Ben darwin edit
Fri, Feb 09, 2024 6:46AM • 37:33
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cohesion, people, team, work, talking, understanding, play, environment, behaviors, level, normative, system, coach, continuity, focus, thinking, underperformance, performing, ben, fundamentally
SPEAKERS
Eric Knight, PB , Ben Darwin
PB 00:00
Ben Darwin Hello, and welcome to the Great coach's podcast. Go poor guy, Eric, nice to see you. And of course, I'm here with my colleague, Professor Eric Knight. Eric, how are you going? I'm Well, Paul, great to be talking to Ben today. It is. And Ben, we always start with a really simple question before we get into the hard ones. Where are you today? And what have you been up to so far?
Ben Darwin 00:23
Okay, so I'm in Melbourne, I have four kids and a wife. So I'm happy to be able to house the school holidays coming up. And I've been looking at NFL data this morning. I'm trying to understand the the policies of the New York Jets and why they have been so horrible for the last 25 years, and then organizing some more speaking stuff. Any,
PB 00:49
that's an interesting place to start. So any insights you can share them about the Jets, before we get into it? It's going
Ben Darwin 00:57
to be complex. But fundamentally, when you have large populations that support clubs that have a long history, particularly early history, then people want to be able to replicate that success. Again, obviously, they were the first AFC team to sort of when the Superbowl. And so there was this sort of sense that that if you've had like Richmond or the AFL if you've been successful previously, you want to get back there as quickly as you can. And so the Jets fans are unbelievably impatient, and unbelievably fickle, and there's a lot of them with like, always places large amounts of pressure on the owner to act fast, and generally fail repetitive repetitively. Well,
PB 01:36
let's get into the interview day, because I think we're gonna get under the skin of what it's like to build a team, why some fail, and why some succeed. But, Ben, I wanted to start by talking a little bit about your playing career, before we get into the work you do around analytics and understanding team dynamics. I mean, you've represented your country. And you've represented many representative teams along the way, and you've coached you've been a head coach, too. And when you reflect back on your journey through these teams, I want to ask you about this sense of belonging that you had in these teams and, and what you found that the best ones did to create it.
Ben Darwin 02:13
Probably the two teams that have been the most successful that I've been a part of, I probably felt the least level of belonging within them, particularly in the early stages. So when I joined the Brumbies, I was 20, or 21. And I was told, change or go, if you don't, if you don't fix your behavior, you're gone. And so that was pretty brutal. And I had a couple of years, they're pretty hard work. But for me, it was like that was a close job. And it was it was, I wanted to join that close shop. And I had to work really, really hard. Whereas I've had this, this sort of discussion, the last couple of days, interestingly, is that really poorly built teams, they'll fundamentally welcome you as a savior, let you do as you want. But the problem is, you don't make them any better, you just make them worse. The other was a team called Suntory in Japan I coached at and it was a very similar scenario, a bunch of guys who'd been at university together, very close shop, very hard to kind of break into that group. And that sort of, there was a high level of mistrust of outsiders. And, and they were, we went through the entire season undefeated. And then I was fired at the end of the year, because I didn't feel like I was what I needed.
Eric Knight 03:26
So Ben, just talking a little bit then about those teams. I mean, you've commented about, you know, the changing makeup of people playing rugby in Australia, and this has obviously been a big conversation in Australia. Can you say something about, you know, how how that trend has played out over the last couple of years. And what you think that means in terms of creating the right sort of environment for for teams to be successful.
Ben Darwin 03:49
I mean, fundamentally, you're talking about the economic migration that's taken place, particularly, particularly off the Pacific Islands. I mean, New Zealand's use that to a great advantage for them over the previous period of time. But I think the one thing that we do see is it's about understanding people's priority. So a lot of guys, off off the Pacific Islands, for example, need are supporting large amounts of people. And so the challenge with that is, is that once then given an opportunity for greater, particularly given the colpack agreement, and if you guys are aware that colpack agreement means that basically, Samoan serve against Pacific Islanders can play in Europe, and be regarded as a local is that you've got, you've got that kind of pool overseas. And so that will be very much affected by for example, the strength of the pound strength of the euro. And those kind of needs and it's very hard to get a sense of community for those guys. You know, when they're when they're joining clubs, and also tours, they've got these different sets of priorities. I'm not a big believer in people not being loyal or disloyal. There's just different types of loyalty. Whereas when you're a young, Anglo Saxon male with two or three fam Listen, you come from wealthy background, that's a different set of priorities that you need to sort of absorb and to be comfortable with. And so you're less likely, for example, to go to Europe. So that's kind of probably destabilize. Sooner I'd be, to a certain extent. But again, it's not about qualities of individuals or qualities of good or bad decisions, just different decisions get made.
Eric Knight 05:21
To how do you build those groups? I mean, you talked about in groups, out groups, different kinds of lines, communities that people are part of, I mean, how do you begin to center that on the team? And the performance of that team?
Ben Darwin 05:31
I think the fundamentals is, is you're not there to like each other, you know, they're to get on, you know, they're to, to focus on on anything else other than success of the team. So basically, it comes down to what is my role? What is your role? Accurate, I know, we're talking to some guys at NAB. And they said they were trying to nab and build this system where they were all trying to hit a choir to make everyone get on great. And they said, it was great, you know, we'd seen together and we'd come back on Tuesday and Dave, still doing the reports wrong, and I wanted to punch his face in. So it's like, it's like, the focus really has to be on alignment of understanding between the component parts of the team alignment, a system, alignment to roll, and then and then once you start to get that clarity, the rest actually takes care of itself, the social, psychological safety, trust, all that sort of stuff just comes as a byproduct of that. If you focus on the other stuff, first, it just keeps butting up against the system.[PB1]
PB 06:30
Then I want to ask you about this alignment and psychological safety in those things, but just a little bit more context, actually into you and where you've come from, because in preparing for today, I've read a lot the articles you've given before, and you talk about your mum, and the fact that she's got a master's in ancient history and archaeology, and that it did shape your thoughts on team dynamics. Could you could you tell us a little bit about those conversations around the dinner table and how they influenced you?
Ben Darwin 07:00
Well, I think, beginning is when we first started looking at the research, we couldn't find any research on sport on cohesion, or portability of talent. So we first went to Grossberg, who's at Harvard Business School, he was looking at, you know, portability of competent stock broking firms. And as we sort of went along, basically sucked up every other piece of research we could possibly get access to, on shared experience, what we call a period of experience, you know, change of environments, Lencioni, all that stuff, you know, psychological safety, the Aristotle project, all these kind of ideas around teams working together. And then I went to my mom and said, Well, what is there in terms of military history, and we'd found a lot of stuff on military history, but mostly modern military history around, you know, continuity of environment. But then I started talking more about like empires and how, you know, different empires, you go out, and you have different armies join up, you know, the Roman Empire was a was a group of different armies with different levels of loyalty, different levels of cohesion. And there was a particular comment made by Bill Posner at one stage when he said, you know, you can't shrink yourself to success. And, and I fundamentally, completely disagree with that statement. In fact, the history of sport is, and history of military is fundamentally shrinking yourself to success. And, and, and growth is the enemy of understanding being sort of easiest component. And my mom said, Jesus, obviously, bills, I don't think she said he's, he said, obviously, Bill's never had any understanding of military history. And particularly, you know, she's talking about the Spartans, and, you know, small groups highly effective.
And elite, and that's the thing is with sport is, it's not 50, on 100, it's 13, against 13, it's 10 on 10. So the individual strength of those guys is not that is regionally important, but nowhere near that much the size of the country, the mass from which they come, really has a very small impact on performance, it's really about the level of understand between those component parts. Now, when you have large military forces, like the US, you know, us basically runs off a policy of we have to have a 10 to one advantage over the opposition, because they understand they have a complete lack of cohesion because of their sights. So so when you put 10 of them up against 10, of a very highly cohesive army and my brother in law's my brother, my brother's father in law, sorry, is actually a Rear Admiral, the Portuguese Navy, he talked a lot about when they were up against the British, because they had a lot more continuity with a smaller navy. They would tear them apart in exercises. So just basically they try to, like I said, suck up everything I can and that includes military history. Through my mom
Eric Knight 09:45
being Can you just dive a little deeper than into team cohesion? How do you define it? What is it? How do you know it when you see it?
Ben Darwin 09:54
The thing is, you may as you don't know when you say it, but you can see it in the numbers.
So what I'm what I'm focused on is an objective way to measure the understanding between people. So we in simple terms, we talk about interpersonal understanding, you know, how many times have I played with you? How many times have I done in this position? How many times have we played in this system? How many times have I played against you? How many times have we done these things in this way. So we also talked about positional understanding, interpersonal understanding, system understanding, so a way of doing something, and then size of a team. So a small team will learn to do something faster than a big team, like in the military, or a basketball team will learn to play together faster, and they'll do certain things more quickly. So teams in generally in 180 degree, sports, invasive sports will actually learn to attack faster than they learn to defend. And you can see that measurably is that new teams are poor, by always much poor defensively takes time for them to learn to function as a, as a group as an amorphous mass, so to speak. And so what we're just basically trying to do is to measure those components and see how that affects performance. And so the way I describe the work is, it's the understanding of understanding the the level of understanding between the component parts of a team is much more predictive of outcome than the individual skill. [PB2]
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Now, if I was to give it to as a as a scenario, and sometimes I give this to make it really easy to understand, if you took the Brian brothers who were identical twins, they play tennis together, they're excellent. They were very successful, but they weren't amazingly individual skills. Now you can basically get more cohesive than identical twins, you know, just that all that time in the backyard together. So if you put those two up against Nadal and Federer in doubles, the first game would the Brian brothers would generally when the question is, how many games? Would it take Nadal and Federer to beat them? That's cohesion analytics, how long would it take their skill and their adaptation to system to playing in doubles to playing with someone else to playing on someone else's system? How long would it take them to beat them if they could at all. And then once you can start to understand that you can start to say, right, we have a team it needs to perform by this point. Therefore, this is how we'll build it. This is the level of change we can make inside of that context to perform. So sometimes we'll get approached work five, that's about 10 weeks to win again. And then sometimes we'll say, a club will say to us, or a country, we have five years to win a title. So there are two different complete different scenarios. And you can work each of those with different contexts and measures.
PB 12:39
And Ben, does that work extend to non sporting teams?
Ben Darwin 12:46
Well, like I said, all the research comes out of comes out of non sporting environments, we're just applying basically HR data and military data and hospital data to sport I just found it was much more effective at measuring sport, measuring the causality of success, rather than form based modeling. And most predictive models are based on form, which was great, but it's really not of any interest because it doesn't get to the heart of the, how they're performing, or why they're performing particularly well or poorly. And so yeah, so we've worked with a military organization I can't talk about I work with. Or we work with a team in Formula One, for example, we work with football teams, rugby team, driver, union teams, work with a farming company, have done work with banks, financial services, it's all the same stuff. It's just everything's built certain ways. And the component parts are different and different systems make getting packed with that a lot of work of platinum asset management, and guy called Cornelsen, and just hammered Kerr two hours about his experiences, and probably the most rewarding was sitting down with her and, and telling him sort of the story about about, you know, CEOs and their inability to transfer between organizations that perform well, and he just started laughing and said, I said, Well, why are you laughing? He said, because I've seen this firsthand. So everyone we speak to what I'm trying, the overwhelming response they give us is what you're telling me is what I've always felt, but no one's ever put this into a number.
PB 14:16
But I go from the numbers, to sort of look a little bit more inside. And I'm wondering, you may not have researched it, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the mental processes that people are experiencing that make cohesion is such a powerful force.
Ben Darwin 14:36
Well, fundamentally, it's about two components of learning versus unlearning. So my son is autistic. And I remember talking to his, his doctor and he was talking about people cannot take on new information under stress. The brain is not capable. And you cannot recall new information, the way that memory is laid down under duress. So we would find, for example, England in rugby fatigue. I After 30 minutes are the worst offensive team in the world. Because they're all playing for different clubs they come in to try to adapt to that new system. And so we try to take learning like that and say, Okay, well what happens when teams do come under fatigue, or what happens when they're brought in, and they do struggle.
So I would say, you know, in terms of the mental process, it's ambiguity is so pernicious in its nature, if I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing, in a certain situation, it's like doing an exam, an English exam. And just before you walk in and say, by the way, Paul's in German, right, like, like, that's how that's how the West targets work. Basically, they're changing things on the run all the time, or everybody in your division has never used this CRM before. In fact, they've been using a different CRM, and they're expecting to hit the same outcomes as they were using a system they use for 10 years. It's just not possible. And so that creates stress. But stress, I believe, is an outcome of ambiguity of not being sure. What's really funny about it is people say things like, oh, and they'll talk about like, Asian team, they'll say, there's no pride in the jersey, or they just don't want it enough. Like, that's not my experience of sport at all. Everybody wants it just as much as the other guy. It's fundamentally your system up against their system under duress, and it's how quickly you can learn. [PB3]
And so so what I would say the answer to that mental mental processes component is, it's what you don't have to remember, it's what makes you win, if I know the plays inherently, and I'll do them without thinking, because you have to do that. A lot of the time in performance, you have to be able to act without thinking is, the more you've done, so you don't have to think the easier it is. And so for those people who are performing in high cohesion environments, the level of clarity is remarkable. When people in low cohesion environments. It's an excuse. It's just a complete shitshow of panic, and not knowing. And it's like, you get people to drive on the wrong side of the road. Like what do you feel you have to remember, all the time, the cognitive load of remembering not to drive on the left hand, or right hand side of the road is really, really high. That's why it passes all time in London as tourists because everyone, everyone looks left, right. So it's, it's about what you don't have to think about.[PB4]
Eric Knight 17:13
So just building on that, Ben, and sort of trying to pull out a couple of more insights and actions in building these teams. I mean, if you think about what you're talking about with team cohesion as a measure of understanding between people, you know, what we might think of as that connection? You know, you talked about under duress, how do you make decisions and clarity helps, you know, helps helps cohere the team and connect the team at that point? What else helps what are some of the things that help people connect better?
Ben Darwin 17:47
I mean, when I when I, if I talk to somebody who's a leader, and they're coming in, and they've been given a mandate to build success a CEO has been brought in from a competitor to come in, I'd always say the first thing you need to think about is what do you actually need to change versus want to change is most of the time people, kidneys, your environment for them. But understanding the ramifications of that change is going to be a large level of underperformance into the environment. So, so basically, forgetting what you think is going to be successful for you because it was somewhere else and saying, Okay, what's going to make this place successful. And there's another part that we will look at quite a lot is what we call attribution bias, which is, we only attribute the performance of the individual to their skill, not the environment they're going into. [PB5]
So in rugby league, Darren Lockyer first test was terrible, because he'd never played with anybody in that spine. Everyone's saying, he's a terrible player, or Wayne Bennett coaching at the Newcastle Knights, if you actually take them measurable level of cohesion, they weren't underperforming at all, they were performing exactly as they should.
So if somebody is underperforming, they may not actually be underperforming at all, it's actually just us overly attributing their success or failure to them rather than the situation. And then, and then any other forms of change, like, you know, understanding there's going to be people who've been somewhere for 30 years, and a change for them, will have a much higher level of influence, a much greater driver of underperformance than somebody who's just a kid who's just come straight out of uni, you've only been there a year. So for them, the unlearning is much easier than the learning. And so once you can start to understand the context, you can start to understand okay, what do I actually want to change here? Who do I want to hold faith in? And quite correctly, he told me a story. After that conversation we'd had and he said, The next day I had a guy come in and do the worst report he's ever had in the history of the organization. And I and I thought, No, I'm just going to hold off one week. He said, Go back do it again. Do it this way, came back was a bit better, was a bit better, a bit better and ended up performing very, very well. But we oftentimes panic in that first, performance and go, this is get rid of that.
PB 20:01
I pick up on this idea then around learning and unlearning, because another theory that I've heard you talk about is that a club focused on internal development. And it can be an organization to growing its own talent. It has more cohesion than a club. This, perhaps he pointed out just last answer with West that he's trying to bring, bring in external development all the time, you know, they're trying to buy it in and develop it up. Could you tell us how a non sporting team would apply this insight.
Ben Darwin 20:36
If you if you look at, for example, the medical industry, there's a reason they don't allow certain people with maybe, you know, maybe this is controversial, but they don't just if you get a medical degree anywhere in the world, you can't come to Australia and function straight off the bat. And that's there for reasons there. Because everyone's going to learn in different ways. So I think that basically, it's about understanding what is the way in which this person has learned to do this job? And how much does it differentiate between us and ourselves. So that's a level system differential. But you've also got into personal understanding is your you, you grow if you if you develop from within, these young guys come through, and they learn the system, they learn the way the club plays, or if you're growing up in the Australian Medical System, you're learning the way in which we do certain surgeries, I remember when my wife gave birth to our second child in Japan, a woman jumped on top of her and tried to push her out through the stomach. And we had some friends who were nurses, and like, we haven't done that in Australia since the 60s. And they're like, well, that's how they do it over there. So there's just these all these these sort of system changes that take place is not I'm not sure if I'm actually answering this question very well. But the internal development allows the interpersonal understanding to grow, and to work inside that system. But you have to remain you have to allow a continuity of system to take place. You look a lot of Australian gymnastics, for example, constantly having different coaches come in, you know, let's go to Ukraine way, let's go the American way. Let's go the Chinese way. And so internal development is only going to work if you hold a continuity of system continuity of environment.
PB 22:15
And I guess this is where stability becomes such a key driver.
Ben Darwin 22:21
Yeah, I mean, the thing with stability is it grows slowly, and it's destroyed quickly. It's like a house, right? You can knock over house in three minutes, if you really want to give it an effort. We saw a club in the NRL, they dropped in their cohesion 70% In a week, right? But to get that back would take seven years, 10 years. It's a long time, grow it grow. Understanding grows slowly, but can be destroyed fast.
Eric Knight 22:46
So Ben, can you build on that to help differentiate between the idea of cohesion in a team and the culture of a team? Well, how are those two ideas different? What comes first? How do they interact? Can you just speak a little bit of that?
Ben Darwin 23:00
Well, what do you believe culture to be? My first question,
Eric Knight 23:05
suppose behaviors, systems, routines, ways of reacting? Yep,
Ben Darwin 23:13
we just try to break this down into basically what we might call normative behaviors. So normative behaviors. When we do a line out, this is how we left when we deliver this product. This is this is the things we say. When you apart when you are in environments that are where people have been together for an extended period of time, they start to develop the same normative behaviors, both good and bad. So so if you have an environment where you have chaos, you just don't have any normative behaviors. It's every man for himself. It's a refugee camp, so to speak, it's just everyone acting in their own self interest. He could call that a culture, but I just tried to adapt to bring it down to as you say, just just a set of behaviors get developed over time. Now, some people also say good culture versus bad culture, I don't really understand what that means. Because like, I think I've mentioned I think like Enron was regarded as the best place to work in the US, at one stage just before things went pear shaped when they were behaving terribly. But one person's good behavior is also another person's brilliant behavior. You know, if you've grown up in a family of criminals and the mafia, anti life, the guy who goes to the cops isn't the enemy, he's the cancer, he's the person doing the wrong thing. So I try to move away from good versus bad. It's simply a case of continuity of environment increases the level of, of understanding between the component parts, but also to is you get normative behaviors that are established over time. And those normative behaviors become more, you know, easy to learn between those component parts, but also harder to change. So if you then get somebody wants to come in and change that environment, you tend to get an underperformance because they're trying to adapt to the new the new system.[PB6]
Eric Knight 24:57
So what does that mean then Ben, if there's someone listening who As a leader of a team, and they want to improve normative behaviors, where do they start? What's what's How do you think about that?
Ben Darwin 25:06
I think the biggest thing is, is what is it that we actually what are the behaviors we need in order to be successful? Begin with that first. So if it's rugby, we need to be able to defend together well, for 80 minutes only allow 13 points again, you want to give it a KPI. Okay, well, how do we do that? Okay, we need to be able to move. So we don't have to look at each other in order to build understanding. So we need to have policies and processes that come in aid to us. And I think that none of this happens quickly, you say, right, we are at a, you know, I know that a team that has been thrown together in the first year is going to allow probably 30 points a game, and there's really no nothing anybody can do about that. But maybe we could, maybe we could get to 25. If we spend the time thinking about the fence. Now we know that expansion teams struggle on defense the most. So I'd be focusing in that scenario on defense more than anything else attack can wait. You know, it's actually easier and quicker to build, understanding and attack. So it's been 70% of our time in defense. And then there's focus on that. So if you can begin to understand what are the things that are the hardest for us to learn as a group, that becomes a priority? And then you work your way out from there. But also to as you need to understand what what, what skill sets do people already have? What do they need to learn? What do they need to unlearn? In order to build that understanding and energy hit the level of effectiveness as fast as we can. And no team building exercises would be my advice, don't climb any mountains together, don't go. I remember talking to a company, they're doing a merger and they said, Oh, the merger is going to be fine, because we're organizing a scavenger hunt. And I'm like, that doesn't help anything that's focusing on how do we do our job? Where do we do our job? When do we do? You know, how do we build this understanding, as fast as humanly possible, not focus on liking each other that will come with time.
PB 26:57
Then I'm the corporate relic in this conversation. And the companies I've been part of have spent hundreds of 1000s of dollars, if not millions, doing the annual Towers Watson survey, which is a global company that looks at culture, sometimes they call that engagement. And you get a whole pile of reports and benchmarks out of it, that that are useful about thinking about the things we'll do differently next year. But I can't remember there being a KPI around cohesion, understanding. But it's got to be easier than that, then the you just mentioned KPIs there, there must be a way there must be something you can be looking at each month, without looking at the analytics that you guys have got to understand how you cohesion is coming along.
Ben Darwin 27:48
Well, no offense, Paul, but it's not exactly my interest to tell you is if I'm the only we're the only company in the world doing it, why would I tell you what you could do? No. Absolutely. But culture is fundamentally an outcome. behaviors or an outcome 360 reviews or an outcome? Stealing is an outcome. It's an it's a, it's an outcome of the way in which the place was put together. And Eric, I, one of my experiences I've had, we've tried to do a lot of stuff with universities, for example, a lot of conversations. And and the overwhelming thing that's kept coming back to is, well, when are you going to publish? How do we publish? Because I'd say well, I'll go back to my mom, it's like, I just want to work with these guys. I just want to meet with students, we just want to focus on the research. She said no, but that's how they're funded. The funding is, you know, maybe this is a little bit older, but this is sort of four or five years ago, is it kept coming back to Everything has to be about the publishing. So if you if you build an organization with certain rewards and certain points of view, it's going to act in certain ways. The way I describe it is, if you go and live in a small town, people are by the nature of the small town able to say hi to each other, they're more trusting of each other. They act in a certain way, in small towns, they shun outsiders. And so so that is simply a geographic driver of behavior. If you take one of the people in small towns, and you move them to New York, they're gonna start acting differently. They don't say hi to everybody. They're not as trusting as everybody. So that is the core driver of their behavior. So that again, is a geographic population issue. So sometimes a lot of the behaviors and the cultures are going to be inbuilt to certain industries. You look at the financial services with the Royal Commission. Last couple of years, people have been acting based on how they're rewarded. And some say poorly, some say, acting brilliantly, sometimes in the interest of the shareholder, whatever it might be. You set things up in a certain way. They'll do a certain set of things.
PB 29:52
I can I can see Eric thinking about what to challenge you with on can we publish or not? But before perhaps he jumps in, I want to ask him Follow up, then. Can cohesion stifle innovation?
Ben Darwin 30:07
If if, if you are, I mean, again, this is all going to depend on where you're at comparatively to everybody else. But I think once you start to look at if you've been doing something a certain way for a period of time, and you have not been evolving, you have to keep evolving all the time, you have to keep improving. But generally, when you do something 1000 times you play guitar 1000 times, you sharpen it, so you'll get better at it as you go. If you don't improve, there's something wrong, and you don't evolve the systems that you have. I think what tends to divert companies, a lot of the time is like, fighting for who's responsible or fighting for power, that that stops them from improving. But what I would say is that, if you look at look at ice skating, for example, the best pairings of all time in ice dancing in pairs figure skating, because they had continuity of their people. They're able to adapt to new programs all the time. I told you and ended Bolero, they moved on to another one. So they're able to constantly move between different programs, but they had continuity of your environment. If you change partners in ice skating, in ice dancing, in particular, which has a much greater level of cohesion required. I don't think anyone's ever won a gold medal ever and change is intense partners that win a gold medal have never, never changed and won again. Because it's just that hard to kind of deal with a level of level of change. But it's, you know, I look at Manchester United under Sir Alex Ferguson. Then Moyes comes in and says, right, we're gonna play the we're going to play the Everton way. And those guys underperformed because they were so used to playing together in that way for men knew that it was almost too late for them. They were like 2829 years of age. So what was his response to that was right, I'm gonna get everyone out, cleaned them out. But now the cohesion drops and the understanding drops. Now they're importing pipe. And you know, man, United's never not saying this Italian voices, but but man united, in that moment dropped in cohesion level by 40%. And they've never been the same sense. They've never been near that level of success that they've had. So oftentimes, a change of system, using the cohesion against them will create a level of underperformance will then create greater levels of change, greater levels of turnover. I mean, that's a&p Basically from 96. to Now, right? Just constant chaos slash, you know, acquisitions, slash turnover, creates a bigger problem, next group, and they'll fix it makes it worse, off it goes.
Eric Knight 32:37
So it's been just blowing out for me and thinking about this in terms of, you know, if I'm a chairperson board of directors of a company, and I'm thinking about succession planning, for example. I mean, how, how do I think about the choice between developing internal talent inside inside those organizations to come through as a CEO? Versus when does it make sense to go to an external CEO, I mean, that principle applies at different levels of the organization, but I'm just interested in how how organizations should should think about the trade off in those choices. From your models,
Ben Darwin 33:10
I think what we find is, is that you cannot compare internal to external in terms of the level of skill, first of all, you know, the external that was going to hide all their faults, you know, the faults of the internal person. Secondly, that an internal perhaps might be 30%, less skillful, but will be 50%, more effective. So you can't, it's not like for like, you don't say this guy's a Harvard graduate, he's fantastic. But he might might have a whole bunch of impacts on the way that he comes in and tries to make things better, or you might say, for two years, so don't don't compare the like for like, secondly, and I've seen this quite a bit, is that they'll go with the internal client. And that doesn't work. So they throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so they'll say, right, I'm going to now that's not going to work, I'm going to go again, but with somebody externally, now that the problem isn't so much that it's the amount of turnover you get when you bring the external person in. If if that person comes in, and they change everything to their own system, they might actually perform absolutely brilliantly. But two years later, you've had a turnover of 70% of the whole place it's over. I've seen that quite a bit with a coach who are coming in by everything, they win a title two years later, they're all gone. Because why would they stay? Because they're at the third club already. Right? So it's, you cannot compare the internal to the external. But it's also in when particularly when I've looked at how the Big Four of measuring a lot of these parts is they measure the performance of the individual, they don't measure what I would call the black hole of the collective. How much chaos does that person create by their influence and coming into the place and all the other people having to tell them where the toilet is where the printer is, this is how you do this? It's like it sucks and everything around them. And then And then, you know, two years later when it's supposed to make changes, and they say, Well, hang on, why can't we go back to how thing is where they get being accused of, because they won't get on the bus, they get accused of being the cancer. And so they, you know, I think you lose probably 30% of your staff sometimes in that kind of way, which is the change upon change for change. And then they say, You know what I'm done with this, I'm off, and then they go, so I can't, can't ever be measured immediately. All these things have to be measured as a training collective, if you make a change in rugby, it won't stop messing with you for eight years, we're still being messed with now, by decisions made in rugby, Australia in the 2000s are still affecting us now. So you can't just look at all the decisions of this CEO, you have to look at all the collective decisions of everybody along that chain of events. And what that does the organization. I mean, they talked about Boeing still being affected now by the McDonnell Douglas acquisition, which was 1990s.
PB 35:49
There's a fascinating video that your company guideline analytics put together about the situation in Australian Rugby, I'll put it in the show notes for everybody to have a look at it's, it's fascinating. And it challenges the way that you do think about teams, and expansion and investment and growth. But Ben, it's been super to spend 45 minutes with you. It's, they are fantastic ideas, they are challenging, they are different, they are innovative. There's plenty of food for thought there. And we appreciate you sharing so much of your insight with us, even if you wouldn't tell us what that KPI was.
Ben Darwin 36:26
I mean, 10 is an easy one. Thank you very much. I would say like, I think one is a great pleasure to speak with you. And secondly, you know, whenever we sit down with people and talk to them, particularly coaches, for example, different environments, our work does not suit everyone. Because oftentimes, I remember we talked to a coach and said, to be honest with you, we didn't win as many titles you should have. You know, he did not respond to that very well. Because because his view of himself is he's the genius. He's the leader. He's won a crisis success. So it doesn't always sit well. But that doesn't mean we're wrong and maybe means we're barking up the right tree in terms of trying to understand performance.
PB 37:06
Thank you, Ben. It's been a complete masterclass in cohesion. It's a term that I hear a lot a lot of coaches use, along with chemistry and connection and a whole others. But I think you've really unpacked cohesion for us today and given us some really simple ideas that people can take into their own teams starting tomorrow. So thank you very much and all the best for that, that research you're doing on the Jets. Thank you