Jack Nayler’s Post

The most mentioned word in the room. I spent the past two days at Training Ground Guru Live at Old Trafford. It was a great couple of days filled with fascinating insights from across professional football and beyond. One theme emerged consistently across sessions with Sporting Directors, CEOs, Head coaches, Academy directors and performance leaders, alignment. Whether that was co-creating values with staff, pulling people behind a common purpose or using a literal translator, one thing everyone was searching for was an organisation where everyone knew what they were trying to achieve. I don’t think this is a coincidence. There has been a massive proliferation in professional sport in technology, data and knowledge in the past decade and football has embraced that. This has led to some amazing insights, learning and benefits for the health and performance of our athletes. However, it has also substantially increased the number of people involved in our organisations, operating in more specialist roles and departments, with increasingly sophisticated structures. More people also means staff come and go more frequently. In response, we are seeing the emergence of new senior leadership structures. What had previously been the remit of one sporting director is now devolving into several roles. And the advent and adoption of AI in organisations is adding another layer of complexity. Now all of our practitioners can login and chat to their own LLM or agentic setup in the search for answers, often unregulated by their organisations. One of the hallmarks of complexity is that performance is emergent from between people, so having a common purpose is vital. As leaders it can be tempting to try and impose alignment by controlling decisions in early stages to set the example and show how you want things done. But in complex systems, imposing control often just makes them more fragile. Sustainable alignment is created by giving a clear intent and then trusting the judgement of those who sit closer to the decision. Alignment isn't really a structural issue, it's a behavioural and informational one that begins with a clear direction from the leadership. Complex systems don’t fail all at once they slow down towards failure. New staff aren’t being onboarded sufficiently, or individual departments start their own research initiatives independent of the rest of the club. What are the signals that your environment’s alignment is slowing down? Thanks to Simon Austin for putting together the event, I will be posting about some of the other key takeaways in the coming days #TGGLive