# Elite Coaches' Decision Frameworks for Business Leaders

**Podcast:** HBR IdeaCast
**Published:** 2026-06-30

## Transcript

I'm Alison Beard.
And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR IdeaCast.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah, I think that's true.
Look, it's kind of a trope to talk about, oh, you know, lessons from sports also apply to business, but it's true.
You know, things like competition, collaboration, stay and adaptable, they are as relevant for successful teams as they are for successful businesses.
Yeah, so today we're talking to two authors who have worked with teams across professional sports leagues in U.S., 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 repercussions.
And of course, all of this is happening under the glare of a media spotlight, right?
Yes, and second-guessing from fans and owners, and sometimes their own players.
So there is 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 Johan Billsborough, who's worked as a director of medical performance and innovation in the NBA and NFL.
They're 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, Johan, welcome.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
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?
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 communication, 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.
And Johan, why did you think that the most interesting or useful way to frame it was this idea of sort of before, during and after?
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 kind of that whole paper started, was just understanding how people perceive information and especially the people at the top of the tree and those elite coaches.
Yeah.
And so just to be clear, you all have worked with these elite teams, you know, 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.
Johan and I are also, we're practitioners, we work on the field, but we also understand doing research helps us be better practitioners because we can have more confidence.
and what we're doing our background is more quantitative so we're always you know in sports science and looking at numbers and data and the more experienced we've got and 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 and the only way to get that is to speak to people so that's why we implemented a an interview qualitative approach to try and dig deep into people's lived experience and understand how they make decisions, because then we can start to understand what that means for them and for us as well.
It's interesting because sort of in the age of AI, there's this idea that the machines are going to be able to make the decisions for us.
But this research points to the idea that the human element, the human oversight still matters.
I'll be honest, when I came to the US, and obviously lucky, Alice and I worked in Boston for the basketball team and the football team there.
Hooray, go Celtics, go Pats.
And we had two completely opposite type coaches.
I had not come from a basketball or I didn't know NFL.
So it was a real challenge, just American culture to start with, the sporting culture of the US of sports that I hadn't worked in.
and two coaches that were at the opposite ends of their careers.
Brad was just starting, Bill was well into...
Brad Stevens, now the manager, but formerly the coach of the Boston Celtics.
And Bill Belichick.
Bill Belichick, who was well into his career.
And there were so many pieces on how he used the information and the data that was available.
And I think there was a lot of situations where there was a lot of subjective information given to him.
how they feel, how they seem, how they look.
We wanted to quantify things better to give him a more informed decision-making process.
And Brad, the same, very data-driven to make decisions and obviously good intuition as well.
But the reps that Bill had had, he'd seen a lot of these scenarios before.
And so he was very, very well prepared.
And I think in any human organization, there's the data, but then also personalities play a role.
So let's dig into your order of operations.
In terms of the before, what did you see elite coaches do to anticipate their future decision needs?
What does that look like?
The biggest thing that came out for me was the preparation and the trust that was built over time before anything needed to be done.
They weren't waiting for things to happen.
And maybe early in their career, when they were speaking about it, they involved over time and they realized that they had to prepare.
And so maybe you don't come into it immediately.
with all of the answers.
But yeah, that big part about just these small opportunities to build trust is something that I then reflected on with my own sort of just experience of day-to-day life and how we operate and how these moments help us understand if we trust them, if we don't trust them.
So I think the before decision bit for me was that was the most interesting, the preparation and the relationships trust aspect.
So understanding the people on your team, your assistant coaches, getting to know everyone ahead of time.
So in the moment you're ready to work together.
Yeah.
And also not just when it matters, but just in those small moments, one of the NBA coaches that we interviewed, we spoke for about two hours on a four second timeout that he made.
And it just became more clear as we were talking and as we analyzed the findings as well, that his decision in that four seconds had essentially been made.
prior to that because of the relationship he had built with the player.
He called a call for a player.
The player said, no, no, I'll give it to someone else on the team.
And he was like, okay, I can actually trust this guy with this call.
So I'm going to go with him.
What he explained is it wasn't this trust was built up in other matches.
It was in the corridor when he'd be stopping and speaking with him or in the locker room.
That was one of the bigger things for me.
And Johan, before you mentioned, you know, working in the NBA, in the NFL and about sort of the flow of information.
So talk about how the coaches you interviewed, the coaches you've worked with, how they make sure to get the right information beforehand.
There's a lot of information that's coming in and there's always a data overload.
coaches are really wise to be able to understand what is the most important information.
So there's not a lot of noise.
If everything's a signal, then nothing's a signal.
And so that was really important for us to understand what matters most.
And when we talk about that before situation, the what if scenarios, which was both coaches that I dealt with, they would go through so many scenarios.
So the preparation, as Alan spoke about, was so thorough.
There was every single scenario that could happen.
in a game that they were prepared for and alan mentioned also the trust the head coach also has so many people vying for their attention on what's important they had to really filter through what was the most important for that situation and be prepared really well with really trusted staff members so the delegation of information to provide him and both those coaches with the right information was really important.
And you'd see there's so much preparation going into a game, but also into practice sessions.
We always practice how we're going to play.
for each different opponent.
So there was a lot of information coming through.
It was just deciphering what the right information was.
And as Alan said before, like having the right information in front of you because you've seen so many different things in the past helps them narrow it down to just doing what is most important.
So business leaders figuring out how to ensure that only the most important information comes to them so that they don't have to do that filtering.
protecting their own time, building those relationships ahead of time, and then also scenario planning seems really important.
Okay, so let's move on to the during phase.
What do coaches do in the moment that business leaders can learn from?
As you said, it's often four seconds as opposed to, you know, maybe four days or four weeks to make a decision.
I think the one that...
struck me as really interesting, but also so difficult is managing emotions.
So what did you learn from how people do that in sports?
From the practical experience I've had, I've noticed that the coaches keep their emotions intact under really extreme pressure and they're able to make really good decisions and problem solve.
For me, it takes me time.
I can go back and I can give them video analysis and I can show them all these really good graphs and I can do that the next day or that afternoon.
They're able to problem solve on what we know, what we don't know, and how we're going to fix it really, really quickly.
I always looked at the coaches that I've worked with over the past 30 years as they are probably the best sports scientists that I've dealt with.
They're able to make really good decisions in a really short timeframe.
And I do think no matter what, decisions that they thought or circumstances they're thrown at, they've got a pattern or a schema of very, very similar situations.
There's not a lot they haven't seen.
And although there might be a new occurrence, they have a very good framework of knowing and being able to solve at least 75% of the problems that they have.
And their emotions don't come into it very much at all.
And they're very dry with that kind of things.
They don't react.
I was speaking with a coach that I was working with who's at the World Cup just now in the US.
He was saying like in the moment he feels the emotions and he feels the anger or he feels the excitement but he's got that self-awareness to check himself as well that it doesn't come out and maybe it'll come out later in a more structured way but in that moment you know it's not that the emotion isn't there it's just as Johan said they're able to manage them really well in that moment but they also don't forget about them because they will resurface later.
Is that personality or practice?
You know, if you're someone who's naturally hotheaded, can you learn how to regulate your emotions so that you're not getting stressed in these high stakes situations?
The coach I'm talking about in the US, he said to me, like, I know I'm a hothead.
I don't know if that was the words they used, but it was essentially, it knows that that's what he's like.
And that's his kind of go-to, but he's learned over time.
to be aware of it and then manage it.
Yeah, I definitely think those elite coaches, no matter what the emotion is, because there is a lot of emotion during a game of football or basketball, but they still follow process.
So the outcome may be slightly different, but they've prepared for it so well, but they just follow process all the time.
They're able to adapt very, very quickly.
And so the emotions doesn't ever get the better of them.
I must say that what I've realized and seen over time is what a head coach says matters to so many people.
So they're very, very careful on how they deliver a message because it can affect a junior player, a senior player, a staff member who may have, you know, be responsible for an outcome that wasn't great.
So they're very, very precise and tactful on how they present information because it has ramifications throughout the whole organization during those.
And I think that's from a leadership perspective.
Being very deliberate with how they present information is really important.
And then there's sort of reading the emotions and the in-the-moment capabilities of other people, you know, your team members.
So how does a leader get better at doing that?
I imagine that that preparation you're talking about plays into it too.
You know, that example you gave of the four-second last-minute NBA play and being able to look at the star player and see then what he could do in that moment, how he felt in that moment and decide whether to take his advice or not.
Yeah.
The coach I was speaking to then also explained within that four seconds how he was basically going through past, present and future.
He was thinking in that moment about the play, but then in the future he was thinking, okay, if I change and I go with the superstar player.
then would other players think I've just went with him because he's the superstar so he was thinking into the future as well about the kind of ramifications and the consequences of the decision he made but was able to process all of that within the four seconds to make the call and the baseball coach we spoke to as well it wasn't that the outcome didn't determine whether or not they were happy with what they went with because it was just that they went through their process and regardless of the outcome then so it was almost like not that they're not thinking about the outcome, but it's like, okay, I've went through my process, I'm happy with it, and we're going to go with it, and then we see what happens.
In those moments, especially I think in the NFL or situations where there's like a little bit more time between plays, there is this tension right now of do you trust what the analytics say about what should be done versus this sort of visceral human instinct.
So Johan, you know, How have you seen that tension play out in the moment for coaches?
Because I'm sure it's happening in the business world too.
I definitely think before the game starts, there is a lot of data-driven decisions on scouting and how a team plays and the familiarity things that we already know.
But I do think that the experienced elite coaches are able to rely on a small percentage of their gut.
that backs a lot of the data-driven decisions that they're already presented with.
Again, there's only small variants of situations they haven't seen.
And those small variants, they're still able to establish the bulk of that decision is already done from past history.
And they also know that there's several outcomes that can happen from the decision that they make because it involves so many people.
And they do trust the personnel around them.
their main lieutenants around them, whether it being a player or an offensive line coach or something like that.
They're all very level-headed about that purely because they know that they have followed the process.
You give a player the right shot and he's open.
You want them to take that shot no matter what.
And if they don't take the shot, you're probably more upset than if they took the shot and missed.
it's not that coaches are blindly following the data they're also sense checking it so you've put the systems in place for the things that they've decided is important we've found ways to analyze those to give the data that's hopefully valid and reliable and that we can have more confidence in it but sometimes the data can be deceiving or you know it doesn't tell the whole story and that's where their coach's eye comes in and when that started when johan started with the coach's eye i thought there's no way that's a thing and then as I've got more experienced I'm like oh actually the coach is I it is a thing it's a built up through experience so when they saw the data bringing them some information they would say okay is this actually what I'm seeing does it match or not and then they would also sense check it with like Johan said they're kind of trusted lieutenants so you've got a few people maybe that's on the pitch side who can see if it's rugby for example because they're looking from up high or if it's somebody on the touchline they might be speaking with someone I used to stay in the stadium in France up high and radio down to the bench so we had different angles to see and it's like okay this is what the data is showing us this is what we all sort of see and then the coach can make an informed decision because he's got a little bit more they don't tend to make a decision straight away based off of data it's do we see the same thing a few times and is everyone seeing that same thing and then okay maybe now we make a decision So let's talk about the aftermath of decisions.
Whether the call has been right or wrong, what's the first step that a coach does following a big choice?
One thing I've learned is that they do not blame.
They ask questions.
They don't question people because, again, as we said earlier, if we've followed the process, the outcome is not always perfect.
We only can control one team.
We don't control the other team.
And I definitely think that...
That post-mortem is definitely not a blame situation because it's very emotional and you have to be ready that you may be playing a game tomorrow.
So you better deal with it and sort it out and address all the issues that you've had.
Work out the solutions and scenarios that we have to deal with and get better on.
But there's never a finger point.
There's never a blame.
It's that next game.
Let's go.
We're on to Cincinnati.
We are just moving forward.
It's that kind of mentality.
The thing is, if you build that environment, then actually, Nobody needs to blame anybody because you actually just take ownership for your part in it.
That kind of post-mortem is always about what could have been better as an organization?
What could I have done better?
What could we all have done?
And if you've got that environment, then people will volunteer those insights and you don't need to be worried that somebody's going to blame me for doing something.
But that needs to be built.
It's not in all teams, maybe.
Yeah, it's interesting because in professional sports, there's this mechanism of the post-game press conference where basically...
The players and the coaches have to either defend their decisions or acknowledge their mistakes.
And is there a way to do that in the business world that doesn't feel stressful or putative?
Like, could you replicate that?
I don't see why not.
It's a fairly straightforward process.
You just need everyone to be bought into it.
You know, this is what we're doing.
This is a process of how we are going to go through the decisions we've made and understand whether or not they could have been better.
It's just really the organization and the people need to be open to it.
It takes time because initially if you get people in a room and say we're going to go through all our decisions and see what we did right and what we didn't, the natural reaction is kind of fear.
You think, oh no, you're apprehensive, but there's consistency and that's how, like Johan is one of the best I've seen at it, they're getting trust from people.
But it takes perseverance as well.
So it needs to be not just this one-off thing, it needs to be shown what's the work on from it as well.
Yeah, it's again a scenario where I think that sort of time compression of sports, is potentially pretty useful for business because obviously we all do postmortems in organizations or retros or whatever you call it, but it tends to be not right away, not when it's fresh in everyone's mind.
You know, it might be a week later or a month later.
So that idea that you have to process immediately seems really useful.
When we play five games in seven days in five different cities, there's not a lot of time to dwell on things.
Otherwise, you get a player that ends up in a slump if we don't address it really early.
So I have seen coaches deal with players because they take it very hard because they get, like you said, a lot of media scrutiny.
So they have to deal with it and instill that confidence in a player that, hey, you made the right moves.
It's okay.
Let's move on.
You're here for a reason and then move forward with the next game.
And again, coaches are really, really good with...
bringing out the positive things.
If you lose a game, it's not the last shot that Jalen misses that was the reason why you lost the whole game.
It's probably 30 other decisions that happened prior.
When a decision that a coach makes upsets people, you know, whether it's players or fellow coaches, owners, the media, fans, how do they repair trust?
I think it's having a good organization that's already got as Alan said, a good system and structure of trust.
Trust takes time.
It's not built overnight and that's both ways.
You have to know what the capabilities of the player is.
But look, I was at an organization where they let go of Tom Brady during a period.
It was quite a big situation and you could definitely see there was a change within the organization.
They had to replace leadership, but they had built leadership underneath Tom for a decision that affected Not only the team, the ownership, the coaching staff, the playing group, but people had to understand why their decisions were made.
And I think explaining those things to a trusted playing group goes a long way.
So in terms of practical steps, it's really conversations with everyone affected by the decision who had an opinion on what choice should have been made or shouldn't have been made.
And then ensuring that collective wisdom is...
gathered and there's a change, you know, that's made because of it in terms of process or protocol.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If there's no change, then it's like, well, the next time people may just not show up for the meeting or you don't speak up in the meeting because you're, well, nothing changes.
There's no point saying anything.
I think that's the biggest thing where you lose trust is somebody says something and there's no action followed up on it.
Do either of you have an example of.
good post-decision protocol that led to a system improvement or decision-making process improvement at one of the teams that you've worked with?
One of the bigger ones, so not maybe with a specific organization, but over time, something that we see in sport is a lot of wasted money, resources, and people's time and effort on technologies and things that people buy within teams, and then they just end up in a corner unused.
And then that basically drove a decision-making model that Johan and I have used for maybe 15 to 20 years about now.
When somebody wants to do something or they come to the club, it's a technology, a strategy or a consultant.
It's like we've got processes now that we can choose more confidently, but then also follow through and see are things working the way they would or not.
So that's probably a big system change that we've had in sport.
And now it gives people...
like an accountability so before it would be who bought this 500 000 pounds machine that nobody's using or i don't know who it was and now it's like oh it was alan or it was johan so now we need to be careful because it will come back to us it's not just that you're wasting money it might be that you actually bring something in that's harmful to the organization so it's also about understanding like what are we doing why are we doing it and and are things doing what we expect rather than just blindly moving along Yeah, I think that idea of investing in new technological tools that don't actually improve productivity will resonate with our audience.
So, you know, another thing that's interesting about elite sports is the talent management piece.
And we've sort of touched on that in all of the decision making phases.
But you're dealing with a lot of big egos, you know, so how do coaches do that well?
And how do those tactics translate to the business world?
Really good coaches.
handle the egos really, really well by good conversation.
We would always lean on that star player to help us get some things done, which also always brought their egos down.
But most of them, it's the external that everyone sees on an ego perspective, but internally, most of the time, they love what they do.
They work with their other teammates, and it's not as much of a bigger issue that maybe people see externally.
But giving everyone a role and a task and responsibility according to the level of what they do has really seen, I think, good cohesion amongst players.
I've worked with some players who, the media, they get a really bad rap and they're the nicest guys behind the scenes and they work hard.
And yeah, there's some that are more difficult than others, but that's just humans.
That's not unique to football.
And one thing I've found that people respond to is just an authenticity.
You need to know when.
to give people space and when not to.
You start to understand each person and what they respond to, what they don't respond to, when to speak to them, when to not speak to them.
Yeah, I interviewed Michael Strahan for our Life's Work feature in HBR.
He was a former NFL lineman with the Giants who's now a television personality.
But one quote of his that always stuck with me is that every different player needs something different from you.
you also need to calibrate what they need at different times.
So it does take that sort of emotional intelligence, really.
In general, it also seems like elite coaches really need to have a high tolerance for risk, knowing that every decision they make will result in a loss or a win, maybe that they might get pilloried by the press and fans, and that they could even lose their jobs.
So is that something you can develop?
Or, you know, is it sort of natural selection that these risk tolerant people become elite coaches?
And is it something that executives, particularly CEOs, need as well?
I think with everything, it's a mix of everything.
It's probably not just one or the other that you just learn it or you're just kind of born with it.
It's probably some people are naturally better.
Johan dealing with people is naturally better than a lot of other people that I've seen, but other people can probably learn to be a little bit better.
And one of the coaches we interviewed.
he was a relatively new coach when we interviewed him and he explained it really well about making a decision to recruit a player to sign a player and he just he felt that something wasn't right with this player that he was looking at and but he couldn't quite articulate why he didn't want to sign the player he was a little bit fearful around the reactions if he went too strong to say no no I don't think this player's for us and he signed the player and then realized yeah this player wasn't for us it wasn't the one to me and from that he then said okay what do I need to do in the next occasion that this comes up so that it doesn't happen again and he's like okay I need to have the data on this I need to be able to give it to this person I need to be stronger than myself I need to realize that the fear isn't good for making a decision so basically he learned from that one experience he's taught himself how to not be in that position again and maybe that's part natural for him that he was able to develop that quicker i don't know but he's basically realized that that wasn't what he wants and he's taught himself to do that but the risk needs to be calculated so it's like okay the next time i go i went with a player that i really wanted and yes it's a risk because he could fail as well but i've got the data i've got the the reasons why And I can back myself with it.
It's all that risk management, I guess.
It's around what risk level you're willing to go to and that you've done the work behind the scenes that you're confident enough that what happens, happens.
Yeah.
Last question.
What is the biggest hurdle to good decision making that you've seen, you know, in elite sports and maybe also in business that you've helped coaches, you've helped the executives you've worked with to overcome?
I think the bigger one for me is Trying to convince people that what necessarily they've done before doesn't mean that's the right thing to do going forward.
A lot of the time it's, we've done that at this last place and we were successful.
So why should we change it again?
So I think that's one of the bigger things that I've come across and it's trying to help them understand that is there a better way to do it?
Is there something different?
I definitely concur with that, especially going to the two most successful franchises in their sporting history.
Why would they want to do something different?
It's having the openness to change.
Like change is a really dirty word for a lot of places.
Sometimes they've been successful in spite of some of the process they've done.
So having people that are really open-minded with that growth mindset to want to improve no matter how successful they are.
I know speaking to a coach that after winning a Super Bowl...
The next day ripped everyone senseless purely because he didn't like what was going on during that period, even though they had the ultimate success.
So that was still outcome, but the processes he was not happy with and insisted on change and improvement.
So people have to be open to reviewing processes at the end of every season or every period because sometimes you wait too long.
it can make a huge negative impact during a season.
So you've got to be able to adapt.
Alan, Johan, it was a pleasure working with you on the article.
And thank you so much for joining me here.
Thanks, Alison.
Really appreciate that.
Thank you.
That's sports performance consultant, Alan McCall and sports scientist, Johan Billsborough.
They're coauthors along with Adrian Wolfberg and Ricard Pruna of the HBR article, How Elite Sports Coaches Make High Pressure Decisions.
Next week, Adi speaks with Josh Tiringal about unlikely ways that real people are using artificial intelligence to fix problems.
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I'm Alison Beard.