Original frameworks and considered writing on people, leadership and culture in high performance environments. Drawn from two decades inside professional sport and applied well beyond it.
Each framework below exists because a real department needed it before it had a name. They are published in full and free to read.
Sustained performance comes from the environment around the work rather than heroic effort. A model for building it deliberately by growing the capacity people bring and removing the interference that stops it showing up. On five components of capacity, seven forms of interference and the cycle that keeps the system learning.
Three decades of investment have built extraordinary support around the athlete. The staff who deliver it rarely receive the same attention, although the science of stress and adaptation applies to them with equal force. On the evidence, the precedents and the five conditions that decide whether staff thrive or survive.
A steering document for extending to staff the rigour elite organisations already apply to their athletes. It turns the evidence in The Team Behind the Team into a pathway of approaches, from changes a department can make this month to a dedicated leadership role.
Being needed and being valuable are different things. High performance environments rarely distinguish between them. On how identity fuses to a role, why the cost lands on staff who never get tested and the questions that separate one driver from the other.
The load you monitor for everyone else, applied to yourself. Performance staff track stress and recovery in others for a living, then run themselves without the same discipline. A practitioner's analysis of the cost that never gets logged, built on the growth equation and a four question audit.
Stated values do not build culture, deliberately designed processes do. Fifty years of evidence from Argyris and Schon through to recent MIT work, turned into four practical moves and a ninety day sequence for closing the distance between what an organisation claims and what its people experience.
How caution compounds through the layers of an organisation until nobody is making the decision the moment requires, and what leaders can do to interrupt it before it hardens into the way things are done.
Building the architecture of a winning organisation. The case for a senior role most sporting organisations need and few have built, covering the fleet problem, the distinction from a Director of High Performance, the precedents already proving it works and the profile of the person who can hold it.
Operating and leading are different jobs that compete for the same hours. On the practice of stepping off the dance floor to see the whole system.
A feature by John McCrone on what championship level preparation actually looks like from the inside, and which parts of it translate to anyone trying to get fitter rather than only to professional athletes.
New Zealand's top ranked welterweight worked with Simon on cognitive training to sharpen decision making under fatigue, alongside strength and mobility work. The exchange ran both ways, with Morgan helping Crusaders players returning from injury through boxing based conditioning.
