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 at 16 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.