Defining success and failure has never been easy (or popular) in the public sector. But managers could learn a lot about a winning mentality from the world of sport
I am rubbish at sport. All sports. There, after 40 years of denial, I have finally said it. I run around with sweaty, red-faced enthusiasm, but unless you are actually in a coma you would beat me at pretty much anything.
That said, I am a bit of an obsessive about sports management and the application of this to business problems. My thinking runs as follows. All sports operate in a world of binary outcomes with complete transparency as to who are the winners and losers and huge wealth and status for the people who are successful.
This has gone on since Roman chaps in short skirts took on no doubt somewhat bewildered lions and has, as a by product, created a Darwinian global laboratory for experimenting with all sorts of issues around motivation, team management and innovation.
There are no hiding places. If you’re good then you’re good and if like me you’re not then you’re not. Although individual teams may wax and wane, the overall standard of any sport goes up over time and we can evidence this by the fact that sporting records continually get broken.
There is no equivalent laboratory for public sector management. There is endless dry debate about worthy subjects such as public versus private provision, the limits of markets, centralisation versus localism, but very little in the way of quantifiable evidence to back any of this up. So my question is: what can the public sector learn from the 2,000-year experiment that is sports management?
Firstly, binary measures of success drive performance improvement. Organisations that agree on their purpose strive to get better over time because everybody knows what winning looks like. This sounds obvious but one of the most challenging issues for the public sector is that for lots of organisations there is no consensus on success.
The most common objection by the public sector to any form of comparative measure or league table is that they face a plethora of stakeholders with differing requirements. They sit in the gap where market forces no longer apply, so they cannot be measured by bean counters in cheap suits.
You would probably agree that it’s easy to define success for Manchester United, but you may contend that it’s oh so much harder for Manchester City Council. This, of course, is all very handy. If you cannot define success then you cannot be a failure.
To some extent, the government has tried to confront this issue by imposing binary measures of success upon the public sector either through centrally defined measures of performance or by letting organisations like hospital trusts face up to the reality of financial failure. However, this has been a bit like trying to put a shrunken jumper on a protesting toddler and I suspect that ministerial appetite to put up with the ensuing screaming and shouting is waning.
The opportunity for local public sector managers is to learn from sport and to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of ambiguity when it comes to measuring success and failure. A lot of public sectors organisations have of their own volition become good at this and have the confidence to measure and assess their performance against quantifiable results. Others are, how can I put this, more comfortable in a world of narrative outcomes, fuzzy contextualisation and ‘we are all winners in our own way’ analysis.
Secondly, you should measure success or failure regularly and at all levels of the organisation. A typical football team will play a game every three to four days. This gives regular feedback on management performance. Furthermore, there is complete transparency about the outcome. Within two seconds of the final whistle, everybody knows the result.
Now compare and contrast this with the BBC’s Digital Media disaster. Five years after kick off we get the final score: IT contractors £100m; BBC nil. If the licence fee payers had been given regular reports on measurable progress then I suspect that somebody would have stepped in at a somewhat earlier and cheaper stage to make changes.
This leads me on to my third point about learning from defeats. Because failure in sport is undeniable and a regular occurrence, people learn to live with it and, more importantly, they learn to learn from it. Every losing football team will sit down on a Monday and painfully relive last Saturday’s defeat. Frame by frame, moment by moment tying to work out what went wrong and how to fix it.
There's no point in having a culture of secrecy because hundreds of millions of armchair pundits also know that it went wrong and have their own trenchant opinions on what should be done differently. The only person blowing a whistle in sport is the seemingly unpopular chap in the middle wearing black who the crowd allege is a banker (although I may have misheard this last bit).
In contrast, the NHS is reported to have spent millions of pounds trying to keep relatively small-scale process failures out of the public domain. You may think that this is a cheap shot at the beleaguered NHS but take a look at the aviation industry.
The Department of Transport funded Air Accidents Investigation branch publishes a monthly report of every incident in the UK. A simple summary of failures freely available on the internet. People die in plane crashes so the public sector regulator and the industry concur that giving everybody the opportunity to learn from defeats is probably more important then trying to prevent bad publicity or protect touchy management egos.
Finally for project type work, use flexible teams with a healthy disregard for grades or structures. All team sport assembles groups of people on a project-by-project basis then quickly disbands them as the challenge changes. This is so endemic in sport that people rarely question it and being substituted from the project team if you are performing badly is a fact of life not a cause for an internal grievance procedure accompanied by your chippy Unite representative.
This flexibility about project teams is coupled with a pure focus on talent not age, grade or job title. I often make myself unpopular at dinner parties by defending footballers’ wages on the ground that this is pure meritocracy that often very poor and uneducated people have got to the top of. There are no barriers to entry and all you need to make millions from football is talent, a battered ball and a patch of wasteland.
Compare this to the other sports that we middle-class brits are good at and you notice that they tend to involve buying something, like a horse or a boat or a golf club membership.
So, in conclusion, I think it is undeniable that the generic mechanisms of sport work as a way of driving performance from the 10,000s of people who work in the industry. This suggests that any sector, including the public one, can learn from this culture of continual improvement.
I think the five most immediate lessons are as follows: firstly, establish binary measures of success for all levels of the organisation, which, secondly, you measure and report on regularly. Thirdly, be transparent about defeats and bravely establish mechanisms to publicly learn from failures, not cover them up. Fourthly, break down complex tasks into discrete steps with, fifthly, regularly changing teams based on talent and aptitude not job titles and seniority.
Do all of these things and I guarantee that your organisation will get better over time. It may take 2,000 years but, trust me on this, it will get better or your money back.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO. @michaelware13
