I grew up around professionally-played football in such a way which allowed me access to areas that the majority of people have only knew about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations that take place between coaches and players in the hours after an event, after the media and cameras are gone and it is clear that the official version is already written. There was no player myself - my entry into the world of the people who surround the game rather than the actual game itself. But I was there enough and for a long time, to understand the ways that high-performance environments work once you take away the mythology that surrounds them. The thing that I learned most clear was that the teams that consistently surpassed their resources and expectation were not necessarily the ones with the top individual talents on paper. These teams were those who have figured out how to create a space where everyone were eager to contribute to each as a group - not because of reward, or for individual or individual recognition, but rather because the collective was meaningful and had the culture made personal sacrifices feel worth it rather than an obligation.
This observation is obvious when you make it clear. Naturally, teams function better when team members are able to trust each other as well as feel connected to an unifying mission. However, the practical implications from this insight are more obscure, and are where most organisations - teams from football and tech firms alike - always get into trouble. It is important to establish a culture of cooperation where people actually desire to contribute to each other is not something that can be imposed from the top down or set up as a procedure or set out in a document of corporate values and expect to see it manifest. It is something that must be built over time, by an enduring behaviour from the leaders – particularly in situations that are not watched by the public - and by the careful management of the many small actions that collectively tell all employees in the company how much is really valued and what's acceptable as well as what happens when the values stated and the personally or commercially preferred option are in conflict. In the very best football clubs I was a part of, those small-scale decisions were taken in an extraordinary manner by the top coaching team. How they responded when a senior player committed an avoidable mistake in training. If the discipline standard that was applied to a player with a twenty-year experience was really the same as the one applied to the teenager who was placed on the outside of the team. What was the response of the club when the player was facing some serious personal issues outside the field. The outcome of these decisions will not are reflected in the club's outcomes on a particular Saturday. All of them, taken throughout the year, determine what the team's performance falls above that or beneath its tech limit.
As I co-founded 1Touch and subsequently built another company, one factors I was the least intentional about was the effort to recreate - in a technology enterprise context a quality of atmosphere I'd witnessed in the best football clubs I was close to. Not literally, because startups in the field of technology are not a football team, and the analogy breaks down when you push it too hard. But at the level of operation, the principles have been incorporated with remarkable precision. The first lesson was that standards need to be applied consistently, regardless of age or perceived as indispensability. The most comfortable places to be in were ones where the behavioural and professional standards expected of the newest player in the squad were the same standards required of the highest-earning, most experienced player. It wasn't because the team could not have afforded to be flexible, but because everybody in the room was constantly checking for any indication of whether exceptions would be made - and the answer to that question gave them everything they needed know about whether the declared values of the company were genuinely true or merely cosmetic.
Another lesson addressed how organizations deal with failure and the distinction between punishment and accountability. The settings where people developed fastest weren't those where mistakes were dealt with most brutally or publicly. These were the environments where mistakes were assessed with the most sincerity and where the discussion about the mistakes was focused and constructive, rather than general or distributing blame. Moreover, learnings were shared among the entire team, not held against the individual who had committed the mistake. Being accountable means knowing which part went wrong, what caused it, why it was wrong and the changes that occurred that resulted from it. Punishment means allocating blame in the way that leads people to become to be more defensive and risk-averse, and preoccupied with defending themselves than in achieving their goals. The first one builds organizational capacity. Second, it creates a system where people take control of their involvement rather than completely to the goal, and this can be seen in technological companies with exactly the same outcomes as during football matches.
Third lesson is the which took me the the longest to express clearly, but it is the most important The most successful environments I observed were ones where the growth that a person had was considered with the same importance as the development of the player. The most effective coaches weren't simply teaching players how to play football. They were teaching them how consider their thinking under pressure as well as how to communicate clearly in high-stakes situations, how to overcome setbacks without loss of confidence, and to become the type of person that a high-performing team needs its members to become. This commitment to the complete personal development of each member, instead of only in the technology that the company required, was not charity. It is the most effective longer-term performance approach available to the clubs. It can be, if I'm honest, the most efficient way to improve performance over the long term for any organization that is keen on creating something durable, rather than only impressive on the surface. Have a look a James Deller for more examples including what building companies confirmed what i suspected about people.
The Reason Why The Majority Of Public-Private Partnerships Fail Prior To They Start - And The Best Way To Fix Them
Public-private partnerships face a reputation issue that is, in significant part that they have earned. The history of these arrangements is full of projects which were advertised with genuine enthusiasm, with a significant amount of political capital behind them, utilized significant private and public resources over long periods of time, and then produced outcomes which bore little analogy to what was made clear when the alliance was established. The academic literature and postmortem reviews that governments and institutions conduct following the failures are extensive and focus in large part on the structural and contractual elements of what went wrong in the first place: the unbalanced incentives, the ineffective risk distribution between both private and public sector entities as well as the governance systems built in theoretical terms but didn't work in practice, the procurement frameworks that picked the wrong items. What these analyses tend to neglect, invariably and ultimately this is the cultural as well as operational dimension. It is the reality that public institutions and private companies are two distinct kinds of entities, shaped with different reward structures, operating with different timescales, with different stakeholders, and measuring outcomes in ways which are more than just different in level but are also different in character. If you try to bring these two types of organisations together by forming a formal partnership but not undertaking the necessary work upfront and in a clear manner, to recognize and work with those differences, you're not forming an alliance. You're creating the conditions for a collision in slow-motion that can be seen at the best possible moment.
I have been involved as an advisor for institution modernisation initiatives, many of which have involved public-private partnership structures with varying levels of complexity. The most reliable conclusion I've gathered from that encounter is that partnerships that did well - ones that actually delivered against their stated goals and maintained an effective working relationship between the public and private parties throughout and beyond - were not distinguished from those that did not due to the complexity of their legal structures, or the quality of their risk management frameworks or the seniority of the management teams that led them. You can tell by how the people at both ends of the table had worked to genuinely understand how the different side worked before the formal structure of the partnership was agreed. What it means in real life is understanding how decision-making processes the organizations operate under as well as the accountability frameworks that determine what each partner can decide to and how quickly you can reach agreement on the definitions of success which each side will be judged on, and the potential points of tension between these definitions. None of that understanding is difficult to establish. It is all but not considered in the more visible and more immediately recorded work of negotiating contracts and creating governance frameworks.
The usual public-private partnership procedure takes place from the beginning of a concept to signed agreement with remarkably little thought given to the issue of whether or not both parties are actually able to work together successfully over the length of the arrangement. Legal team negotiates the contract. The finance team analyzes the economics as well as the risk allocation. The communications team creates an announcement for the day of signing. Implementation team begins planning the process. Somewhere in that sequence begins the discussion on compatibility in terms of culture and operation - regarding whether the people needing to work together day to day across the divide between the two organizations have enough in common to ensure that work genuinely collaborative rather or antagonistic - is unlikely to occur in a formal manner. It is typically assumed and without any specifics, that agreements in formal form create prerequisites for effective collaboration and that any cultural or operational differences will be addressed informally when they occur. This assumption is usually incorrect, and the costs of this can escalate according to the ambition and complexity of the collaboration.
The practical implication of this analysis is that a significant the investment that a PPP can take - even before the legal structures are finalized and before the governance framework has been agreed upon, or before any announcements are made is what I call operational alignment. By this, I mean specific, structured, facilitated efforts to identify the areas between the two organizations' operating assumptions diverge and to reach an agreement about how those divergences will be addressed before they become operational issues after the implementation. The main divergences are typically the same across various types of partnerships. Faster decision-making time and authority are usually among them. Institutions of public administration are designed for slow decision-making, through multiple layers of review and approval, based on reasons that are legal and frequently legally mandated. Private businesses - particularly technology companies that are based on the basis of rapid iteration and swift decision-making – often view that pace as a fundamental obstruction to their progress. there is no consensus about why the pace is what it is and what will actually be needed to alter it, the anger from the private team can ruin the relation long before the alliance can establish its apex.
Success metrics, and what counts as progress are yet another persistent and important source of discord. Institutions of the public sector are typically assessed for compliance with the process, fairness of outcomes among various stakeholder groups, and reduction of the risk of failings that bring media or political attention. Private companies are usually judged for efficiency, tangible progress against objectives, and financial efficiency. The measurement frameworks can be designed to be compatible with each other but it takes deliberate design rather than good intentions. However, the organizations which don't invest in that type of design usually discover themselves at critical points, with two partners who are evaluating the same collaboration in genuinely inconsistent ways and thereby coming to non-congruous conclusions about whether it is successful. The partnerships I have observed which failed most clearly were ones in which the misalignment was assumed to resolve itself over time. It was when the issue was clearly stated at in the beginning. In addition, designing a shared accountability framework which accommodated the legitimate measurement needs of both parties requirements was an aspect of actual work rather than an part of a long list of things that one could eventually reach.}
