Did we do Big Ange dirty?

Can there ever be psychological safety in the Premier League?

A couple of years ago, I was surrounded with so many happy Spurs fans that I bought into the euphoric buzz they were giving off.

Ange Postecoglou had brought the smile back to Tottenham supporters. I chatted to Charlie Eccleshare from The Athletic about the cultural reinvention that the Australian manager had enacted.

Reader, the Big Ange story didn’t end well. As a result a lot of fans of other clubs regularly message me asking about the episode, or my opinion of Postecoglou’s demise. It was while I was joking about this one time that today’s guest got in touch.

Dan Jackson is a former Aussie Rules footballer who now acts as General Manager at Adelaide Football Club. He got in touch suggesting that I might be unfair backtracking on the support of Ange, challenging me to reflect on ‘how the world’s premier football competition has such little respect for building genuine high-performance culture?’

He said ‘I’m sure you’d agree it takes time and a lot of focused effort to change and build a good culture – two things that don’t appear to be given any focus in most EPL teams’.

I loved the pushback and immediately got in touch to have a conversation with him. We talk both about Postecoglou (and whether we did him dirty) but also about how he is part of a team that tries to build strong long-term culture in his team.

Transcript

Bruce Daisley (00:55.491)

Dan, to kick off, I wonder if you could introduce who you are and what you do.

Dan Jackson (01:04.236)

Yeah, Bruce, Dan Jackson, I work, I look after leadership and culture and a professional Australian rules football team, Aussie rules. Some people will be aware of it, others not. My background, I played in this competition in a different team for 11 years, then went over and did a masters of performance psychology at the University of Edinburgh, worked in and around different industries in the UK and then have landed back in the game that I know best here in Adelaide. But yeah, my role’s…

predominantly around doing what we’re going to talk about today. And that’s how you optimize culture in a professional sporting environment.

Bruce Daisley (01:37.112)

And you got in touch with me after, not after the Andrew Postokoglu episode, but after I sort of kind of pulled back on it, I said, you know, maybe I shouldn’t have done that episode or people had criticized me. And you got in touch with me. You said that maybe, I think you said something like, I’d be interested in looking at how the world’s premier football competition has so little respect for building genuine high-performance culture.

rather than challenging him. And I thought, that’s a good critique. Explain a bit more of that pushback really. So what do you think was going on and why was I getting it wrong potentially by turning my guns on Posto Kuglue?

Dan Jackson (02:23.864)

I sound like a very passionate sports fan. That wasn’t necessarily come to the defence of Ange per se, although we can explore sort of what happened with his relationship with Tottenham. It was probably jumping more to your defence in the sense that my line of work is all around how do you build high performance cultures that help you win. And my personal view and experience is that you need a certain period of time and it’s generally not a short period of time if you want to actually create

and sustain effective culture change. And it just seems, I mean, even statistically, the high turnover rate across the industry is for the English Premier League. It’s nearly unparalleled. Now, football, we’ll say football, we’d call it soccer here. Very similar across a lot of the other professional leagues, but comparative to say Australian domestic sporting competitions, even the North American ones, there’s greater stability and time given to managers or head coaches to be able to build a culture that they believe is going to help them align their strategy and achieve long-term.

success. So I was probably jumping more on in that we know that Ange Postocoglu is a culture coach and that’s what I’d really enjoyed from the episode that you’d done at the start of his tenure and the insights from the journalists he’d chatted through about. So then when I guess he retracted it, I kind of saw it as a, well, that’s obviously culture is not that important, which of course you believe that it is and mine was maybe a little bit of broad stroke to say that no one in the Premier League cares about it. But it was a statement to say, maybe there’s an opportunity lost there for Tottenham because they’ve done the coach turnover thing multiple times.

Dan Jackson (03:51.244)

hasn’t got them anywhere necessarily. Maybe this was one they needed to stick out a little bit longer to see if he would have had the opportunity to actually genuinely evolve that culture to something that gives long-term success, not just looking for the shortcut. Might be wrong, but that was, I was coming to your defence on that one.

Bruce Daisley (04:07.273)

Yeah, and I suspect at the heart of that is the underlying thing, which is for a lot of people creating culture, it appears to be more of an art than a science. And so I guess that you might to the defense of the Spurs organization, you might say, well, there’s no agreed scientific methodology to creating culture. So as a result of that, we don’t know if another 12 months was going to

help him achieve something or continuity is going to help him achieve something because it’s so nebulous. You were kind enough to send your dissertation over and there’s one quotation in there from someone which is someone who’s got a business background and they talk about, maybe change isn’t the thing that we should be seeking to do every time things aren’t going well in culture. We should be seeking some continuity. And you seem to be sort of saying that that continuity is

probably quite important when it comes to building something that’s got psychological safety at the heart of it. Do want to talk a little bit more about that?

Dan Jackson (05:12.214)

Yeah, and this is the reflection from a key leader at an AFL club who had been through this. And I’ll talk about potentially how our industry is different and it’s all made for equality so that there are parameters in place that stop teams being able to dominate year in, year out, which is very different to the landscape that say Tottenham operate within. But that idea, and this is something that happens a lot in sport that we go, something’s broken and it’s pretty obvious because they’re losing, teams lose and…

I’m sure clubs all have their own way, but even AFL teams have been guilty of it. They go, okay, well, something’s broken. It’s probably culture. Cause like you say, it’s more of an art. So it’s hard to really say we’ve got the tangible data and that the win loss record, the rankings on the table, that’s proof that we’re not performing well. And often it’s sack coach, a manager, whatever it might be, different positions of leadership across these clubs. And then the next group come in and off they go. And we just assume that it’s fixed, but I’ve always looked at it like it’s kind of like putting a brand spanking new rug.

Dan Jackson (06:07.352)

over a cracked foundation and assuming that you’ve fixed the problem with your ground. Unless you’ve done the audit to go, okay, well what within our environment’s not working? And that’s what I went and researched that this club that had been very successful was in fact my old club and I’d been there 11 years of lived experience in a culture that it wasn’t high performing, it wasn’t good, suboptimal, I could tell you stories that would resonate with people from, this was 10 years ago, 10 to 15, about what old school toxic culture looked like in professional sport. Like you’re late, you go in the boxing ring.

Other people are late, you’re down jumping in the ocean at 4.30 in the morning, because that’ll teach you to be more committed to time schedules and stuff like that. Now, the game has evolved a long way and people from the corporate world often can’t relate to that because you’re probably not sending your HR team or your graduates to do anything like that. But this person had made a comment that just because you change the leadership, you’re not necessarily going to fix up the problem. So the proper methodology would be, okay, well, let’s do a cultural assessment. And that’s what it sounded like, the conversation you had with the author.

or sorry, the journalists from Tottenham was that they basically got that on face value, that there was low enjoyment in the way that the players were engaging, was not much trust there, there was just a whole lot of issues which would have said culture wasn’t where it needed to be and that, and should come in and yeah, some of his stuff’s quite unique, he’s an out there kind of guy, but high connection, bring the joy, bring the energy and it was working early, but then after two years we say, not working. Now maybe the pundits will say that his football strategy wasn’t, that’s fine, I’m not trying to claim that that was.

the wrong decision because it might’ve ultimately been the right one. But if it’s about trying to embed a long-term sustainable high-performance culture, which gives you the best chance for your strategy, your X’s and O’s to play, it’s very hard to do that in 18 months, I reckon. And so just recycling the leader, you’re probably gonna find those same things are at low connection within the group, low enjoyment, all that kind of stuff are still gonna be there. Time will tell.

Bruce Daisley (07:54.256)

Give me bit of the perspective of how you might bring that rigour to it. So you’ve got the benefit here of being a former sportsman yourself and now studying this stuff. So if you were going to come along and do…

the sort of audit that you’re describing here. What does that audit look like? You’ve mentioned a couple of things, but are there certain things that you look out for or are there certain things that you try and get your head around?

Dan Jackson (08:18.296)

Yeah, I mean, I’ve not led one, but I’m in the beneficiary of one that was happened at the club that I’m working at now, which probably fits in regards to the narrative of what I’m sort of saying around in Australian sport, or at least in the AFL, there is time given to coaches to be able to do it. Now we don’t have a relegation system in most of our sports leagues, so there’s different pressures. So it’s not to say that the Premier League need to go and adopt this. So we, my team were struggling prior to me getting here. They did a cultural review, so they get external parties to come in.

sit down with key stakeholders, being players, coaches, administrators, take a lot of the sort of standard data that you’d get through engagement surveys and whatnot, and just put together a report that says, what’s happening in regards to the people dynamics of this organisation? And it was a similar process that had happened at the team that I’d done the research on. And then the themes come out, and if the themes are people related, then you need to make people kind of investment. So one of the recommendations from the report that had assessed the Adelaide Crows was that they needed someone full-time to look after.

leadership and culture because traditionally in our game it had been done by consultants that would be in a day or two a week and very hard time to have your finger on the pulse of culture if you’re flying in and flying out. And I’m not sure, mean, you’ve chatted to a lot of different people and have worked in different industries, whether it is so unique, but I mean, generally we look at the custodians of culture or the architects of culture being a CEO, a head coach or a head manager and maybe some key influential people in the org chart, they need to shape it up.

and then they just send it, prefer it, down. In our world, are jobs like mine where it’s the job, I’m not there to move X’s and O’s and magnets around or to coach how to kick a ball, how to mark my roles. How do you build, help those key leaders build the environment that’s going to help optimize all the people both on and off the field and then build the leadership capacity to bring it up. So the audit process is very, it’s very subjective. Most of the time it’s just interviews with a bit of because like you said at the start, it’s an art form, not a science.

and putting together a case that says, okay, this environment is people are just coming and getting the job done and then leaving. They’re not enjoying what they’re doing. There’s high fear of making mistakes. There’s low trust, so therefore people aren’t seeking help. All the stuff that comes out in the psych safety research. Okay, what are we gonna do about it? And I would wonder if you’re in charge of an organization or maybe if you got given a role like this in a big organization where you didn’t have to worry about strategy because you’re not actually given any leadership title. Your whole role was to help optimize the…

the environment for the day-to-day work out, like what would be the things that you might look at implementing to help support the strategy.

Bruce Daisley (10:50.129)

Yeah, I was really struck. I I feel like

overwhelmed even thinking about, daunted about how I would do that in a high pressure environment like sport. I read one of the outside people, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say who the person was, but one person came and said on this audit of the club that the club currently was high detail and high control. And I guess that must be a reflection of stress and anxiety that they put a lot of rules in place.

And this person said they should have more lateral thinking and be more relationship focused. Now that I love that as like an outline, but you can imagine that maybe a chief executive of a club might not necessarily see the upside of that. And so can you sort of talk me through the realities of a diagnosis like that, you know, how it’s received, but then how you would bring about

applying that to a club because I guess to sort of look at Tottenham, you might go, well, when the fans start getting on the clubs back and then the press start getting on the clubs back and what we saw exhibited with Ange was that this guy who had been this sort of warm hug of a personality, he’d been like making jokes, he’d been, you know, like everyone’s mate. Suddenly he’d become this angry, rassable, impatient interviewee.

He was frustrated with everything. look, it just seemed like he was being pulled down into a vortex where he was never going to be the old version of himself. long, complicated question, but I’d love you to sort of explain when a diagnosis like that comes along, the high detail, the high control, what that means and how it’s interpreted and how you could try and move towards more relationship focused.

Dan Jackson (12:50.86)

Yeah. And I remember that the person you’re quoting actually, we can chat about it is Pippa Grange. And the reason it’s relevant is because she’s worked within English football before and being a guest on your podcast, it’d be definitely worth bringing her back to chat further. Cause she’s, I would say she’s probably one of the foremost gurus in this balance of all culture psych, performance psychology and what it is to work in professional sport. Cause it is a unique base that you’d and England in particular living in London, I know what it’s, what that media and the fan base are like, but

Bruce Daisley (13:00.126)

That’s right, that’s

Dan Jackson (13:20.8)

It’s exactly the same like as Australians after my few years in the UK, I realised that we are just the children of you guys. And so our culture is very similar. And so when teams are winning here, everybody is put on a pedestal. And so the Adelaide Crows is from a two team town. It’s not a huge city, but they are passionate about football. So we live that experience week to week. And when you’re on top cloud nine, there are their own traps within that. But it’s definitely a lot better than being at the bottom, which you’ve just referenced around what it’s like when you’re losing a lot.

Bruce Daisley (13:29.965)

Yeah.

Dan Jackson (13:50.21)

probably the biggest learning I took from my research at my previous club. takes real steady leadership to be able to ignore that external noise because the average football pundit is not there to try and help you make sustainable change to your culture. They’re there to create noise around their own title, which is to be a pundit. But that noise then reverberates around through fans who then sit in the ground. And so when you lose, there’s the heckling and then your board who are in charge of making these decisions, they’re only human. So there’s this

constant pressure on key decision makers to make change because we think that’s what’s going to fix the problem. And because we can always relate to stories in sport, oh, well, so-and-so changed their coach and look at them go. But if we, I don’t know, finding someone from the Oklahoma City Thunder, it might be really interesting, like the Sam Prestey type, to talk about his experience in charge of an organisation in a small town that are passionate about sport. And it’s a six or seven year journey where they stated, we’re going to focus on…

There’s a great quote out there around them talking about drafting people, not players, and that they really want to build an environment where they get the best out of the person on and off the court because that was what they… Now, there’s lots of teams that would have said that that’s been their strategy, but they’ve stuck to it for six or seven years and ultimately won a championship. How do you do it though? It goes back to that art versus science thing. in our experience here, we had issues in the start of our tenure. We got a new senior coach, a new general manager of football when I started at the start of 2020. And some of the issues were that…

because of the pressure around the external environment, it had made the enjoyable job a lot less enjoyable. People were sort of coming in and then leaving. There was a lower trust, which often happens with leadership change. When people in our environment and hype, they’re high performers, but when they’re in an environment that’s not performing, often the selflessness falls away and it goes to how do I make sure I get the next contract, which is no knock on an individual, it’s a survival mechanism. So for us, the process was about, how do we build in a stronger sense of

connection and belonging. Like they are buzzwords these days, but inherently, and this is really interesting listening to your podcast and I forget the author’s name, but the mattering guy, Zach, the book really aligned with, yes, fantastic, really aligned with what we do. Like how do we make these young athletes who have often been the best players in their teams come into an environment like this and make them feel like they matter, but more importantly, help them understand that if they can make, we have a squad of 44, only 22 play, if they can help everyone else feel like they’re important as well, then

Bruce Daisley (15:52.214)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dan Jackson (16:12.312)

come game day, you’re going to have a pretty strong, united, I connected group. So that was one push of ours early. Now we weren’t using the language around mattering. We had everyone read a children’s book about have you filled a bucket today, but effectively it’s just mattering in children’s book form. And it’s like a rite of passage that every person that comes into our club gets a copy of this book. And we talk about filling buckets. And it’s, if you wanted to look at the psychology behind it, it’s really foundational stuff. But if you talk to 18 to 26 year old or 32 year old professional footballers around.

the neuroscience of connection and empathy, you’re probably going to get a glazed look. You ask them to read a children’s book and then bind to the concept of filling buckets and not tipping it, you can start to build a pretty strong culture around, if you want to use today’s language, around mattering or belonging. Now that’s just one small example. You’ve still got the how do you manage stress under pressure on fear? Well, that’s another avenue where you’ve got to bring in the right experts, create an environment where people might have to have the humility or vulnerability to think about learning mindfulness as a tool to…

Dan Jackson (17:10.52)

help them perform better under pressure, which again in male dominated sporting environments, nowadays it’s a lot more, people are lot more likely to do things like that. When I was playing, no one was talking about doing mindfulness. That would have been seen as a bit of woo woo kind of stuff. what I’m trying to say is yes, when it comes to the people part, there’s no one way to do it, but there’s no point just listening to what other clubs do, other teams do, other organisations do and saying, we’ll do that. What’s at the heart of your cultural problem? And that’s the biggest issue with culture. We have to take the time to do that audit and say,

Our strategy, we think it’s pretty good, so let’s back that in, get real clarity. Everyone knows their role and what they need to do, and that’s in any industry. Ours is just, you standing in the right place and kicking in the right direction? But then all the stuff that fits in and around that is where we can make it a bit of guesswork. And I guess it’s removing that guesswork and making it more applied and being able to test it and see if it works. Because maybe you might build a really highly connected group and you’re still not winning. Okay, well maybe we’ve got it wrong and maybe it is the actual strategy or the game plan. But I’m just not sure people take, like you said earlier, the rigor.

Bruce Daisley (17:42.266)

you

Dan Jackson (18:08.61)

to understand what kind of culture they’ve currently got and where are they trying to take it to.

Bruce Daisley (18:14.835)

I was really interested. mean, I guess what you’ve you’ve said along the way there is sometimes it’s about silencing the noise of the people outside a group and that might be agents, it might be fans, it might be the press, it might be sort of and then being inwardly focused and trying to get a more meaningful connection and more meaningful synchrony of perspective. That children’s book helps achieve that sort of synchrony.

If culture is organisational programming, how can we all get to agree with each other? What our philosophy is here? You talked a little bit in your dissertation and it was so powerful that I’d love to go through it about how you try and get people to feel a connection, how you are connection first, relationship first. And one person said in passing that after going through one of these exercises, they realised

how superficial their connection with each other had been in the past. And they realized that they now had a sort of greater extent of understanding. And that seemed, if you could take us through sort of some thinking behind that, it seemed relevant for people who might do a more mundane office job, but maybe don’t have the same connection with colleagues that they used to have. Maybe they don’t go to the pub anymore with them, or they don’t sort of know them socially anymore. So I wonder if you could just talk about how

being relationship first or relationship focused has an impact and what methods people have done to reach it.

Dan Jackson (19:42.828)

Yeah, this is a really fascinating one when you take it from a broader conversation than just about sport, because sport is so dependent on interaction. you’re literally in the same room. We can’t have work from home days in this environment because you can’t kick the ball from screen to screen. I guess you could do review meetings. And generally everyone that works here or competes here is passionate about what they’re doing. You’re not coming and just checking the box for the day. There’s not many spreadsheets to fill out. There’s certainly a lot of hard things about working in professional sport, but…

one of the pleasures is the human relationships at all. we don’t even need to wrestle with why connection’s important per se. If you really want to understand though, where the value comes back from. And I think this is where it does relate to all the conversations you have with people at the moment around sort of work from home and where that fits in is genuine connections. It’s not just about, well, I like you and that’s great. For me, it’s about, first of all, shared understanding. if you’re gonna work with someone, now, if you’re just working with spreadsheets all the time and your interaction with other people,

doesn’t involve much more than sending them email, probably not that important. But if you have to have a robust conversation around where your strategy’s going, if you have to give someone feedback around how they presented, if there’s not a, we believe, there’s not a strong level of understanding of what makes that person tick, what are some of their fears, what’s their best approach to receiving and giving feedback, very hard to optimise that small relationship. And if a whole good organisation’s suboptimal on its little diodes of network relationships,

then there’s gonna be sub-optimal performance outcomes somewhere along the way. How do you do that though, if you’re outside of sport and people wanna work from home and they don’t wanna go for beers and these generations, they’re not necessarily seeming like they need that same level connection, it’s certainly not through their work. That’s one that I’m still wrestling with. I’m lucky that I’m in an industry right now that doesn’t require me to solve for that problem because people have to be here and they do understand the power of it.

It’s been one that as I’ve listened to a lot of the guest experts that you’ve had on your podcast, it’s made me think, okay, if I was doing this in industry that wasn’t so dependent on people being in the same office, would I be able to preach connection and belonging and now mattering as a subset of that being as fundamental? Well, I think so, because I believe it’s an absolute core principle to high performance, because if you’re to get the best out of someone, you need to genuinely understand them. But I haven’t actually got an answer for how you would go and do that. don’t know whether, same thing, I keep throwing it back to you if you were tasked with…

Dan Jackson (22:04.65)

improving connection and understanding across an organisation that had remote working opportunities, what would be your approach?

Bruce Daisley (22:11.85)

Yeah, I just loved the, there was one part in what you talked about where as part of a group introduction, players or I guess all team members,

whether playing team or the support team had to stand up and do something which was hero hardship and highlight of their lives. just, I guess that just do a certain amount of self revealing to each other. And that’s where someone said, I realized that the conversations I’ve had till now have been so superficial. And I was just really struck. I did something with the Moth storytelling group and they said,

This was about teaching people how to tell stories. And they said, I was interested, are we teaching people how to tell stories? Because there’ll be better presenters or there’ll be better meetings. And they went, no, no, not at all. It’s just when people feel like they’ve listened to, you know, the wonderful moment that changed someone’s life when they were 13, when they’ve listened to that from a colleague, the colleague suddenly becomes this sort of three dimensional real individual in their heads.

And you’re the thing you talk about here, the hero hardship highlight just seemed to be a very simple tool that made maybe this new person who just transferred into the team, it made them seem connectable, relatable, real, and just a very simple device. But for that to elicit the response from someone to from a leader there to say, I feel that all the connections I’ve had till now have been trivial, superficial, meaningless.

actually demonstrates that a degree of mutual exchange, a degree of mutual self-revealing, I mean, it seems so straightforward, but it can be transformational in terms of building that connection if you are going to be relationship first.

Dan Jackson (24:08.372)

And yeah, I’m probably repeating the same thing. If you’re in a performance industry, you’re really dependent on having people execute their role at the highest level, which is what at least sport is about. But I think even in small startups, everyone is so invested early and we’re intimately connected that it’s just not such an issue to have to go through these processes because we spend so much time together and we’re driven to move forward. But as things start to grow, if you just assume that those connections are staying at that nice deep shared understanding level.

That’s when we often that’s the reflection that you sort of quoted from there. The assumption often ends up leading you astray because you find out eventually like, do I really know this person? So that hero hardship highlight piece has been well documented over here because the team that used the Richmond Tigers went on to win three premierships, championships in four years. And so everyone wants to, of course, look at what are they doing really well? And there’s a great story that comes out of it. We’ve had something similar here in the early part of our journey. We do footy family friends and bring a photo of the mosaic of who you are.

How has Footy influenced the person you’ve become? Because that’s obviously the core part of our people’s lives. Whether you’re a coach or administrator or a player. Family, like how has your family shaped your values and your traits and characteristics. And friends, who supported you along the way. So as an example, if you ask me about family, I would show a photo of my grandma who’s now with us and say that, she had a huge influence on who I am because as a child, I just remember so fondly her taking me to the museum and the botanical gardens and reading me stories and just imparting this love of learning.

the thing that I love to do, endlessly curious. So if you’re sitting either as if I’m direct report or someone below or on equal level, and that’s all you take from it, like, Dan Jackson talked about his grandma and his love of learning. Well, then if you need to come to me and you wanna work together to come up with a new strategy for a project or execute on something, you’re probably gonna lean in on that opportunity for us to develop a new understanding or to leverage my curiosity.

Dan Jackson (26:00.792)

As opposed to someone else who doesn’t really care about that, who they’re all about results driven, because the person that had the biggest influence on them was their father and he’s just all about you’ve got to work really, really hard. You’re going to have a different conversation when you need to really lean on them. And that’s where that high performance part comes in. We’re all about dealing with that external pressure, internal pressure, which not everyone deals with that in their job. So maybe hearing about someone’s, know, tightest family member or hero or highlight or something like that may not have the impact. But in our game, it certainly does because at that root level of understanding how to get the best out of someone.

Bruce Daisley (26:26.061)

Yeah.

Dan Jackson (26:29.718)

And I think it underpins the mattering piece as well, which is just, it’s more language around psych safety in connection. ties in Owen Eastwood stuff, Pippa Grange, Brene Brown. They’re all saying the same thing. How do you make someone feel that the job that they’re doing, which may actually not be that important, is really important because they’re playing a role in a big picture. And as a leader, you need them to execute that role if you’re going to be performing at your best. The caveat with that, or the risk is, if people listening go, I could do hero highlight hardship.

Bruce Daisley (26:55.917)

Yeah.

Dan Jackson (26:57.558)

and you start to get your people to go out there and be vulnerable. There’s good research, anecdotally and academic as well. Putting people in a vulnerable position when the environment’s actually not very supportive, there’s low psych safety can be really detrimental. So that’s what I saying earlier. Don’t just do the connection piece like that because you think, that sounds great. I need to more connection in my team. My team will like doing that because unless you’re in a place that the team’s ready to support, you’ve got a pretty reasonable level of psych safety.

It might work backwards for you. Or your team might go, we don’t even work together, connection’s not important here. There might be something else. It might be about clarity, commitment, might be managing anxiety. But you need to know what are the cracks underneath your rug that you’re working on if you want to build a genuinely sustainable high performance culture.

Bruce Daisley (27:37.76)

I think you’re exactly right. Quite often we hear from people that people feel that certain initiatives or certain things that they’re asked to do are manipulative actually. They can see through if the intention isn’t honest and good, they just think, you know, they might have a friend that they go and whisper, what’s this all about? And they can see through it and they maybe performatively go along with it, but don’t believe it.

You know, I guess that undermines everything that we’re doing. The one thing I wanted to, I guess, reflect on is that that is a mechanism to try and build a tighter cohesiveness amongst the people. But that isn’t the culture in itself, is it? You you need to have a set of grounding philosophies or principles. And one of the things that came out of the report, the dissertation you wrote is that maybe the old

version of thinking about culture is that if you wanted to enact cultural change, you had to unfreeze the culture and sort of change what was going on. Then you had to realign the culture and then refreeze it. And the one thing I got from what you’d written was that that notion of refreezing culture probably isn’t dynamic enough for the way that we live now. So, you know, an example might be that if you’re a sports team,

You can’t just freeze the culture because new people might come along and you need to make them feel like they were a participant in creating this ethos that we’ve got around us right now. It can’t just be like you slot in and nothing changes. The culture needs to evolve over time. And that cultural evolution, that substance of what the culture is and what it looks like seems to be a really important part of trying to make sure a culture feels inclusive, dynamic.

I’d love you to talk about that, experience of that with sports teams.

Dan Jackson (29:33.42)

Yeah, I think this one plays across all industries. That model you’re referring to is one from Edgar Shen, who I know Francis Frey based a lot of her work on and I get a lot of someone I’ve lot of respect for both in the literature, I’ve read her books and listened to on podcasts like yours. let’s, he’s not the only expert in this space, but his model is really profound in this space. Cause it’s quite simple. If you want to change culture, it’s first of all, we’ve just chat about this, you need to unfreeze what’s there, what’s broken. And

That part is all about helping people in your organisation or team understand that it’s broken because we don’t always necessarily see that. In the sports world you do because we’re losing but just because you’re losing it the culture might actually be quite strong. We might just lack talent. Like I know Owen Eastwood has sort of shared anecdotally that when he’s talked to all the different leaders and he’s talked to a lot across not just sport but a lot of different sporting teams and organisations I think he said something about like know when leaders that he works with that say that 40 % of success comes down to talent. You just can’t.

Dan Jackson (30:27.224)

You just can’t have success in our environment without having talent. But then he said that next chunk, and then he’s a cool anecdote, 25 % environment. I’m pretty sure he quoted some research out of the English Institute of Sport. It was a meta study. Yeah, that was something about like they claim that 70 % of behavior is influenced by environment. So you need to work out, okay, well, what in our environment’s working and not working and help other people understand that too. Cause you come in as the leader and say, we’re going to change. Everyone thinks it’s okay. It doesn’t help with the next part, which is cognitively restructure. And I think it’s very…

Bruce Daisley (30:30.221)

You did here.

Dan Jackson (30:56.962)

clever term because if culture is just a representation of how all the people in a, so let’s just say, organisation or team are thinking, and I would say even at its simplest, it’s how they’re behaving, but that’s underpinned by how they’re thinking, you have to cognitively rewire everybody’s brain to be able to get culture change. Because if you can go and put values on a wall and you do some connection activities and you put the ping pong table and have free coffees on Fridays or something, that you might say we value connection and fun and joy. But unless people actually, like you’re saying, they’re not rolling their eyes and saying, here’s another stupid initiative.

you’ve not actually completed the first step with unfreezing. But where I challenge it is, the third part of Edgar Shenn’s model is about refreeze. So once you change the shared brain and everyone has these underlying assumptions and the behaviour is really consistent, no one’s rolling their eyes when we do these things, we’ve got clarity about what we stand for. It’s not about refreezing, because then effectively, as he’s articulated, as people come and go, the people’s brain, the collective brain is different, because people are different. And if you just try and suck people in to be like what it was six months ago, six years ago.

you’re just not capturing the genuine, first of all, culture of who’s in the group, but also the opportunity to evolve. So that’s where I think we’ve all realised that culture is about constantly evolving. So that brings you back to the first step too, because if you’re always assessing, self-auditing within your team and organisation, what, not from our strategy, what from our environments working for us and what’s not, it can actually help you bring you back to that unfreeze phase and go, well, we’re really nailing this part, we’ve got great connection and belonging. Probably what we need to do now is challenge each other more.

because we’ve got this really strong unity. We’ve actually got to leverage that to have harder conversations because that’s going to help our performance in the boardroom, on the sporting field. How do we do that? Well, we build it into our system of cognitive rewiring and then we assess it over time. So you get this cycle of just constantly reviewing your culture as opposed to saying, are our values, here’s the behaviours that everyone adheres to. They’ve been here for five years. That’s why we’ve got such a strong culture. Because in my experience these days, it just doesn’t work anymore. You get left in the past.

Bruce Daisley (32:52.409)

So we started off sort of reflecting on Ansh Postokoglu. guess I’d love you to, do you think, do you think it was, would you have given him more time? I mean, you get, we’re getting into specifics here, but how would.

If you were the chief exec of that club, how would you decide when you think the culture is in a good place? or cause, cause persisting is, isn’t always going to be the right solution. back to Ange. Did we do him dirty?

Dan Jackson (33:26.336)

Yeah, as a proud Australian, the easy answer is yes. But as a rational human being, I understand there are so many variables around it. Probably, think, where the opportunity lies, maybe it’s worth finding some people at other clubs, English Premier League clubs, that can’t compete on the talent war part. So, I mean, I’m a Fulham fan, having lived in South West London when I was there. What do Fulham do to try and optimise the talent that they have if they can’t spend as much?

Bruce Daisley (33:56.606)

Yeah.

Dan Jackson (34:18.914)

change the culture with the easiest way, which is get rid of the players he knows aren’t working for the group and bring in somebody he knows, because that’s the easiest way. It’s just a cheap way to do it. And give him another six months or less than that the off season over there to start to really embed and then test. And if 10 rounds in, they’re still going to change it. Okay, no worries. But that’s what I would have done because again, in Australia, you coach will get four or five years before you that kind of put that kind of pressure on. They won’t get cut after 18 months or two, but it’s a different game. And so maybe I’m probably being a little bit.

idealistic and loyal to a fellow Australian. But we’ll never know because he got the sack and he’ll go somewhere else and maybe win another trophy in his second year. Maybe not.

Bruce Daisley (34:51.839)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. It’s just a demonstration quite often, isn’t it? That there’s so much money involved that someone who just wants to optimize for money believes that making a quick decision is the right thing to do. And it’s just, it’s just interesting that in the

business world, which quite often needs more money involved, we don’t reach for the same conclusions. We don’t change leadership teams as quickly in the business world as we do in sport. So it is an interesting contrast, possibly because results are so much more immediate in sport.

Dan Jackson (35:33.482)

and public and it’s very easy to get that noise. Like unless you have a BHP in Australia that keeps returning bad profits quarterly, then they’re gonna get shareholder noise and it’s gonna, but it’s not front page and back page every day. So that pressure isn’t there. They get time to go and review and audit. like I think going back to that question before, how do you work it out? Engagement survey data, I don’t think that’s part of the picture. We have real clarity. mean, part of the things we assess going into our game review meeting every week. The core part is the tactics, the X’s and O’s, but a core part of it is what are the behavioural expectations, what are the behavioural norms that the players have agreed that are more intangible on the field that we know make a difference to performance. And that exists off the field as well. There’s real clarity that in an AFL game, in the moments where the ball’s not in play, there’s a responsibility that you’re living up to the cultural elements of expectation. It might be picking a teammate off the ground. It might be celebrating a little thing. It might just be connecting through

Eyes and hands like we track and measure we have real clarity first of all around what those things are and so Let’s say you’re a project manager on a construction site, and you’ve got really strict policies around safety you’ve got Project management tools which makes sure everyone knows exactly what they’ve got to do and how they’ve got to do it But are you having a conversation with 30 different people maybe more maybe less around? Those in between moments which I think you’d agree is the culture part like how do we how do we what’s above the line on? How we talk to one another?

It could be as minute as like swearing on site because we’re next to a school. This project’s next to a school and we just don’t, we want to be a well-respected part of our big vision as our construction company. We’re all about being respectful members of our community. And so that project manager does a bit of an audit about where this group’s at, sets real clarity for the length of this project. These are some of the things we’re going to agree to, but they may be different to the next project, which is at the country and you can go to the pub afterwards, but being able to assess what do we need out of this group right now for this period of time to achieve this goal.

And then getting real clarity. That’s where think the easy wins are. Sitting down with your team as a manager and going, look, hopefully you’ve got role clarity on what I need you to do, but do you have clarity on who I need you to be? And that’s not trying to shape you into someone you’re not. It’s asking you what you need in regards to this collective environment to be your best at work every day. So if someone says, well, I really love actually connecting at least once a week in a non-work way. And I love having a beer. Well, you might get back to beers on a Friday. But if others say, I hate that. It makes me really feel awkward.

But I actually really would like to get to know people at a more intimate level. Then maybe one of these storytelling components would work. But culture change doesn’t have to be a big review piece. It might actually just be carving out the time and everyone’s really busy just to seek clarity around what do we need from our environment and are we there right now? And wherever that gap is, just building in behavioural expectations that we can all buy into. And then goes that unfreeze, put it in whatever process is in place, and then just go back and assess. And it takes us round and round. I think it’s small wins can end up.

Bruce Daisley (37:58.654)

Yeah.

Dan Jackson (38:24.088)

It’s gone a long way.

Bruce Daisley (38:25.84)

To wrap up, Dan, you’ve mentioned your obsession with lifelong learning and sort of curiosity. I wonder if you could just point us in the direction of something that you enjoy.

reading, listening to that gives you some direction on culture. Is there anything from the world of sport or something that you find actually helps you understand these things?

Dan Jackson (38:47.608)

Well, Bruce, it’s awkward because a lot of the stuff that I go to, it’s not sports related, it’s your podcast. I think you’ve got a great understanding on the consistency. And this is the whole idea of, yeah, people, sport and business, they are very different in so many ways. But if businesses are people focused, then they’re going to be very close to sport. And that’s where I think you’ve got a great strong leaning towards. mean, Owen Eastwood’s book, Belonging, was really great to help me get…

Bruce Daisley (38:52.749)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Jackson (39:13.846)

better able to articulate probably what I’ve had the lived experience around, like having an environment where, say, to take Brene Brown’s idea of not trying to fit in, it’s very easy in a sporting environment to people come in and go, well, what’s the archetypical English Premier League footballer look like? He’s a bit of a lad and he’s going to act that way, as opposed to be your authentic self understanding that there’s parts of this environment you’re going to have to kind of put a bit of a mask on and fit in, but ultimately do you belong? So that one I think is foundational for if you’re looking at that connection piece.

Bruce Daisley (39:32.494)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Jackson (39:41.624)

This book about mattering, I’m only halfway through, but I agree with you. think that the research, again, it underpins this really important part. From a sporting sense, to be honest, I try and do a lot of my thinking outside of sport, because sport just tends to focus on sport a lot. So I’d probably fill your bucket, certainly with the Phil Bucket book. Keep exploring this stuff, because it ties across professional sport. And I would encourage, if there’s someone, if I can think of someone that I know over in the landscape of…

Bruce Daisley (40:02.221)

Love it. Thank you so much, Dan.

Dan Jackson (40:08.088)

Premier League football would be really fascinating to find out what are the constraints that stop people. Like we know that talent is going to be the number one way to win because you’ve got the fine out, fine out, fine, sorry, infinite budget. It’s not infinite, but they’ve got a lot of money to spend. How are other teams trying to create competitive advantage if they can’t spend? I’m sure there’s a really interesting people that you could tap into.

Bruce Daisley (40:31.01)

You got in touch sort of saying that there was more to the conversation. And I think you’ve, you’ve demonstrated you’ve, you’ve definitely provided some sort of provocation and stimulation there. So I’m so grateful you got in touch.