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Episode 4 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: How do we decide when it matters?
Episode 4 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: How do we decide when it matters?
A senior player loses his temper with a member of the support staff, and someone has a quiet word with him. A younger player does the same thing and is benched. Dr. MCB starts with what the people in that dressing room learn from the two responses, and asks how an organization can make decisions that match the values it says it holds, especially once it is under pressure and already hoping for a particular outcome. She draws on Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick's 2004 paper on ethical fading, where the ethical part of a decision becomes harder for the person making it to see, and on what healthcare and aviation call Just Culture and the research into procedural justice. The suggestions are a way of working rather than a tested method: look back at the decisions already made and ask what was protected when two things the organization cared about came into conflict (she calls this conflict archaeology); keep abuse, harassment, retaliation, welfare concerns and credible risks of serious harm out of ordinary team discipline and in an independent pathway, with a lower threshold in youth sport; agree a few questions to ask whoever is involved, including whether the same process would follow for someone with less standing; write down who decides what; and after a loss, wait seventy-two hours before major decisions unless they were planned beforehand, which never means waiting on an urgent health or safeguarding concern. To begin this week, put your last three discipline decisions side by side and ask someone you trust what they notice.
This series draws on The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony (Routledge). Find the book.
Dr. Marie Claire Bourque. Her newsletter, Dr. MCB’s Curiosities, is at curiosities.dr-mcb.com.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
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I'm Dr. Marie Claire Bourque, Dr. MCB. I'm a psychiatrist, and I ask a lot of questions. My favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to.
That's where Dr. MCB’s Curiosities starts. We take a question about neuroscience, human behaviour, clinical medicine, or something else entirely, and build a podcast episode or series to explore the answer.
I read the research and look at different explanations. What do we know? How do we know it? And what haven't we figured out yet?
You get to follow that search with me, without having to work through all the papers yourself. We'll make sense of the science in plain language, including where the evidence is uncertain or the answer is still taking shape.
You might leave with a clearer answer, a different understanding of something you thought you knew, or another question worth asking.
And if you've got a question I can't answer, send it my way. That's the engine.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
Three incidents, the same behaviour each time, three different responses, and the one thing that decided them was who did it.
That's what Sian puts on a single page. Sian is made up, a composite of situations I've seen many times with the details changed, but the question her page asks is a real one: why would a club with all the right words on its wall make those three calls, and what would have made them the same?
Sian looks after player health at a football club. She doesn't pick the team or coach, and she isn't in the leadership meetings. What she has is a desk that every conduct incident crosses on its way somewhere else.
Over six weeks, three incidents land on it, the same behaviour each time: a player tearing into a member of the support staff. A senior player does it twice; the first time somebody has a quiet word, and the second time nothing happens at all. Then a young player from abroad, here on a visa, does it once, and he's dropped for two matches.
So Sian writes it all on that one page. The head of performance replies: "These are football decisions, and context matters." She asks for a meeting, which is moved twice and then cancelled. The sporting director tells her: "It's a dressing-room matter."
Two months on, the young player's agent files a discrimination grievance, quoting the club's own values statement. An outside review finds the club can't show how it handled discipline, because nobody wrote anything down, and recommends a new code of conduct. Sian's note isn't mentioned anywhere in it. Nobody asks why the one person whose job was catching inconsistency was told, twice, that it wasn't hers to catch.
The new code goes up on the wall, right under the same words that were there the whole time.
Now, you could call that weak leadership. You could call it empty values. I think there's more going on than either of those explains, and I want to show you why.
This series is about elite sport, and we're answering one big question: what makes a high-performance culture? Each episode takes one smaller question on the way there. This is episode four of seven, and today's question is: how do we decide when it matters?
Welcome to Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I ask a lot of questions, and my favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to. So, let's find the answers!
This is the fourth layer of what I call the High-Performance Culture Operating System. For three episodes we've been making the diagnosis: the pressures, whether people can speak, and where the harm comes from. In medicine, once you have the diagnosis, you plan the treatment, and this is where the treatment starts: how decisions get made. It assumes people can speak. If they can't, episode two is where to start.
Sian's page leaves us three things to work out. What did those three decisions say the club actually values, whatever was on the wall? What would have made the same behaviour get the same response, whoever did it? And what happens to all of that when the person at the top is having the worst week of their season? By the end, I want you to be able to look at your own last three decisions and know which of those three things is where you'd start.
Let's start with the wall. Walk into almost any dressing room or head office and you'll see some version of the same four words: excellence, integrity, teamwork, respect. Put them up, mean them, behave accordingly, and that's easy, right?
I don't think the people who put them up were lying. The trouble is that the words don't do any work on their own. "Respect" is compatible with almost anything, and it sits comfortably above a coach who rules by fear. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, two organizational theorists, gave that gap its names in the nineteen-seventies. There are the values an organization says it holds, which they called espoused. Then there are the rules that actually govern its decisions, which they called the theory in use. When the two disagree, the real rules win.
I want to tell you how they found that, because the method is the point. They wanted to know why clever, well-trained professionals so often behaved in ways that defeated their own stated intentions. So they ran seminars with practising professionals and asked each person to do two things. First, describe how you would handle a hard conversation at work. The descriptions came back full of openness, respect and collaboration. Then write the conversation itself, word for word: what you would actually say, and what the other person would say back. The scripts told a different story. Almost every one was built to control the conversation, to win it and to keep anybody from being embarrassed, the writer included. So the same people who had just described themselves as open were steering, withholding and judging on the page. What struck Argyris and Schön was how universal that was, and how blind each person was to it in their own case while spotting it in everyone else's. That's the wall and the dressing room in one exercise. The description is the values statement. The script is the three incidents. And the person who wrote both believes every word of the first.
And the room knows this, because of something basic about how people learn. We repeat what pays off and drop what gets punished or ignored, and the psychology of learning has shown for decades that we also learn the rules by watching what happens to other people. The way I explain it, culture works as conditioning. Take what happened with Sian's senior player. The behaviour is a player tearing into a staff member, and the consequence is a quiet word and then nothing. The lesson the whole dressing room takes is that the standard is negotiable if your status is high enough. Nobody decided to teach that lesson. It got taught anyway.
A value only counts when it costs you something. If it never changes what you do on a Tuesday morning, it's decoration. And the room works that out before the leadership does.
So if the wall won't tell you your values, what will? Your old decisions will, the ones made under pressure, when two good things collided.
I call this conflict archaeology: digging up what's buried and reading the pattern. You get the people who live with the consequences into a room and ask for the real trade-offs of the last year or two, not complaints, but moments where two legitimate priorities couldn't both be honoured. For each one, you ask four questions. What was at stake, and what was protected? What was given up? And who made the call, under what pressure? Sort enough of those, and some values win every time they're tested, while others lose every time. That ranking is who you actually are.
I'll tell you what these sessions are like, because the shape never changes. The first quarter of an hour is easy: old, settled things. Then somebody names the live one, usually someone mid-level, too junior to have made the call, too senior to have missed it: "What about the time we kept him on after his second incident, because the playoffs were coming?" The room changes: two people study the table, the head coach's jaw sets, and the general manager looks at the door.
That's the moment, because the one conflict nobody wants to touch is the one holding your real values. If the leader lets the room back away, the exercise is theatre, so I don't let it. I say, "That one counts. What did we protect, and what did we give up?" And then I go quiet. What comes out is rarely comfortable, and almost always true. The hard part comes after, when someone says, quietly, "We say development matters, and every time it went up against results, results won." That's where the real work starts.
And while you're in that room, notice whose conflicts get named. The ones that surface on their own belong to the people with the most voice. The ones lived by the player from abroad, the woman on an all-male staff, the athlete from a minority background, stay buried unless somebody makes room for them. Dig in a room where everyone looks the same and you'll build a system that protects the people who built it.
Then make each value something a stranger could spot after a week of watching, without being told. "Respect" fails that test, but "we bench the star for the same things we bench the rotation player for" passes it. If you have to explain the value, it's an aspiration, not a standard.
Now here's the turn. Line Sian's three incidents up, and the obvious word is hypocrisy: they said respect, and they did favouritism. That may be part of it. But calling it hypocrisy doesn't tell us how to stop the pattern coming back.
Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick, who studied how people lose sight of the ethics in a decision, described something in 2004 that they called ethical fading. Under pressure, the brain quietly refiles a decision about values as a decision about tactics. It's no longer about who we are; it's "a football decision." Once it's refiled, the dilemma stops registering. And they pointed to language as one of the main ways the refiling gets done.
So when the head of performance tells Sian "these are football decisions", that phrase can move the situation into a pile where the club's values no longer seem to apply. He may have stopped seeing a values question at all. And organizational researchers who looked at how groups behave under threat described something similar at the scale of a whole organization: attention can narrow, and the system can fall back on what it already knows. In a club, that can mean decisions sliding back toward habit, hierarchy and protecting whoever has status, even without anyone deciding to do that.
So inconsistency can involve more than character. Pressure can narrow what people notice when nothing holds the values in view. That's why a better speech alone may leave the problem untouched.
That doesn't excuse harmful choices; it gives us something else to change alongside holding people accountable. You'll hear the refiling happen in the language. The same incident that was a conduct matter when the young player did it comes back, when it's the senior player, as "that's a football decision", or "context matters", or "we need him happy". A person can say those things and sincerely believe their values are intact.
So that's the first thing to work out. The decisions at Sian's club said that status mattered more than the words on its wall. And the people making those decisions may not have seen it happening. That's exactly why the fix can't depend on people noticing in the moment, which brings us to the second thing.
What would have made the three responses the same? Here's the pathway I'd want in every building, with discipline as the example.
It starts with a gate. Before anything gets called team discipline, you ask one question. Is this a welfare matter, or a credible risk of someone being seriously harmed, like abuse, harassment or retaliation? If yes, it stops there. It leaves the coaching chain for an independent pathway, and nobody with a competitive or reputational interest gets to override it or hurry it. In youth sport, when in doubt, you route it through. That gate is the test of the whole system. If the chair of the board can shorten a safeguarding process because the press is calling, the structure is protecting the institution rather than the people in it. So the question is never whether you have a process. It's who the process is built to protect.
Past the gate, you classify: what kind of incident, how serious, first offence or pattern. Then you run the same three fairness questions every time. If someone with less standing had done this, would we run the same process and land on a similar consequence? What response teaches the standard rather than just punishing? And what does this teach the group about what's allowed here? If the same behaviour was "minor" for the star and "moderate" for the rookie, you go back and classify again.
Then you pick a response from a ladder agreed before anyone was in trouble, and you tell the person the standard, the consequence and the review date. And you write it on one page, in the same format, every time. That page is the organization's memory. Without it, nobody can show the next coach what the standard actually was.
It borrows from what healthcare and aviation call Just Culture: separate the honest mistake from the reckless act, respond in proportion, and run everyone down the same path. And it leans on decades of research on what's called procedural justice, which keeps finding that people are more likely to accept an unwelcome outcome when the process was consistent and visible.
Now, I'm not going to tell you to treat everyone identically, because the room knows that's not honest. Behaviour standards that aren't negotiable apply to everyone, star or rookie, but practical accommodations, training load, travel, rest, can differ: a ten-year veteran with a chronic knee isn't loaded like a rookie. So my rule for any exception is what I call the exemption tax, and it has three conditions. First, is it about performance? He gets it because it improves what he gives us on Sunday, not because he's famous. Second, is it out in the open? Leadership explains it to the group, rather than letting it be discovered through gossip. And third, is it taxed? The privilege carries a cost back to the group: extra video, mentoring, a stricter rehab regime. Sian's senior player wasn't getting that kind of exception, though. He was getting a pass on a behaviour standard that's meant to apply to everyone, and no tax can buy that. A pass like that tells everyone else their investment in the standard doesn't matter.
The pathway doesn't guarantee the right outcome. What it does is make inconsistency easier to see, and easier to challenge.
Sian did this by hand, three cases side by side, and the gap was obvious. The structure makes that comparison part of the routine, instead of depending on one person's diligence.
And it rests on one plain question most buildings can't answer: who decides what? That means who picks the team, who disciplines, who sets playing time, who clears a player medically, and who signs off on spending. I call these decision rights, and they have to be written down, because when they aren't, whoever has the most status in the room decides. The tell is what you get when you ask three people, separately, who holds the final call on those five things, because a building where it's settled gives you the same answer three times, and three different answers means the ambiguity is serving someone.
Listen to Sian's club again with that in mind. The head of performance called it "a football decision." The sporting director called it "a dressing-room matter." Two senior people pointed somewhere else, and nobody said the call was theirs.
Which brings me to the objection I hear most. "We're a football club, not a hospital, so what do we want with flowcharts? Good coaches decide fast, on experience, and this slows everything down."
Here's my answer: the most experienced pilots alive still run a checklist before take-off, not for lack of judgment, but because the stakes are too high to trust memory under pressure. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who wrote about why checklists work, showed the same thing in surgery. The checklist isn't there instead of expertise; it shields expertise from the conditions that wear it down. A decision pathway works the same way: it won't make the decision for you, but it settles who owns the call, who gets consulted, which questions get run and what's written down. And if the honest worry is that it will expose inconsistency, that's not an argument against it, that's the pathway doing its job.
So that's the second thing. The same response, whoever did it, comes from a pathway built before anyone is in trouble, a page that remembers, and a written answer to who decides. But a pathway is only as good as the person running it in the worst week of their season, and that's the third thing.
Here's another composite, a coach called Connor, made up in the same way. Connor was a good coach, and I mean good at process. He ran debriefs where people actually spoke and owned his own mistakes in front of them. Then they lost five straight, and after the fourth the board's language changed, and Connor didn't sleep. Next morning an analyst brought a report: the midfield press, Connor's own design, was exposing the back line. A month earlier he'd have pulled that thread. This time, in a flat voice, with his arms crossed, he said: "The press stays. What we need is better execution." The analyst's next report was about execution errors, the assistant coach stopped questioning tactics, and Connor noticed none of it. The press fell apart in the sixth match, three goals through the exact corridor the analyst had flagged, and the next day Connor asked his assistant, "Why didn't anybody say anything?" There was a pause, and then: "We did, Connor, three weeks ago."
Here's what I want you to notice. The moment Connor's thinking changed wasn't a decision. It happened in his nervous system before he knew it, and the room adjusted weeks before he noticed. People read a leader's body before they hear a word, and there's a study I love behind that.
Sigal Barsade, who studied how moods spread through groups, wanted to know whether one person's mood could change how a whole group behaved, not just how it felt. So she set up an experiment, which she published in 2002. She put business students into small groups and gave them a managerial exercise with something at stake. Each of them played the head of a department, arguing for a bonus for their own candidate out of a pot that wasn't big enough for everyone. One person in every group was a plant, trained beforehand to carry a particular mood into the room, cheerful and energetic, warm and calm, irritable and hostile, or flat and sluggish, and otherwise to take part like everyone else. Barsade measured the others' moods before and after, and had outside observers rate the recordings as well. The plant's mood spread to the rest of the group. The groups that caught the pleasant moods cooperated more, fought less and rated their own work higher, and the groups that caught the unpleasant ones went the other way. What strikes me is that nobody announced a mood. It moved through faces, posture and tone, by observation and copying, and the people catching it were busy arguing about money. Later work found it runs harder downhill, from the person with power to everyone else, so a leader who's wound tight walks in and the room braces before anything is said.
So think about the last time your team lost three in a row. Who stopped bringing you bad news, and would you have noticed?
The tool I'd give Connor is a rule for after a loss: no major decisions for seventy-two hours. The exception is anything you planned and wrote down before the loss: "If this happens, we do that." Psychologists who study how intentions turn into action call that kind of pre-commitment an implementation intention. It gets around the brain that the loss has narrowed. The number is a guideline, not a validated threshold, and this never means delaying urgent health or safeguarding action. The principle is to give major decisions some distance from the narrowing that acute threat can produce. On loss day you do nothing, and you tell one person to hold you to it. On day two, you write down every fix that feels urgent and act on none of it. On day three, you ask of each one: is this solving the actual problem, or reacting to how I feel? And on day four, whatever still looks right, you do it.
Urgent because we lost is not the same as urgent.
I'll be honest about the evidence. Research on losing runs in elite sport is thin: one interview study of elite coaches heard them describe their own decision-making degrading, and the pull toward quick fixes that cost more later. And when athletes say a coach has "lost the room", they usually mean the moment his behaviour started depending on the score. So watch how the same leader walks into the building in a winning week and in a losing one.
So that's the third thing: the leader's thinking needs protecting too, with a rule agreed before the loss rather than a promise to stay calm after it. Put the three together and you can see what Sian's club was missing. Nobody had dug up what its decisions really protected. There was no pathway or page to put the senior player and the young player through the same process. And the calls were left to whoever had the most status in the room.
So what do you do with this on a Tuesday morning? Here's where I'd start.
First, take your last three discipline decisions and put them side by side, the way Sian did. Would a stranger watching all three conclude the standard applied equally? If the path would have changed with who was involved, you've found the thing to fix.
Second, write down on one page who decides what: the team, discipline, playing time, medical clearance, spending. Until that page exists, whoever has the most status is deciding by default.
Third, before your next loss rather than after it, write down the decisions you'd want made if it happens, and name the one person who'll hold you to seventy-two hours on every other major decision, which never means delaying urgent health or safeguarding action.
Where does the research stop? Most of what I've described comes from outside sport: workplaces, hospitals, aviation. The decision pathway is adapted from Just Culture and procedural justice research and has not been validated as a sport-specific tool. Conflict archaeology, the seventy-two-hour rule and the exemption tax are practitioner tools, built from theory and applied observation, and their timeframes are guidelines, not validated thresholds. The sport-specific evidence points the same way, though it's a small number of interview studies. The researchers talked to the people who led culture change in elite teams, and found it needed structural mechanisms, clear roles and regulated power, not motivational appeals alone. So what you have is strong mechanisms, borrowed carefully, and tools to test in your own building, not a recipe to trust blind.
Madeline Antony and I wrote the full framework up in a book, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership. The link is in the episode notes.
So, how do we decide when it matters? Here's the answer: intention alone isn't enough, because pressure can make the values question harder to see. We decide by structure built before the pressure arrives: dig up what the old decisions say we actually protect, put a welfare gate in front of everything, run the same questions for everyone and write it down, protect the leader's thinking when it's under threat, and tax every exception.
Values aren't what's on the wall; they're what the room watches happen to people, and a culture decides well when that's the same whoever it is.
So here's what that adds to our big question: a high-performance culture is one where values show up in real decisions under pressure: the same behaviour gets the same response whoever did it, it's clear who decides what, and leaders are supported to think clearly when it counts.
Next time, question five: are we listening, and using what we hear? It starts with a young player going privately to a club's player liaison with one question: is the veteran all right, because he won't look at us any more?
That's Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I hope you learned something. I sure did. Can't wait to ask more questions with you. See you next time! Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. I'm a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views here are my own and aren't endorsed by either university, and this podcast is general education, not medical advice.