes and I think that one of the problems is small changes, big change. If you make two to three changes to a rugby team, it can basically drop your numbers by 40%, 50%, particularly if they're in certain positions, and so it's not panicking when those things happen and saying you know, this is part of a process. We obviously, with our process, we actually provide data to show that right. Yep, so, like Panther of Panthers right now, their numbers have fallen off a cliff in the last six or seven rounds and now they're kind of last, but they're not underperforming.
Speaker 2:Well, according to your stats, they're actually where they should be. Yeah, they are where they should be, huh.
Speaker 1:And so, but other people, all the fans, are like that's it, we've got to get rid of this player. And it's like, no, just have some time and some patience. You know they've had three or four years of success. People have been taking their players. You know the team's been getting younger and younger. It will come about.
Speaker 1:There's come about is a great turn of phrase from the sydney swans, which I think is don't panic, it's organic. It's like there's an organic nature to success. You can't rush it, so just let it, let it, let it ride. And it's that patience of understanding, to not panic and not make changes, because then you'll make change. You'll say, right, we need a new coach. New coach will come in, have a new system, team underperforms, you sack him. New guy in brings in three or four new players and it goes dook, dook, dook, dook, dook and the whole thing can collapse. And the problem with Cavision is it's built slowly but can be destroyed quickly. So we're using a number called TWI. So there's one particular club in the NRL. They dropped 30% in one off season and they've never been back since. Is that just loss for players Loss? Well, new coach coming in. I'm going to turn the whole list over. We're not going to go juniors anymore, we're going to go by players.
Speaker 2:And then the problem is you then perform so badly, he either gets sacked or the players get sacked and you just bounce along the bottom for like 20 years, yeah, and then just in that process of just chopping and changing, and then sometimes too, like you can buy and win, right, you can do it too long, but the problem is like what happens after that, because they leave, and then when you bring players in above other players, those players leave.
Speaker 1:Yep, remember really specifically when I was at the Brumbies. You know, part of the Brumbies success we had was built on the Kookaburras who was underneath us. So we had a club team in the Sydney comp and then since they since they don't have that they haven't won a title. Since then they've gotten close because they're still pretty stable. But when you, um, when I was at the Brumbies, this prop above me left Noriega, he went to racing Metro and this is the day after we won the final. And it's like I wasn't ready yet and I knew I wasn't ready. But the Brumbies were like, well, you're it now and the next year we won the final Right and I but I cause I was the only change, basically to that side.
Speaker 1:Now, if, if, if they'd replaced me with somebody else above me saying you're not quite ready, I would have then gone to they've gone, where's ben? Ah, he's gone somewhere else. And then they have to then buy someone else in to fill that problem. So we talk about sometimes you sign one and you lose three. You know you replace somebody, the kid coming here, he goes. Oh well, if they're not going to show any faith in me, I'm going to go. They go and then off it goes, and then that can end up. That's a tumble process.
Speaker 2:And how long. You've got some stats on how long that takes on average. Rough enough at elite level.
Speaker 1:Well, when someone transfers clubs. So we first found this work for a guy called Grossberg who was looking at stockbrokers. He found it took three years for someone to hit peak performance With EPL. We found it was 2.8 seasons. Right, but I'll give you a really easy one we did in rugby league, which was now this is this is bad because it involves voting, which is humans, but that you know the medal right? Yep, the delhi m medal they have for the best in each position.
Speaker 1:Okay, wingers, when they change clubs. The average time a winger has been to this club is two and a half years. Who wins the Dallium? Yep, halfback hooker, five, eight, it's seven years. So the difference. So the management positions take longer to build in. Understanding, right For guys to do well, okay. So when you're forming a new team, right, expansion teams, the guys who perform well for the outset are generally the positions just require power. So props, for example, or wingers, they'll do quite well. It's the midfield where you'll tend to have the chaos and it's harder for those guys and they'll tend to underperform the most. So high cohesion clubs will actually tend to produce the midfield players, whereas the low cohesion clubs only produce talent on the outsides. So it's not a rule, but it just tends to be a tendency.
Speaker 2:So if you were to look at that and if you were to shaping a team out of nothing, you would look to be building good depth and cohesion with the midfields and you're more happy to recruit in the wingers from elsewhere.
Speaker 1:I think what's happened generally is and we saw this. For example, if you want to win today, there's a club in Wasts in the UK had a netball team. They started a netball team and they took six players from the team who'd won the title the year before. They just transferred them straight across, put them in a different top bang, won the title. So that works straight away. Newcastle Falcons did it a little bit Um Melbourne Storm when they started. A lot of the guys that come from the Hunter Mariners the spine had basically been at the Hunter Mariners, so that's that gave them a starting point, but then they started to develop from within and that's where the storm had the great outcome.
Speaker 1:And one thing too is that the more stable your environment is, the faster your players get better. So if you're a young player and you go to the Crusaders or Brumbies, I think you will generally improve in your skill faster, right Whereas and you'll be able to overtaking guys who are more talented than you younger and you'd be like how did that guy get so much better and I didn't improve at the same rate? So I think where guys go, which clubs they go to, is really really important, because, as a player. If you're constantly dealing with a new coach every year, a new system and a new teammate, you're not going to get better because you're spending all your time adjusting to chaos. You're spending all your time adjusting. You're not actually improving your skill. You're not getting to the detail.
Speaker 1:And when I talk about getting to detail, it's like you know those Jap, japanese guys who learned to do the samurai swords like it takes them 25 years and by the end they get to like they understand how many hits the metal requires in order to become really, really detailed. That's how Melbourne Storm are Like they're. They're focusing on like what's the angle of the second defender on the inside shoulder, whereas like if you're coaching the Barbarians, you're just like, and the side clubs basically is like coaching the Barbarians all the time. It's like, okay, this should play same way. But you can only talk in really big generalities, right? So we talk about really good systems are complexity inside of simplicity. That you know. What's interesting is storm crusaders historically actually don't play a lot of patterns, but those patterns are, you know, and victor madfield like had one good seven metal on here, but that thing is so well drilled and so detailed that he can basically adapt to whatever it's in.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Function really well, but you can only get to that detail through stability. You can't you can't go to the storm and go. Okay, we're going to focus on our shoulders when you're the West Tigers and you're like, okay, well we've, we don't even know who's going to play this weekend. Storm know who's playing in three seasons from now. They know who the next guy is. The next guy is, the next guy is, and so they can start to drill that in and they can start to get their feeder clubs to play the same way. Right, or their feeder clubs. They'll make sure one edge is always the same and then when that guy's players come through to their team, they'll play on the same edge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what happens to those guys? Often you were saying it off here when those guys go off, they often don't underperform. When they've come from those great high cohesion environments and go to a not so cohesive, they struggle more than others may.
Speaker 1:There was this. When we did this study in the EPL, we found this kind of couple of scenarios. One was somebody who'd been involved in German football said oh, that's the Bayern Munich mirage. I'm like, what's the Bayern Munich mirage? And they're like you take a player from Bayern Munich and they're never the same again. So you take a player from the Crusaders and and like they're not able to replicate the same level of performance they did at the same place.
Speaker 1:If, particularly if, they go to a low cohesion team. So If particularly say go to a low cohesion team. So if you go from a high to a high, like um, uh, uh, cronk, cooper Cronk, when he went from the Storm to the Roosters, there's also a high cohesion team. After the, after their attack sorted itself out, he still did very well, right, because they were the two highest cohesion teams in the league. But if you go from, say, the Storm to a Titans, or if you go from a Crusaders to say Western Force, no offense, you know they'll tend to struggle who was the Irish fullback who went to the Force?
Speaker 2:Escapes me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it was Sancha Anyway, but it was, I should remember. But it's so. There's this turn of phrase called the Mirage in rugby league they might call the Melbourne Storm Mirage. So if you go from a high to a low, it has a different outcome than a low to a high, for example. So if you go to the Crusaders, a lot of Australians have gone to the Crusaders, won titles and then come back and they can't replicate the same performance. The other thing is the position. Certain positions are easier. A lot of guys who change codes, codes it's easier for them. As a wing fullback, you know centers is really hard for rugby league players. You look at rts, you know coming across, there's a whole range of them. Um, and then the, and the third part is what you're going to. If you're going to a stable team, it's easier. So it's like where you're coming from, what you're going to in the position you play, all have a big impact on those outcomes. Have you ever experienced that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Right, yeah, yeah, I often found it when I was coaching Otago versus. We'd often get a lot of Canterbury Academy guys that probably didn't make it into the next step and then they were looking to go elsewhere and they'd often come south and a lot of those guys never kicked on as much as they potentially should have and they sort of struggled with the otago mentality, which was a lot freer, lost, a lot less prescriptive and they just never really meshed with. You know how the game was played down there. It's like there was a mentality required which they didn't have because it's such a cohesive system there to transfer to something which was completely different. I always felt like they were struggling.
Speaker 1:Whenever I think of the Highlanders, I think of the TV show Walk of Shine.
Speaker 2:Well, unfortunately it does get a little bit of that rap, but it's often turned on its head to be the source of motivation, inspiration. The band of men that can that, um yeah, the, the. The band of, uh, men that can't get picked up elsewhere, um, get tight around that and and really use that as their motivation to come together.
Speaker 1:I think, I think that can help. But I think fundamentally like this, structural advantages that the Crusaders have and Islanders have been you know, otago and Southfield right, yeah, that's, that's pretty hard for them and and you know this doesn't mean um, and it's hard for me because I because some of these things that we're talking about are clients and some are clients, and so I kind of got to keep to one side of that argument. But there's definitely ways around it. If you look at what the chiefs have done, they've been working around it because you've got limitations of what you have. So with you, for example, newington doesn't have a lot of borders, right? No, in boarding school would be a massive advantage because they just get more time together. So you have to say, right, this is our disadvantage. How do we work around that disadvantage? How do we get the guys together more? Because you know the Joeys, they're probably not doing their prep. They're probably sitting up talking about how they play. You're passing the ball to each other, right?
Speaker 1:so all that a little bit of an impact.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, there's the structural disadvantages, but you can also work around it and how would you, how would you like address like for coaches listen to this that, uh, not coaching at that elite level, but they're coaching just their club, which varies year to year. What would you say would be some good advice around how to keep cohesion in a team, say at club level or even at school level, where you're not paying people. You can't control that aspect of things. Any ideas?
Speaker 1:So the first thing is and I made this mistake myself is don't promise the world when you interview for the job. Right, if somebody else has been losing before you, there's probably a reason for that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Club's been underperforming and and you go. Well, hang on, I was at this place and I was winning. Therefore, I'm going to come here. A lot of clubs have fallen into that danger. Like most of the recruiting that's done in professional sport, is you take the assistant coaches from the team that's winning? Right, yeah, what the Paramedic Eels did this year. Paramedic Eels are coming currently last right, yeah, Taking the assistant coach from the Storm and made it their coach and he's a great coach, Coach Wallaby as well. You know that's not the issue. It's just how the Paramedic Eels are built right now.
Speaker 1:So don't promise the world. The hard part is, in order to get the job, sometimes you have to promise the world. I'm going to turn this thing around, Yep. The next thing is what happens when it goes wrong, Because, let's say, you have your first game and your numbers are terrible and you beat a team sorry and you lose to a team by 50. You're like, well, maybe this is just where we are right.
Speaker 1:One thing I did with the NRL is I looked at teams who lost by 20 and then what happened next. So if they lost by 20 and they made three changes, they won like 37% of the games. If they made two changes, it was like 41. If they made one change, it was 45. If they made no changes, it was 49% of the games. So the more changes they made to try to make things better of their games, so the more changes they made to try to make things better, the worse they got In the EPL. The more money you spend comparative to last year on the free agency, you know, on trading players, the worse you do the next year, Right? So you know? We understand. 600 million, have you?
Speaker 2:is that the stat, the more that's spent, the worse you do the previous year in the cricket.
Speaker 1:So if teams spend more than 200 million more than last year, on average they'll go down two places.
Speaker 2:So would you suggest that sort of club level. That's a nice one as long as you think you've got the right combinations from the outset. That's a nice one as long as you think you've got the right combinations from the outset. Avoid that feeling, that chopping and changing just stick to trust.
Speaker 1:Let's begin at the first point is you don't find combinations, you build combinations. So whatever combination you have is going to look terrible at the beginning. We always forget how bad championship players were at the start, like I got to tell you the Brumbies, I was awful, couldn't figure out how they wanted to scrummage. They just kept going. It's like you're the guy, so we're just going to keep going. So smaller countries do better in team sports. At the Olympics In the last Olympics, the Netherlands did the best of any country in team sports, which was more than like three or four participants like Fiji's only won at sevens. New Zealand, australia they do well in team sports. You think of the history of New Zealand sports around teams? Right, because when you have a limit of the amount of people you can choose, you keep the same guys. So do you remember the New Zealand team in the 2010 world cup? They actually went undefeated in the football world cup.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, great yeah.
Speaker 1:Finds in their supporting crew Um, rory his name is, and he said uh, otto was pray for a miracle, right yeah, but he had to play so many qualifying games and they only have 20 or 30 professional footballers in New Zealand that that core basically had to be the group they kept through, whereas England, who always underperform in team sports because they have so many feeders and like they lose to Iceland, right, which makes no sense, unless you understand that every time you play badly for England you get dropped.
Speaker 2:Ooh, do you reckon there's another piece of it around?
Speaker 1:the motivation on the psyche behind that, with that hanging over your shoulder, I don't know, but we know that when players come motivational and the psyche behind that, with that hanging over your shoulder. I don't know, but we know that when players come in and they haven't played with their teammates before that generally before badly.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So so I I don't what if I can't measure it? I don't know it, I'm just going off what I can measure. And we just know that big systems only perform well. So you look at England, and we just know that big systems only perform well. So you look at England 03, they had to keep that group together for about eight years. You know they were called Dad's Army, right, they had to be an older team, whereas, let's say, penrith Panthers won the comp with the second youngest team in the comp because they'd all played together through the systems. Right? So we're just simply going on. I'm giving you an overview of the structures. Yeah, whether right, so we just we're just simply going on. I'm giving you an overview of the structures. Yeah, whether people are threatened or non-threatened, we know if they don't have cohesion, they don't win. We know if they do have cohesion, they should win. Don't always do it, they should win.
Speaker 1:So you have to have a minimum amount to win a world cup. There's a number we use which basically everyone's hit to win a world cup, and there's I've said this before there's basically three ways to win a world cup you and there's I've said this before there's basically three ways to win a world cup, you can either keep your team together for a long time as a national team, so that's England 0-3. Yep, you can. You can keep your team together, um, very, very consistently in the two years leading into the tournament. So that's Wallabies 99. It's basically the same team that beat England by 80 in 98, was, I think, 13 of the starting 15, played all the way through to the World Cup final. Or Springboks 19,. Basically been the same team that Razia pulled together, just kept the same group.
Speaker 1:So continuity of last 18 months. Or the third one is getting shared experience from underneath you, so Western Storm. So if you look at the history of the World Cup, 87, auckland, I think it was like 11 or 12 Aucklanders in that team. And basically each World Cup we seem to find grows one more cohesive thing. So in the first one there was one. Second one there was two Australia a lot of guys out of UQ Queensland 95, transvaal, plus other issues going on 99 with Wallabies and Queensland nine Queenslanders. And they had that continuity. The last two years 03 was England, but New Zealand and Australia and South Africa all dropped off dramatically in the two years before the 03 World Cup.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So we went with rugby league players Mitchell dumped Cullen, uh Umaga, right, and the spring box were just terrible. The numbers were just diabolically bad because a lot of us were going overseas at that point, you know, and then, and then I, oh, seven was sharks, bulls, 11 Hurricanes Crusaders, 15, hurricanes Crusaders mix, and then 19 was Western Province Stormers, 23 the same, but also too is Rassi, basically just had the agents just bringing those guys through. So he's got huge amounts of cohesion inside the spring box.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I think that one is particularly for any spectator of the sport can see that one with his African team. Just the sheer consistency of what they're doing. That's an obvious one, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, it's hard to do. You've got to be really thoughtful about it. But also too, is their systems too. Is they have what we don't have in Australia? We have Super Rugby and there's nothing really under that, whereas they have. They have super rugby sorry, urc and they have curry cup. So I think one year the Sharks in their system are playing about 50 to 60 games a year If you include URC. European cup was the Vodacom Cup that third tier, whereas the Australian teams generally are playing at 20. So that's a huge advantage then is the guys playing together all the way through and before they go overseas.
Speaker 2:How do you know? Do you have some stats and data on you know, when it's something glaring that's missing, like do you know? Could you reveal a problem before it appears on the scoreboard?
Speaker 1:We can see, definitely, when clubs are putting themselves in a position, for example, they're over-relying on one starting 15, is if they lose guys, there's nothing behind it, I think. Do you remember the OSEP like, say, change 14 plays and they still beat ireland by 40 because they could do that? Yeah, new zealand can't do that anymore. They don't have the ability to change players and still be cohesive. So there's a whole bunch of numbers in behind that about how they're built. And then you've also got scenarios where, um, you can I'm going to explain this we have this number called a Sinfield Ratio, right, and what it basically says is is your club in a good position or a bad position? So you can have a high cohesive team, right, but it's old. If you have a high cohesive team but it's old, then if those guys are then going to sort of, or you can have a, you could have a team that is philosophically reasonably development focused, but you just keep them together long enough, you'll do pretty well. So, um, I'm trying to think of a good example. Parramatta Eels have a different times had a high cohesion team and it means they could probably win a grand final, but they had to be old to do it. Penrith Panthers, like I said, had a young team that had high cohesion. So that means, because they've got a system that's developing those players together, you could change that team out and then two or three years later they could just keep going because the system is producing cohesion all the time. So what we can find is if you have a team that's reasonably well built and you win 10 games, the next year you could win 12 and you look like you're making progress. But if the sin field ratio is not going up, you're not actually making progress at all. You're just on the same spot. That makes sense. So sometimes, if you're as a club, we might call it reloading, okay, bringing young guys through, but the starting 15 of your club is not actually winning games. You could be making great progress, but it's not going to be seen on the field.
Speaker 1:And other times you can make great. You can make and I'll tell you a quick story. So there's a club in Newcastle, just north of Sydney, and they had a long period of success and they brought a coach in. And I went down to the club but they, they brought a coach in and he brought in a whole bunch of guys from another country, from New Zealand, and the club. And the club was awful at the start of the year, improved their way through and then won the title. But by the late rounds, third grade was forfeiting, right. Then all the players who'd come left and all the players who were coming through left. Two years later the club was gone, right.
Speaker 1:So you were doing things to win so you can win a title and destroy a club at the same time, hmm, so so just because you win doesn't mean you're doing great. Sometimes you're actually paying a price to do that, and I think a lot of the time coaches will come in and say I can win, I'm going to bring in these guys who I've had somewhere else, but what does that actually do for the health of the club in the long term? And can actually do a huge amount of harm. And just because they win, the health of the club in the long term and can actually do a huge amount of harm, right and so. And just because they win, you know they're never you're never able to replicate the level of sponsorship.
Speaker 1:But also, too, the fans know it. They're they're not cheering for their own, they want to cheer for their own guys who they watch play as kids. And you like you, look at Penrith, right, they, they've been selling out for a long time. Yes, and you like you, look at Penrith, right, they they've been selling out for a long time. Yes, they're reloading this year. But there's just such an affinity of the fans to the players because they've seen Cleary since he was 15 years old, right Playing through the juniors. When a club is buying to win, it's like, yeah, we won. But then you'll notice, the minute they start losing again, the fans just completely disappear again. There's a really strong correlation between cohesion and the long-term actual fan engagement and success. So I explained that terribly. But fundamentally, just because you're making progress doesn't mean you're making progress.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And just as I, just if you're not winning doesn't mean you aren't making progress. And the big thing of this is clubs. You know, coaches will say to me but I have to win today, I have to win today, I have to win to keep my job. So it's like, well then we're probably talking to the wrong guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's talk to the board, right? So you, you know if if I say this nicely if Newington expect you to come in and win a title tomorrow, right, it's not going to happen. It takes time, right, it takes time to develop all this. It takes time to get those normative behaviors in Scotland. You've got to work around the border issue, whatever it might be. It's going to take time to have success and oftentimes I think that there's a great tour I don't know if you know this one the 98 tour of Australia by England.
Speaker 1:So in 98, rugby had just become professional and England basically sent a young group of B team to Australia and I think the first game Australia beat them by 78. Right, and everyone was like this is a disaster. But in that team was like Vickery and Wilkinson and some of the young guys who played in 03. The next game they lost to the All Blacks 60 to 10. The next game they lost the All Blacks 40 to 10. The next game after that and this is 98, so that's a good, that's Tosh from Springbox they lost 18 to nil. So you could see their defense was allowing 78 points, 60 points, 40 points, 18 points, and if they just kept going with that group and they did with some of those guys it would have kept on improving. So if you just look at that first game you're like, well, they're crap and they called it the tour from hell. But if you actually look at the underlying nature of it is they were actually improving as they went.
Speaker 2:And I guess that's the balance for any coach, isn't it To have the long-term vision alongside the here and now and being able to be confident enough in yourself and your abilities to be patient around there and actually sell upwards and sideways in every way you can around that? That's, that's probably the art of the coaching aspect is to make sure the whole structure is on board with what you're trying to achieve in the longer term. Right, and I think too.
Speaker 1:It's important to understand what are we up against. So in the lower leagues of football and in rugby in the UK, money works because there is no cohesion. So money works at the lower levels. But then when you come up against Saracens of the world or the North Hamptons of the world, they have money and cohesion. So you have to actually change in your philosophy as you go. So if you came to coach in the A-League in Australia so the Soccer League in Australia there's not a lot of cohesion in that league, right, is that right? Yeah, it's just a high turnover league because the guys are going overseas all the time. The feeder system's all over the place. So you can actually win that tournament with money. But you can't win the AFL, which is the most stable league in the world, with money. So you look at how expansion teams do.
Speaker 1:Teams in the a league have won the league in their third year of existence. In the afl I think gws was the quickest. They were six years in before they really got sort of competitive five, six years in. So it takes longer to bring teams into that environment and there's more participants on the field obviously. So the more stable the league is, the harder it is to win. So winning the World Cup now is harder than it was in 87, 91. Yes, now you can see through Europe, the Spanish, the Portuguese, they're getting their stuff together. It was a bit chilly when they beat USA. They had their own club underneath that, yep. So World Rugby is kind of cottoning onto this. Had their own club underneath that, yep. Yeah, so World Rugby is kind of cottoning onto this. And so, as we go along, more and more teams are actually starting to be built better, like. You'd never think that Georgia and Spain could challenge Australia 20 years ago. Why do you? Our numbers at the World Cup were absolutely catastrophic.
Speaker 2:Is that right?
Speaker 1:They were just off the chart.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was, it was the worst by a long shot. If, going into that World Cup, did you have a heads up, just on your numbers, that this would be a disaster of a tournament for Australia? Yes, yeah, that obvious was it. Isn't it amazing how your number do you do? You often put bets on uh games. Are you allowed to do that with the information you've got?
Speaker 1:it's sort of we work with clubs, so we have to be very careful yeah if you do games, what will tend to happen is the the teams will change inside the game, like the lineups will change inside the game. Yep, right on games. But we're pretty good on seasons and actually had a pretty long set of conversations with people in that area. But if we go to that area we can't sort of work in sports. We've kind of got to decide to do one or the other, yeah, but if it hits the fan, we could probably go down that path.
Speaker 2:Well, what's the accuracy rate Like? If you took, say, the Super Rugby and you went through and analyzed it all and you put all the teams in a row, do you reckon you'd be pretty close to what would end up?
Speaker 1:So it's about so in Super Rugby, I think this year it's like 74%.
Speaker 2:Accuracy.
Speaker 1:But the betting market is also about that right, because the betting market is actually pretty good. It's always just a bit behind. So if we have an advantage over the odds, it's in the first five weeks. So, for example, this year the Raiders were fourth by our ranking but they were last to the bookies. They were 74 to one to win the title and now they're sitting second. Now the market knows the Raiders are good after 10 weeks.
Speaker 1:So in the early rounds, 100%. They were the outsiders in a lot of those games so and so. But in Rugby World Cup, for example, it's accurate like 92% of the time, but like the favorite wins in World Cups, like 90% of the time, but like the favorite wins in world cups, like 90% of the time anyway. Yeah, time where there's like a really big outlier would be, say, japan, south Africa, like the numbers there were pointing to Japan, but even we didn't believe that ourselves. Like surely Springboks got more talent and you play that game again. Springboks probably win that seven times out of eight, but at least they had a. It gave them a shot. Hmm, um, the shot. The other thing too is is there's some evidence we found around teams who underperform when they change jerseys Color of their jersey.
Speaker 2:Makes a difference.
Speaker 1:They underperform on attack by about 40%.
Speaker 2:By a jersey change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you, you, when you, when you're looking I've actually experienced it myself. Not that I'm allowed to pass the ball, but you look, you look for a color right. So when you're looking to offload, so you look at, you, look at um quarter final 07, offload data of the All Blacks went through the toilet. They kept dropping the ball, passing to someone else passing the opposition. They were not offloading accurately and so yeah. So with league and union and AFL, we find that if it's a New Jersey color, they underperform by about 40% on attack, not on defense. Doesn't affect it, because you're looking at the opposition. You're looking at a different color when you defend, when you attack, you're looking at the opposition. You're looking at a different color when you defend.
Speaker 2:When you attack, you're looking to pass to a different color and you need to flinch. That's a fascinating stat, fascinating stat, and what are some of the? Because obviously, you work with some pretty high-profile teams. What are some of the? For your company, gainline Analytics, what's the common thing that those teams want from you in terms of what? What sort of information do you say? This is, this is important. What do they ask for?
Speaker 1:sometimes they want to understand where they are like why aren't we winning? Is the way we thought we should. Sometimes it's about saying how do we become something else? The clubs that we find the hardest is is there's clubs who are winning and they want to stay there and they want to understand why and they and they and they don't have too much hubris. That's probably the hardest part. It's like to get past the fact that they think they're very special yeah the.
Speaker 1:The clubs are right on the bottom. It's really hard to talk to those guys because they're constantly new coaches being fired, brought in all the time, and so we oftentimes we'll sign with a club and then two months later the coach is fired and the new guy comes in and goes oh well, this is about. I've been. I've told them I'm going to win, so no problems. So that's hard for them to hold on. It's the clubs who are in the middle, and the clubs who are in the middle are the hardest to get because they always have to actually feel like they're one signing away from winning a title, or sometimes they have won a title. You know, particularly since in the NRL is like this, three or four really dominant clubs and there's one or two that'll jump up and win a title now and again. But that generally requires a lot of luck and a lot of in-season stability. So no injuries and then a whole bunch of things. Like you know, you've got to be 20% better if you're an out of Sydney team to win the comp, because you've got to be 20 better if you're an out of sydney team to win the comp, because you've got to deal with the you know, referee bias that comes with home teams, things like that. So if you, if it's this kind of sense that if we just make one signing, we can do it and we'll be there. And they generally don't want to have that conversation. So that's the hardest for them in terms of what clubs are looking for Sometimes. It's sometimes they're they're wanting to, they've kind of given up on everything else. Yep, I remember one presentation we had. One of the board members started crying because he's like what have we been doing for 25 years? Um, but generally it's, it's um, yeah, wanting to understand their own performance and wanting to make sure they don't make mistakes, to to then send them off, cause you can.
Speaker 1:What can generally happen is you'll end up tipping yourself off an edge. So an easy example might be um, richmond in the eighties in the AFL, they made a I'm going to get this wrong, but I believe they lost a grand final. Okay, well, they won a grand final and the next year they had a number of their senior players out and they missed the finals, basically by a kick. Okay, their response to that was sack the coach, right. So then they brought in the captain as the coach and he didn't really know how to coach, but the next year they still made the grand final because they still had great cohesion. Now, some of the players didn't like how we treated them, so three of them left and he. The response to that was I'm going to bring in three players one of our competitors, right? So the next year, with all of this cohesion mixed up, they then came last and they go he's not the coach.
Speaker 1:So then they went through like seven coaches the next 11 years and then they brought back the guy they fired in the first place and he's like I can't work with this environment and that took about 20 years to get over. That happened in about 82. They didn't get competitive again until, you know, consistently, realistically, 2018. A long time to what's that? 30 years, 25 years, something like that. So it took a long time to let's have 30 years, 25 years, something like that. So it took a long time to kind of work themselves out of that and that. That you, you make one change, then you underperform, then you make another change and you underperform and then all of a sudden, the cohesion just falls into a heap and it's a long slide back.
Speaker 1:Every every title you won generally has about an eight years history to it of players playing together and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it just keeps coming back to that. Don't panic, it's organic phrase, doesn't it? Which just rings true across the board, not just for coaches but for shareholders, board members. The whole organization has got to be believing in that.
Speaker 1:It's why family companies outstrip listed companies because they're not dealing with the pressure from the fans, which is the shareholders. Because we measure companies in the same way. Yeah, family companies probably help companies. They're just naturally biased towards people they know and people they've worked with before, and they're not having to constantly justify their decisions and people they've worked with before and they're not having to constantly justify their decisions and they're not dealing with short-termism. Short-termism is the enemy of success and growth is the enemy of understanding. So if you're constantly looking to answer the problem now, very difficult to be successful long-term.
Speaker 2:I think that phrase, short-termism is something you've got to get out as a coach. You've got to almost stamp that out from the outset. If you're a new coach and organization, Get that mentality out. How do you interview for a?
Speaker 1:job where it's like, okay, this is going to take a long time and we're not going to have any success. Now, right, you've got to and you won't get the job. Yeah, that's the hard part. And so, hopefully, clubs, clubs. You actually sometimes need a club like, like a great example, the lions. You know, the lions got thrown out of super rugby, yeah, and they came back and three years in they were making finals. Like they just came back so well, because they basically said, right, whatever happened, this is rock bottom, we've got to fix this. And they went back to internal development and then they were playing the Crusaders and in two years they made finals and they're not there anymore. But they, like that tragedy developed some memory in them to say, you know what? This can't be done the same way anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's fascinating, mate. It's actually amazing that your stats Mate, you just have a massive database. Is that how your stats roll? You've got 80,000 algorithms Running around in your system. Is that how you do it?
Speaker 1:Without giving away too much IP. We basically take every game we can ever find and then we need at least 10 years of data On every player. And then we need so we know where everyone's playing at every point, not like schools. But you know, yeah, high level, yeah, my level professional rugby.
Speaker 1:And then, um, because we actually the way this actually started was I was running a database of professional players to see if clubs wanted to understand who was off contract. And then, as I developed the data, I'm like, oh, look, how these clubs are built. And then I just built this algorithm called TWI and then we did TWI across about 40 different leagues and it's like, wow, it seems to be a really high correlation here between internal development success. And then there was other clubs who had low TWI but they were getting players from other places together, for example. So I'm like, okay, that's another part of it. Or they've got really good cohesion, but their spine numbers are bad, so they're not attacking well, whatever it might be. So we just kept on kind of iterating it and iterating it and iterating it and then bringing in different data points.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so it started from just understanding where people had been to then going, okay, let's now do this game by game. And so we just build this database and then we keep on trying to make it more accurate over time and understanding what works, what doesn't work, what's affecting performance, what's not.
Speaker 2:Mate, it's outstanding mate, it's a game changer really, mate. And the more people that get on board with this sort of things, not only will performance get better, but I actually reckon the enjoyment factors around the way you play is better too, right?
Speaker 1:So Myles, I think for me, like one of the things that's actually been quite nice is, particularly when we do corporate work, employees will come to me and say now I understand why I'm finding it so hard. You know, I remember talking to a guy Sam Norton Knight rugby player, had gone to Cardiff and had a really difficult time because then I think in one of his first games cause he said he could play for eight, played mostly fullback at the task, played five, eight, and his words it was. He said it was like playing in quicksand. Every time I tried to fix it I made it worse. Now you could blame yourself for that scenario, but it's like, well, he was playing with a nine and never played for Cardiff. Blame yourself for that scenario, but it's like, well, he was playing with a nine who'd never played for Cardiff. He was a 10 who'd never played for Cardiff. It was absolutely built to fail.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's. It's got nothing to do with his ability, it's all to do with the situation. What are they up against Now? That plays out all the time and some players blame themselves right For playing poorly. Or hopefully the other end of that players can understand. You know what. There's probably certain circumstances as to why I'm the best player in the world, it's because I've been with the same bloke for a long period of time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but that's the other side of it that hopefully people can start to understand is there's a term called attribution bias. We overly attribute performance to the individual, not to the collective of the situation, both in a negative and a positive way. So we say someone plays Orly and was like well, has he actually ever played in this group before? Is he doing something new? He's not lazy like none of the Highlanders. Easy example yeah Right, whereas we overly attribute to that when he was playing at the hurricanes, that he was just a genius. He's a very, very good player. He's developed that over time but also affected by how many games he's played with Conor O'Speth. So it's important to kind of look at everything in context.
Speaker 2:I think it's a lovely takeaway for coaches actually just to be a little bit more open around that. Hey, mate. So look, it's come to that time. It's absolutely flown by mate. That's a good hour and I just want to finish mate just real quickly around. A question I asked at the end is mate, do you have one belief about team performance that you reckon a lot of your contemporaries or peers would disagree with?
Speaker 1:I think that there's a belief within me as a coach I want to outwin your numbers. I want to out-coach the numbers. We can't find anyone yet that can out-coach the numbers. Sometimes you have a good year and you might be plus five games or plus four games. We can't find anyone in world rugby or in sport for that matter that can basically out-coach it as in perform above their station. And if you can think of anyone, please let me know. We'll find them and it helps us improve the algorithm.
Speaker 1:But that's probably the biggest thing is that great coaching is fantastic. It helps you retain people. You know, if you don't coach well, people don't feel like they're gonna get better. They leave. If you don't create a great culture, they leave. But fundamentally, there is things in play that will drive the level of performance that are beyond your control, that you have to be aware of. Or the control is really about the things you do with governance in the off season, the decisions, decisions you make that will set you up for success or not having success. I don't know if I've answered it very well, but I hope so.
Speaker 2:No, man, I think it's great. I love that concept, the things you do with governance, I think that's a massive one. I love it and it's sometimes forgotten. I think not only would people may not appreciate or agree with the importance, but I think they wouldn't even think about the off-season being a governance period.
Speaker 1:So I love it, mate, it's outstanding the rugby league team in Sydney that basically had this guy running the club and ran it like a criminal thiefdom. They won 60% of their games. And then they were so worried about having someone like that before they decided, right, no one's ever going to be on the board for longer than two years and for the next 20 years they won 38% of the games On the board was like we have to win the next two years, otherwise I'm not going to be here. So one question we ask your board members like why are you on the board? Why are you here? Why do you want to be here and would you be prepared for the team to win after you left? And because a lot of the time they just want to have success now so they couldn't explain to their mates and stuff like that. So that's that's hard right. That's hard conversations to have mate.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, mate. I think that's a great question to ask. Are you prepared to have success after you leave here? Yeah, I like that. I like that, uh, benny. Hey, mate, thank you for your time today. It's eye-opening around this cohesion and its relevance to culture, and putting some measurements on it Well, not just some measurements, but actually getting really defined measurements where you can go to the bookies and outdo the bookies is outstanding, mate and mate. The Gainline Analytics company that you run is going really well. Mate and mate, thank you for your time and sharing some of that insight around the measurements of this stuff around culture and cohesion.
Speaker 2:Here is my final summation of a conversation with Ben. Overall, it was amazing to hear his company, gainline Analytics, are putting measurements on teams' cohesion and how that directly relates to on-field success. The big takeaway I got from Ben was this cohesion and culture often builds slowly, so there's patience needed to be shown. Don't panic, it's organic, was his phrase. Especially relevant after you lose games of rugby, where the temptation is, as coaches, is to make changes, to get new players on, to change combinations because it wasn't working. It's trying to find combinations, but Ben ben reinforces you. Don't find combinations, you build them, and you've got to have faith and understand that good things take time.