What it takes to win: Three data-driven lessons for business leaders
Surely, we can’t be doing anything as obvious as talking about the World Cup? But do bear with us. At Threshold we are performance geeks and anything that gives us such a clear-cut set of performance data is impossible to resist. Whether in sport or in the workplace, the data overturns many of our assumptions about what it takes to win.
5-minute read – 100% written by humans
Evolutionary psychologists believe that sport, like storytelling, evolved because it carries important lessons about survival in the real-world. (Of course, for many football fans the football-as-metaphor-for-life thing works the other way round.) Either way, performance data from sport often equips us with some eye-opening insights.
In 2002, Brazil won the world cup in Japan with a team of typical skill and artistry. That was the last time a team outside of Western Europe won the contest. By 2014, the World had changed. That year, the South American maestros suffered semi-final humiliation on their home soil, being crushed – seven goals to one – by Germany. This reflects a pattern.
Since 2006, all finalists apart from Argentina have been European.
So, what’s changed?
In a word, tactics. European teams, driven by big money and mounting pressure for results, have taken an increasingly data-driven and analytical approach to discovering what works.
Lesson One: Tactical savvy beats flair
At the heart of this is the use of space: The key is rapidly to close it down for your opponents and open it up for yourselves. A systematic approach whereby each player knows where they must be when and what they need to be doing as they observe the situation changing, cuts down thinking time, increases understanding between players, and minimises errors and misunderstandings.
It means that a team can collectively observe what’s happening and know instantly how to respond. This works because the tactical options have been drilled into each team member. This may all seem a little sterile to those who love to see the stadium enchanted by individual wizardry, but we can’t escape the fact that it works. It delivers results better than focusing on the individual maestro.
Lesson Two: The high-minimum performer beats the maverick genius
That is not to say that talent doesn’t matter. In fact, the hard data could not be clearer in underscoring the importance of talent. The performance of a team over time correlates with the size of its wage bill more closely than any other variable. It is one of the few correlations in performance data that is almost a straight line. The logic is simple. High wages attract talent. And talent, above all else, is what succeeds over time.
Here’s the important point. Clubs using their player budget wisely focus on talent, but talent in this context doesn’t mean that maverick genius, it means smart individuals who take a disciplined approach to tactics and are technically competent. What top performing teams don’t do is splash out on individual stellar performers while tolerating weaker links. It’s the principle of the high-minimum performer. Your least-good player must always be stronger than your opponent’s least-good player. This is the philosophy of focusing on the floor not the ceiling. If you have a system, every agent within it must be capable of playing their part to a given standard. This is because team cohesion consistently beats individual brilliance. It may seem unheroic, but it works.
Lesson Three: Flexibility beats strategy
This leads to a further point. Research shows that top performing teams change things frequently. Research on World Cup substitutions from 2002–2022, found that 2022 produced far more multi-player substitution moments than previous tournaments. Teams now have more capacity to alter pressing intensity, change attacking profiles, protect tired defenders, or switch from control to fluidity.
If every player in the system has a shared understanding of the tactical options available and how to switch tactics rapidly, the system is flexible and responsive to change. In our experience, flexibility in the face of changing conditions is the most underrated of all performance drivers. Leadership teams repeatedly overrate the importance of coming up with the right strategy and underrate the importance of flexibility.
Strategy without the ability to flex and modify soon becomes a burden. One of my most eye-opening moments at business school was realizing how often the second entrant into the marketplace outperforms the first. ‘Me-too’ competitors have the benefit of observing a marketplace and then flexing and modifying. Most of the world’s top performing products were not first into their marketplace. The iPhone beat the Blackberry, Google beat Yahoo! and the Nintendo Wii beat Sony and Microsoft.
What we find in business simulations
When we work with leadership teams on business simulations, so often their first reaction is that they underperformed because they didn’t stick to the plan. The analysis invariably shows quite a different problem. The plan wasn’t flexible enough to be modified when the situation changed.
In the words of US General Eisenhower: ‘No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Although, we tend to prefer Mike Tyson’s version: “Everyone has a strategy until they get hit in the mouth.”
The power of the system
Flexibility and adaptability are essential and they are borne out of team cohesion. In his book Six Degrees, the physicist Duncan Watts makes a similar point. He uses Toyota’s response to a factory fire to illustrate an important principle about high-performing systems. Because Toyota’s supply chain is tightly interconnected, a disruption in one place can quickly affect the whole network. Yet Toyota recovered remarkably fast because everyone in the system shared the same underlying principles and methods. The lesson applies equally to football teams and businesses: success is not just about having a plan, but about creating a shared understanding of how to adapt when the plan meets reality.
What you measure matters
What’s more, the changes that we see at football’s most elite level provide useful lessons about what we measure. In business, as in sport, too often we measure what intuitively seems to make sense or what’s easiest to measure. And given that what gets measured is what gets focused on, if you get your KPIs wrong, you focus your efforts on the wrong thing.
The quality of a defender was measured by the number of tackles successfully executed. However, the statistics showed that Italian skipper Paulo Maldini, arguably the best defender of his generation, scored relatively modestly on this measure. Maldini was said to have responded: “If I have to make a tackle, I’ve been standing in the wrong place.” Further analysis showed that Maldini was right. His positional play was so astute that he prevented opposition attacks before they started. In business as in life, often your most valuable contributors are those who stop problems before they arise.
Beautiful in its own way
So, what life lessons do we take out of the data?
Elite individual performance can be awe-inspiring, but it rarely prevails against team cohesion.
Passion, art and wizardry must ultimately surrender to team cohesion, discipline and data-driven tactics. To the romantic, it may all seem flat and non-heroic, but the latter has its own beauty.
But then again, we might be wrong.
That’s the beautiful game!
Back to the workplace next week.
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
