How Top World Cup, NBA, and NFL Coaches Make Better Decisions Under Pressure

0:28Johann Bilsborough:I'm Alison Beard. And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR IdeaCast.

0:40Johann Bilsborough:Adi, as you know, and as anyone who knows me knows, I'm a huge sports fan. NBA, NFL, and of course, this summer, I'm obsessively watching the World Cup. You? Yeah, big time sports fan, a big fan of team sports. I'm very partisan, so I'm very religious about the teams I love. So we love sports as an escape from the rest of life, but I think there are also lots of lessons in it that we can bring back to work. And I think business leaders in particular can learn from managers and coaches of high-level teams. Yeah, I think that's true. Look, it's kind of a trope to talk about, oh, you know, lessons from sports also apply to business.

1:16Johann Bilsborough:But it's true. You know, things like competition, collaboration, stay and adaptable. They are as relevant for successful teams as they are for successful businesses. Yeah, so today we're talking to two authors who have worked with teams across professional sports leagues in U.S., Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Recently, they decided to do a deep dive into how elite coaches make high-stakes decisions, how they prepare, what happens in the moment, and how they deal with the repercussions. And of course, all of this is happening under the glare of a media spotlight, right? Yes, and second-guessing from fans and owners, and sometimes their own players.

1:49Johann Bilsborough:So there is so much that managers can learn from how they stay cool and make smart choices under all that pressure. My guests are Alan McCall, a sports performance consultant and founder of Research and Innovation for Sports, who's worked primarily with FIFA World Cup and Champions League teams. And Johan Billsborough, who's worked as a director of medical performance and innovation in the NBA and NFL. They're co-authors, along with Adrian Wolfberg and Ricard Pruna, of the HBR article, How Elite Sports Coaches Make High Pressure Decisions. Here's our conversation.

2:26Johann Bilsborough:Alan, Johan, welcome.

2:28Alan McCall:Thanks very much. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

2:30Johann Bilsborough:Decision making is a really complicated thing to study. Why do you both think that elite sports coaches have lessons for the business world? Are there really enough parallels? Alan, why don't you start?

2:44Alan McCall:I think we're making so many decisions all day, every day, and really in different areas, working with the players, working with the staff. We're essentially a group of people trying to succeed at something. So you've got the same interaction, you've got communication, relationships, and we all have to make these decisions, hopefully pulling in the right and same direction. So I think there's a lot of parallels with sport, with business, and with military, with hospitals, with all walks of life.

3:10Johann Bilsborough:And Johan, why did you think that the most interesting or useful way to frame it was this idea of sort of before, during and after? We're dealing with hundreds of decisions all day, some really, really big ones, some not so big. And some of the decisions you're making, like you have to make really, really quickly, but they do become a bigger picture for us overall over time. So that's where it kind of that whole paper started was just understanding how people perceive information and especially the people at the top of the tree and those elite coaches. Yeah. And so just to be clear, you all have worked with these elite teams, you know, across the NBA, NFL, European football leagues.

3:54Johann Bilsborough:But this particular study, you approached it by doing in-depth interviews with specific coaches. Just tell me a little bit more about the research.

4:03Alan McCall:Johan and I are also, we're practitioners, we work on the field, but we also understand doing research helps us be better practitioners because we can have more confidence in what we're doing. Our background is more quantitative, so we're always in sports science and looking at numbers and data. And the more experienced we've got and the more conversations that we've been having, it's like, well, the data is not telling the full story. It's showing some insights, but there's something missing. And the only way to get that is to speak to people. So that's why we implemented an interview qualitative approach to try and dig deep into people's lived experience and understand how they make decisions, because then we can start to understand what that means for them and for us as well.

4:47Johann Bilsborough:It's interesting because sort of in the age of AI, there's this idea that the machines are going to be able to make the decisions for us. But this research points to the idea that the human element, the human oversight still matters. I'll be honest, when I came to the US, and obviously lucky, Alice and I worked in Boston for the basketball team and the football team there. Hooray, go Celtics, go Pats. And we had two completely opposite type coaches. I had not come from a basketball or I didn't know NFL. So it was a real challenge, just American culture to start with, the sporting culture of the US of sports that I hadn't worked in.

5:27Johann Bilsborough:and two coaches that were at the opposite ends of their careers. Brad was just starting, Bill was Brad Stevens, now the manager, but formerly the coach of the Boston Celtics. Yes. And Bill Belichick, who was well into his career. And there were so many pieces on how he used the information and the data that was available. And I think there was a lot of situations where there was a lot of subjective information given to him, how they feel, how they seem, how they look. We wanted to quantify things better to give him a more informed decision-making process. And Brad, the same, very data-driven to make decisions and obviously good intuition as well.

6:09Johann Bilsborough:But the reps that Bill had had, he'd seen a lot of these scenarios before. And so he was very, very well prepared. And I think in any human organization, there's the data, but then also personalities, play a role. So let's dig into your order of operations. In terms of the before, what did you see elite coaches do to anticipate their future decision needs? What does that look like?

6:35Alan McCall:The biggest thing that came out for me was the preparation and the trust that was built over time before anything needed to be done. They weren't waiting for things to happen. And maybe early in their career, when they were speaking about it, they involved over time and they realized that they had to prepare and so maybe you don't come into it immediately with all all of the answers but yeah that big part about just these small opportunities to build trust is something that I then reflected on with my own sort of just experience of day-to-day life and how we operate and how these moments help us understand if we trust them if we don't trust them so I think the before decision bit for me was that was the most interesting the preparation and the relationships trust aspect.

7:17Johann Bilsborough:So understanding the people on your team, your assistant coaches, getting to know everyone ahead of time. So in the moment you're ready to work together.

7:27Alan McCall:Yeah. And also not just when it matters, but just in those small moments, one of the NBA coaches that we interviewed, we spoke for about two hours on a four second timeout that he made. And it just became more clear as we were talking and as we analyzed the findings as well that his decision in that four seconds had essentially been made prior to that because of the relationship he had built with the player. He called a call for a player. The player said, no, no, I'll give it to someone else on the team. And he was like, okay, I can actually trust this guy with this call, so I'm going to go with him.

8:00Alan McCall:What he explained is it wasn't this trust was built up in other matches. It was in the corridor when he'd be stopping and speaking with him or in the locker room. That was one of the bigger things for me.

8:10Johann Bilsborough:And Johan, before you mentioned, you know, working in the NBA, in the NFL and about sort of the flow of information. So talk about how the coaches you interviewed, the coaches you've worked with, how they make sure to get the right information beforehand. There's a lot of information that's coming in and there's always a data overload. Coaches are really wise to be able to understand what is the most important information. So there's not a lot of noise. If everything's a signal, then nothing's a signal. And so that was really important for us to understand what matters most. And when we talk about that before situation, the what if scenarios, which was both coaches that I dealt with, they would go through so many scenarios.

8:55Johann Bilsborough:So the preparation, as Alan spoke about, was so thorough. There was every single scenario that could happen in a game that they were prepared for. And Alan mentioned also the trust. The head coach also has so many people vying for their attention on what's important. They had to really filter through what was the most important for that situation and be prepared really well with really trusted staff members. so the delegation of information to provide him and or both those coaches with the right information was really important and you'd see there's so much preparation going into a game but also into practice sessions we always practice how we're going to play for each different opponent so there was a lot of information coming through it was just deciphering what the right information was and as alan said before like having the right information in front of you because you've seen so many different things in the past helps them narrow it down to just doing what is most important.

9:53Johann Bilsborough:So business leaders figuring out how to ensure that only the most important information comes to them so that they don't have to do that filtering, protecting their own time, building those relationships ahead of time, and then also scenario planning seems really important. Okay, so let's move on to the during phase. What do coaches do in the moment that business leaders can learn from? As you said, it's often four seconds as opposed to maybe four days or four weeks to make a decision. I think the one that struck me as really interesting, but also so difficult, is managing emotions. So what did you learn from how people do that in sports?

10:36Johann Bilsborough:From the practical experience I've had, I've noticed that the coaches keep their emotions and intact under really extreme pressure, and they're able to make really good decisions and problem solve. For me, it takes me time. I can go back and I can give them video analysis, and I can show them all these really good graphs, and I can do that the next day or that afternoon. They're able to problem solve on what we know, what we don't know, and how we're going to fix it really, really quickly. I always looked at the coaches that I've worked with over the past 30 years is they are probably the best sports scientists that I've dealt with.

11:11Johann Bilsborough:They're able to make really good decisions in a really short timeframe. And I do think no matter what decisions or circumstances they're thrown at, they've got a pattern or a schema of very, very similar situations. There's not a lot they haven't seen. And although there might be a new occurrence, they have a very good framework of knowing and being able to solve at least 75 % of the problems that they have. and their emotions don't come into it very much at all. And they're very dry with that kind of things. They don't react.

11:41Alan McCall:I was speaking with a coach that I was working with who's at the World Cup just now in the US. And he was saying like, in the moment he feels the emotions and he feels the anger or he feels the excitement, but he's got that self-awareness to check himself as well, that it doesn't come out. And maybe it will come out later in a more structured way. But in that moment, you know, it's not that the emotion isn't there, It's just, as Johan said, they're able to manage them really well in that moment, but they also don't forget about them because they will resurface later.

12:14Johann Bilsborough:Is that personality or practice? You know, if you're someone who's naturally hotheaded, can you learn how to regulate your emotions so that you're not getting stressed in these high stakes situations?

12:27Alan McCall:The coach I'm talking about in the US, he said to me, like, I know I'm a hothead. I don't know if that was the words they used, but it was essentially, it knows that that's what he's like and that's his kind of go-to, but he's learned over time to be aware of it and then manage it.

12:42Johann Bilsborough:Yeah, I definitely think those elite coaches, no matter what the emotion is, because there is a lot of emotion during a game of football or basketball, but they still follow process. So the outcome may be slightly different, but they've prepared for it so well, but they just follow process all the time. They're able to adapt very, very quickly. And so the emotions doesn't ever get the better of them. I must say that what I've realized and seen over time is what a head coach says matters to so many people. So they're very, very careful on how they deliver a message because it can affect a junior player, a senior player, a staff member who may be responsible for an outcome that wasn't great.

13:23Johann Bilsborough:So they're very, very precise and tactful on how they present information because it has ramifications throughout the whole organization during those. And I think that's from a leadership perspective, being very deliberate with how they present information is really important. And then there's sort of reading the emotions and the in-the-moment capabilities of other people, you know, your team members. So how does a leader get better at doing that? I imagine that that preparation you're talking about plays into it too. You know, that example you gave of the four second last minute NBA play and being able to look at the star player and see then what he could do in that moment, how he felt in that moment and decide whether to take his advice or not.

14:13Alan McCall:yeah the coach I was speaking to then also explained within that four seconds how it was basically going through past present and future he was thinking in that moment about the play but then in the future he was thinking okay if I change and I go with the superstar player then would other players think I've just went with him because he's the superstar so he was thinking into the future as well about the kind of ramifications and the consequences of the decision he made but was able to process all of that within the four seconds to make the call and the baseball coach we spoke to as well it wasn't that the outcome didn't determine whether or not they were happy with what they went with because it was just that they went through their process and regardless of the outcome then so it was almost like not that they're not thinking about the outcome but it's like okay this this i've went through my process i'm happy with it and we're going to go with it

15:02Johann Bilsborough:and then we see what happens in those moments especially i think in the nfl or situations where there's like a little bit more time between plays, there is this tension right now of do you trust what the analytics say about what should be done versus this sort of visceral human instinct? So, Johan, you know, how have you seen that tension play out in the moment for coaches? Because I'm sure it's happening in the business world too. I definitely think before the game starts, there is a lot of data-driven decisions on scouting and how a team plays. and the familiarity things that we already know.

15:40Johann Bilsborough:But I do think that the experienced elite coaches are able to rely on a small percentage of their gut that backs a lot of the data-driven decisions that they're already presented with. Again, there's only small variants of situations they haven't seen. And those small variants, they're still able to establish the bulk of that decision is already done from past history. and they also know that there's several outcomes that can happen from the decision that they make because it involves so many people and they do trust the personnel around them their main lieutenants around them whether it being a player or an offensive line coach or something like that they're all very level-headed about that purely because they know that they have followed the process you give a player the right shot and he's open you want them to take that shot no matter what and if they don't take the shot you're probably more upset than if they took the shot

16:35Alan McCall:and missed it's not the coaches are blindly following the data they're also sense checking it so you've put the systems in place for the things that they've decided is important we've found ways to analyze those to give the data that's hopefully valid and reliable and that we can have more confidence in it but sometimes the data can be deceiving or you know it doesn't tell the whole story and that's where their coach's eye comes in and when that started when johan started we were the coach's eye i thought oh there's no way that's a thing and then as i've got more experienced i'm like oh actually the coach's eye it is a thing it's a built up through experience so when they saw the data bringing them some information they would say okay is this actually what i'm seeing does it match or not and then they would also sense check it with like johan said they're kind of trusted lieutenants so you've got a few people maybe that's on the pitch side who can see if it's rugby for example because they're looking from up high or if it's somebody on the touchline they might be speaking with someone i used to stay in the stadium in france up high and radio down to the bench so we had different angles to see and it's like okay this is what the data is showing us this is what we all sort of see and then the coach can make an informed decision because he's got a little bit more they don't tend to make a decision straight away based off of data it's do we see the same thing a few times and has everyone seen that same thing and And then, okay, maybe now we make a decision.

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19:11Johann Bilsborough:So let's talk about the aftermath of decisions. whether the call has been right or wrong. What's the first step that a coach does following a big choice? One thing I've learned is that they do not blame. They ask questions. They don't question people because again, as we said earlier, if we've followed the process, the outcome is not always perfect. We only can control one team. We don't control the other team. And I definitely think that that post-mortem is definitely not a blame situation because it's very emotional and you have to be ready that you may be playing a game tomorrow so you better deal with it and sort it out and address all the issues that you've had work out the solutions and scenarios that we have to deal with and get better on but there's never a finger point there's never a blame it's that next game let's go we're on to Cincinnati where we are just moving forward it's that kind of

20:06Alan McCall:mentality the thing is if you build that environment then actually nobody needs to blame MD because you actually just take ownership for your part in it that kind of post-mortem is always about what could have been better as an organization what could I have done better what could we all have done and if you've got that environment then people will will volunteer those insights and you don't need to be worried that somebody's going to blame me for doing something but that needs to be built it's not in all teams maybe yeah it's interesting because in

20:33Johann Bilsborough:professional sports, there's this mechanism of the post-game press conference where basically the players and the coaches have to either defend their decisions or acknowledge their mistakes. And is there a way to do that in the business world that doesn't feel stressful or putative? Like, could you replicate that?

20:51Alan McCall:I don't see why not. It's a fairly straightforward process. You just need everyone to be bought into it. You know, this is what we're doing. This is a process of how we are going to go through the decisions we've made and understand whether or not they could have been better it's just really the organization and the people need to be open to it it takes time because initially if you get people in a room say we're going to go through all our decisions and see what we did right and what we didn't the natural reaction is kind of fear you think oh no you're apprehensive but it's consistency and that's how like johan is one of the best i've seen that they're getting trust from people but it takes perseverance as well so it needs to be not just this one-off thing it needs to be shown what's the work on from it as well

21:32Johann Bilsborough:yeah it's again a scenario where i think that sort of time compression of sports is potentially pretty useful for business because obviously we all do post-mortems in organizations or retros or whatever you call it but it tends to be not right away not when it's fresh in everyone's mind you know it might be a week later or a month later so that idea that you have to process immediately seems really useful. When we play five games in seven days in five different cities, there's not a lot of time to dwell on things. Otherwise, you get a player that ends up in a slump if we don't address it really early.

22:12Johann Bilsborough:So I have seen coaches deal with players because they take it very hard because they get, like you said, a lot of media scrutiny. So they have to deal with it and instill that confidence in a player that, hey, you made the right moves. It's okay. Let's move on. You're here for a reason and then move forward with the next game. And again, coaches are really, really good with bringing out the positive things. If you lose a game, it's not the last shot that Jalen misses that was the reason why you lost the whole game. It's probably 30 other decisions that happened prior. When a decision that a coach makes upsets people, whether it's players or fellow coaches, owners, the media, fans, how do they repair trust?