I've been angry recently. Furious really. It's not pretty and those who are foolhardy enough to follow me on Twitter will have seen the evidence. More F-bombs, more retweets, more futile arguments with randoms.
It kicked off due to the resurgence of the debate about School Sport. While I welcome the return of the debate and the interest in the topic, it's reignited my fury. And I'm not happy about that. Contrary to appearances I don't like being furious.
So I thought I'd explain where that fury has come from.
Love.
Just typing that word makes me feel clearer-headed and less stomach-knotty. Isn't it always better to find the positive feeling behind something and focus your energy there?
My husband, the love of my life, is a self-confessed sports nut. He's lucky enough to have made a career from the thing he loves. He's worked in community sports development, sports development for a national governing body, coached sport abroad and, until last year, he ran a School Sports Partnership (SSP) across two counties.
He did it for love. There was no fame in working for an SSP, the pay wasn't that great and, as it turns out, his job security wasn't all that either. But he would come home buzzing with stories and passion - the inner city secondary school pupil who'd tried rowing for the first time in her life during one of his sessions and is now representing her county, the coach who came to work for him as part of his unemployment programme and was flying, the kids who had never swum before Jamie's partnership took them to a pool and gave them coaching, the teenagers who had become Young Sports Leaders and were blossoming with confidence and passion (he spotted one of them standing behind Usain Bolt during the 100m final and as he pressed 'pause' his pride was palpable). I used to look forward to these stories. These testimonies of the power of his passion for his work, and the sheer goodness that came out of it.
Jamie's love for sport is contagious. My own enjoyment of the Olympics is amplified because I get to experience it with him. I get to walk round the Olympic Park and see his face like a child at Christmas. I find myself jumping up and down on the sofa with him as our rowers/cyclists/runners speed towards the finish line. And the free explanations of sporting rules, gossip and insider knowledge is pretty handy too.
Because of love.
Jamie now works for Fields in Trust (FIT). Having found himself unable to achieve his goal of bringing his love of sport to as many people as possible via School Sport he just went and found another way round the problem. People with a shared love have a habit of finding each other and when Jamie found FIT I knew he'd found a home. He now works with communities, sports clubs and councils to protect playing fields and open space. He's about to launch a project to create opportunities for young people to play sport on the playing fields that FIT protect. Frankly, he's unstoppable. But of course he is - he has a love for something that teaches you to just keep going because the buzz of achieving great things is addictive.
That love is what we should be seeking out and replicating now as we enter the debate about School Sport, sports development and the Olympic legacy. It's not about politics. It's about propagating love for sport. You won't do that by making it compulsory, or by dictating how that love should manifest itself. You'll do it by bringing together the Jamies of this world, getting behind them and letting them do what they do best. They're the experts. They're the ones that have been doing this since before it became a cause du jour. And they do it for the love of it. Let them lead, give the job of shaping our legacy to those who care and who have the experience. Keep the politics out of it. Do it for love.
Saturday 11 August 2012
Monday 6 August 2012
A.M.O. & Mo
Ability, Motivation, Opportunity.
Not so long ago Bath University ran a well known piece of research on the drivers of organisational performance. They concluded that performance was a product of three things: Ability to perform, Motivation to perform, and the Opportunity to perform.
In an organisational context, it would look something like this:
You hire and train people with the right skills, attitude and knowledge to perform well.
You encourage them, inspire them and engage (yes, I know, we hate that word) them.
You make sure that they have the opportunity to perform well - the organisational structure, systems, support functions and their role and remit all enable rather than impede high performance.
Of course, digging a bit deeper into that and it all becomes very difficult. Different parts of the organisational system don't support each other's performance. People are contrary beings and are motivated by complex and ever changed phenomena. Hiring the right people is something that everyone thinks they do well, yet howlers are still made. Training costs time and money and ROI is a bugger to measure.
But it is possible. And we are seeing a living, breathing, running, jumping, swimming, javelin-throwing example of it right now.
Yes, it's an Olympics blog. Sorry - I should have had a disclaimer upfront.
1996 was our worst Olympic year ever. We won 1 Gold medal. As I type, we have 5 days left and we're at16 17 Gold medals. So what happened in between?
Well, there was a plan. There was also investment. Lottery money and the School Sports Partnership programme ensured that we worked hard to get more young people playing more sport, in more variety, more often. It grew participation and, from that, found and developed future sporting talent. Denise Lewis spoke the other night about how much better the sporting bodies work together these days - the different systems support the overall performance. Jess Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farrah are all state school educated and grew up during the School Sports Partnership era. I wrote about School Sports Partnerships in one of my first blogs - I've said pretty much everything I need to there. That was almost two years ago and its safe to say they barely exist now. Participation is falling, funding is 5% of what it was then. The specialists who built the links between schools and clubs and governing bodies have gone and got jobs somewhere else. There's no joined up plan and comparably little training for coaches (most of whom were made redundant). 'Minority' sports are falling by the wayside (Gove would prefer that we play Rugger, like they do at Prep. Rugger isn't in the Olympics).
So, every time I hear about how the Olympics is motivating young people to take up sport, I feel conflicted. One the one hand it's awe-inspiring to see new, incredible, deserving role models - pretty much three a day for the past week. On the other hand, I know that the infrastructure to harness that motivation - the means to develop ability, the opportunity to play, to be coached, to compete - just isn't there at the levels required to replicate Beijing and London.
Lord Coe reminds me of the CEO who thinks that all that's needed to drive high performance in their people is a cracking Christmas party. Sustainable high performance requires a strategy, with investment. Our Olympics has been phenomenal. Inspirational, successful, quintessentially British, in a very modern and inclusive and uplifting way. But it isn't a strategy to sustain sporting success. It isn't even a strategy to increase sports participation in children. Without that strategy we'll have had a bloody good time. Some amazing people will have done some amazing things. But nothing will have changed. And we can kiss goodbye to 2020's Mo, Jess and Greg.
We may have Inspired a Generation. But without developing their talent, or giving them opportunities to play, we aren't building any kind of platform for future performance. Without that, we're all mouth and no trousers. Without that, we really might have wasted nine billion pounds.
Not so long ago Bath University ran a well known piece of research on the drivers of organisational performance. They concluded that performance was a product of three things: Ability to perform, Motivation to perform, and the Opportunity to perform.
In an organisational context, it would look something like this:
You hire and train people with the right skills, attitude and knowledge to perform well.
You encourage them, inspire them and engage (yes, I know, we hate that word) them.
You make sure that they have the opportunity to perform well - the organisational structure, systems, support functions and their role and remit all enable rather than impede high performance.
Of course, digging a bit deeper into that and it all becomes very difficult. Different parts of the organisational system don't support each other's performance. People are contrary beings and are motivated by complex and ever changed phenomena. Hiring the right people is something that everyone thinks they do well, yet howlers are still made. Training costs time and money and ROI is a bugger to measure.
But it is possible. And we are seeing a living, breathing, running, jumping, swimming, javelin-throwing example of it right now.
Yes, it's an Olympics blog. Sorry - I should have had a disclaimer upfront.
1996 was our worst Olympic year ever. We won 1 Gold medal. As I type, we have 5 days left and we're at
Well, there was a plan. There was also investment. Lottery money and the School Sports Partnership programme ensured that we worked hard to get more young people playing more sport, in more variety, more often. It grew participation and, from that, found and developed future sporting talent. Denise Lewis spoke the other night about how much better the sporting bodies work together these days - the different systems support the overall performance. Jess Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farrah are all state school educated and grew up during the School Sports Partnership era. I wrote about School Sports Partnerships in one of my first blogs - I've said pretty much everything I need to there. That was almost two years ago and its safe to say they barely exist now. Participation is falling, funding is 5% of what it was then. The specialists who built the links between schools and clubs and governing bodies have gone and got jobs somewhere else. There's no joined up plan and comparably little training for coaches (most of whom were made redundant). 'Minority' sports are falling by the wayside (Gove would prefer that we play Rugger, like they do at Prep. Rugger isn't in the Olympics).
So, every time I hear about how the Olympics is motivating young people to take up sport, I feel conflicted. One the one hand it's awe-inspiring to see new, incredible, deserving role models - pretty much three a day for the past week. On the other hand, I know that the infrastructure to harness that motivation - the means to develop ability, the opportunity to play, to be coached, to compete - just isn't there at the levels required to replicate Beijing and London.
Lord Coe reminds me of the CEO who thinks that all that's needed to drive high performance in their people is a cracking Christmas party. Sustainable high performance requires a strategy, with investment. Our Olympics has been phenomenal. Inspirational, successful, quintessentially British, in a very modern and inclusive and uplifting way. But it isn't a strategy to sustain sporting success. It isn't even a strategy to increase sports participation in children. Without that strategy we'll have had a bloody good time. Some amazing people will have done some amazing things. But nothing will have changed. And we can kiss goodbye to 2020's Mo, Jess and Greg.
We may have Inspired a Generation. But without developing their talent, or giving them opportunities to play, we aren't building any kind of platform for future performance. Without that, we're all mouth and no trousers. Without that, we really might have wasted nine billion pounds.
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