How Top World Cup, NBA, and NFL Coaches Make Better Decisions Under Pressure

**Alison Beard** (0:01)
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I'm Alison Beard.

**Adi Ignatius** (0:51)
And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Alison Beard** (1:02)
Adi, as you know, and as anyone who knows me knows, I'm a huge sports fan, NBA, NFL, and of course, this summer, I'm obsessively watching the World Cup. You?

**Adi Ignatius** (1:11)
Yeah, big time sports fan, a big fan of team sports. I'm very partisan, so I'm very religious about the teams I love.

**Alison Beard** (1:19)
So we love sports as an escape from the rest of life, but I think there are also lots of lessons in it that we can bring back to work. And I think business leaders in particular can learn from managers and coaches of high level teams.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:32)
Yeah, I think that's true. Look, it's kind of a trope to talk about, oh, lessons from sports also apply to business, but it's true. Things like competition, collaboration, staying adaptable, they are as relevant for successful teams as they are for successful businesses.

**Alison Beard** (1:46)
Yeah, so today we're talking to two authors who have worked with teams across professional sports leagues in US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Recently, they decided to do a deep dive into how elite coaches make high-stakes decisions, how they prepare, what happens in the moment, and how they deal with the repercussions.

**Adi Ignatius** (2:03)
And of course, all of this is happening under the glare of a media spotlight, right?

**Alison Beard** (2:07)
Yes, and second guessing from fans and owners, and sometimes their own players. So there's so much that managers can learn from how they stay cool and make smart choices under all that pressure. My guests are Alan McCall, a sports performance consultant and founder of Research and Innovation for Sports, who's worked primarily with FIFA World Cup and Champions League teams, and Johann Bilsborough, who's worked as a director of Medical Performance and Innovation in the NBA and NFL. Their co-authors along with Adrian Wolfberg and Ricard Pruna of the HBR article How Elite Sports Coaches Make High-Pressure Decisions. Here's our conversation.
Alan, Johann, welcome.

**Alan McCall** (2:49)
Thanks very much. Thanks for having us.

**Johann Bilsborough** (2:51)
Thank you.

**Alison Beard** (2:52)
Decision-making is a really complicated thing to study.
Why do you both think that elite sports coaches have lessons for the business world? Are there really enough parallels? Alan, why don't you start?

**Alan McCall** (3:06)
I think we're making so many decisions all day, every day, and really in different areas, working with the players, working with the staff. We're essentially a group of people trying to succeed at something. So you've got the same interaction, you've got different types of relationships, and we all have to make these decisions, hopefully pulling in the right and same direction. So I think there's a lot of parallels with sport, with business, and with military, with hospitals, with all walks of life.

**Alison Beard** (3:32)
And Johann, why did you think that the most interesting or useful way to frame it was this idea of sort of before, during, and after?

**Johann Bilsborough** (3:43)
We're dealing with hundreds of decisions all day, some really, really big ones, some not so big. And some of the decisions you're making, like you have to make really, really quickly, but they do become a bigger picture for us overall over time. So that's where it kind of that whole paper started, was just understanding how people perceive information, and especially the people at the top of the tree than those elite coaches.

**Alison Beard** (4:06)
Yeah. And so just to be clear, you all have worked with these elite teams across the NBA, NFL, European football leagues. But this particular study, you approached it by doing in-depth interviews with specific coaches. Just tell me a little bit more about the research.

**Alan McCall** (4:25)
Johann and I are also practitioners. We work on the field, but we also understand doing research helps us be better practitioners because we can have more confidence in what we're doing. Our background is more quantitative, so we were always in sports science and looking at numbers and data. And the more experienced we've got, the more conversations that we've been having. It's like, well, the data is not telling the full story. It's showing some insights, but there's something missing.