Ben Darwin: Why coaches get sacked.

Want to know why the “hot coach” from a powerhouse program often struggles at your club? We sit down with Ben Darwin of Gain Line Analytics to unpack the data behind coach hiring, culture, and the compounding power of cohesion. The conversation challenges easy narratives and asks harder questions about why stability, system fit, and patience routinely beat short-term fixes.

We break down a striking contrast from the NRL: assistants leaving the dominant Melbourne Storm win far less elsewhere than the small group of coaches who’ve departed the West Tigers. That flips common wisdom, and it makes sense when you zoom out. Stable teams create deep habits, shared language, and automated trust. Exporting that playbook into a chaotic environment often fails because the receiving club lacks the scaffolding to absorb it. Meanwhile, coaches shaped in turbulence learn to navigate churn and expectation shocks.

From there, we map the real trade-off boards must name: delivery coach or builder coach. One chases immediate wins by importing senior talent and accepts the hidden costs to youth, depth, and future cohesion. The other sets a long horizon, aligns academies to the first team, and lets detail compound across seasons. We show how action bias—doing something to “look active”—can reset hard-won progress and why decisions echo for years. Along the way, we explore surprising performance drags: first-time jersey color changes that dent passing accuracy and attack, venue effects, injuries in the wrong positions, and small tweaks that cause big drops.

This is a practical playbook for smarter reviews and better questions. What are we truly up against? When do we expect to win? Can our players actually play the system we want? What will it cost to change, and who do we lose if we sign one? Move beyond the scoreboard and into the inputs that matter—shared experience, system familiarity, and player-to-player understanding. If you’re ready to replace hiring hype with evidence and build a culture that keeps people long enough to get to the good stuff, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague who needs it, and tell us: what would you change first at your club?

If you can SUBSCRIBE, RATE, and SHARE the show and series, you would be doing your bit to grow this show. Very appreciated. Ben

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Coach Change Myths
• 2:47 The Lure Of The Next Coach
• 6:07 Storm Tree, Tigers Fruit: Surprising Data
• 12:07 Expectations, Patience, And Environment
• 18:32 Stability, Detail, And System Fit
• 24:57 Delivery Coach Vs. Builder Coach
• 31:57 Long Tails: Decisions Echo For Decades
• 39:17 Action Bias, Fans, And Pressure
• 45:57 Jersey Color, Context, And Causality
• 54:27 Reviews That Actually Measure Reality
• 1:01:47 Culture, Strategy, And Cohesion Loops
• 1:09:47 Narratives, Small Changes, Big Drops

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Welcome to Coaching Culture, the podcast about cultivating culture and leadership. I'm Ben Herring. I've been loving this side of the game for bloody ages. Today's guest is Ben Darwin. Ben is back. The guy behind Gain Line Analytics, who we love on the show because he provides the data that defines cohesion. And I reckon it's some of the world's very best stats. Third time on the show, and my message board absolutely lights up after every session we have done with him on the podcast. Today we're going to dive deep into some stats around making good coaches and picking good coaches and why changing coaches has all sorts of stuff associated with that. Ben Darwin, welcome back to the Coaching Culture Podcast. Hello, Ben, and happy new year. Happy New Year, what a pleasure. We're going to rip in to some stuff which is going to light people up today, I reckon, Benny, about some of the stats you've got on changing coaches. It is a topical thing. What have you seen in your work about when clubs decide they're going to change coaches? And what are the some of the stats say on this stuff? And what's your insight and experience with your analytics company?

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

This be this begins in many ways almost anecdotally, which is our experience of having all these conversations with cops. The interesting thing to be a lot of the time is we'll come to a club and they're in they're in some sort of crisis. If they're going well, you know, very you know, 30% of the time they'll come to us for things that go great, and most of the time they come to us for things that go poorly, and they won't understand why. But it's really hard for them to change their thinking on whether they like a coach or don't like a coach as the as the current. And that's a really interesting thing, it seems to be is that they're not it's almost like they're more obsessed about the bloke they could have. So there's someone out there who's doing, let's say Ben Herring's at the uh the Auckland Blues and he's just won a title, and for some reason he's he's off contract, and you're you're super happy club here in Australia A. If they haven't had the year they want, there's just this absolute theoretical magic around you. And all of the focus basically is on how do we get this guy and how are we going to justify getting rid of the other blog, the guy we currently have. And so you see this internationally, you see this with clubs, that they've already started talking to the next person. They've already in that conversation, they don't know any of that person's weaknesses, they know all of the weaknesses of the guy they have. And it's almost like a fate accomplishment. And so the re when the review is done, it's done in that guise. If they're if if they really want that person to go, they'll ask the players, or sometimes they won't ask the players. Right. If it comes down to well, you know, it comes down to wins, it's well, this is a results business. You know, we have to have success, and unfortunately that's the nature of it. We're very happy, we wish this guy all the best, you know. And these guys had exited. Obviously, from our perspective, so much of the time that coach isn't necessarily underperforming at all. And the state of the club is the issue, particularly with some clubs or countries for that matter. And but that's a really difficult long-term solve, and that's not palatable a lot of the time. That's not the conversation we want to have. We want to have a conversation about this person that's kind of fix it. And we sort of call this the yes but conversation. Yes, we want to fix it, but if this guy's available, and if it's not available, I mean we've literally had this conversation, you know, if this guy's not going to be available at other times, then we've really got to probably pick him up because there's not a great opportunity for this to bring this guy in. And then invariably that person is brought in, and then they find that person cannot perform to the same standard they had in the last organization. And the same problems are the same problems that were previously there. And what you buy is not what you get. We know that from a player's perspective, we know that from a coach's perspective. And so that we end up having the same conversation, except this time half the board gets removed from the last decision. And so you're now you're having the same conversation with new people who weren't there at the last conversation and need to be re-you reconnected to the same levels of understanding. So you get these kind of merry-go-rounds. You know, we've had one conversation where we presented to a board and they said, This is great, you should have been here. And we said, We were, but none of you were here. Right? Or you were in the room four years ago who, you know, we just signed up with another club we spoke to, we did some work with 10 years ago, right? And it was like, we have to actually work on this problem. Let's stop trying to fix the problem through, you know, acquisition of talent. So I went and looked at, decided to look at um rugby league. Now, over the past 20, so 1998, so what's that, 27 years? The most successful team in um 27, 28 years uh in in the NRL has been the Melbourne Storm. And there's a really long line of assistant coaches coming from the Melbourne Storm or former head coaches, but mainly obviously because Bellamy's done so you know the stayed for so long, then going to other clubs. And so I wanted to look at how those guys did if they left the storm and they ended up somewhere else, and how the club did in those years. And then when I finished that, I was like, oh, let's do the other end of the scale. So we went and did the West Tigers, and the West Tigers is the opposite of that because they have the worst record in the last uh since they've they've been around since 2000. So understanding too, there's a little bit less games involved here, about 40 games less, but but fundamentally pretty close. So with the storm, there's been 15 coaches that we qualified as ex-head coaches or or and of course Melbourne Storm just weren't successful during goal. I mean, they won the comp in their second year, right? So they've had that level of success. Then 15 guys who are assistant coaches or head coaches have gone on and coached at other places. They they've won 45.79% of their games. Uh 45.79 sounds pretty close to 50%, but it's important to understand that everyone basically sits between 70% and 35%. You don't get clubs only when 20% of their game's total. Like everyone's everyone's really about that middle line. So 45% winning record, 45.79% winning record is not good. So that's storm assistant coaches if they go somewhere else. And in terms of those seasons, there's 79 seasons, and only 32 of them are 50% better. 50% or better. So they have a 40.51% positive win record. Does that make sense? West Tigers, and and and the interesting thing is, first of all, is there's not many people who come from West Tigers who go anywhere else, obviously, because of their lack of success. So coaching careers don't go to die at the Melbourne storm. They go to die when you go somewhere else. So you go, you work at this club. It's interesting, for example, Aaron Bellamy is probably never going to leave his dad side. That would be very smart to do that, right? Because you're just going to stay at the storm. But everyone else, like, okay, this is a stepping stone. And this is not, you know, there's guys who've had success with this, it's hard, right? There's a lot of guys who hasn't gone further, or maybe they've gone one or two clubs and attended, or they've gone being a head coach, then back to an assistant coach. But fundamentally, your career does not die at the storm. You'll get picked up somewhere else. Right? It's like you're it's like being under Belichick during the when the Patriots were there. And then the guys who've left the Patriots in the same way who are assistants who've gone elsewhere also haven't been successful, nor has Belachev actually, for that for that matter. But um, with the West Tigers, very, very few of them ever get picked up. So there's only six of them, right? And so it's it's guys who are assistant coaches who then go somewhere else and end up being a head coach, but generally they have to go somewhere else, then have success, then get picked up. Does that make sense as a head coach? But they on average win 56.69% of their games and 60% of their seasons are positive. So I'm not saying you know, cause and effect is this is really is really interesting, and we'll have our our notions about it, but fundamentally the history of guys who've left West Tigers as coaches do better on average than guys who've left the Melbourne Storm as coaches by a huge margin.

SPEAKER_00: 9:09

It's fascinating, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01: 9:10

Yeah, yeah. Huge margin. And so the question is, is actually Melbourne Strong good at breeding good coaches or bad coaches in this case, which could obviously not be the case. But what's really going on? And I think a lot of it would be about expectations. A lot of it might be around the state of the clubs who are picking them up. A lot of it will be um, you know, in their minds, these guys, I suppose, expectations again, but these guys are going to be very, very good at what they do, therefore they're gonna come to us, therefore they're going to, you know, do very, very well, and then they have some some lack of patience for it. Guys who've been generally head coaches at other places, though, will be afforded a little bit more patience, I would say. So, like the Wayne Bennett at the Dolphins or, you know, Souths or whatever, it's like, well, the problem can't be him, the problem must be us. Whereas when they go and hire a kid, a young guy who's never coached anywhere else and it's not working, they'll very quickly jump to this isn't working, then we're gonna go get someone else.

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 10:08

So if you give give a an average coach three years and he's able to build, he'll probably be able to find success. If you give an experienced coach three years, he'll do the same thing. And if you give a young guy three years, he'll probably do the same thing. But the problem is they never give those young guys some years.

SPEAKER_00: 10:25

It's an it's an interesting stat, mate, that you're saying. So well the obviously there's some there's some data in that. That's on the whole, if you're if you're coming from a great organization, coaches that come out of that as assistant coaches are generally not doing well elsewhere, as good as their stats would suggest from those good clubs. And the guys that are coming out of lower clubs are actually far outseeding results-wise when they leave and go elsewhere. Would you say we've talked previously on an episode about this monopoly effect where you're in those great clubs, there's a whole lot of stuff outside your control, such as, you know, good budgets, good systems, good structures, which you don't sometimes even realize are massively influencing your coaching. And it's not till you go to somewhere else and you are realize I don't have those things that they become really key factors that you go, oh the environment that you were in was actually magnifying your your coaching effect.

SPEAKER_01: 11:25

Yeah, and I could and you can imprint the same conversation on a player. I was doing so well here, I've left. I believed I could go to that next place and do great, and I haven't been able to. Like that's the story I've heard hundreds of times. It's part of the research. In terms of in terms of, yeah, so so the other thing, the other thing too is is that when you've been part of a high highly successful club, there's a whole bunch of normative behaviors that are established to that club because they're not in chaos. So club in chaos is like a mix of the five different head coaches that have been there the last five years, of all the different habits and systems they've had, and you know, your physio's just left and the SNC guy's gone, and you know, or someone's come in and changed something else again, and we've got a new CEO or whatever. So when you've when you've been to that really successful club, there's all these great normative behaviours, and you're like, well, wherever I go, I'm gonna imprint this. So I had this great conversation with Ryan Hoffman. I've probably mentioned this before. It's really hard having this conversation with you because I'm telling I don't remember what I've said, just being the third of the trilogy, excuse me myself. Um, Ryan Hoffman said he was at Melbourne Storm and he went to the Warriors and he was like, and the Warriors are there's a there's a minimum number that you require in order to be um a grand final winning team. And we'll call that 2.5 that number. It won't make much sense, but it needs years and years to get to 2.5. And the Warriors are the only club in the comp outside of the Dolphins that have never got to that number. Everyone else in the league has at some time or enough been stable enough to win the comp. Doesn't mean you will win the comp, but to get that level of stability, and the Warriors have never had that level of stability. And the closest they got there was 2.3 in the year they lost the grand final. I think it was 02 or mod year old. Maybe 2010. I'll have to go back. Anyway. And they even last year were like, oh, they're getting close. No, not quite. They just kind of chop and change a little bit more. But he was saying, I want to go to the Warriors and I want to turn the Warriors into the storm, and I'm gonna take the things that we did there and turn them into hearings here after like six months. Oh, this is not working. I can't do this. I can't, I can't get these guys to do this in the way that I want to. And I had a chat with laser and they say Houston is time at Curbing. He said it was the same thing, even as a player. And so I think sometimes those guys who've been assistants at really good systems think we're just gonna take uh those methods and apply them. And the problem is that often creates a lot of change and chaos. And the problem is that Melbourne Storm have been doing these things, or the Pandemic Guns have been doing these things now for years. And when you've been doing something for years, you can refine it, you adapt it, everyone understands it, and it's also your juniors all learn that way, and it's the first thing they ever learn. What you're asking is a bunch of 27-year-olds to tackle differently and to change to the new system that you've now brought in, and they can't learn and unlearn at the same time, and that causes chaos.

SPEAKER_00: 14:32

Well, I've I've got a little analogy, that I think um that that sort of sums up a little bit that chaos. I just just thinking of it then, mate. Like you're talking about sporting environments, but say you take a family environment for this metaphor, and you talk about a chaotic family life versus stable family life. Like a stable family life for small kids, right? A stable family life is a mum, dad, and the kids, and it's the same mum and dad for 20 years. They have the same job, they're in the same area, it's the same friends, same schools. Your kids get used to a stable life, right? And and it's it's it's easy and it's good. It's the systems, there's routines, they're ingrained. So it's a chaotic um in family life where one of the it's a single family, there's new partners coming in and out, and the kid has to adapt to the new spouse that comes in, the changes six monthly, you change house, you change location, country, job. And and that's chaotic, right? And you like to think if that's equating to like a sports team, w when a child from a chaotic environment goes to another chaotic environment once they're older and left it, they're probably more acclimatised to it, right? Like they kind of go, okay, yeah, this is kind of my family life was that, and they're going from chaotic to chaotic, and they can they're ready for it. Whereas with you, if you're going from a very stable, organized family life and then you go into a chaotic one as in a new team, or you get hit pretty hard. Like, oh, this, you know, there's not two parents here. We don't have a consistent routine, and then it's a real shock to the system. What do you reckon about that analogy, mate? How does that feel?

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

So, first of all, yes, chaos makes it extremely difficult. If you look at the educational outcomes for kids who are army brats, whose dads, you're particularly in the US, have changes like every two years. 100%. It's very, very difficult for those kids to do well on their education. Um, I I liken it to, you know, when we move house, for the first six weeks, in order to get something, I have to move a box to move a box. And then for the next six weeks, I move one box, and by the third, you know, twelfth week, moving house, it doesn't happen quickly, right? You know, by the by the 12th week, you go, okay, now I can go and start finding stuff and putting stuff away. But it's going to take a year before we start, or six months before we start putting up the pictures, or getting to the detail, or putting the knives and forks in the order we want, right? So, in that case, think about that from a player perspective, is like you join a place and at the moment you're just in the big brush strokes. What are the patterns we play? How do we do things here? Getting into the detail is where you actually start to get better as a player, right? And so if you're, or even as a coach, right? If you go, we talked about this about four, if you go catch barbarians, you're just going like, we're gonna go one way then the other, and like, you know, with we you get to no detail whatsoever. It takes a long time to get to detail, right? I I, you know, the limited conversations that I know um, you know, Simon's probably having Eddie Jones probably talking about like when he coached the Waldies in that year, he never got to any level of detail. Well, he did or he was pulling his uh remaining hair out because he was never able to instigate any of that. Because it's like, hey, you know, the feedback would be, hey, I I know what you want to do and I understand this, but let's just let's just understand the basic patterns first, right? Let's come back to simplicity before we go into complexity. I think kind of the challenge is always continuously bouncing is those players themselves never get to detail, right? If you sat down with a Cameron Smith who was at the storm for a very long time with the same guys for a very long time, or an Andrew Johns, the detail of which they can talk about the components of the play, not only with each other, but individually, are incredible. Right? If people are all of a sudden all the time at different places, um, you know, there's some guys that being at 10 clubs, they've bounced around all these different places. Maybe they never get to that point of detail. It's and maybe in some areas but not others. So I think there's, yeah, I I don't know if I've answered your your question specifically very well, but one thing too is is that if you keep going to different places, and it's like Ben, if you had a different girlfriend every week, you never get too attached, right? Whereas Mrs. Harry now, you know, has the the joy of seeing you in your new budgie, as you told me before, but also of getting to know you very well and getting levels of detail. And you're, you know, they always say don't build a house in your first year of marriage. Do the simple stuff, get to the complexity later, get to the difficult stuff that you can cope with as you go. And as you as you build in your relationships, you become more capable of doing more complex things and being able to suffer the challenges that come with it. Whereas new relationships, just not, none of that's really possible. I think I've given you this analogy before is that when people move countries and they're suffering a language failure, they generally can only do quite simplistic jobs, drive a taxi, you know, delivery and stuff like that. They provide a stable enough environment for their kids to be able to go to university and then go further. So we like in that too. If you create stability in the environment of a club, the next generation can then actually build on that. So if you stabilize a club, you don't get success other than in terms of the innate agent. But in terms of skill development, it comes after that. So it means you create a stable environment, stable environment creates stability, stability of systems allow skill acquisition, and skill acquisition drives you to further success.

SPEAKER_00: 19:51

Well, in that regard, Len, are we picking like do teams pick the modern head coach? Are we picking on the wrong things a lot of the time? What else do you got to look for? Because if you're saying to me to me here that if you can't just pick on the success rate of where they've come from because there's factors in that which are outside of the control which aren't relevant here, what what what are some of the behaviors we're looking at at from for a coach outside of the winners?

SPEAKER_01: 20:20

We we have we have data that we use which talks about whether a coach is a development coach or whether it's an electric delivery coach. And I think a lot of the time with the delivery coach, he will he will bring a lot of people with him. What's a what's a delivery coach? Delivery coach is we're gonna win today. I don't care about five years' time from now. Delivery coach is somebody who's there to have success straight away. And oftentimes it comes with the pressures from the Board, we've got a new stadium, you know, we've got some short-term revenue issues, we need to get crowds, we need to get exciting talent here. Um, obviously the ramifications of that decision are not necessarily understood, but it's it's about win today. The fans are sick of rebuilds, the board's sick of rebuilds, and because rebuilds are often not done very well or done in an appropriate way or actually built to be sustainable at all, then um then you you you have this kind of roundabout of constant failure and people not understand why the front success is not coming. To be kind, Newcastle Knights have probably been through that now, now for 21 years or something. Continuous rebuilds and not to having any kind of delivery. And so a delivery coach is basically going to go, okay, he's gonna do this for us now. And the board is generally willing to forego a lot of they don't necessarily understand they're going to do it, but they're willing to forego future success for that success to come immediately. So we're willing to bring in players in terms of implementation of talent, understanding that we might lose quite a few kids in that process. So those delivery coaches will bring people with them for the last organization they've been in, or they'll bring in senior guys and they'll use all sorts of terms like these senior guys are going to be really good for our young players, the ones who are remaining, they'll be a great influence on them, so therefore it's justifiable. And so a huge amount of challenges will then come with that in the fallout from those decisions. So each one thing we understand with clubs is that the board and the um the coach, each decision they make will have fallout for up to 20 years. Right? 20 years? Oh yeah. I'll give you an example. Richmond, I mean, if it takes, if it takes in some comp, so in the AFL, takes minimum five years to put something together to be kind of a successful club. You're almost building on something. So every game that every person has ever played with that club is going to affect how the next game is played.

unknown: 22:45

Right?

SPEAKER_01: 22:46

So you go back to every, you know, take every player you have. Some guys have been around for 10 years, but something's gonna put you in that state. So I think in the early 80s, Richmond, you know, had have had a lot of success. They had a year where their the their previously successful head coach who won grand finals had missed the finals, and they missed because they had some injuries to senior players, and their response was, we're a finals team if you don't make finals. So they sacked the head coach and they brought in their captain as the coach for the next year, and they were still well built. So they made the grand final the next year, but the players were not happy with that person's demeanor. And so some of the senior players left, and his response to that well is if you're gonna leave, I'm gonna acquire a whole bunch of players from the club just as it took them. So they lost guys and they gained guys. The next year they came last and the board goes, okay, we're gonna set form. And then they went through five coaches over the next seven years. You know, they didn't recover, they didn't start to build again until 2013. So it was another 20 or so years, and then they worked towards winning grand final ATO. So that was 82, 84, something like that. We're in chaos for the next 20 years, started to rebuild. LFL is particularly long cycles because it's the most stable league in the world, therefore it takes longest to build clubs. But there's always ramifications, there's always things that have happened, even if it's simply affecting my set of the fans who put more pressure on people, right? Like like the poor Waratars have had one win in the last, you know, since we got a super 10, you know, since 95, one title in. And so the long-suffering fans are like, this is gonna be the year, this is gonna be the year, it's gonna happen. And you know, they may or may not be structurally built to do that. It's very hard for them, it's not really fair on them in many ways. But that pressure is gonna manifest itself in comments to the coach. Is this gonna be the year? Is this gonna be the year we're gonna do it?

SPEAKER_00: 24:57

Do you think we're gonna overcome it?

SPEAKER_01: 24:58

Do you think do you think fans actually have a big influence on not only that, there's a gap between like there's a gap between the fans and the players and the coaches, but even there's a gap between coaches and reality sometimes. We've talked about it, that's the monopoly effect. I am the reason we're winning. Well, that may not be the case.

SPEAKER_02: 25:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:20

Everyone, including I, we are always a little bit off. We always have a bias. I think they did a study once and they found that actually um football commentators are some of the worst people at picking outcomes. Because they have a bias towards certain things. They think they know more, therefore, that bias kind of puts you in a certain direction. We know it's terrible. I was watching something at ABC the other day at being able to predict the future because we think the trends as they are now will continue as they are, but things are always moving and always changing. And so none of us are very, very good at predicting the future, and none of us are very good at understanding causality.

SPEAKER_00: 25:57

And and and winning doesn't help that, does it? If you're coming from a super successful place, sometimes that that lends itself to thinking that that's replicatable everywhere. 100%.

SPEAKER_01: 26:10

It's it's 90% in the setup, it's 90% the construct of the club that you're a part of. And so, like I experienced this literally myself at Suntory. I couldn't get that team to lose no matter how hard I tried. No matter how much I tried to stuff it up accidentally, I couldn't derail them. None of us as coaches could derail them.

SPEAKER_00: 26:34

Because Suntory, for a context, is a hugely successful team with a lot of history that's always done well, has great setup, structure, budget, resources.

SPEAKER_01: 26:45

A whole bunch of guys who've been at Wasada University together. There's this group that have been together for a long time. Eddie left as a coach, some of the coaches stayed. I came in as a coach. The next season we did even better than when Eddie was there. We went undefeated through the entire season, no matter what I did. But we could not stop their success. There is so many examples of a new coach taking over, and that Kim T keeps winning or wins more than they did the year before because they're achieving better setup. One of the great things I liked was um Leicester City when Ranieri came in, because of the way in which he came into the club, he only had eight days before the season started. So he could not make changes to the club, and then away they went, and other clubs, the numbers were fantastic, but they they all kind of they had a lot of change themselves, and so Leicester City kind of walked through a window a little bit. And it was fantastic statistically. Yeah, so uh sometimes the circumstances will mean you can't make change, and either that's built in structurally or it happens through some sort of strange set of accidents. That helps. Like there's a club in the UK, Reading, who whose Chinese owner came in and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on bringing in new players. There was a disaster. They went down a division. The FA actually halted all trading of players and they started winning more games. So it's just about they just stopped them trading. That was great, that helped. We can see it particularly around the size of clubs, the size of clubs at least the fan base, right? If you look at, you know, in the AFL, Carlton and Richmond are huge clubs, huge clubs being very unsuccessful. And, you know, one comment I make quite regularly is Carlton's problem is not a person. The Carlton's problem has been Carlton, right? Carlton's problem is being the big boss that you have to have success. Or previously being the big boss in the cop. Or, you know, you could say this with the Auckland Blooms in New Zealand, right? The pressure's always there to win because we've got a million people wanting this club to do well. Or the Warriors, for that example. This, you know, a couple of million people wanting the Warriors to be successful now, and we're so big we can't fail, but we can. That's the problem. Being big is, you know, whereas, you know, when you're a new club like the Brumbies were at the early stages, there wasn't really a lot of pressure. And you could build over the years. And if you had a bad season like we did in 98, I was like, okay, we just move on, right? Eddie Jones wasn't fired at the end of 98. 99, they came fifth, thousand seconds. 2001, when I single-handly won the grand final, we um that's probably Andrew Walker. You know, we won, he we beat the sharks in the final. So that that the size of the size definitely counts.

SPEAKER_00: 29:23

Right. And and mate, what what sort of things do we need to talk about when we're looking at coaches?

SPEAKER_01: 29:28

Okay, so so I we sort of went to the the delivery coach, and then there's a building coach, right? But there's also the you know, the the guy who, if you give enough time, like an Ange Posticogalu, will build something. Right? So Ange generally comes in and changes the list. That was doubled up for him, his time at Tottenham, with also a large amount of injuries. But he wanted to put something together. He also dramatically changes how the team plays. I mean, could we talk about that with you or whatever, it doesn't matter, right? But changes how the team plays, so that's going to require some underperformance in the short term. And then he wants to probably bring in guys who he thinks can play his way, but then he'll develop it later. So there's all sorts of different guys with different views of how we go about doing this. Then there's the guys who are just like pure development, and sometimes just pure development is suicide. You know, we saw um, you know, examples where if you don't necessarily understand cohesion in the same way in the right way, you'll go, well, I'm gonna take a bunch of kids now and bring those kids in, and then you've got no shared experience and you've got, and you don't have the right systems in place on easily, you have no shared experience, you have no experience, and you get annihilated. We saw that with the Brisbane Broncos a couple of weeks ago. You see that a lot happening in football. It's it's you everything you have to do actually needs to happen probably more slowly. I think probably Shaleks Ferguson when he got to Manu was probably one of the best people at ever doing that, is he stabilised the team, then he started to bring kids through. Right? But he he set systems up in place. If if you can't educate people to play the way you want, right, and you don't have those systems in place, then there is no point having an academy.

SPEAKER_00: 31:12

Is it yeah? So if you're trying to create a academy with no foundation, no base, just you think you need to have one, so you just have one and there's no structure, no pathway on it. Yeah, at one point.

SPEAKER_01: 31:25

If you're talking to a football club that's now in the in the the Premier League, and they were saying we'd use one academy player in like 23 years. None of them are ever good enough, right? So we get them and we we mobile by the places. So it's almost like a there's like a tokenistic notion to it. Or we we're there because it makes people happy. But if you're you're a you know, you need to be bringing people through, you need to get to the players young, you need to put great coaches into that system, the academy needs to be playing the same way that the senior team is. Like this is one of the problems with Welsh Radmi, is because like none of the provinces are attached to whatsoever to the teams, none of the provinces in the tier three are attached to the provinces in the tier two, right? Whereas Canterbury or Tasman are pretty much blowing away the Crusaders play. You have teams 21's program. So all of this, you have to build systems to educate people on the way you want to do things, and you have to have continuity of that, and you can't tie that to a person. If it ties to a coach, you have five different coaches in five years, you have five different ways of playing in five years. And so the academy coach will sit down and goes, right, okay, we're changing again, are we? Like, how can you build to that? I remember someone talking to me about, you know, his time at the um the Crusaders junior system. It's like, it's pretty simple, but God, it's always consistent.

SPEAKER_00: 32:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 32:42

And so simplistically doing things the right way, you could get to the detail when they get to the senior scene, but you want them to arrive knowing exactly what you need to do. It's really interesting hearing about Jordan Maialata when he went to the NFL. You know, you the guys who tried to go across older, it's too hard for them, it's too much to unlearn, like uh Jared Hain. But the the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles on the offensive line was saying, I just loved him so much because I didn't have to fix any of the crap that he'd learnt in college.

SPEAKER_00: 33:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 33:14

And it took a bit longer, but he was like the blank canvas. So I'm like, oh yeah, there we go again. So um because he was young, they could put the time into him. Whereas for Jared, it was too late. It was like, we can't do this in six weeks, right? So they gave Jordan a couple of years, and now I think he's captain of the offensive line, he's one of certain blah blah blah. And you look at um that kid who came across uh Mason Cox, came across from basketball. If they come across young, you can teach them, right? It's real, there's a real interesting case about learning versus unlearning. And it's like the less they have to unlearn, the easier it is. And it's not even so much about age sometimes, it's just about like what's that done. The um but yeah, building building an education system as to how we play and to be able to institute that is really important so you can then when they come to you, it it's gonna bear fruits, right? Not only do they have shared experience, but they also have institutional knowledge. But you've got to stop changing the institutional knowledge, right? You know, I I remember going to Suntory and saying, okay, well, I'm gonna use the line out system I used of the Western Force. And I nearly destroyed the tank. I should have just stuck with what they had, but I didn't understand it, and I thought mine was better, which was stupid. But even if it was better, it doesn't matter because it took so long to adapt to that system that we nearly, you know, I think in one of the files, we won one of like 12 lineouts or something. We almost almost stuffed it up, right?

SPEAKER_00: 34:42

Because it came under pressure and this completely soul heart. When you review that sort of thing yourself, like, and and and let's talk a little bit bigger about a bigger scale review of how you went. When boards and things are reviewing a coach's performance, say they're not happy. You talked earlier about there's a little bit of perhaps disgruntlement and there's a little bit of bias in their thinking around that coach. What sort of stuff should a review consist of? What's in a review? What should you be looking at? And what are actually the factors that kind of you should just be unbiased towards when you're doing that?

SPEAKER_01: 35:14

I think like obviously there's the only company in the world that can do a good review, and everyone else is terrible at it, right? But uh so but what I would say is like whenever you're whenever you're looking at performance, the first thing you need to think about is what are we up against? Okay, what is the context of what we exist in? The competition. So here's an example in the NRL. To win the NRL in 1999 or 2000 was easier than it is now. It's much harder now. The reason for that is because between 1995 and 2002, when I get this right, there were 23 different changes to teams. Teams either merged, demerged, ended, started, so the whole league was in chaos. And even for the clubs that had not changed, they were suffering huge levels of change because the new clubs that kept being started up were eating the old clubs. We saw this particularly in Netball and Australia. They had a five-team, five teams in Australia and five teams in New Zealand. They ended that complex starting a new, three new teams in Australia, and the three new teams went and ate all of the five old teams. So everyone was unstable. So therefore, in an unstable environment, it's easier just to win through talent because there isn't any codesia. If you're in the AFL, you absolutely have to look at it in context of okay, how we're built, how we put together, how does that compare to everyone else? How are they constructed? The other thing, too, is to understand the best team doesn't always win the comp. In fact, most of the time it doesn't, I'd say. Maybe 15%. How do you define the best team? The best team, so if you have if you have a great year and you come sixth, and let's say your league means that all the finals are held in your hometown because of the AFL sometimes. And or your home state, and let's say you're Richmond and Geelong have to come to Melbourne to play a home game, but you're actually two minutes down the road. We know that crowds affect performance, they affect the referees. You don't have to be, you don't have to be better to beat them, you just have to be close to them to beat them. You win that game, you play West Coast Eagles in the grand final, who wouldn't have to be 20% better than you because the grand final is always held in Melbourne. Richmond win the comp, but they're the third best team in that scenario. They didn't do anything right or wrong. Or you have injuries. We saw in this year's NRL grand final, the storm team was so much better set up than the Broncos, and they lost one of their centers, and the numbers just went bang. And then you saw Broncos come back into the game when they happen. So we've even, you know, we've talked about colour of jersey can affect performance. Sometimes um if you colour of jersey, what's the stat on that one? So we found that teens were underperforming on attack by 40% if you can't change the colour of the jersey for the first time.

SPEAKER_00: 38:08

40% difference if you wore your away stripper.

SPEAKER_01: 38:11

Have we talked about this? I don't believe so. Okay, so so there were these games that weren't making sense to us in terms of like a highly cohesive team was losing to a low cohesion team. I'll offer you an example. 2007, New Zealand, all blacks against France in the quarter final. Yes. Right. Um and we were like, oh, that's really interesting. And and we couldn't figure out why these teams weren't winning, because the numbers were good. Sometimes injury, sometimes cards. But one of the things we noticed, and I experienced it myself, was like my club for Centenary changed its jersey, and I'm like, this doesn't feel right. And so we found that these teams were um their offload was dropping away, they weren't passing accurately, and so they were scoring less points. Defence was staying the same, but they weren't passing accurately. And uh, and so I asked people who were allowed to pass the ball, like Stulley Mortwork and Danny Gadiras, and they said, Yeah, what happens is you you turn and you're looking for a colour and you flinch. Because you just like that, so bang. Because you look at the opposition, it's like that's a different colour. Whereas you turn to look at the colour, and like there's these great footage we use, like one of guys in football whose team is the same as the um on the sideline, so they pass it to the steward on the sideline. Uh, I'm gonna get this wrong. There was a game Broncos Storm, where one of the storm players who used to play the Broncos passed it to a Broncos player because he was calling for it. And he looked and went, yes, he would just pass it and screwed up the other end. Xavier Coates, I think it was. Anyway, so but but yeah, so we just found that there was like all of these games, and even in the EPL in football, think guys, uh teams that this year in the EPL, I think on average you score what, 2.2 goals per game, something like that. And you know, I don't want to get this number wrong, so I'll just say it's about that. But teams, I think, are scoring 1.2 goals per game at the moment in the EPL when they're wearing it in New Jersey for the first time. I think um uh Crystal Palace lost to Backlesfield the other day in a in the FA Cup because they're wearing this yellow jersey they've never won before. Uh at least in a year or so. So just this, yeah, so it's things like that can affect performance, right? And I love the fact it's it's and and so what was happening was on average a team will win 21-19, the home team will 21-19 any game that the inner regular league, give or take, and they were only scoring 14 points, but they're still only allowing 19 points. Look at uh if you look at the All Blacks with with white jerseys, they're not quite the same. Not quite the same, no. Yeah. And so um South Africa against Ireland, last World Cup or that weird stripy thing. Like it does happen if you've really got with turn they'll change the jersey colour and they'll come up against Namibia, they'll still win. But um I think it's Definitely the last World Cup because of this colour blindness issue, the data was about the same. It's not changing, it's not always changing the outcome. Sometimes just changing how many points you score. When you went against Georgia when they wore that black jersey, isn't it? 11 or anything under that. We really did not score a lot of points. So it just seems that and and people say, well, something's off, but they don't quite know it. Or a lot of people say, well, Jersey's, you know, check Jersey change all this stuff. But it always seems to be the first time. And if you get used to it, I know the rebels uh in the conversation with them, they use their um uh they use their training jersey as their starting jersey, which might help to get used to it. So so the answer is there's lots of different things that it can affect performance. Yes. And you know, sometimes you'll just have a really bad day, and the reaction to that, I think you saw this Adelaide Crozy AFL, maybe not took too much about AFL, but like they did a review based off losing the grand final and you know, really wanted to change a whole bunch of different things culturally, and then up going and doing that camp where players basically felt like they were being assaulted, like it went really you can look it up in the paper, but it went really, really pear-shaped off the back of the bat. And one of the players just said, guys, we just had a bad day. Stop worrying about it. Like we had a bad day in the grand final, let's just move on. Let's not try to fix this through there's something wrong with us. So I think the really good clubs just understand we're gonna lose games, we're gonna win games, there's there's good luck and bad luck, we just move through it. The bad ones are this kind of neat, we have to do a review, we have to fix this, we have to make changes. This is action bias. We have to take action. We have to look like we're doing something here. Whereas sometimes just doing nothing is fantastically successful. I'm gonna, I might be wrong about this. I think there was a study that looked at investing, that looked at people who were investing, and they're like they're looking at this online platform people using to invest. And the people who were the most successful at it were people who died, right? Because they didn't touch anything. Because they didn't touch anything, or the people who lost their logging.

SPEAKER_00: 42:45

Well, as another analogy.

SPEAKER_01: 42:47

I love data like that.

SPEAKER_00: 42:48

I think that's good. Another analogy going back to that family one is when you're going through as a parent um sort of those tricky years around puberty and teenage children and all that stuff. If you try to react to everything that happens, you're gonna be chasing your tail because some of the stuff that happens is just you know a biological sort of blowout that your your son or daughter has, and it's just what it is. And the more you dive into trying to get to the bottom of it and what it means and the reaction to it, you've just waste a whole lot of time because it's just puberty, and sometimes they blow out because they're going through the stage of life. And if you just if you just go, okay, it's just puberty, this is what they're going through, sure enough, in a few months' time, six months, whatever, yeah's time, it wasn't even an issue. And it's something you laugh about because, oh, this is the way I behaved. And you only have to think back to yourself when you think, geez, I did some funny things when I was going through that stage. But I'm glad mum and dad didn't do anything, they just let me roll and work through that stuff, and it was no issue. Had they have said, this is no good, you're off to military camp to discipline for this behaviour because X, Y, and Z, you'd be a different sort of person, wouldn't you? That would be the bit which affects you and probably in a in a negative way.

SPEAKER_01: 43:56

Yes. Yeah, and and the chaos that that causes. So there's a there's a there's a turner phrase called pound the rock. Have you heard that before? No. Okay, so it's um it's used by the San Antonio Spurs, but he used by Brisbane Lions. It's kind of kind of known, it's a it's a parable. I'm gonna get this. So a guy called Jacob Reese, who was a who was a social reformer, and I think what he was trying to do is change people's rights to vote. And I think he did it through like mailing people, but he knew like he had to do millions and millions of drop-offs in order to do this. But what it basically said was, he said, if you if you're a stonemason and you want to break a rock in half, the only way to do it is you have to hit the same spot a thousand times. But you don't know, you see no change in the first 999, but on the thousandth, it splits in half. So if if you keep changing the angle, the thing's just never going to change. But the only reason it breaks is because of the 999 times you've done it prior. So all of those hits contribute towards something, but sometimes you will not see a change. So there's so many things you can can adjust to that. And and you know, one of the biggest things I'm really interested in is is terms of phrase. Kind of like might be the next topic we we go to in a second, but um, yeah, help me with these terms of phrase. So one of them is if you keep changing, you know, um, if you keep what is it? People's people attributed to Einstein, which is the meaning of insanity. Yeah, the meaning of insanity is keep doing the same thing expecting different results, right? It's also called practice.

unknown: 45:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 45:28

And also it's important to understand Einstein never actually said it, but people attributed to Einstein. Um, but I'll get I want to get to the other one in a second. But the point I the point we were talking about, and which I've sort of never never finished, I'm totally so apologize, is you're asking me about what sort of things do we need to think about. Okay. So the first thing is the context of what we're in, right? The context of the cop of what we're up against. The next part is how long is that competition? Like when are we expecting success? So in the MBA, what is you have like 82 games or something? Or you know, the MLB, you have 160 games. So there's a context there of we have time to put together a team from scratch that can win this thing and we're gonna improve as we go. If you're in a World Cup, it's too late for all of that, right? So therefore, how you put together a team, you know, together for a World Cup. I don't think Gatland didn't know who to pick for Wales, so he just picked the Ospreys team and he won the six nations. Like that's a way to do it, right? But the one can't do that. So there's a whole bunch of ways and means in which you can have success, but in terms of the when, right? The when is almost the most important question to us for board. When do we want to win? When do we want to have success? When are you gonna lose patience? Because that can drive everything else, okay? If I said to you, Ben, I need you to put on 20 kilos in three weeks, right? That's different to six months. Six months means you could go to the gym, you could build it through muscle. Three weeks is I'm gonna have to drink donuts. So all these different components of of the when is gonna affect how you go about doing it. The when is gonna make you think, okay, I need to import town or I need to import or you built teams. Or um, you know, if the board said to you, God forbid, we're not even interested in winning in the next five years. There's no relegation here. That's the thing that always gets me. It's not really an answer, take your time, right? Um, how do we do this? How do we do this? How do we build ourselves to be unbeatable in 10 years' time? That's a great question to ask. Right? Like that's the that's the dream question. Because then you've got permission to lose to a certain extent. And I and one thing I do see quite a lot of is boards going, yes, we want to rebuild, but when the losses start to come, and maybe they've gone a little bit too hard on the the kids scenario or a little bit too hard on gutting the base, it's like sometimes you need to warn them, they're gonna get embarrassed by losses. Um, but sometimes they're not ready for that embarrassment. Well, yeah, yeah, no problems. But if they've always won nine games a season, they're not sure what two feels like. And so two feels a lot worse than they think it's going to, and they're gonna be bullied by their mates and bar and stuff for their particular board members, like, and then people are gonna start calling them and say this guy's shit. This it becomes a yes but conversation. Yes, he's a good coach, but we just didn't sense the players are getting us down. Well, they're losing every game. What do you think's gonna happen? So um the context, the when the how do I want to play as a coach? With the players I have, can they play the way I want? If I can't, how long is it gonna take to get some change? How long have they been doing that other way? If I'm then gonna try to get change out of them, or if I don't think I can get change out of them, I'm gonna have to import that talent. What's the fallout gonna be from the importation of that talent? Right? Who am I gonna lose? No one ever asks who am I gonna lose. We talk about sign one, lose three. You sign a player, the next guy coming through gets frustrated, he goes, and then next, you know, much younger kid who's kind of like a dream was following a player, you know, he's like, Well, if they're gonna do this, I'll be able to go to right. Yeah. Um, and then and then that guy who you brought in, he goes because he's only been there for two years, and then and then there's no like where are the kids? And the kids haven't come through and say you have to buy again.

unknown: 49:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 49:23

So that's how these things have these kinds. Um uh kid system ramifications. And another question on the when, for example, is like, you know, board tenure is really important.

SPEAKER_00: 49:33

I remember you're talking about this, yeah. Like if you're only on a short-term board, you're short-term thinking, right? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 49:40

And so um all of all of those components haven't even gotten to you as sort of onto the field yet. These are all just basically sort of general bigger picture. In terms of the context, oh, the other thing of context feeling is when you dig it onto the field, like what are teams not only, what are we up against, but what are teams putting against us? So the Sun Wolves never faced a really good team at any point. People always couldn't their B team against them, so we never really knew how bad they could be. You know, a good example is uh the you know putting a bad team against, you know, is is the Warrior Tyrs made six changes, and I think the Crusaders put 90 on them in 96. I might have that number wrong. Remember that? I remember that game. Yeah, I was at the Brumbies, we enjoyed that. And the poor Warriors, we played the next week, put 50 on them because like they had to be changed back again. It just completely threw their season off. It was for all the right reasons, right? And sometimes you can do it. I think the uh Bulls did it against the Stormers in a preliminary final, um, and then won the final the next week or won the semi-final, but like it just making those changes and understanding that things can go category completely wrong, and then what the response is to that. The response that so many clubs have is so negative and such big a change, it's not necessarily needed. And I think that we all get a lot of the things we learn in life, we actually find with board members, even if they've played sport, they don't necessarily apply to their time at being on a board, which is, you know, this is going to require some patience. It's almost like they become as reactive because when you're a board member, you're not really judged anywhere near as much as you are at sport. You have a might have a shareholder meeting once a year, but a rugby game or a football game is like having a shareholder meeting in front of a crowd that's throwing stuff at you, screaming at you every week. And so we we when there is reaction, we react ourselves. We think that reaction requires further reaction, what actually requires is patrons.

unknown: 51:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 51:49

That makes sense. So we don't do that. We kind of just go, no, no, we've gotta we've gotta do something here. We've got to do something here to fix it. Yeah, mate. I've got a question. I've got a question for you. So one of the things is um culture eats strategy for breakfast.

SPEAKER_00: 52:07

Yes, I've heard the phrase. Yeah, okay. Do we know who said it? That would be someone like, is it Drucker? Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 52:17

Um it's it's been repeated to me oftentimes. I remember having a meeting with a guy at the Big Four account, and he's like, I understand what you're saying, but doesn't culture each strategy for breakfast? And I was and I go, yeah, okay, well, you know, maybe it does. But oftentimes one of the things we talk about is what's the driver of culture? Like what are the things that drive it? So turnover will change your culture, or you know, a small environment will make it communication more easy, things like that. But anyway, uh so I actually was interested in this and I actually went and looked at at um that statement. And so I actually someone sent me this this document that actually had uh genetic strategy for breakfast and it was from the Drucker Institute. So I contacted the Drucker Institute and um and I and I contacted the guy because there's actually a there's actually a a uh um a group of people that actually think Drucker never said it. What he did say was culture is very hard to shift, behaviors are hard to move. So I contacted the guy and I said, Do you know that Drucker never said this? And he goes, Oh, I just googled it, I didn't I didn't actually research it. This guy's a university professor.

SPEAKER_00: 53:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 53:24

So we ended up on this email chain of about 20 different professors at this university. And at one point this guy steps in and goes, Sorry guys, he never said it. This guy he said this, and that was it. So Drucker never said culture, historians, for boxes. But yet it's something we talk about all the time, right? I'm not saying it's not important. It's just on that part, he never actually said that statement. But that doesn't mean it isn't true, okay? But here's my question for you is how do we know it is?

SPEAKER_00: 53:52

Well, yeah, it's well, it it's it's a little bit more subjective. Even that statement is just a subjective throw-it-out there thing, isn't it? Yeah. You don't know, well, this is just just before we get to that one, I I think it's important that some of these rules and statements that get thrown out like that, you just have that little bit of time to actually critique it. There's there's another rule which just along this methodology of thinking around there's one, the 58387 rule, which I I've I've been in conferences where they've talked about body language, and they talk about it like I've been in clinics where I said, where someone stands up and goes, What do you think is the most important when you're speaking? Is it your body language, your tone, or or the words? Like, without question for me, it's the actual words, but they always come back when those things is according to the science, it's 55% of when you're speaking, the most important thing is your body language, then 38% your tone of voice, and 7% the actual words. And I've always gone, that's rubbish. If you're up there speaking and you you think it's not the words, if you think your body language is more important than the words, then like no. And so I went back and looked at the actual s the research on which that came from. And it was the research was based on just doing one word and and the like like the word like maybe and like whether you did this with it. Yeah. And then the whole like people now quote that as if that is the most important thing when you're getting up on stage is the body language according to the stat. It's not the words. Could I bring more with you?

SPEAKER_01: 55:25

And and someone has spoken now hundreds of times, right? And we're always bringing new stuff to the presentations. I try to change it every couple of weeks or at least every couple of months, right? And whenever I get to a slide that's new, I change my demeanor because I'm not sure. Right? So if I've done a slide 700 times, there's one we use uh to say I can explain this to you in three minutes. I'm feeling confident now, even thinking about it. But then when I'm thinking about the slide I tried the other day about Edinburgh Trans or whatever it might be, I'm like, oh what am I supposed to do? Okay, up is down. And so like eye change, so your your physical um, your body will represent how you feel. Okay. You see that on the field. If if guys, don't they say you go guys don't have any card in their jerseys? Well, it's because they're not sure on the play you're trying to run, because they've only got it twice and with three different people, they're not sure about the person next to them. So they're not going to be looking proud because ambiguity. Wait, there's a great quote. The chief talks about, um, psychologist talks about clarity is confidence. Clarity is confidence. If I'm sure, I know, you can see it. And and um one of the other grand finals for Adelaide, and they lost this grand final, and and um during an actual length, and they were doing the power stance. So the power stance is you have your legs a little bit wider, and that represents somebody who's confident. But their idea is like, well, if I just show I'm confident, then I'll be confident. Don't what doesn't work that way? And it's like they were nervously standing there with their legs really wide apart to do the power stance and then lost by like 50, right? Um the guy I was talking to who was involved in that game said to the players before the game to the opposition, guys, if they have to do that, they have massive problems. Like if they got to do stuff like that, that's a you know, very different scenario, right? So I think that, yeah, 100%. So you these things become law, but it's really important to get to the heart of that causality. What caused you to feel confident? I feel very clear about what I'm doing, therefore I'm gonna physically show that. It's that is going to be physically represented because there's a very small level of differentiation between the words. Some people are good speakers, some people are great speakers, but but you'll you will physically manifest, I don't like that word, so your ph your body will represent how you feel, right? And so maybe there is no causality in that, but there is correlation, there's statistical correlation. You know, we've talked previously about the the hugging study, you know, the NBA, where they, if you people were finding that people are hugging each other were winning more often, therefore they tried to get people to hug each other more often. What was actually happening is the teams have been together for a long time, hugged each other because they knew each other.

SPEAKER_00: 58:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 58:09

Yeah. So, so, so every one of the things I've kind of like done in this work is found we got stuff really, really wrong. Okay. So we started off with this number called TWI, which was basically like is what is a representation of the philosophy of the club, bio build. Okay. Now, the most cohesive team we've ever found in football, in soccer, is a Real Madrid team that won the Champions League. I don't want to get the year wrong, I'll get it wrong, but it was like this was like because we have every single game in football for the last 30 years, except something I'd begin in. And the most, the best built team was Real Madrid. Now, Real Madrid's going to the game is Galacticos. They don't develop, they buy. But they were able to buy and hold that talent together to build a very, very well-built Tony Civ team. Okay. Sometimes if you're a continuous development club, you end up with just kids all the time. You've got to be able to balance it off with keeping talent together. So every time we've gone, okay, so just because you're a development club doesn't mean you'll win, and just because you do develop doesn't mean you'll do well. And just because teams do well doesn't mean they are developments. So then we started looking at, let's just go look at the 9-10 combination as an example. Let's look at that first. Or let's look at, you know, um, you know, if you do acquire players, where do they come from, how long are they together? And so we've we've started to temper what we're doing and say, okay, what is the actual truth of performance? And then that for me sort of become the motto, like what's the truth of performance? No matter what it is, what do we actually know, what can we focus on? And if it is, you know, it's okay, you can win, you can win and hate each other, then that's the deal, right? Or if you can win without, can you win without a coach? Harlequins did it a couple of years ago. That doesn't mean coaches aren't important, but it can happen. Therefore, what was it about that that made that team successful? I think it was probably the players were empowered to do stuff themselves. Okay, so therefore that can be possible. How much as coaches can we give to other people? So I think it's really the thing for me is what I'm trying to focus on now is not I'm right, but how do we how do we understand as best we can what actually is important? Okay, and so what I always begin with is if somebody says something, can we prove it? And even if you can't, that doesn't mean it isn't right, right? Like culture is really important, absolutely it's a normative behaviors of everybody, but what do we actually know about that statement is true, and and how can we learn from it, and what can we cruise, and and how can we use that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:47

You just come back to that statement that started this conversation, culture eat strategy for breakfast. I think whilst it sounds like it's a nice catchy little phrase, when you actually stop and think about your strategy, if if that's your breakfast, that's equally as important as eating it. Like if you don't have it, you go you go hungry, right? Like you actually break it down.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:13

I am what I would call a hardline cohesion, you know, like hardline radical, sort of like cohesion is everything. And he's like, you can't be that way. You can't be that way. And I was like, yeah, uh, you're right. And then we talked about like how I'm wrong. And he's like, okay, maybe it's circular. Okay. If you have a great culture, your people will stay. If they stay, you'll build cohesion. If you build cohesion, you will win, but you also develop normative behaviors, which means you have a stronger culture. That makes more sense. You can have, if you can kick teams together using other means, right, that may also create cohesion, which also means you could be successful. If you but if you have a great culture and you don't have cohesion, then it's a bunch of really nice people who don't know each other. But also two is it's very hard to have a good culture without stability, because without stability you can't develop normative behaviors. There's a bunch of people thrown together. So um, but but you know, Nick would even say to me, Well, then if you treated me terribly, I would leave. Right? And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right, right? So therefore, my behavior is important. Okay. So I think that it's really, really none of these, none of these things sit on their own. Everything in an organization is connected to each other. And as they're connected, then we can start to build a real understanding about what their impact is.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:42

Yeah, I I couldn't agree more, mate. I I reckon it's the everything feeds on itself. Like if you don't have one thing, it's gonna affect the next thing.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:49

Yes. But what is but what is like what is two, culture doesn't eat strategy for breakfast, but strategy doesn't eat culture for breakfast. So now I'm gonna get my metaphors wrong. But they they will affect each other, and you can develop strategies to improve your cohesion, you can improve you can develop strategies to improve your culture, but also two is an easy example I always give. If you live in a small town, you'll behave a certain way, you live in a big town, you'll behave a certain way. That's just geography affecting it. Now, being in a small town or a big town is a strategy. So, what are the strategies we can develop to make our culture better or that will drive our culture? Or how do you pay people is really important. The KPIs you set for people is really important. That will also affect your culture. If you said to your players, we're not going to pay you anything, but we're gonna pay you a thousand dollars every time you score a try, watch what happens with the seasons. Right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:48

There's no passing, mate. There's tucking, there's dummy and go.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:52

No matter how good those guys are, if they're really, really great people, they will tend to do certain things in certain situations because their wife needs more money because they did have kid, right? Like all those sort of things. Um that's what about good people, just these certain situations will create poor behaviours. One of the studies I've actually gone and done is like um terrible people who've done amazing things. Like Hitler banned smoking, for example, just because he's an awful person doesn't mean he wasn't sensible in some areas, right? So um, you know, I think I think one of your biggest problems that we do tend to have is people are either good or bad. So we all get away.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:31

And that and that comes back to this original, the start of this conversation, mate, when we're talking about why teams get rid of coaches, isn't it? It's that they're not good or bad, but that's the perception sometimes that the wider public have on coaches, they're good or bad.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:43

Yeah, it's funny because we we um, you know, I think I think probably one of the coaches that people are the most struggle with is Gatlin. Because he's had such huge success in some places and such huge theoretical failure in other places, like when he came back to the Chiefs or recently with Wales. When we look at the data, we don't actually see any of that. We actually see him just performing exactly as he should. Or close very close to how he should.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:10

With with the squad and the cohesion of the squads that he's dealing with.

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:14

Yeah. When it's been good, he's been great. When it's been bad, it hasn't been great. And particularly if he comes into a system and tries to change something. So when you came back to the Chiefs, probably tried to choose a couple of systems, team would have been underperforming because they're trying to adjust to that system change. So cohesion is not just you know interpersonal understanding, it's also system understanding. So so I think there's so much a narrative around coaches. Wayne Bennett's gone from being super coach to dinosaur like five times. Right? What's the truth of it? He's a he's a pretty good coach, you know, over time. Like um, you know, it's gonna be interesting to see the narrative. You know, let's put aside um the good and the bad of that. Let's you see the the narrative on razor well, right? I think we I think we could comfortable say that. Like people are now going, okay, well, the because then people will start to reflect on some of the Crusaders, right? And at Canterbury, and now the All Blacks. And so, so there is this, and this is the problem too with the boards, is like there are times when a coach is just like really hot, and they and you know, that's you know, there was a time when Checker had to be the guy we brought back. There was a time when it was Ewan Mackenzie, there was a time when it was Eddie Jones, there was a time when it was when it was Eddie Jones again, that he they had to be the person. But people generally can't fix systems. And so we see this all the time. They just fall in love with this person, they are gonna be. And then at the same time, like, you know, Fagan, who's the coach of the Brisbane Lions, no one saw him being the next guy to win two grand finals in a row. The oldest coach in the league, Brisbane did that, that numbers started to become good, I will add that. But it didn't make, it wouldn't have made any sense to Woody if you'd said that that guy if his assistant page is become a hugely successful coach. So it's it's such a it's such a guessing game. But what really frustrates me is all of a sudden guys become poisoned, become too good in people's eyes, and other guys become poisoned in people's eyes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:16

And that shifts, doesn't it? That that that public sentiment just moves.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:19

It's shifted in 48 hours. It's just shifts in the last 48 hours with Razor. Don't you think? Like, you know, people weren't thinking it was too bad that how they went towards the back end of last year. Now it's now the sentiment of it will change. And I've seen that sentiment change around Gallon. I saw it change in 24 hours when they beat Australia in the World Cup, and everyone's like, oh, Gallon is a genius. It's like, no, Australia just had never played 10-12 together. To be to be a little bit biased on that, but like, because it didn't, they weren't really, you know, they weren't able to go further in that World Cup. They just annihilated the show that day. And I think one of the problems with our research, not with our research, I think one of the problems with cohesion is small amounts of change can actually create dramatic amounts of change. So one or two changes to a team and it can drop by like 40% if those changes are the wrong place. So people go, hang on, they've only changed two or three players. I remember Liverpool talking about this, they changed one midfielder, it was like the whole system kind of derailed with Liverpool this year, this early star early start of the year, and what it was doing in terms of how it was affecting Salah and his ability to play, because he wasn't playing with the same guy anymore. And so the narrative will change based on a small amount, and all of a sudden this player is terrible or this coach is terrible or this club is terrible, and it's not necessarily understood in the right way. And so that's one thing we're trying to put some context on, which is you know, like like uh Brazil, Germany beat 14. You know, they they lost one guy off the back of that. Brazil made five changes, Germany beat them seven-one, and all of a sudden it's a disaster. It was like, just don't change your back five, they change too much of it, position changes, and it was it was disastrous. None of those players are bad fighters or bad coach.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:07

Benny, I've got one more question for you uh for this awesome session, mate. Is you've discussed about how just because you've got a good win-loss record as a coach, it doesn't always translate if you move away and try to coach a different team. Those data, those spreadsheets on win losses aren't always the big driver of whether you're going to be successful. But what is important, mate, what what is the data collection point and spreadsheets that we need to be looking at as coaches uh going forward and defining what a successful coach and team looks like?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:44

There's there's this notion of you know, data is amazing, but data can send you off in really, really weird directions that don't have a hard-end causality, which is really, really important. And I think that if we if we do that, if you are focusing on the spreadsheets, then you're focusing on what you can measure, and we are not really anywhere near yet understanding what we can measure. So your focus has to be off the spreadsheets and finding what we can put onto them. Does that make sense? We need to focus not on what's already there, not on the data we have, but what is the data we don't have that best represents our experience of playing because we don't really understand that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:22

We don't really understand coaching. What are we looking at at the moment on the on the dots?

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:27

So what we what we are looking at, what we're focusing on is how well do players understand each other? That's not on a page right now. We're trying to put that on the page. How can a coach affect, I don't know, the the level of understanding that players have that's not yet on a piece of paper. How much has a player used this particular system of doing something before that's not on a piece of paper? So what I'm saying is anything we've already collected, anything that is on the page right now, is not necessarily working for particularly spectacularly well in terms of trying to get to the heart of how we make teams better. Let's try to look off the page what are the things we don't know yet, what are the things we haven't measured yet? Let's try to understand those as best we can.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:07

And I love what you do. What an absolute pleasure to have you on the Coaching Culture podcast, brother.

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:12

Hope we enjoy time with you, Ben.