What Years of Investing Confirmed What I Suspected About What Matters

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What Has A Football Dressing Room Led Me To Build An Elite Tech Team
I grew-up around elite football, in a way that provided me with access to situations that many people would only hear about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. Conversations between coaches and players during the time following a game, when reporters and cameras have gone and the official account of what happened have already been written. There was no player in any way - my entrance to that world was through those around the game rather than the actual game itself - but I was on the right side of it, and for long enough, to absorb something important about how high-performance settings actually work after removing the mythology surrounding them. The thing that I learned most clear was that the teams consistently exceeding their resources and their expectations weren't the ones having the most individual strengths on paper. They're the teams that have figured out how to create a space where members of the team committed to performing for each others - not to earn reward, or for individual acknowledgement, but because the collective had a meaning and a sense of community that made personal sacrifice feel worthwhile rather than merely obligatory.
This idea sounds familiar when you state it plainly. The truth is that teams function best when members trust each other and feel that they are part of an agreed-upon goal. However, the practical implications of that observation are considerably less apparent, and tend to be the places where organizations - both technology and football clubs alike regularly find themselves in trouble. A culture where employees actually desire to contribute to each other is not something you can mandate from the top down, or set up as a procedure or in a set of values for the company and expect it to manifest. It must be built in time, through an enduring behaviour from the leaders – particularly during the times when they are not being watched - and the responsible management of the myriad of decision-making processes that collectively convey to all members of the organisation the things that are valued as well as what is tolerated and what can happen when the stated values and the more personal or financially comfortable option conflict. In the best football environment I played in, those small-scale decisions were taken with extraordinary intentionality by the top coaches. The way they responded when a senior player committed an unavoidable error during training. Which disciplinary criteria used for the 20-year veteran was genuinely the same as the one that was used to the eighteen-year-old on the edge of the team. How the organization responded when a player was dealing with some serious personal issues outside the game. None of these choices appear in a team's results on any given Saturday. They all, accumulated during a given season, will determine whether the squad performs above and below the technical limit.

As I co-founded 1Touch and later created numerous other organizations, one those things that I was very conscious of was trying to recreate - in a company context a similar quality of environment I'd experienced within the best football facilities I had been close to. It's not literal, as startups in the field of technology are not like a football team and so the analogy is shattered when you try to push it too far. But at the level of operational principle, the lessons could be translated into a stunningly accurate manner. The first lesson was that standards have to be consistently applied, regardless of seniority or perceived as indispensability. The best dressing rooms I've been in were those that had a professional and behavioural standards expected of the youngest player in the squad were, in reality, the same standard that were expected of the highest-earning and most skilled player. This was not because the organization could not have afforded to have exceptions made, but simply because the entire dressing room was always looking for whether exceptions would be made. And the answer to that question told them everything they needed know about whether the stated values of the organisation were actually true or just decorative.

The second lesson was about how companies handle failure and the distinction between accountability and punishment. The environments in which players developed fastest weren't those where mistakes were punished most strongly or openly. These were the places where errors were dealt with most openly when the discussion of the error was focused and constructive, rather than general and allocating blame. It was also a place where knowledge was shared among the entire team, not held against the individual who had committed the error. Being accountable means knowing exactly what went wrong, and why it occurred and what changed as a result. Retribution means distributing blame a way that makes people cautious and defensive, and more focused on protecting themselves rather than trying to do their job well. The first builds organisational capability. The second helps create a culture where people are able to control their own involvement rather than completely to the mission. that is the case in technological companies with exactly the identical results it has during football matches.

The final point is part that was the hardest for me the longest to articulate clearly, but that I consider to be the most important my observations: the most positive environments I have observed were ones that ensured the development that a person had was considered just as important as the growth of the performer. The best coaches were not simply instructing players on how to play football. They taught them how manage under pressure in a clear and concise manner, how to communicate in high-risk situations, and how you can bounce back from setbacks in a positive manner without feeling defeated, and to be the kind of person a team that is highly-performing has its players be. The investment in the complete improvement of the individual and not just in technical capabilities the organisation immediately required, was not charity. This was by far the most effective long-term approach to performance that was offered to those clubs, and it is, as I see it, the most effective way to improve performance over the long term for all organizations that are committed to creating something lasting, rather than simply impressive in the short-term. See the James Deller for more advice including why scaling tech companies changed my approach about people.



What Causes Most Public-Private Partnerships To Fail Prior To Their Beginning - And The Best Way To Fix Them
Public-private partnership have an image issue that's at least in part paid for. The history of these agreements has a wealth of projects that were released with genuine enthusiasm with a significant amount of budgetary capital. They used up significant public and private assets over a prolonged period of time and finally produced outcomes that bore only a passing similarity to the outcomes promises when the partnership was formed. The academic literature and the postmortem examinations that governments as well as institutions commission following these mistakes are extensive, and they concentrate mostly on the contractual and structural factors that led to the failure such as the misaligned incentive structure, an insufficient risk allocation between both private and government entities or the governance structures which were designed in theory but did not function in practice, and the procurement frameworks that were able to pick the wrong items. What this approach tends to ignore, and in the end that is the culture and operational dimensions - namely, the fact that public institutions and private enterprises are fundamentally different kinds of entities, formed using different incentive frameworks that operate using different timeframes, with different stakeholder groups, and evaluating their effectiveness in ways that's not only different in extent however, they differ in the way. When you bring those two kinds of organization together by forming a formal partnership but not performing the work, in advance and explicitly, to know and work with those differences, you're not creating one. You are creating the conditions to create a slow-motion collision that will be obvious at the worst time.
I've been involved in advisory work supporting institutional modernisation projects, a few of which involve public-private partnership structures of varying levels of complexity. The most dependable conclusion I've had from that experience is that the partnerships that performed well - that did indeed meet their declared targets and maintained a good collaboration between the both private and public entities throughout it - weren't distinguished from the ones that failed because of the sophistication of their legal structures, the precision of their risk frameworks, or the experience of the leadership teams that started them. In the end, they were distinguished by how the participants who were on both sides of the table had undertaken the effort to genuinely understand how the other side operated before the formal partnership was agreed upon. What this translates to in practice is knowing the processes the organizations operate under accountable structures that make it difficult for each party to accept and when and efficiently they can do so, the criteria of success that every party will measure itself against, as well as the points of likely tension between these definitions. Any of this knowledge is difficult to develop. Every time, it's put aside in favor of obvious and quicker recordable process of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partnership process evolves from an initial idea to signing of the agreement with very little concentrated attention to the issue of whether or not the two parties involved are actually capable of working together effectively during the time of the arrangement. Legal teams negotiate the contract. The finance department models the economics and the risk distribution. Communications team prepares the announcement in advance of the time of signing. The implementation team begins to plan the process. At some point in the process the conversation turns to compatibility of the operations and culture - regarding whether the people who will have to work day-to-day across the boundaries between the two organisations share enough common ground so as to ensure that collaboration truly collaborative rather or antagonistic - is unlikely to be conducted in a structured way. The assumption is, typically without stating, that it is the agreement that creates the necessary conditions for effective collaboration and that any cultural or operational conflicts will be resolved informally as they occur. That assumption is typically incorrect, and the expense of this tends to increase according to the ambition and complexity of the partnership.

The practical application of this analysis is that the best investment that a public-private partnership may undertake - before the legal structure is finalised, before the governance framework has been agreed upon, or before any announcements are made - is through what I believe is operational alignment. It is the specific, structured, and supported effort to discover the areas where the two parties are operating under different assumptions, and to determine the manner in which these divergences should be managed before they become operational issues after the implementation. The factors that are most crucial to consider are usually the same across different kinds of partnerships. Speed of decision-making and authority tend to be among them. Public institutions are structured to make their decisions slow, with multiple layers of scrutiny and approval, based on reasons that are legitimized and often mandated by law. Private firms - and particularly technology firms that have been designed around fast iteration and quick decision-making - often see the slow pace as a primary limitation to progress. And without a common understanding of exactly why the pace is as it is, and what would truly be needed to modify it, the resentment and discontent that can be felt on the personal aspect can affect the working relation long before the alliance has established its own footing.

Success metrics and what qualifies as progress are another ongoing and contributing cause of discord. The public institutions are primarily evaluated by their compliance with processes, the equity of results across different stakeholder groups, as well as the absence of apparent failures that generate media attention or political pressure. Private partners are typically assessed according to efficiency, measured progress against targets, and financial performance. These measurement frameworks can be designed to be compatible with each other however it is a intentional design and not just good intentions. Those partnerships which do not invest in this kind of design are likely to find themselves, at critical moment, with two organizations who are measuring the same collaboration in not compatible ways and hence coming to inconsistent conclusions regarding whether it is achieving its goals. The relationships I've seen have the greatest failures were ones where the issue was assumed to take time to resolve. The ones that succeeded were those where the issue was made explicit, from the start, and when developing a shared accountability framework that met the legitimate measurement needs of both parties needs was an actual work rather than an option on a wish list of things that a person could come to.}