"Talent development is like a flock of hungry seagulls" - a conversation with Andy Kirkland - The Talent Equation Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, Stewart here before we get into today's podcast,
I wonder if I can ask you to do me
a favor. I'm hoping that I can get the podcast
to grow to a wider audience. But further it goes,
the more people that it can impact. I often get
letters of messages on social media from many of the
listeners who often talk to me about the impact it's
had on them and the people that they work with.
Sometimes that impact goes as far as family members and

(00:23):
relationships that you hold. I'm hoping that I can get
that message out call wider audience. Now. Obviously, the more
people that listen, the more impact the show can have,
but also the more people that subscribe and download, then
that helps me to invest in the show and put
out more content. As you know, my podcasting of late's
been a little bit sporadic, say the least, and that's
partly due to the fact that I've just been struggling

(00:43):
with capacity. Now I'm hoping to be able to enlist
some help so that I can improve the quality and
improve the amount of podcasts I put out there. But
I can only do that with your help. To please
share it far and wide, you know, use social media
if you want to use your networks through WhatsApp or
other messaging channels that you use, or even if you're
face to pay with people, conferences, seminars, those sorts of places,
let them know about it, encourage them to sign up

(01:04):
and listen. Now, I've got loads of ideas for a
new ways to take the show. I want to bring
on new co hosts other than the world famous Flow
the Dog. I want to do some live streamed episodes
that people can interact with and do Q and as
live Q and a's, and I'm also thinking about doing
live podcasts from conferences as well as bringing on some
big name guests. But I can only do that with
your support. Every single subscription is a massive benefit. Now,

(01:26):
if you want to go a bit further than that,
then there is a Patreon page, and if you go
to the Patreon page, there's opportunities for you to buy
me the equivalent of a cup of coffee. If you're
are to do then that's amazing and that's massively supportive,
but it's not essential. The main thing is if you
could just take the time to share it on your
social media channels or share the episode with somebody that

(01:46):
you know and if you find some value in it,
then pass it on to others and pay it forward.
And if you can do that, I'd be enormously grateful.
Thanks in advance via support.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Welcome to the Townent Equation podcast. If you are passionate
about helping young people to leash their potential and want
to find ways to do that better, then you've come
to the right place. The Talent Equation podcast seeks to
answer the important questions facing parents, coaches, and talent developers

(02:17):
as they try to help young people become the best
they can be. This is a series of unscripted, unpolished
conversations between people at the razor's edge of the talent
community who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences and
challenges in an effort to help others get better faster. Listen, reflect,

(02:38):
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot UK. Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Andy Kirklins, Welcome back to the Talent Equation. Long overdue.
Second conversation looking forward to this.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Is when was it that I was last on? Was
at twenty twenty?

Speaker 1 (03:16):
It feels very very close to yes, when we were
all online lockdown and all that sort of stuff, and
you've been doing some reflection and the Emperor's New Clothes
you've just published, and so we had a bit of
a conversation about that.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Absolutely I didn't believe what happened to Sssole of brighting
that piece. It's probably reached so many people, even recruited
people for the MSc that I work on and performing
scating that as a result of that articles in who
is This Sky they spoke to me and then enrolled

(03:53):
in our program. Australian Institute of Sport was in touch,
you are in touch. I upset a few people. I
think it is fair to see, ah, but the it's
probably the biggest impact and anything. I was writing that piece.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well before before we dive into that plus other subjects,
because you know, you haven't you haven't sat still, You've
been busy. You've been writing various things. And I think
there may even be an Emperor's Too coming out which
we might want to speak to a little bit. Some
people may not have caught that initial episode because they're
only just starting to listen. So real you wouldn't mind
just giving the quick intro of your background, really or how.

Speaker 3 (04:40):
To do that so I like to think of myself
as a bit of a cultchin anthropologist. It's a clever
way of seeing that. I'm interested in everything relating to
sport and coaching. H the University of Starlink primarily on

(05:04):
our Performance Coaching Master's program, So I've got the joy,
and I do mean joy of working with developing coaches,
some working in professional demands at the highest level of sport,
through to people working in grassroots clubs, so it really

(05:24):
suits me. I love the diversity of the types of
coaches I work with. I'm also a triathlon coach. I
limit myself to working with one professional athlete because that's
enough for anyone. So that's an important part of what

(05:47):
I do, just to keep myself as close to the
coal face as possible whilst still playing golf and walking
the dog. Having a relatively balanced life. That's really important
to me as well. But my life isn't completely about sport.

(06:11):
I think the dog is the priority in my life.
But don't tell my partner about.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
I shouldn't giggle might be signaling something myself, So I'm yeah. So,
just to circle back a little bit to the central
thesis of the Emperor's New clothes you'd basically, you know,
you were, I guess, questioning the sort of system that

(06:45):
existed and some of the changes to the landscape that
were being made, and all of those things in terms
of where we were with sort of coaching policy, you know,
coaching development systems. Have we really moved on? Are we
just doing the same sort of thing? All that sort
of stuff, So you know that it was just I
thought it was a really interesting discussion because I was
in the middle of it as a policymaker, so I

(07:07):
was interested in speaking to you. Yeah, and obviously wanted
to talk a little bit about that. So, yeah, just
a quick I don't know, reflections since then really, because
obviously we're what five years on, things have changed, they.

Speaker 3 (07:20):
Have and they haven't. I think my perspective in writing
it was partly emotional in the it's angry the right word.
I don't think angry is the right word. Maybe frustrated
with the system. I've also reflected on my life course

(07:44):
through sport as well and thought about my experiences in
and through sport and how that reflected my views or
on the system. And an important part of that is
probably the I was probably the sort of kid that

(08:05):
Sport England Sports Scotland wanted to engage with, so not
wholly engaged in education, living in a council estate, overweight,
not overly physically active, and sport became everything for me
as I grew older, and it took me from being

(08:28):
an underachiever or someone that didn't prosper in a conventional
education system to someone who I think it's fair to
say I've been relatively successful that I've worked for British Cycling,
I've coached some really good athletes. I've worked with a

(08:52):
few Olympians. I've coached in grass roots clubs. So that
sport is the essence of who I am. It's where
I've grown from and it's really important to me. So
everything I do, I don't think it's virtue signaling. Everything
I do is for people that may be experiencing things

(09:16):
like I did when I was a child. There's a
recognition that sport can change lives for the better. It
can help people grow, it can give them opportunities that
they wouldn't necessarily have in wider society. And that's what

(09:39):
sport gave me. And maybe I'm a little bit OCD
used to be really really driven as well to making
a difference and being part of the system. So working
at British Cycling, working in an institute of or like

(10:01):
many others. So I'm sure you've done it as well.
You've questioned a being effective, is the system being effective?
Are we making a difference? And my conclusion was, in
many cases we're making things worse rather than better. We're
not necessarily providing the right foundations for people to prosper

(10:28):
and through sport and the consequences for those working in
high performance domains, an environment that I've worked in as well.
We hear the glory stories, but the reality and working
in these environments, the wider public, even academics which I

(10:53):
am now one of, don't necessarily hear about those stories.
They lived experiences of individuals. It's not something that's reported
in literature. It's only things that are reported in the
Times or the Daily Mail where there's readers to grab
through the recent one in swimming for example in Portsmouth, Leander.

(11:20):
The papers love these things. I would suggest that working
in some of these environments they don't know half of it.
But there are good things that happen in those environments too,
and that's the world that I've existed in for over

(11:42):
twenty years now, and I've really questioned hard having committed
my career and seeing other really great people committing their
careers to making a difference and they're not making a
difference because there's wider constraints within those systems that are

(12:04):
maybe preventing people from growing and making as much as
a difference as they could. And I also think it
reflects poor use of government money as well.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
So you just mentioned constraints, and I think I have
a decent amount of sympathy with or at least I
think I resonate with what you're saying about some of
the constraints on the system, because I don't I agree
with your thesis in many ways. I don't necessarily think

(12:41):
it's because the world of sport is full of bad people.
I think most people sport are doing so with the
best of intentions. I just think that they are constrained
and there's lots of different ways the constraints materialize. But
i'd love to just hear your your sort of position
on that a little bit mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (13:03):
I'm think I'm going to sound like an academic and
say it's complex, complicated and multifaceted in all these words,
but it is. I'll use an example. So I posted
on LinkedIn last week or something about the experiences of
sports scientists in football academies, ah, how they're often paid

(13:31):
minimum wage, And someone who will remain nameless reached out
to me for a chat who's in that environment and
has coming to academia as well and just wanted to
have a chat, like we are chatting out about my perspective. Well,
these sports scientists are being asked to go into what

(13:53):
they believe to be an elite sporting environment. I woul
question the use of that term elite because they're not
but expected to go into an elite environment with an
undergraduate degree, a master's degree at least a ue B

(14:13):
license that's cost them a fortune to get. Then they're
paid less than they would get paid in tescos and
the head coach doesn't value them. They're not able to
have an impact using their practices, and what are the reasons? Well,
of course it's complex. Many of them are typically young men,

(14:38):
but occasionally young women too, with limited experience. They've gone
through an educational journey that has promoted a particular philosophical
way of thinking. About performance in which you measure things,
measure things in a particular way without consider during the

(15:01):
social context in which these measurements take place, and the
fact that it's the head coachure the gaffer that makes
the decisions and needs to use that information if it's
to be useful, and these coaches have often gone through

(15:22):
problematic coach education journeys. They may lack the wider skills
and knowledge of how to use sports science data. So
we've got underpaid practitioners trying to deliver stuff to people
who are not able to use that stuff. And there's

(15:46):
wider policy factors that influence why that's the case. So
the s FA and the FA dictating the academies employee
sports scientists to achieve academy status when the clubs don't

(16:10):
see the value or benefit for these people, so everyone's
a loser in that case. The teams aren't necessarily coherent,
so that coaches aren't working with the sports scientists. There
may not be a multidisciplinary team approach in which we're
aggregating the data from multiple sources, and lots of resource

(16:34):
is being WestEd. All the while athletes are continually being
ooked and prodded and measured as almost experiments. They're not
necessarily seen as human beings. They're se inputs and outputs

(16:55):
of the system. Now we're going to talk about a
book have written a chapter on in the second I believe.
But the editor of that book, Candy Bori, has talked
about similar experiences as a performance director and such in
sport and has shown that well, of those that come

(17:20):
into some sort of academy structure in the Olympics sports,
the funded sports, zero point two percent of the people
that come on to a national government body performance program
will go to the Olympics. We know in football academies

(17:44):
the statistic is less. It's about it's less than point
one percent, point zero zero one percent something like that.
I can't remember. So the question is whose sport actually for?
What are we trying to achieve? What are we expecting

(18:04):
coaches to do? Are we preparing them to work in
their particular context? And what's the output from the coaching?
And if we buy into this performance narrative and the

(18:25):
purpose is for people to progress to a professional contractor
to win at the Olympics, while the system's failing in
that regardless, isn't it Because we've got a tiny proportion
that will go there and what the numbers are showing. Now,
you'll be more informed on them on those numbers than

(18:46):
I am. But participation rates are struggling. New coaches coming
into coaching are lore than they've been for a while.
I've heard about you talking on your dog walk chat
about you not coaching in a particular environment, and I

(19:09):
think you're quite representative of lots of coaches saying I've
had enough of this. It's just too hard. I'm too
busy in the rest of my life, and I'm continually
fighting to stop bad things happening rather than using my
energy to make good things happen. And I think broadly

(19:33):
it sounds really negative. I don't think and being negative
and just being realistic that too much energy within our
system is spent trying to stop bad things happening rather
than using it to remote what sports about, and it's
about giving people healthy experiences that encourages them to want

(19:57):
to continue to do that. So participation rates go up
if people are enjoying it. And yeah, if we want
to call them the cream, the cream will still rise
to the top. We'll have a greater population base competing

(20:19):
for the same amount of chances to perform at the
very highest level and everyone's a winner, and we can
create these genuinely believe we can create environments in which
we can support those who simply want to participate and
have a nice time and want to come back. And
I also support those who have got aspirations to perform

(20:44):
at the very highest level. But we also need to
have critical conversations with parents, athletes, quangos about the chances
of what we can that they're to be successful, not
selling the dream. That's selling the experience rather than selling

(21:06):
the dream that the sport can be deeply meaningful and
positive for many people. But I kind of think the
system is making things worse rather than making things better.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, I mean I yeah. Interestingly, for me, I think
I think you might be right, But I think I
think the conditions for change are there. This has been
my thesis for a while, and my recent sort of
murmurings have been along these lines. I think the conditions
for change are there, and the foundations are in place.

(21:45):
It just needs people to grab them and take them
in order to create in order to create the environments
that we're looking for, which requires a change of thinking,
which is now becoming a central feature of what I
talk about on the podcast, because I kind of want
to open people's or help people to see some different
some alternatives, some different paths. So you made reference to
the book you've written a chapter in, and you know

(22:09):
that one of the things that the book is, you know,
I'm really interested in as well, was that, you know,
you know, it's it's reimagining talent development in sport. You know,
so Time Equation podcasts is all about that. So I'm
I wonder if you wouldn't mind just sort of sharing
a bit about, like, you know what, the sort of
the central thesis of the book, and then let's delve
into your chapter, because I think there's a lot of

(22:31):
really good themes that can emerge from that that we
can then you'd frame our conversation around.

Speaker 3 (22:37):
Yeah, that's the best way to do it. Because I
emailed the editoral last week handy and my copy has
not arrived and arrived on Saturday morning, I've been rantically
trying to read a very interesting, then sateful, but academic
book all the same over the weekend, and I've built miserably.

(23:01):
So the thesis of the book is that kind of
what I've said there that the system isn't being successful
or short changing young people, and through sport or selling
often a non existent dream in which lots of people

(23:24):
buy into that wider narrative and it's not necessarily that
healthy for them. And Andy and Emily Ryle got together
a very different but like minded group of people to

(23:47):
write individual chapters which reflects both practice. So it's not
a bunch of esoteric academics using big bordoozi and words
to confuse the hell out of everyone, at least all
of the time. There's some of these in there, and

(24:08):
I use some of them too. It's a group of
people who are calling for change through an evidence guided approach.
I use evidence guided rather than evidence beast. I'm saying

(24:29):
there are alternatives, and the thesis is basically, we've got
to stop selling the dream of talent development pathways and
think about some of the assumptions of talent development pathways
a challenge those assumptions because most of them don't hold true.

(24:56):
It's challenging, challenging the narrow that we hear some of
our sporting heroes talk about on the BBC or whatever,
when they're talking about sacrifice, extreme work, ethic giving up
everything for sport and saying actually, no, there's other people

(25:18):
that don't sacrifice everything. They've got a life outside of
sport as well as in the sport that can succeed. Two,
we don't have to promote this narrative that we see. Well,
I'm a big fan of Denise Lewis, for example, but

(25:38):
interviews like that saying oh, you must have sacrificed so
much to win this medal, I'm thinking a sports never
been a sacrifice for me. I love what I do.
Tonight I'll be on the bike again, self fladulating myself,

(25:59):
absolute killing myself because I love it. I'll be out
on the golf course playing golf because there's a great
joy in playing and doing sport. So why is sacrifice
so embedded within that wider narrative of sport When we

(26:24):
know that when identity or individual's identity is so contingent
on sport that when that's the case, issues emerge from that,
usually relating to mental health. And if we recognize that

(26:44):
in that context where we define success by ultimate performance,
the vast majority of people are going to fail within
that narrative through injury, through becoming engage, through not loving
their sport anymore. Got to think, what actually does success

(27:07):
look like? What is talent? How does talent develop and
how does it emerge? And how can we support environments
to allow people to adapt and grow and maintain that
love of sport that I'm talking about when golf is
a joy for me now? And let me say is

(27:33):
that Katrina Douglas, for example, wrote a chapter on her
experiences as a professional golfer and how a lot of
that was contingent on who she was as a golfer.
Talks about these things another sort on tour, saying I
don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to
do this. They might have succeeded at a very high,

(27:56):
high level, but they just don't want to be there
any more. That's kind of why I've worked with a
number of athletes too that have said I've fallen out
of love of my sport through being on the program,
on the performance program. We're talking on podium programs. Was

(28:21):
with potential to perform at the highest level, and I
don't like it anymore. We need to challenge that.

Speaker 1 (28:30):
So I have spoken several times on this podcast and beyond.
I met Katrina a number of years ago when I
was working in golf, and she did open my eyes actually,
because you know, she was a good number of years

(28:51):
ago now, but was talking about some for personal experiences,
and it did resonate quite a lot. I was. And
the irony of that, of course, was I was in
a that was designing pathways at the time. You know,
I was kind of as as sort of steeped in
the in the ideas of pathways because that these were
the early days of well didn't other pathway. So the

(29:12):
idea was, we have to create a pathway for golf,
because without a pathway, how could golf ever develop? And
there's lots of other idea you know, there's lots of
things about that that I am interesting about. I guess
the question I've got is, I mean, i'd love, I
want to dive into your chapter a little bit, but
there's an immediate question that emerges in my mind, and
I imagine people will other people less, we'll go, well,

(29:34):
what's the alternative? Like I think I've been guilty in
the past, particularly we'd say things like coach education is
broken and all those sorts of things of sort of
lamenting the existing system, which is easy to do, but
I'd be interested as interested in what are the alternatives,
what are the what are the things that we can
consider in a reamat, because there's always going to be

(29:56):
people who want to be able to sort of self
factualize through sport. They're trying to be they're trying to
achieve something within the sporting domain, or trying to become
the best versions of themselves in these worlds, and whatever
we think about that pursuit on the potential pros and
cons of it, that's something that's always going to be there,

(30:19):
and a way of allocating resources to support that journey
is something that most sporting organizations see it as their.

Speaker 3 (30:27):
Roles, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
And they want to do it as well as they can.
I think they are basing the way they do it
on some broken assumptions, and I think there's some ways
we could probably start to explore all of that. But
I'd just be interested in your thoughts on you know,
what we could do differently.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
Yeah, I'm shifting my glasses and sighing and go, oh, well.
In the book that and they suggests that they're not
really presenting solutions because it's really complex and not on
my dog walking journeys as well, that's where I do

(31:07):
a lot of my thinking. In fact, as you do,
I'm thinking what would I do? And I was thinking
about that this morning as well, and there was a
tension within my mind between what's ideal and what's realistic.

(31:29):
So what are the systems in place? How do people
within these systems behave, think, act? What's their levels of capability?
How do they see the world? And they're basically the
dominant power And here's just Andy Kirkland having a whine

(31:51):
about stuff on the other end that through maybe through
conversations like this and shift the dial a little bit
within that, how our dynamic? How how do we make
change happen? And the honest answer is I've not got
a bloody clue from my way of thinking. And I've

(32:17):
spoken to a number of people in coach education asking
exactly that question. How how would you use resources? Ah?
In terms of coach education, I said, well, we give
it in this broadly aligned to some of the things

(32:40):
that we're done at Sport England as well, is let's
give a very basic experience to the wider market, just
an entry level tick a box to get insurance.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
And uh, then those that demonstrate a desire and capability
to go further, to invest heavily in a group of
individuals who are head coaches and key clubs.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
Who.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Have the drive to influence others and work closely with them,
maybe on a program like I deliver a University of
Sterling quite a holistic, integrative type program to develop them
as people, to influence the ways that they think about sport,

(33:40):
to understand contextual factors within their environments, things like power dynamics,
there as ecological dynamics, different ways of design and coaching programs,
different conceptsations of skill and skill acquisition. Sometimes where I

(34:06):
get a little bit pushback from students, I deliver quite
sports science oriented stuff. Go oh, this is my first
experience of it. I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't know how to map out and define the
demands of my sport. You're talking a different language to me, Andy,

(34:28):
and they don't engage and maybe complain as a result
as well, this isn't anything to do with my coaching context,
whereas I'm sitting there on the other side of the fencing. Well,
you should know these things. Let's expose you to different
ways of thinking, and that often brings with it tension
as well, because if we present a vision of the

(34:50):
world that's very different to the context that a coach
works in, then there's sometimes tension, there's sometimes conflict, but
it's about seeing the world in different ways. And that's
kind of what I would do is invest heavily in
fewer coaches. And on the other side, what is the

(35:14):
purpose of coach education an extent is to ensure coaches.
It's to ensure they've tick to box, to show that
they've demonstrated a minimal level of competence. I'm not sure
that the qualifications do that, but yeah, so it would

(35:37):
be more a social system in which we target specific
almost like the gold mine effect type things. Let's focus
on individual groups, individual clubs and grow discourses from that,
but recognition that that takes years to do. We're not

(35:59):
saying immediate delivery of metrics that way. It's like my job.
So there's one coach I'm thinking about. It's quite a
high profile athlete as well, who said, Andy, you've changed
my way of thinking about how my coach, and you've

(36:24):
encouraged me to go on to do further study as well.
He's working with how many maybe thirty forty other athletes.
He's also sufficiently high profile for people to listen to him,
which is important in terms of behavior change. Who you
are is more important than what you say in sport. Unfortunately,

(36:49):
so that can I measure the impact of me working
with him? No, I can't just got nice anecdotes to
say You've made a big difference to me. And that's
what we see on the program that lots of coaches
are saying you've changed the way I think about how
I coach, and then they go out into their environments

(37:09):
and maybe change that environment slightly. Do we see increases
in performance and participation as a result of these interactions,
not in any measurable forms, And therein lies the tension.
It's a bit metaphysical, if you will. We can't necessarily

(37:32):
always see the impact of things we do. But we're
working in a system that expects deliverables of KPIs, many
of which aren't deliverable. They're unachievable goals.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
So where I resonate you talk about ecological dynamics, obviously,
and when I'm obviously.

Speaker 3 (37:57):
Picked and just poking the bear and just cooking.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
I need to pope. I am, but I'm not necessarily
going to talk about that necessarily, But I think one
of the if you look at the sort of some
of the underpinning theoretical ideas around or assumptions sort of

(38:22):
rooted in ecological psychology and to a certain extent some
of the dynamical system stuff. Where it kind of takes
you to is a sort of you know, more of
a kind of like complex or complexity embracing view of
human development. And this is one of the things that

(38:43):
attracts me to it because I think just to sort
of talk about some of the fundamental assumptions that exist
around talent development and for that matter, sport development, by
the way, is that sport development I think has been
captured for quite a while. Sport they're at sport development
and therefore talent development because the sort of two things

(39:05):
go hand in hand. Talent development is almost a sort
of subset of sport development. But if you think about
some of the underlying ideas and assumptions that sort of
have permeated sport development, and again I don't know if
this is necessarily because there's been any sort of master plan. Necessarily,

(39:26):
I think it's sort of the winds of political change
that necessarily bring this around. But if you look at
some of the underpinning ideas, it's actually quite reductionist in
its sort of central idea, which is, you know, almost
sort of going down this sort of and quite mechanistic
as well. So it's the way pathways have emerged is

(39:47):
almost to say well, and for that matter, systems and
the system systematization of talent development has moved in direction
where sports are asked in order to justify their resources
that would be placed within them, whether they're human or

(40:08):
cash or whatever it might be. The system is designed
to say, you should have a pathway slash system with
these ingredients in it. Firstly, you've got to have a
blueprint or an architecture, usually in the form of some
kind of pyramid style diagram, which bears actually no reflection

(40:31):
of an actual journey that a human or group of
humans would go on, but nonetheless creates a smart visual
of how individuals might develop or how a system might
be built. Again, once you're designing the architecture of a system,
you're immediately almost not really considering the people within it.

(40:54):
So that's fundamentally I think a bit of a flaw.
And then second, and then because once you've built that ard,
that blueprint, and you've got that architecture, and you've sort
of started to create this, almost to a certain extent,
sort of factory approach to the development of talent, you're
immediately going to force human beings to fit within that model,
so that there's an immediate tension there.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
Absolutely, and it's one of the.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
Reasons why so many talent systems don't really deliver on
the outcomes that they're looking for, because the reality is
that the vast majority of talented individuals emerge around those systems,
not necessarily through them. That's a massive overgeneralization because there
are products of the systems that do emerge as well.

(41:40):
I'm not saying it doesn't work that way, but I
would say that there's been a lack of sophistication in
the way individuals or in the way talent systems are
measured in terms of their output. And I think if
someone was to properly critically evaluate talent systems, I don't
think they deliver on They don't deliver the output that
actually they should deliver if they were supposed to work
as well as they should. And I think there's a

(42:03):
lot of SURVIVORSHIPT bias, and I think there's a lot
of other but.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
What is the output Because there's limited funding. There's always
going to be limited funding. Success means having more people
going through the system to an extent, but there's limited places.
The further you go up, the fewer the places there are.

(42:28):
And to achieve the ultimate metrics, say when we use
Olympic medals, there might only be one Olympic medal available
in that domain and only eight people that can be
in that Olympic final in the world. So that even

(42:49):
if we get more people going through the system and
develop a more a system where people are performing at
a higher level, nothing much changes because the level of
failure because of funding and available partium places remains the same.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
So my view on the talent system, though, is not
necessarily so. I don't necessarily see the outcome of a
talent system or the output of a talent system being
you know, like meddling, necessarily even.

Speaker 3 (43:28):
Want a talent system the steward or or do we
want lots of little ecosystems throughout the country from which
people emerge and we support people within these ecosystems to
define success on their own terms.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Well, now that's good, right, We'll go back to that
hold that thought because I think that's really important because
that's sort of partly where my mind is going as well.
But just to sort of centralize a little bit on
where we are with what we got the system system
that is designed, as we said before, and that's a
flawed concept, the idea of the development of a system

(44:11):
in itself, but if you were to evaluate it properly,
you know, does it deliver? And your question, you rightly ask,
is well, what is the output? What should we be
saying is the output? And I think a lot of
people will see the output is yes, the meddling all this,
that and the other, or you know, the number of
people achieving international representation in team sports or whatever it is.

(44:31):
My view has always been is actually a TAR system
is successful if it is delivering and oversupply. So, for example,
if it is providing enriching and meaningful experiences for the
humans within it so that more of them are able
to self actualize or maximize their potential, which then gives

(44:54):
whoever the decision makers are around selection for whatever it
is that the you know, where it's junior representation, international representation,
whatever it might be they have a headache because there's
more of those people than there were previously. That would
be Now I'm not saying that's the right measure. I'm
just saying that's our measure that and it should be

(45:17):
about And I don't think these so called systems, with
the amount of resources put into them, deliver on them
promise any more than if those systems didn't exist.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Absolutely, And do you know what the picture in my
head is of a deep fried fish am a vegetarian,
A deep fried fish down at the beach with a
bunch of seagulls walking around it trying to get their
juicy bit of cod and batter down and Portobello prom

(45:50):
Just don't say Edinburgh. That's the picture I've got that
there's this price, which is the deep fried bit of fish,
a bunch of crazy sea eagles fight and pecking each
other's eyes out. If we can think about them more
so as entitled parents, I use that very carefully because

(46:14):
not every parents like that. And it's not a them
and us mentality I'm thinking about either. But there's a
whole lot of people competing over this same thing, and
if they don't get their piece of fish they're not happy,
and they're angry at the at the system, and they're

(46:36):
challenging the system because there's this belief that they're entitled
to something through and from the system. So we're developing
cultures of expectation, of entitlement, of flawed beliefs, and even

(46:59):
that if you card, then you're going to be successful. No, no,
that's not the case. You've got to be in their
right social conditions, have the right inherent talent, have a
bit of luck. And again there might be life experiences

(47:21):
which make you pathologically driven to move to the next level.
That hunger. It's saying, I want this bit of fish
more than anyone else, so I'm going to fight every
seagull other seagull to ensure I get the biggest bit
of fish. And that's the way I often see the

(47:41):
system operating, just a bunch of seagulls fighting over a fish.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
I think you're right. I mean, I think the cu
just gob to seagulls as maybe the parents. I described
the seagulls as the organizations, and the fish is the
relative the resources or the funding that's available, and I
think often that's that's the fight, or sometimes it can
be organizations within you know, and also if you take
the fish as being the athletes, then very often the

(48:11):
organizations are fighting over a finite pool of athletes, and
that what they're trying to do is they're trying to
pick off the athletes to come into their system, which
is one of the reasons why SIS talent systems have
got younger and younger, because the thinking is we have
to get them before the other sports get them.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
Absolutely, it's a race to the bottom. I had that
particular discussion with ahead of academy at a football club.
I'm thinking about how much I can see because I
don't want to reveal identity, But my question is, why
do you want to develop your academy to the next

(48:53):
level when we know that primarily either failing And his
view was that unless so, he suggested their system might
have been a bit better than the other clubs, but
the fact was that they weren't getting any of the

(49:13):
athletes coming in as sixteen year olds because other clubs
had got them before, so that they weren't able to
get the athletes when they were sixteen because the system
existed where all the other clubs had got them. So

(49:34):
he accepted it was a failing system and the rest
of the bottom, but simply to exist they had to
play the same games as everyone else, which was quite saddening.
In fact, he understood these things, that was quite insightful,
and he was ready to answer my challenging questions on

(49:55):
why would you want to do that in the first place,
and he had a really good answer that actually changed
my way about thinking about it.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
It's interesting, though, that the same organizations that are so
driven to hoover up talent what they consider to be
talent younger and younger and younger, and I'm not just
talking about football here, by the way, talking about across
the set cross system, are also perfectly happy to hemorrhage

(50:27):
it by virtue of either really quite injudicious selection systems
with extremely poor athlete engagement, athlete involvement, athlete voice, athlete choice,
and or my virtue of hemorrhage that talent by virtue

(50:49):
of a lack of and this goes back to what
you were talking about earlier, on a lack of really
high quality knowledge amongst the practice, as in those environments
around adolescent developments and health well being, physiological developments, biopsychosocial

(51:10):
as you've talked about earlier on and that lack of
knowledge leading to injury or burnout or all these other areas.
So let's just keep hoovering up at the bottom as
many as possible, because we know we're going to break
them one as many as possible, so that the ones
that break are less of an impact and we've got
the ones through. My view is like, why why would

(51:31):
you invest all that time and be so hairless with
the you know, this, this goal that you've accumulated, Why
would you just allow it to fritter away? It doesn't
make sense. It's really yeah, sorry.

Speaker 3 (51:49):
We're seeing one of my sports. I'm seeing one of
my sports. I've got three now, so I've got cycline,
which was golf and triathlon Eikland was my first love
and and part of that environment and worked quite closely
in that sport. And what we've seen over the last

(52:11):
ten years is a huge shift in the age group
of riders winning at World Tour and pro tour level
to being much younger. So you would typically get twenty eight,
twenty nine, thirty thirty one, and now we're getting nineteen, twenty,
twenty one, twenty two year old, but their careers are

(52:34):
much shorter, they're having less fulfilled careers and the impact
on their health and well being is more pronounced too,
so they've got less of a sustainable career and almost
a wee bit like golf. In fact as well, talk
about golf, I'll sound like an old walk now, which

(52:58):
I am. But it's not as enjoyable to watch the
sport as an observer because the base is much wider,
The systems have become much more structured, much more metric driven,
and you've not got players like Sevy and Lee Trevino

(53:20):
coming out and swash buckling and all these types of things,
and it's not as much fun for the viewer to watch.
People are things are going behind pay walls as well.
We've got that issue where to watch the Tour de
France this year it's thirty one ninety nine on TNT,

(53:42):
which is quite a big thing. There's petitions going you know,
all the petitions going up in the cycling community saying
we need to legislate so that we get it on
free to view. Yeah, that's going to take up the
government time, isn't it. But these are the sorts of

(54:03):
environments that are developing and people are actually walking away
from watching the sport as well, so that maybe we're
getting a slow rot of the systems too. It's more
difficult to watch, therefore it will be more difficult to
make money. We'll have less people coming through it roots level.

(54:25):
So there's lots of things going on, but athletes being
younger and younger is definitely not a good thing. It's
almost like in my world of higher education. I came
to higher education as a thirty year old. It was joyful.

(54:49):
Every opportunity to do anything I was doing it. Every
lecture was a privilege. I was hungry or knowledge. And
now I often describe a better be careful what I
say here, but sometimes lecturing to rows of cabbages in

(55:13):
which it takes so much investment to engage with young
people in meaningful ways as well, And I think or
this relates to the chapter I've written, or do a segue,
so I'm not going off in multiple tangents. I talk

(55:35):
about a word soluted genesis. Ah, now I'm sounding really
academic now, but solutogenous is the basis of that word
is posing questions around what makes and keeps people healthy?
What does a healthy environment look like? What are the

(55:56):
factors that influence good health. So that's what my chapter
is about, exploring my life course things that have made
me healthy in some regards and allowed me to manage
some of the stresses in the sporting milieu. And there's

(56:19):
three three words there. Well, there's an over arch, a
few overarching principles, and one sense of coherence. And under
that sense of coherences meaningfulness. It's one word. So the
motivations of individuals. So where do they get their satisfaction

(56:43):
from life from what's their orientation towards particular tasks, how
do they engage in those tasks, and what intrinsic rewards
do they get from doing them? A The another word
within sense of coherence is comprehensibility. How do individuals see

(57:06):
the world, how do they appraise stress, and thus how
do they cope with stress in particular environments. So a
high level of comprehensibility allows us to go hope more
effectively in the environment. So, coming back to the golf

(57:28):
course analogy, I'm thinking about the third tole on my
golf course. There's an out of bounds right the way
down at this par five, and the slope goes down
towards that out of bounds. I'm not going to die

(57:50):
if my ball goes out of bounds, but if I
focus on it, it probably is going to go in
that direction. We're going into that challenger threat type thing.
It's not a threat. I'm in a beautiful place. There's
lovely trees, the cherry blossoms been out and it's just dropped.
I'm having a lovely time. So does it matter? So

(58:10):
that's my stress coping response, and more often than not,
I'll keep it in bounds. That's the same for many
things in life. How do we appraise the environment we're in?
Is it a positive one for us? Do we see
it as meaningful to us? Does it motivate us? And

(58:34):
then there's the manageability. How do we manage in that environment?
How do we develop? So again that's the adaptation process.
How able are we to adapt within that environment? And
we could probably bring in the eco DA to that is,

(58:56):
how able are we to deal with the constraints within
that environment? And a wider concept within the theory is
general resistance resources. We could talk about that as affordances.
Where do we draw our energy from? Is it individual?

(59:19):
Is it individual coping responses? How have they developed through
our life course and what are the external factors who
can we draw on to help us when we're unable
to cope? Do we have adequate support structures? Are they

(59:40):
providing things that are actually helpful to us? So I
would say the dog's probably magrat. It's a general resistance
resource because she's absolutely dependent on me a lover deeply
in that she helps me cope with the stresses in
my life because after this, I'll have to go up,

(01:00:00):
have a stretch, take the dog out for a wee
have a chat in a play with the dog, and
I'll come back refreshed. So if we think about sense
of heerence, I would suggest how do we develop that
sense of coherence that umbrella term for all these words
in the sporting environment and when things go wrong, where

(01:00:23):
can we draw up on to help people adapt more effectively?
I would argue that where sport has often gone and
we talked about gymnastics off air, was a negativity bias
in sport and sporting systems. So we're looking at not

(01:00:45):
developing healthy environments. We're looking at preventing harm and risk,
and that's very different. How do you prevent bad things happening?
And using a lot of resource on safeguarding and various processes,

(01:01:06):
procedures and policies to stop bad things happening. What if
we flip that on its head and said, how do
we help or support good things happening? In a report
from the Scottish Football Association, trying to think how many

(01:01:28):
years ago that came out now, For example, there was
child abuse going on at Celtic Football Club with a
coach and affected lots of people, and there was a
big report and the government was involved because it was
football and it was Scotland. And one of the recommendations

(01:01:50):
in that was to promote autonomy support climates where athletes
had appropriate voice, so that they weren't operating in these
control and environments where the coach screams instructions from the
sidelines and seen as an authority figure in which you're

(01:02:13):
unable to challenge. We've had a story in the papers
over the last few days of a similar thing in swimming,
and without interrogating that too much, I would suggest that
an autonomy support climate didn't exist there. But to develop

(01:02:36):
that climate takes time. It takes wider systems in schools
as well to quit young people to deal with and
cope with autonomy. That's often what a challenge way face
in the higher education system, and there's been a recent

(01:03:00):
study out on that that students are coming into the
higher education system going I've not been given autonomy formal
own learning before, and you're expecting me to deal with
that really, really quickly. They can't cope with it. They're
struggling and they're failing to engage as a result. So

(01:03:21):
the easy thing for me to do is someone working
in higher education is to blame secondary schools, and then
secondary schools will blame primary schools and everyone will blame
the parents too. But if we fundamentally changed the question

(01:03:41):
to what creates a healthy learning environment or what creates
a healthy performance environment, it's about developing these things, the comprehensibility,
the understanding, the stress appraisal, the manageability of these things things.
So how do we create environments to promote appropriate stress

(01:04:07):
hoping responses? Ah? The reason I reached out to you
was I was listening to one of your dog Walk
commentaries in which you challenged Dave Collins's stuff or on trauma,
and that's why I reached out to you. I was thinking, Ah,

(01:04:29):
in my life and in my career by definition, or
I'll ask you first, what what's your definition of trauma?
What do you think it is?

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
For me, it's a sort of a deeply negative experience
that then leaves lasting damage, whether it's emotional, psychological, physical,
but it leaves lasting damage or harm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Mm hmm. So I would think that's that's maybe where
the difference in thinking is coming from for me as well,
and that I was thinking. Lots of things in my
life have been quite traumatic, so really my definition is
around them being distressing events which have been unable to

(01:05:22):
cope with, that have caused a lot of distress, so
that have occurred in working environments. I'm sure you've experienced
some of these things getting home from work, thinking I'm

(01:05:43):
unable to cope with this experience, or I'm distressed by this,
or i feel really helpless as a result of those
interactions within my day and I'm not equipped to deal
with these And I've often felt these things throughout my career,

(01:06:06):
and I think that they're a normal part of life.
I've studied Buddhism too, in part of one of the
central tenets of Buddhism is suffering is inevitable. Everyone suffers
it's part of being human, but it's how we deal
with that suffering, how we appraise it, and how we
grow from it. Now, I had a good chat with

(01:06:29):
Professor Andy Lane a while ago on emotion and emotion regulation,
and I'm trying to think where the work he was
drawing on. But he said from an evolutionary psychology perspective,
if emotions weren't helpful in on an evolutionary basis, humans

(01:06:55):
wouldn't have them. So that say, we go back to
caveman or cave women experiences and we've just been attacked
by a saber toothed tiger and we find it deeply traumatic,
had a chunk taking out our leg at heart, we

(01:07:17):
think we might die as a result. What do we
do way withdraw we think we think about strategies to
deal with that sabertooth tiger when we emerge from our
cave or of despair. If you will, I'll use a

(01:07:39):
personal example just during COVID. Yeah, as we were emerging
from COVID, I had fast developing cataracts, which meant my
eyesight went down to six thirty six, which is partially
cited and as an academic being partially cited being unable

(01:08:02):
to read very well and being exhausted by midday was
deeply distressing. It was deeply traumatic. It impacted on me.
But what's grown from that experience after getting it fixed,

(01:08:24):
is well an appreciation of what it's like to have
a disability and the things within society that are difficult
to negotiate, like crossing a road where someone's parked selfishly
on the pavement or something like that. I become quite
engaged with. That makes me annoyed, but it also gives

(01:08:48):
me deep joy. Saw a gold crest bird the other day.
There was over a year that there was one day
I saw someone walking towards me and I thought they
had a dog, and it was actually a suitcase. So
that those deeply distressing circumstances often help us grow and

(01:09:15):
grow stronger and take deeper meaning from life. And some
of my negative experiences in and through a sport give
me the drive to do what I do to meaning
and motivation into my life and help me grow as
a practitioner. And it's idealistic to think the world as

(01:09:38):
such that bad things don't happen to people. Bad things
sometimes help us grow. The word soluted genesis came from
a medical sociologist called Aaron Antonovsky. We've always got a
name like that, haven't they. His observations and development of

(01:10:04):
the theory came from his work with Holocaust survivors, and
what he observed was how resilient many Holocaust survivors were
despite the adversity that they've experienced in life. Where they

(01:10:27):
draw meaning from, how they draw positive energy from their
wider community and such, and that's where the theory emerged from.
So that if we think about trauma or many words,

(01:10:50):
in a neutral capacity, we talk about learning in such
a way as well. You can have positive, neutral, negative,
same with trauma. It's what emerges from the experience that
may help us adapt to deal with future challenges within life.

(01:11:10):
And what I think we're seeing in society the moment
is young people struggling to cope. Maybe the environments almost
like vacuums, have meant that they've not had to make

(01:11:31):
decisions for themselves, they've not had to deal with challenging
experiences like maybe I did as a kid, being chucked
out the door as a six year old with your
mates and getting up to all sorts of nonsense, through
to being a teenager living in a working class community

(01:11:52):
where there is basically gang warfare with the other parts
of the town and other towns where we're hanging about
street corners and the car would go past and they're
throwing things at us and fighting and all these things
going on. So that's the environment that I was brought
up in, and you're seeing how higherarchies develop in those environments.

(01:12:16):
You've got the hard man, the top boy. Us kids
are aspirational to the top boy who's the hardest, and
stature is determined on how hard you are in some
of these environments that can be quite traumatic at times
as well. I don't think young people are maybe not

(01:12:39):
exposed to those extremes, but they're not exposed to the
sorts of things people of our generation were, and as
a result, they're less able to a praise and deal
with stress appropriately and manage it. So that if we

(01:13:01):
think about trauma is a neutral word that can help
us grow, to help us deal more effectively with stress
in the future. That's a bit different to thinking about
it wholly as a negative event. And I would say
that I wouldn't necessarily want to engineer traumatic experiences within

(01:13:25):
a developmental trajectory of a young person. But you know,
and I know that part of a major part of
life is a failing, being excluded, being treated with disrespect,

(01:13:46):
getting into arguments, having conflict, people telling you you're not
good enough. And sometimes these things are justified. I've got
to do that in my job. Sometimes to student sy
your work is not of the required standard, I'm suggesting

(01:14:09):
or recommending you don't progress or you don't get this
qualification because I don't think you've achieved that standard. That's
very typical to what young people will experience when they
go out into a working environment. They may work in
Tescos or Sainsbury's where they've got a bullying boss. They

(01:14:32):
need to be able to deal with that. They need
to appraise that and deal with it appropriately. And what
I think we're seeing now is young people less able
to deal with these things and lashing out and not
able to cope with challenging environments.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Yeah, young people are saying, we don't want to inhabit
environments that require us have to navigate this level of
negativity in our life. We want to inhabit environments where
you know. So it's interesting, though, you know a lot
of what you've said there, I think is an interesting

(01:15:14):
reflection on again the status quo, and I'm again going
back to sort of challenging some of these assumptions. So
there's a lot to unpack. So just forgive me for
a second while I do it. Your point, you make
a good point, which is, you know, there's no doubt
that challenging, difficult, maybe traumatic again, what the bar of

(01:15:36):
trauma is I don't know, but let's say, you know,
let's take this whole group challenging difficult, suffering elements in
let's call them under this umbrella of sort of traumatic
experiences can illicit growth, And lots and lots been written
about that, lots and lots of you know, it's a
central thesis that t X work around the growth mindset, struggle, challenge, difficulty,

(01:16:00):
getting it the right sweet the right sweet spot, and
all those sorts of things is canceltic. Growth can be developmental,
can create people on a you know, and a lot
of coaching, in my mind is getting that sweet spot,
finding the right level of challenge. Absolutely, and that's the
skill of it now. And it can but it can
just as easily be debilitating and and ilicits extremely negative

(01:16:26):
experiences that people find it extremely difficult to overcome, and
then that leads to all sorts of other debilitating experiences.
Only a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to
a mother whose child had experienced a fairly savage de
selection process and their response to and the part of
the de selection process the feedback given was about physical

(01:16:47):
stature linked to maturation, and the response in the child
was an eating disorder. So these are the consequences that
can happen results of that. And I guess my thesis
in my meanderings in the dogwarf was around this idea of, actually,

(01:17:08):
if we go out there with a message to suggest
talent needs trauma, right, I think we've got to be
much more judicious with our language, right. And I would
have thought to recognize that. But I'm just trying to
say that. I know that's not the central thesis of
necessarily of the message behind the actual work. But you've

(01:17:29):
got to be careful with slogans because they capture imagination,
particularly honest individuals who aren't necessarily that well versed to
actually read the detail. And that's the danger. The danger
is a slogan's capturing The other thing that I would say, though,
is is that a lot of that work feeds into
the performance narrative which we've been lamenting, right, which is
talking about the idea that there is something inherently valuable

(01:17:56):
in the idea that these sorts of experiences, and and
I'm not sure that that necessarily is the case. I
want to challenge that assumption. I think we've we've worked
on the basis that the only route for such a
self actualization, whatever that looks like, is through this sort
of this sort of overcoming hardship approach.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
No, yes, yes, And can I come back to the
theory stir and see. So Antonovsky talked about the river
of life much as the way Dave talks about the
Rocky Road's.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Description better than the rocky Road.

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
Yeah, but if we are prepare, or if we are
try to prevent children and young people ever entering the river,
and then they find themselves in it, they're going to

(01:19:00):
struggle even on the meandering bits of that river, Whereas
there but in life, we've got to go down these
meandering bits. I'll link it back to some wider psychiatric
definitions of a dynamic equilibrium. So it's a moving dynamic

(01:19:23):
equilibrium of adaptation. It's forever changing much as a river does.
So sometimes there'll be times of peace and tranquility and
the river's moving slowly and we're content and everything's fine,
and before we know it, we're falling down a waterfall,

(01:19:44):
bumped our head on a rock. Then we're going down
a fast moving current, and so ah, and life and
sport is like that river. My life's like that. I'm
sure your life like that. Seeing colleagues who have recently

(01:20:06):
been made redundant on LinkedIn and things like that, so
we're found changes in their lives too that are going
down this river. So that if we don't prepare young
people to navigate that river successfully where there's times of adversity,
times of challenge, occasionally times of trauma, then the consequences

(01:20:32):
are much worse. And I'm seeing in my working environment
young people less able to deal with criticism, with challenge,
with failure of lashing out, of blaming others. I think

(01:20:54):
the evidences suggesting it's not just me that's thinking that way,
that there's a general feeling that young people are really
struggling at the moment, and part of that is that
many have not learned to navigate the river sufficiently to

(01:21:14):
cope with the challenges that life throws at them. I
suppose that's central to what I would suggest about any
sporting environment is we should be helping people grow, adapt
and deal with challenge, Recognize that injury happens, that crashes happen,

(01:21:35):
that other people might be nasty to you that well.
I've worked with performance directors and head coaches that are
very similar to those that we've seen in the abuse
cases in the newspapers and had consequences on me thinking

(01:21:55):
about challenging one coach in particular, where I nearly lost
my job because of the power dynamics, because of saying,
this is all physical development in this environment, that's all
they're doing. It's like a trojan work ethic. Where's the
skill acquisition, where's the other things going on in that environment?

(01:22:17):
And I nearly lost my job for saying that in
the high performance environment because I was challenging the head coach.
So that that's often the reality of the environments people
exist within, and that makes me really sad. I don't
want coaches like that to be operating in these environments.

(01:22:40):
But the sad reality is with the current narrative, that's
kind of how it is in many environments, so.

Speaker 1 (01:22:47):
That yeah, I mean, I'm with you on this in
the sense that I'm not suggesting that equip it. I mean,
I've thought about this thesis before. I think I've talked
about the idea of sort of climbing a mountain wearing
a pacamac. You know, I don't think young people in particular,

(01:23:08):
as they go on this developmental journey are being equipped
with the right tools to be able to navigate effectively. Now,
some of that's to do with the fact that you know,
there's children, right, so why would they be why would
they be equipped? But only in the parents who are
the caregivers of the child, and the parent child is symbiotics,

(01:23:30):
So you shouldn't really I mean, whenever you hear a
sport talking about parents being a problem right as parents
the child are one, until such time as the child
is suitable to be able to start to make some
of their own decisions, which obviously happens later in life,
which is one of the reasons you would really only
ever want talent systems to happen much later in adolescence,
when children have begun to be able to start to

(01:23:52):
make life decisions, like, for example, making choices about what
careers they might do and then subject and make changing
subjects at school. Whether or not you agree with the
timing that happens in a schooling system, fundamentally we've decided
that's the right time for them to start to make
some decisions about their future. Anyway, so it should happen
a lot later, and that would be that would be beneficial.

(01:24:15):
Reality is that doesn't happen. So I really like this
solut agenic thesis, by the way, this idea of actually,
let's not just be dealing with treatment or artificial preventative measures, right,
which happen a lot as well, Let's actually look at
a really enriched experience for young people which will enable

(01:24:38):
them to out develop the sort of capabilities, and part
of that is support and helping them to navigate some
of these challenging experiences. Because one of the other central
thesis around even around the sort of you know, the
sort of the trauma hypothesis, really is that even in
the Great British Medalist project, you know, these people who

(01:24:58):
experienced traumatic experienancies who then went on to become supermedalists
all had extremely supportive environments that enabled them to make
sense of what had happened and then use that as
fuel for further than further development, right now, you know,
So that is a key component. If that doesn't exist,

(01:25:19):
then that sometimes can be a really problematic situation. And
in some cases with young people who are having some
of those experiences, it's the parents are kind of part
of the problem in some cases, because you do sometimes
see parents who are either semi absent to some of
the emotional needs of young people. But then the minute

(01:25:39):
that person that the young person experiences some challenge, they're
compiling in wanting to fire blame everywhere, you know, at
coaches and this, that and the other. So that becomes
a huge problem. So I'm totally sort of on board
with this idea that we need to develop. But again,
this comes back to the point, right and it's again
central thesis of this podcast and why I set it
up in the first place, which is that talent coaches,

(01:26:01):
in my view, are very often massively overlooked and under
resourced and in the sense that they bear a huge
responsibility for navigating and supporting and guiding journeys for young
people going through huge amounts of change, you know, And
it's a key critical component. And yeah, they're never given

(01:26:22):
level the level of resource and support that they should
have in order to be able to do this, and
they don't even have some of the core basic requisite
knowledge to be able to help those people. So I
think there's a really important message to be made here,
which is that and this goes back to your point
around instead of just continuously putting barriers in place, or

(01:26:43):
more things for coaches to do, and this is a
central feature of the research I was doing on strategy
and policy, more things to do which give the artifice
of safety, more DBS checks, more safeguarding courses, more for staids,
more this, more that, more the other. Instead of doing

(01:27:03):
all of that, put the genuinely supportive systems in place.
To the people with this responsibility for athlete health, do
coach development properly and then not you do Once you
do two or three things a you give the athletes
the capability to be able to sort of go through
this developmental journey with the right level of support. The

(01:27:26):
people responsible for the developmental journey, or at least the
guide by the side on the developmental journey, is better
equipped to help them navigate. So both parties are equally
protected from anything you know, overly harmful occurring, which is
what gives rise to all these headlines. So my view is,

(01:27:47):
and this is what I've been lobbying for for ages,
is that when I'm talking about coach education is broken,
I'm coming in it from the perspective of, let's forget
the idea that we need to educate coaches into oblivion
in order to prevent harm and to create this. It
doesn't work and it isn't doing the job, and you're
expecting it to do. Let's start to rethink the way

(01:28:10):
coach to Paul happens. Coaches will have a better experiences
after a better experiences, if you only care about metals,
you'll get better outputs. Anyway, it's the ultimate win win proposition.
But it's going to take resources, and it's going to
take a new different way of thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:28:23):
I think though. I think there's often what in discussions is, oh,
we need more resource or we need more resource allocated
in this particular area, and I would maybe take a
different approach. I would say, we need to use the
available resource more effectively to have impact. I'm thinking as well,

(01:28:52):
so we've got the mental health discourse that's become popularitiest
over the last ten year years or so. And then
if we look at the mechanisms of support and how
they work, that's broadly not successful either. There's been things
like developing mental health literacy to help the stress coping

(01:29:13):
response of young people in sport. But if we look
at where that literacy comes from, it comes from DSM five,
which is the psychiatric Bible, if you will, of taxonomy
and nosology of how we define mental health, much of
which isn't evidence based, first of all. And secondly, if

(01:29:37):
we look at the growth of mental health literacy, what
else has grown? Prevalence and use of pharmacological agents, and
mental health has not got better, So that system isn't
necessarily working. So I'm saying, oh, we're supporting athletes by

(01:29:59):
promoting mental health and saying it's important. If we come
back and say, well, what are the mechanisms and mediating
factors that influence change, How does this help athletes become
more mentally healthy? Then the evidence is pretty clear that
it doesn't. If people are referred on that they're lucky

(01:30:20):
if they get a six week course, if they need
to go into the healthcare system for support. Good luck
you U last year about to die or commit suicide
because it's unlikely you'll get support anyway, and that often
makes things worse. So my argument is that we need

(01:30:42):
to support these talent development coaches and performance directors and
such to be able to create environments to allow people
to adapt and prosper. And that means perhaps taking resource
away from safeguarding, from mental health, literacy courses, all these

(01:31:09):
add ons that we know don't really work, and invest
in that in appropriate coach development. And something that I'm
really aware of in my world is not to be
judgmental of coaches either. So there's almost a tension in

(01:31:30):
my mind that some of the coaches I work with,
I'm astounded at what they don't know, thinking, how do
you not know that you're working on a talent pathway,
you're working on an Olympic program, or you're working in
a really big school supporting a few thousand children, and

(01:31:51):
you don't know that. You don't understand this. But the
humble side of me says, wow, As a physiologist, I
was working with Olympic level athletes sometimes and hadn't studied
the endocrine system at any level. I didn't know much
about psychology. There was all these things that weren't in

(01:32:15):
my toolbox as someone working with athletes at a very
high level, to their detriment. So I need to reflect
on my own life course and what I didn't know
in how these things changed over that life course, which
really is what probably a fifty year old I'm starting

(01:32:36):
to say, Ah, I think I'm getting there. I think
I'm quite confident in calling myself a wee bit of
an expert here. I've not got this imposter syndrome anymore.
I'm actually quite good what I do, rather than this
overinflated ego that thought, Oh, I've got a PhD. I've

(01:32:58):
worked with Olympians, and this I must be awesome. There
was that period of despondency when I started to be
exposed to new things and new ways of thinking and
different ways of developing people and going, oh, my goodness,
how bad was I? In that period of thinking how
bad was I? And as a coach educator as well,

(01:33:21):
and some of the rubbish that I delivered on courses,
I mean rubbish that was making young people worse. I
was that person infecting the minds of other coaches simply
because of the T shirt I was wearing, and I

(01:33:42):
didn't have a clue what I was talking about. So
that's really important in how I praise other coaches as well,
not to be judgmental. I've been them, and that's where
why I'm speaking to you as well, that I really
cared deeply about the professionalization of coaches, much in the
way that we look at general practitioners in medicine, because

(01:34:06):
it's that complex. It's that difficult a job. You're engaging
with complex organisms on a daily basis, and every word
you say or don't say can have a profound influence
on the rest of someone's life. That's the responsibility I
have of a coach. So an offhand comment about wait,

(01:34:30):
without a deeper understanding of that athlete can be a
trigger for something really bad happening.

Speaker 1 (01:34:37):
I agree, I mean, and look, I I like your
point about resources is a really good one, well made actually,
which is the idea of where do we allocate resources?
You made me think actually of a sports organization that
I'm working with at the moment, and I was actually
talking to them about resources and available resources, because of
course you always get the sort of pushpect I'd love

(01:34:58):
to do all of this, but resources, and it's really
about allocation of resources and decision making. And actually this
goes back to your point actually about having compassion for
the coaches, because it's not their fault that they don't
know stuff. It's the fact that we have policies and

(01:35:19):
resource allocations which say that good enough is good enough,
and it's not. It's just not we're not equipping the
people to be able to do the job they need
to do. It's the equivalent going back to your point
about the you know, the river of life, but it's
the equivalent of saying, you know, we're going to basically
take a junior doctor relatively newly, newly sort of qualified

(01:35:43):
and throw them into heart surgery, which it's a bit
of an extreme example, but it's not as similar. So
I think there's a major issue there. But going back
to your point about safeguarding, And I was having a
conversation with somebody and I was saying, how much does
this How many people are working in safeguarding in your organization,
and what's their budget, And it's twice the size of
the coach development budget, and it's twice the size in

(01:36:06):
terms of the amount of people. So we've got all
this resource going into complaint handling and training courses and
more and more barriers, which basically affect the practitioner and
mean less and less people are going into the into
those roles, which is becoming self defeating. So what you
get again is the people who stay in the world

(01:36:26):
of coaching are the ones who are prepared to go
through and jump through all the hoops, whereas an actual factor,
you lose really good coaching talent because quite a lot
of people are like I don't want to be part
of that world, or at the very least, they then
operate in the gray, you know, in the gray what
people call the gray market. They operate outside of the
qualification system, which is a damning, a damning indictment. But

(01:36:50):
to say actually, which I think speaks to your thesis,
one of the benefits I think, and this is a
shift in thinking, one of the benefits in working up
Put England where they got to meet you get to
meet some really amazing people, these brilliant social entrepreneurs doing
really great things. One I got to meet your Lance Thomas,
who has set up a little micro charity called self Guarding,

(01:37:12):
partly because of her experiences as an athletics coach, and
self Guarding is the idea of instead of saying, right,
we're going to almost take this paternalistic approach to the
protection of children by saying you adults need to jump
through this hoop and that hoop in order to be
determined safe to practice, which does not work, really does

(01:37:34):
not or at least doesn't work as well as we
would hope it would do. Creating this finkle hornes Finkelhorn's
walls get create walls to stop people getting in. What's
the point you're that right, you want people to be
in to be just being a quick better self guarding?
Is the idea that what we do is we take
the young people in the experience and we give them
the support and resources and their parents and caregivers to

(01:37:58):
be able to navigate through these worlds and actually point
out when things are happening that aren't necessarily.

Speaker 3 (01:38:04):
Going absolutely absolutely and.

Speaker 1 (01:38:06):
That's when the SYS thesis comes from.

Speaker 3 (01:38:11):
That's what the SFA report was saying as well, that
we need to empower people within those environments to say
when things are wrong and not from a complaining type perspective,
because people do that. When I was trying to interrupt
as well, but I'm glad I didn't. I was thinking
of a particular safeguarding incident that kind of demonstrates some

(01:38:33):
of the challenges in that there is a case of
over prescription of training lad for a particular athlete who
had unrealistic expectations placed upon them. I can't say too

(01:38:54):
much because I would reveal identity. Maybe I spoke with
the safeguarding officer the national governing body, but in full
knowledge that they probably wouldn't be able to do anything.
But what the coach was doing was pretty consistent with
the normalized ways of doing things within the system, and

(01:39:21):
what he was doing wasn't open for sanction through safeguarding processes.
And then there was the legal aspect as well that
if the national governing body got that decision wrong, it
could leave them open to litigation. This person ran a

(01:39:42):
whole regional coaching program presenting harmful messages, and the safeguarding
processes couldn't be invoked in that particular circumstance because a
certain bar hadn't been reached, despite the fact that it

(01:40:03):
was affecting dozens of young people. The other point I
was going to make, and it relates to when we
were talking about resources, I talk about the three s's
as well different three c's. We've got capabilities of individuals

(01:40:31):
in the environment and coherence within that environment too. I've
forgotten my third see but the but it relates to
resources and then an example I would use was that

(01:40:53):
I was working with a highly capable individual who didn't
achieve much in a particular organization with quite a big workforce.
Then this individual went over to take over a whole
program another national government body within another country in fact,

(01:41:15):
and had one member of an admin team and delivered
about six programs over eighteen months with next to no resources.
Because they had coherence within that environment that they could
run that agenda, they could focus on what they wanted
to focus in a coherent way and use resources appropriately.

(01:41:43):
So that the capability of individuals needs to be aligned
with coherence within the organization. Another example would be in
a football club that I worked with, the perform rorman's
analysis staff weren't speaking to the physiologists come strength and

(01:42:09):
conditioning staff despite being in the same office. My question was,
how do you triangulate your data and feed that into
the coaching team. Well, we don't do that. So you've
got four people as performance analysiss more sports scientists all

(01:42:35):
operating in slightly different demands, monitoring training load in slightly
different ways, and you're feeding information into the coaching system.
You're doubling the work of the coaches, and they're not
buying in because you're not presenting coherent messages that they

(01:42:59):
can use within their coach decision making. So if I
was your head of performance and coming in here, I
would cut the workforce in half, have half the resource,
and deliver it in a coherent way, ensuring you guys

(01:43:22):
who are on the edge of the pitch speaking to
the head coach, working with the coaching staff, collaborating, co
creating questions, co creating projects, to understand each other's perspectives
so that you develop well shared mental model, shared language,
shared ways of doing. That actually shifts the performance dial

(01:43:45):
And I think that's really important in all systems that
you need that level of coherence. Everyone focusing on the
same sort of thing. In sport right now, you talked
we're going on a wee bit here, but you talked
about the physical activity and sport agenda. They're really quite

(01:44:09):
different things. Can we do both? Are we diluting effectiveness
by trying to do both? By putting a resource into
physical activity when in fact, organizations like park run our

(01:44:33):
community sport or pensioners clubs are doing equally if not
a better job at getting people active. Why do we
not just detach these agendas? And the reasons obvious is
because that's included in the portfolio of the minister, certainly

(01:44:54):
in Scotland that's their portfolio.

Speaker 1 (01:44:59):
You disagree, well, sort of in the sense that I
actually think they're really compatible agendas, particularly when you know,
if you're taking if you look at the lens of
the development of physical activity, and part of the way
in which you foster a more physically active population is

(01:45:22):
reducing barriers to access, tackling inequality, looking at it through
an inclusive lens, finding the reasons why people can't engage.
And my view is I think many of the ideas
that are sort of sort of almost naturalized within what's
often referred to as the sport for development world. So
the sport and development world, you know, where you're using

(01:45:44):
sport as a vehicle for social change, you're you know,
you're dealing so with social barriers, but in so doing
you also have to address these inequalities because otherwise you
can't use support as the vehicle, and so people who
operate in the sport for development look at things through
a very individualized and humanistic workway because they know that

(01:46:05):
if they don't, they won't have the impact they're looking for.
And actually, I think the world of sport, which has
been focused much more on the doing of the sport,
which has then almost removed the human element out, and
a lot of the stuff we've talked about around systems
and everything else has been driven by the idea of

(01:46:26):
almost like we're just taking these bodies and objects and
just putting them through this system in order to try
and get some kind of an output, and it becomes
a little dehumanizing and in some cases a lot dehumanizing.
I actually think the merging of those two worlds is
really where the secret sources. And yes, okay, it might

(01:46:46):
also be happened to be a policy agenda, but I
don't know sssy think that necessarily is a bad thing.

Speaker 3 (01:46:55):
I'm not one to disagree, and I'm not going to say,
but I'm not sure it was. Finny Web always used
to say, Andy, you always say, but, which means something
else is coming. I'm not sure really on my view
of it, that things like it and I'm sure you'll

(01:47:18):
agree with this that I work did a bit of
work with charity called Youth Charter for Sport in Manchester
and one and one of the things I discovered in
that work was how the budgets for youth services in
Manchester had decreased from oh I can't remember, I'm picking

(01:47:43):
it out the air, but it was maybe an eight
figure sum two about a million pounds, so a huge
decrease in community centers for youths where lots of really
good activity went on. That charity folk focused on sport

(01:48:07):
and the arts and integrating and understanding actual communities in
which young people existed. So most side East Clayton quite
divisive societies where there's gun crime, drugs, gang warfare, lots
of things, fears of going into different areas, so the

(01:48:31):
extreme barriers and very very specific gender roles which are
very very different to the world that I populate in
in which men are men and women or women.

Speaker 1 (01:48:53):
In that.

Speaker 3 (01:48:55):
I think it was recognized that the girls wanted to
do different things, that they wanted to do things that
we may in the current climate think, oh, that's not
appropriate to make it so gender specific, but that's what

(01:49:16):
these young people were wanting what the girls were wanting.
But what Jeff, the head of the charity, also realized
was that typically it was the girls who were the
best leaders who would control the boys quite effectively. In there.
You would always find a few people in these environments

(01:49:36):
who were natural leaders, and you would target your time
and your investment in those people much in the same
way as a football manager will come in and see
who's the most destructive in the dressing room, try and
make them as an ally and reach the players that way.
That's kind of Jeff's approach as well. So I see

(01:49:57):
the benefits of all these things. I wonder though, within
current structures, and this is maybe where I differ, that
we need to differentiate between the roles of national government bodies.
I would like to see the role of national governing
bodies going back to what it was maybe fifteen twenty

(01:50:17):
twenty five years ago, where they would do a level
of coach education for sport orientated coaches. There would be
the level of governance and regulation of the sport, and
not a great deal else, and maybe investing more in

(01:50:40):
the community groups and youth services and all these things.
To look at that physical activity agenda more so, I
think the skills of national government bodies and their capacity
is far too diluted on too many agendas. If we
simplify that, it may make things better. I'm saying that

(01:51:05):
from someone as an outsider of the system rather than
someone inside. That's how I see it, and it's not
necessarily evidence based. It's based on perceptions. I recognized that
I might be misguided in some of the things I'm saying,
or the evidence may can find what I'm saying. That's

(01:51:27):
my perception though, that maybe if we focused on funding
for the core purpose of national governing bodies and maybe
limiting that core purpose to what they did traditionally twenty
years ago, and then using additional resources elsewhere. But I
think the different systems, whilst they can be mutually or

(01:51:54):
whilst they can be exclusive, they can be compatible as
well and can work together.

Speaker 1 (01:52:00):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's personally. I think more
inclusive your sports is the more chances you've got of
achieving anything you want to achieve. You know, a get up,
a participating, which is great, and b you give more
opportunities for people to be able to make make progress.
If that's something that they achieved, they want to do so.

(01:52:20):
I think it's the tide that rises all boats. But
I am very philosophically aligned to that way of thinking,
and that's partly due to my own bias. It's linked
to my own life course. So I can't understand how
that influences are thinking, Hey, look we're coming up on
two hours, which is that's crazy, which is a big,
a big one, even for me. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

(01:52:42):
Thank you for reaching out and thank you for sharing
with me the research on soluted genesis. I think it's
a really interesting way of thinking about many of the
problems that we are presented with and in many ways,
I think, going back to what we were saying earlier on,
I think it encapsulates a lot of you as a

(01:53:03):
lens through which to look at how can we rethink
the way coaching happens, the way support is provided, the
way talent talent is developed as a as an idea,
I think there's a lot, a lot to unpackt there.
I really like it, so I really appreciate sharing it
with me.

Speaker 3 (01:53:20):
I'll end on saying that the word was a light
bulb moment for me. It was so damn obvious thinking
about how we're driven by the negativity, bias and many
things we do in our lives as well as sport,
and simply asking the question what are the origins of health?

(01:53:42):
Was absolutely transformational. I know Harry Burns, the Chief Medical
Officer a few years in scott Ago in Scotland, advocated
that approach in hospitals as well, and it worked well
in various educational establishments general in places like Holland and
Scandinavia where they're more progressive. But that's simple orientation and

(01:54:08):
reminding myself of it often when I go down that
pathogenic type direction, or remind myself, now, what are we
trying to achieve? How does what I'm saying help create
a healthier environment for people? And it really is a
transformational almost a change of a philosophical way of seeing

(01:54:29):
the world. It's huge, and there's a bit out there
that listeners just googling the word. There's a giant handbook
as well on it that's free to access. It's a
big Springer handsbook, so the publisher Springer, so that quite
high quality and a lot of the writings on it

(01:54:53):
are quite accessible. I think it's not really pervaded the
discourse in North America and the UK as much as
it has in the Scantic countries, halland Belgium and such
a very European and North European centric But there's political

(01:55:18):
and philosophical things going on there. Why it's more well
received there and not so well received in the UK.
It's not a new thing, it's it's not novel. It's
well accepted across many domains. It's just not pervading our
the social systems in which we live.

Speaker 1 (01:55:41):
Yeah, I can understand that. Thank you for thank you
for coming on and for U as always a stimulating conversation.
I really enjoyed it too. Are you Are you available
for people to reach out to if well? The last
time apparently it stimulated all sorts of people getting in touch.
I'm assuming you're bill contactable. What's the best best way

(01:56:02):
for people to reach out?

Speaker 3 (01:56:04):
Best way is either LinkedIn? Are it's easy to google
me and my email at the universities publicly available, So
I'm not going to give you specifics. If you really
want to speak to me, you can find me quite easily.

Speaker 1 (01:56:22):
Yeah, God do a bit of work to get access,
so I get it.

Speaker 3 (01:56:26):
Absolutely, It's not that difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:56:31):
Thanks for listening to the Talent Equation podcast. If you
like the show, then please consider supporting it by leaving
a review on your favorite podcast player, telling your friends
about it, or even becoming a hero and show your
appreciation by becoming a patron. Just head over to the
Talentequation dot co dot uk and click on the Becoming
a Patron puddon at the top of the page.

All Episodes

"Talent development is like a flock of hungry seagulls" - a conversation with Andy Kirkland

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Dateline NBC

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}"Talent development is like a flock of hungry seagulls" - a conversation with Andy Kirkland