Francis Wade | Sports federations, taking the long view

You love a national sport. Nothing inspires you more than seeing the Jamaican or West Indian flag flying high over a global stage. But you also realise that in football and cricket, we have fallen. Does it have something to do with long-term thinking?

When the West Indies men’s cricket team was beating the world in the 1980-1990s, it made other countries jealous. They all tried to close the gap, but the Australian response was different.

Essentially, they decided to invest as they never had before in youth cricket. Why? They realised they had a long-term problem. Short-term fixes would not provide sustainable solutions.

Fast-forward to a decade later, and from then until now, the Australians’ success is a function of their planning. While we in the West Indies are struggling to find talent, overcome waning interest, and resolve governance issues, there is no end in sight to Australian dominance.

In a nutshell, they have crafted a systemic solution to the challenge of winning international cricket.

In the meantime, the West Indies continues fail, apart from the odd success here and there. Sometimes, we get lucky and win. But the victory occurs in spite of our system, not because of it.

I don’t mean to heap criticism on our setup. I’m not an expert. But if we take Australian cricket’s long-term focus, could we apply it to our national football team?

After all, a perfect storm carried us to the World Cup once. But the long-term system is still missing there as well. More importantly, is there something all our sporting federations could do differently with respect to their planning? Here are three ideas if you happen to be in such an organisation.

Pick and visualise

First, pick a planning horizon some 10 to 30 years away, that is, a target year. Take care as there are mistakes to be made by going too close or too far.

Pick one too close and you end up being selfish. Now, you will selfishly disenfranchise future generations. Furthermore, try to be too aggressive in your ambitions and others won’t believe. As such, they won’t take any action.

By contrast, if you pick a year too far away you could become irrelevant. In this instance, there is not enough tension for stakeholders to respond.

But the point is not only to choose the right year. The accompanying idea is to commit to milestones between today and your target date. Together, they should bring about the appropriate mindset at scale. Furthermore, they should galvanise citizens at all ages and encourage them to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve world-class performance.

Having specified a target year, the next task is to create a vivid vision or end-game. This is no mere vision statement composed of vagaries, but a numeric, measurable list of outcomes. Together, they describe a future space.

Within this space, the team should generate up to three distinct but alternative visions. Then choose one.

A lot of organisations make a big mistake by stopping here.

Strategise backwards

To connect the vision to reality, you’ll need to backcast, or plan back from the future space to today. As you do so, there are two anomalies you’ll be correcting.

The first anomaly is the fact that some of your initial, visionary outcomes are probably unrealistic. Some will be overambitious.

The second anomaly occurs when the target year itself must be adjusted in order to make the plan work.

These anomalies shouldn’t be removed randomly. Instead, the team needs to achieve a careful balance between aspirations and reality. As such, this is an exercise for insiders and cannot be outsourced.

Unfortunately, if your team fails to achieve this balance, you’ll lose the backing of your fans. For example, if they sense that the planning team said yes to too many things, and did not make difficult tradeoffs, they may walk away in disgust.

The plan must pass a logical test.

Build social support

Sporting federation plans need wide fan support, but the traditional idea of selling it to an audience no longer works.

Instead, the modern best practice is to engage audiences from the start in the process. But this doesn’t mean filling the room with hundreds at every meeting.

The key is to incorporate both diverging and converging activities in your schedule.

Divergent activities are invitations to gather more input. They benefit from broad participation.

However, convergent activities involve making difficult decisions using these inputs. This is a consolidating step when summaries and conclusions must be drawn.

Use them both in a sort of dance and you’ll bring your fans into your long-term thinking and the planning necessary to achieve success in your sport.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To search past columns on productivity, strategy and business processes, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com