From the outside-in it can be hard to diagnose the failings within a team or organisation, particularly in those where success is not obvious – such as where the real impact of your work might only play out over a generation or more. One of the advantages that sport has – at least for us spectators – is that, one way or another, it’s pretty clear if you’re being successful (or not). We can see it in the moment, in the result of a game, and the positioning over a series of games or a season. Knowing the outcome, and understanding what took place to achieve that outcome, are quite different endeavours, though. We’ll never be in the dressing room or team meetings or training sessions, nor the heat of the battle, the only visible element. What’s going on that’s invisible to spectators, and what can that teach us about our own organisations? 

Here’s my question, given the depths of mediocrity being plumbed not only by the English men’s cricket team but also the NFL team I follow. What can we learn from the failings of sports teams as it relates to the performance of own teams in the workplace, and – I’m curious – what might be different about the cricket team if it was run like a successful NFL team?

Where a team fails to live up to anything close to expectations, inquiries follow into what went wrong. The higher the hope and expectation, the more precipitous the fall off when a team is soundly – and consistently – beaten. I’m looking at the England men’s cricket team as it goes about an increasingly disastrous Ashes tour in Australia, and the NFL’s  Arizona Cardinals – and asking myself these questions. 

Logic dictates that there are only so many scenarios, the most obvious being that the players individually and collectively are not as good as we thought they were. Having talent, like knowledge, is of no use unless it is utilised and maximised. We can all see the talent in some players but those that end their careers being called ‘great’ found a way to consistently elevate their performance in the most important moments, when it really mattered. 

Momentum is an over-used and generally unproven concept in sports (although we all like to believe in the hot hand fallacy). But when things start to go wrong either the team will dig deep and pull it around (see first scenario), or the wheels can fall off as things rapidly escalate. The latter may be made more likely if it’s happened in the past and hasn’t been properly been dealt with – the self fulfilling prophecy of ‘here we go again’. 

Coaching is another critical element, itself a broad term that, depending on the sport, hides a multitude of roles – technical input, tactics, people management, strategy, comms, recruitment and team selection… who is ultimately responsible for, say, strategy, when so many other factors come in to play that are outside the scope of simply the coach? In the current ashes, for example, strategy extends to team selection given specific conditions, the preparation and warm up games, travel plans, how to use down time, plans to address specific opposition players, how to manage workload, and so on. In short, how to be a high performing team, and win.

Having a multitude of roles appears confusing, too. In terms of the England cricket team the captain has a clear role on the field and in the team’s leadership; the head coach to ensure the players are performing at their best; the chair of selectors, to pick the right players. But if we are to have clear accountability we need clear roles. In an organisation there is a CEO who will ultimately carry the can for the corporate version of getting trashed in the Ashes, an NFL team failing to reach the playoffs or your football team relegated from its division. 

Yet even this is to confuse our human desire to hold someone to account – to make us feel better about things – with the reality that in a team game there is rarely a single point of failure. I have always wondered why football managers get sacked for the poor performance of their highly paid players when so many other factors are at play. It’s almost performative, the desire to show action in the face of failure, and in sacking a manager or firing a coach (or employee) we can also absolve ourselves of any role in the mess. We do this all the time: the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, the tragedy of Baby Peter. Yet these are systemic failure across multiple interconnected parts, each interaction generating unknowable consequences. 

So what might have gone wrong for the cricket team and what learning might we take to apply in our own organisations? I’ll offer six core insights in the next blog.