SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello and welcome back to the Slice to Pi podcast, where the Pi is the psychological informed environment, and the mission is to try and further our understanding of what that might look like in sports, in business, or in any environment where performance and well-being are hot topics. It's been a long hiatus again, and apologies for that. Finishing chartership training, new exciting job, writing up research and case studies, dog, children, family, yadda yadda yadda, excuses, excuses. But we're back in 2024 with a bang and a totally new format for this podcast. So as with the last few episodes of the podcast, they're becoming more and more dated. I interviewed most of the guests in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic, and this is my very last recording that I have left in the bank to edit. And it's with a very smart, charming, and articulate sports psychology researcher called Niels Federson, who's based in Norway. So anyway, I finished the edit, I sent it to Niels, and he emails me back and he says, Hey, here's an idea. Why don't we record an update to the episode three years on from the first interview? So a conversation about the conversation, if you will. Well, what a great idea. And we did it, we found the time, we caught up, and what we'll do now is we'll jump into both of those conversations in five, four, three, two, one. Right, so this is a bit of a first for the Slice of Pie podcast. We've got Niels Federson back on because we spoke three years ago. And I, in my very busy period of trying to put out the episodes that I recorded three years ago, have only just got around to putting out our conversation. And I sent it to Niels to have a uh listen to. And he very kindly said that he would be willing to come on and speak again and talk about that conversation three years on. So having a conversation about the conversation. So I'm very excited to to do this because this is a first for the podcast. And Niels, thank you very much again for giving up your time to talk about what we talked about.

SPEAKER_04 2:33

Yeah, thanks for for having me on. It's all getting uh very meta right now, but I think since it's been a while, I think it's good to kind of revisit some of the main points that we talked about and and how they have you know moved on and matured a little bit uh since then.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Right. And we tend to meet up at fairly kind of critical points of each other's career. There's there's a few things that have happened in in my life uh since we we last met. And I think last time we spoke, you'd just moved or were in the process of moving to Norway, and recently you've just moved jobs within Norway. So congratulations on the new role. Uh how's you how's it going so far?

SPEAKER_04 3:19

So far, it's it's great. I've been there for I suppose three weeks now. It's so basically I moved from Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and I moved to the univers the well, the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences in Oslo. Yeah, and I moved from a postdoc that I've been doing for the past three years to an associate professorship in in Oslo. And so far it's it's great, great people, great colleagues. I do miss my my old colleagues at NTNU, but so far so good.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Awesome. Shout out to the old colleagues there. Right, okay. I didn't really know where to edit this bit in. So this seems like the most appropriate. So a bit of clunky editing, forgive me for that. So that was our preamble from last month. But what about when we first met? So here's the original discussion, and then we'll jump back and forth three years depending on the themes and my editing skills. It might not be perfect, but you get the idea. So here we are three years ago, myself and Niels. Let's go. Niels, how are we?

SPEAKER_04 4:26

Pretty good. It's uh it's really autumn here in Norway and it's getting cold, but uh we're managing. Yeah, but uh the long nights are coming. Winter is coming, as it were.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

The Game of Thrones, yeah, exactly. Winterfell. So if um if uh if London, if London is kind of the the southern, the southern part near kind of Sun Sunspear, where's uh where's Norway? Is it Winterfell? Is it beyond the wall?

SPEAKER_04 4:56

I honestly think it's beyond the wall, pretty far beyond the wall.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Beyond the wall.

SPEAKER_04 4:59

Yeah, it's not even in the show. Um in that case. We're we're pretty far up in Norway in Trondheim, and it's it's just to give uh a sense of where we are, it's a five-hour drive, no, six-hour drive from Oslo.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:13

And it's even north of uh of Stockholm and um so yeah, we're pretty far north right now.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Oh wow. So you're gonna be close to northern lights territory when we get into that that season, you're gonna be able to see them.

SPEAKER_04 5:24

Supposedly there was actually a lot of low northern lights um last week. Um, but we can't see them here. Not right now, maybe later in the year, but I think still a little bit further north. I'll keep an eye out and let you know if uh if I see anything.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Nothing nothing more to stir up a bit of jealousy from from someone spending their autumn and winter in London than um a casual aurora borealis happening just uh after the working day over drinks. Um I know. Where where kind of did your your career in in kind of sports psychology and research start? And and and how do we get to to this point?

SPEAKER_04 6:04

It actually probably starts in 2005, 2006. Uh, and I was 15, 16, um, going to a boarding school in Denmark, and we had to write this big paper on on a self-chosen subject. And I wrote about imagery and uh and self-talk.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Oh, right. At the age of 15.

SPEAKER_04 6:25

At the age of 15, and brilliant. I just thought it was really interesting, but uh then went to high school and kind of put that out of my mind. Uh thought I wanted to be a doctor, uh, medical doctor, and went to university uh to study sports science and wanted to do neuro uh neuro um physiology. But then I yeah, I went to Canada on exchange and had a really good teacher in in some more so uh sociological psychological work and a very poor teacher in neuroscience. So I kind of flipped on a on a dime there and came into my master's and yeah, from then on I haven't really looked back. I just put my head down, studied sports psychology, sociology. Um, yeah. And then I went to yeah, if after my master's, I took the leap from Copenhagen to Liverpool.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Copenhagen to Liverpool. Now that's a that's a switch up.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

Yeah, it was um honestly, I was at my one of my best friend's wedding, and I had seen this job advert the day before, and and I was having a chat with some of my friends there and saying, like, this sounds really interesting. It sounds like what I did in my master's. Um, so I might apply for it. So the wedding goes on until seven o'clock in the morning. Uh, and then I come home and I wake up again at 11 because the deadline for the submission of the um uh what's that called?

SPEAKER_00 7:57

The submission of the application?

SPEAKER_04 8:00

Yeah, the deadline of the submission of the application was uh one o'clock on Sunday. So I woke up at 11. Um still in your wedding suit. Exactly. Uh sat down for for two hours and just yeah, wrote an application which ended up becoming being being quite good. Uh because it was it was probably one of the more focused applications I've ever read or written. Um and then I sent it and went for an interview, and and a month later I was in in Liverpool. Um but yeah, uh that's kind of the journey to Liverpool. And I think it was about the fit. It was a it was an PhD position for someone doing action research with organizations, and that was essentially what I did in my master's project. I'd spent a year doing action research with three different uh sports clubs in Taekwondo football and fencing. Um so it was the fit, uh the project fit me perfectly.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

And for and for those, sorry, for just for those who might not know what action research is, for for the the lay person, what does action research mean?

SPEAKER_04 9:17

Well, action research is uh method for studying change and how change comes about. And the thing that you do as a researcher, instead of being a fly on the wall, you insert yourself in the change uh change process. So that's action research and very short, short form.

SPEAKER_00 9:37

Okay. And imagine like a a Deloitte or a KPMG who have change management. This is the kind of the research version of being part of the change, but also studying how that comes about at the same time.

SPEAKER_04 9:52

Yeah, you can say that. It's it's essentially studying how the change comes about. It's really looking into the processes of of change, what is underlying, why why do some things um work, why do some things not work? Um, yeah, that's that's the that's the study in in action research.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

Okay, great stuff. Well, that thanks for that clarification. So we've got the 15-year-old Niels already starting to think about psychological principles with imagery and self-talk, the a little soiree and detour to look at maybe medicine and maybe um the neuroside of things. But then there was a teacher in uh in Canada that kind of lit a fire under your your enthusiasm for the psych side of stuff, the wedding, the sleep-deprived application taking you to to Liverpool and the action research. So we're we're up to the present day. And uh one of the reasons why I was so excited to to interview you was your your paper, which has got a lot of interest um and so topical, given um some of the media accounts of um some of the um organizations in um British sport and some of the the the cultural aspects around that. Your paper, the influence of macro cultural change on national governing bodies in British Olympic sports. How did that how did that come about? Had you parachuted into Liverpool specifically to do that study, or did that that come about afterwards?

SPEAKER_04 11:27

I think it was part of the process. I started out really early um wanting to study how coaches they can influence change in athletes. So in the beginning, we we reached out to a few different sports and national governing bodies to to find the right collaborators, and we ended up finding uh collaborating very closely with one. But in the reconnaissance phase, this is a part of the action research where you do a reconnaissance, you look at the organization, you figure out what is going on here, what are the con what is the context, who are the people here, um, and what kind of problems do they do they walk around with. And we quickly realized in in collaboration that it wasn't coaching that was a big problem at the time. It was actually the culture that was um that was the problem. Uh, because this this board had lost all their funding post 2016. So everyone who worked in the world-class program were just fired on the eve of December in 2016 and the first of January, there was no one left. And they had essentially retrenched from a professional organization to a kitchen table uh organization where volunteers were in charge of everything.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

A kitchen table organization. Is that a an official uh official terminology?

SPEAKER_04 12:53

Uh it actually is.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

It is, yeah, the kitchen table organization. That's interesting. So that that's an organization run by volunteers, is it?

SPEAKER_04 13:00

Yeah, essentially. Um it is it is what it is, where you just have volunteers who sit around a table somewhere and they just hash things out and and deal with problems as they go along. Um, it's something coined by some Canadian researchers who who did a very long longitudinal study over 12, 13 years, uh, a long time ago. Um but yeah, they were essentially now a kitchen table organization. But then in April, they received new funding from Sport England to start up a talent program which reached into the under 23s. So um they started rehiring, rehiring a talent manager, rehiring head coaches, rehiring talent administrators. Um and it was already back then, it was quite a loose, uh, fragile organization, which hadn't really had any um long-term programs running, except for the world-class program. And what we saw back then was that all of this change, first the regression to a kitchen table organization, and then a very fast change to becoming a newly professionalized organization again, created a lot of conflict within the organization. And we looked at that through the lens of uh legitimacy, like what is legitimate behaviors, because a lot of organizations will have an idea of what is okay, uh, what is all right behaviors in this organization that's based on their characteristics and history, but legitimacy views that in the lens of what are the societal uh norms for behavior uh and and actions. That's really where this macrocultural change influence comes into the picture because we often heard that coaches were saying what I could do 10 years ago is just not okay now. So that kind of sparked uh an idea. And then we well blossomed out from this one organization and spoke to three other NGBs in in the UK. Um I'm sorry if I'm being a bit coy about what NGBs they are, but they are all subject to pretty heavy anonymity because the other paper um I published, which is about destructive cultures in elite sport. Um so anonymity is something we we spent a lot of time on, but we branched out to these other three, which included uh single event um sport, a multi-event sport that was governed by that had a a GB governing body, but we spoke to the England body. And then we had uh multi-event sport where we spoke to the British uh governing body. Um so to have everything in. And then we spoke to EIS, UK sport, Sport England, TASS, a university program. Um we we limited it there because oh UK coaching too. Um but we could have gone into the British Athlete Commission, but they used they mainly work with uh the elite side of things, and we only worked until under 23 or we create the boundary of saying it's only talent development.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah, so that's um that's a large number of different stakeholders and organizations you're having to juggle there with your your research. Was was it just you or was there a a team of you um being able to to juggle all of this work?

SPEAKER_04 16:40

It was it was just me. Um but that's I was quite uh fortunate to have a very good collaboration with the main organization and the people who were there because they they also acted as co-researchers, especially on the the data that came from them. Um and I was also quite lucky to to get through to to key uh collaborators in the all in the other organizations. And on one hand, it's it's both it's both about hustle, uh that you work hard, but it's also about a bit of chance and finding yourself in in the right positions at the right times.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Um yeah, that is a beast. That is a a beast of a project. And by the way, love the soundbite hustle and chance. Yeah, feel like that could be a good bumper bumper sticker. Can see that as a good bumper sticker, uh hustle and chance. So okay, well, let we definitely dig into some of the the kind of the talking points from the from the research, but let's just kind of fast forward 18 months. What what has been the kind of the impact or the fallout of of publishing these these papers? What how how has it been received by everyone?

SPEAKER_04 17:55

I think the first paper was probably the most impactful. Uh, the first paper being the emergence of and perpetuation of destructive cultures in British Olympic sports is probably the one that got the most attention. It's also maybe a bit juicier, uh, in a way, because it it covers a subject which is front and center at the moment. Um so that got a little bit more buzz. Um, the other one, the the macro cultural change on national governing bodies, is in some parts very technical because it talks about the coupling between organizations and what are loosely coupled organizations, what are tightly coupled organizations, which is extremely important if you're uh PD or you are talent manager or you're a CEO or head of a board, or maybe work in uh as a sports manager or some sort, in but it is it's a much more technical and further removed from daily grind, as it were, for a lot of people. Um in general, it's been they've been received really well because they treat culture in a different way. Most research on culture has treated culture as uh from an integration perspective. The integration perspective basically looks at um the values, basic assumptions, artifacts, beliefs, history, where everybody share the same thing, where culture is a uh the the leaders' values are blueprint blueprint for uh for an organization, and everything which is not fitting into this shared idea is not culture. It is marginalized. So all ambiguity and uncertainty and um negative uh actions, behaviors, they are are marginalized, it's and saying they're not part of the not part of the culture and swept underneath the rug. And and these papers, they they look at culture as something that's always in flux, something that's differentiated and ambiguous and influenced, of course, by values and beliefs and history, but also very much by power. The power uh relationship between an NGB and say Sport England, and the power relationship between Sport England and the EIS, and and further in the power relationship between a talent manager and a volunteer. Um so that's that's very different and something that is coming through now in sports with uh with Michael McDougall, um I believe what's his name, Ryan Groom, are looking at micropolitics. Uh but it is it is a new wave of of culture. Um that's really what I believe it is.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

And then on the the the point of power, because I was really interested about this. You you mentioned that in the paper power comes from the formal hierarchy within organizations and across organizations, but also tacit power as well. So so what what's a good example of tacit power?

SPEAKER_04 21:09

Well, that's a that's a lot of really good examples, but I'll pull out this uh this one. Um this is this is from the organization that we worked a lot with, and it also speaks a lot to to how much tacit power actually influences is systemic power, the formal power that's already written down. So oftentimes you'll see power as the talent director or the performance director having more power over everyone below. But what we saw in this organization was that even though some had on the face of it systemic power, they did not have the tacit power. So tacit power is much more elusive. Um, and when the and when the NGB tried to evoke change, uh instill new coaching behaviors, um A great example is when we um at this one time I was standing in in a in a gym in North England and I had woken up at two o'clock in the morning in Denmark, taken a bus to Hamburg to fly to Manchester, and then hired a car to get to this gym somewhere in North England. And I was supposed to be there 15 minutes after the training camp would start. And this is a training camp for the national team, the youth national team. And I arrived there, and it was probably 9:30 in the morning, and I was all alone. The lights were off. Uh, I found a janitor who could let me in, and I stood there for about an hour before the first coach showed up. And this is an hour and 15 minutes after the camp was supposed to start. So what had happened was the NGB had put out the uh the information that the camp would start at 9:15 Saturday morning, but they had faced such a massive backlash from the parents who argued and discussed and berated and called the CEO and the talent director to push that starting time back. So it ended up changing the starting time from around 9 o'clock to something like 11 o'clock. And I just think that's just a really interesting sign of how a group of people can have so much tacit power over an organization that the youth national team camp is pushed back from 9 a.m., which I already think is uh is a pretty sweet starting time, to after 11. I think that's uh that's an example of how tacit power is a counterpart to systemic or formal power.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I suppose in in professional sports, whereas athletes are employees, if you take professional football, for example, athletes are employees of the clubs, and the coach supposedly tells them what to do, and the managing director supposedly tells what the coach wants to what's to do, and then you might have an owner in America or Thailand or or whatever who kind of runs the whole thing. That's your kind of your formal hierarchy. But then the whole thing might just be completely undermined by an agent or a manager of the player who then has a huge influence or say over their motivation or their enjoyment or their want to be a part of that organization or to work hard on behalf of it.

SPEAKER_04 24:30

I guess an example could be how Lionel Messi in in Barcelona at the moment he wields uh or he is the subject of so much tacit power in the club that he has influence over who will be the coach and who will definitely not be the coach. I guess that's one example. But if we look back at the Olympic sports, one of the places where athletes have seen an incredible rise in their power, in this informal, tacit power, is through social media. 10, 15 years ago, all the information that will come out of a national governing body would come through the national governing body, through a communications arm or public relations. But today, if you look at just Instagram or or Twitter, you can see that athletes have many thousand followers, sometimes hundreds and thousands of followers. Whereas the national governing body or the national team for that sport only have a couple of thousand. I think here in Norway, a great example is um one of the uh one of the best biathletes. Uh it's skiing and shooting, by the way. Tiril Ekhoff. Tiril Ekhoff has probably 350,000 followers, 500,000 followers. And they hang on everything, she says, or posts on on Instagram. But on the other hand, the national team of biathlon or the skiing association here in Norway only have a couple of thousand followers. So you're really changing the power dynamic there. That 10-15 years ago, everything came through the organization. Today, one athlete can post something on Twitter or Instagram, and you can have a massive fallout. Just look at uh British gymnastics at the moment, where athletes are coming out far and wide, former Olympians, current Olympians, current youth athletes coming forward and talking about abusive coaching behaviors. That is a big change and something that is really a tipping point.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah, I mean, there's that's something I I wanted to ask you about actually, because in in some of the stuff I've read from from what you've written, um, we talk about athletes being able to um feel like they can uh speak out things like welfare, but you also mentioned uh the words tipping points there. So obviously a lot of the stuff that's been spoken about has happened a long, quite a long time ago. So what in from what you've kind of researched, what has had to kind of change in order to kind of tip the balance towards people being feel feeling able to to come out, to speak out, to talk about it?

SPEAKER_04 27:21

Well, first of all, these are are huge societal changes to to norms, behaviors. Um basically what what we as a society we say is okay. Um and it has happened faster probably now than earlier because of the introduction of social media and and and just the internet in general, but it is really large-scale changes. And it's it's hard to pinpoint everything, but I think some of the the areas that have has had a huge impact have been the Me Too movement that started in 2016, uh probably a bit earlier than that, some places, where people can see that if they speak out about things that they that are that is not okay, they are listened to. Um that's just an example of of being able to speak out. It's been a rolling development. Uh, I think just varnish, who came out around the 2016 Olympics with British cycling, had a big impact because now athletes athletes could see that they're they're actually listened to. Um these are massive, uh massive changes to to norms and behaviors. And I also think it has something to do with a new generational shift with millennials coming in and generation Z uh coming in and changing what is uh yeah, what's acceptable behavior. Um, but that is a that is not something I I research particularly so in depth. I think that it's something that informed our findings. But because it's so elusive, it's it was extremely hard to research that and how it influenced uh NGBs. Um but yeah, it it definitely it definitely influenced the politics around sport.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

Yeah, that's super interesting around the this element that societal changes bring around norms and behaviours. So that that goes back to your legitimacy point you were making before about what kind of social norms exist and what we say is okay. Bizarrely, it reminds me of the book The Castle by Franz Kafka. It was the one that he didn't finish. I don't know whether it was because he died or whether he just didn't fit finish the book. It's about a guy who comes to a village because he's been invited for a job interview, and then but no one knows who's invited him, and he gets sent around the the houses from pillar to post, and no one seems to know. Everyone in the town seems a bit odd and a bit crazy, but they act so congruently with each other that by the end of the book he thinks he's the the crazy one because the the norms within that culture are so are so different, and it's just a really interesting, I suppose, kind of story about how what feels normal is not just a product of your own view on the world, but the the bubble with which you exist in. And if everyone else is pulling the other direction, that might not necessarily be okay, but it feels okay because everyone is is legitimizing it.

SPEAKER_04 30:40

Yeah, this kind of social bubble, it is definitely something we saw in the research that influenced these destructive behaviors. That if you can kind of create a bubble, a social bubble, a cultural bubble, um, and you can have a consensus within this bubble about what is okay and what is not okay, then it can it can spark more destructive or conflict behaviors. And that is basically what has happened, or that is what we we saw had happened in sport, where there was created this bubble of uh political will funding that has been incredibly generous through 2008, basically, in Beijing and then later London and um and Rio and now Tokyo, the funding for Olympic sports in the UK is is extremely high, the highest it ever it's ever been. And that has helped immensely to create support for the system as long as they win medals. But with the changes, with Jezvani's coming forward, with the public reviews into British cycling in 2012 and 2017, and into British canoeing, the duty of care review, the current one in British gymnastics, people are alerted to that, yeah, okay, winning medals is important, and and we do that pretty well in a in a very good way, but maybe we need to consider what is success, what is a success definition for for our organizations, and that has really created a different a change in the political will that is behind sport. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Okay, good stuff. So here's the first reflection period coming up. Let's fast forward three years to last month and speak to Niels again, looking back at these topics of power, societal changes, the tipping point for speaking up, Kafka, who can I can confirm died when writing The Castle, which was published against his will. And that linking to the social bubble and the consensus on what is okay versus not okay in any given culture. So let's fast forward and speak to Neils again. So, yeah, so interesting kind of reflecting on reflections within my world of advertising. There's uh a writer that I look up to who's uh chairman of a big ad agency, and he's written so much over the years about advertising, about business performance, about diagnosing business and marketing challenges, about audience insights. And it's interesting to hear him speak now about some of this kind of seminal blog posts and seminal writings that he he did like 10 or 15 years ago, which he says that some of which he agree with, but some of which he'd probably update with kind of what he knows now. It was interesting. We were talking off air about that, how you know some of the research we talked about three years ago are kind of like the you know, the building blocks, the foundational thoughts. But with time and and new knowledge and and new research, these things tend to evolve. So yeah, it'd be interesting to hear from from your perspective three years down the line, kind of looking back on that that conversation, you know, the things that that come to mind for you.

SPEAKER_04 33:53

Last time we spoke primarily about one paper where we looked at how big scale changes in society influence the way we look at sports, or we look at the organizational cultures within sports. So, what what are the big you know societal shifts like um Me Too and more power for athletes? Um, we also talk about what organizational culture might be, uh, and how we can look at it in different through different lenses uh from different angles and see different things depending on what method you use, what a scientific approach you use. And a lot of those things are still quite valid today. I mean, they are probably even more valid. It's not like uh the big philosophies they change overnight. Yeah, a lot of the foundational research and organizational culture was is from the 1890s, at least 40, 50 years on some of this research, but it has to be adapted and implemented to the time that we're living in now, and that's where we can talk about you know theoretical frameworks. And so one of the things we picked up a lot on was this athlete power, uh how we had a big shift in the UK back then, with just Varnish coming forward, and that you know that kind of started the first domino, just and more and more cases came out. And and since we spoke, we've had the white review in British gymnastics, which again found similar cultural issues of abuse and misconduct in Norway. Uh luckily it hasn't been as as bad, but uh there's uh a really in to many really interesting cases right now contract disputes where athletes are are unwilling to sign you know the contracts from the national governing bodies because oh really in in Norway, yeah, because they they put a cap on how much money they can earn and how they can use other sponsorship. But if you're an alpine, so this is in the skiing federation, okay. But if you're an uh an alpine skier or even a cross-country skier, most of the money you make will be from sponsorships. But some of the contracts they put they put caps on or they put restrictions on when and where you can use your sponsors. Well, similar case in Denmark with the world's best badminton player, who also wanted bigger opportunity to earn money through sponsorships and a bit more freer reins in the way he prepares to to bigger competitions. So he's moved, I think he's moved to Dubai, maybe. Okay. Um because Babinton is primarily played in in Asia, so it's easier for him to go to the bigger Asian tournaments from there and not deal with with the time zones and all that stuff. Um so we have similar similar cases now, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Yeah, it's interesting. I remember you talking about kind of this tacit power last time, and it's one of those things, once you hear the words, once you hear the phrase, you start seeing it everywhere, even in the company that I work at now. A lot of the inverted commas culture, some of the stuff that's happening in the company is coming from not top down but down up. And it's really interesting. I mean, we have a run club that happens on a Monday or Tuesday most weeks. On a Thursday afternoon, there's a tasting menu thing that's just started up where two different people get drawn out of a hat in the company, and they have to come together to provide snacks and and drink drinks for people on a Thursday afternoon. And someone else is starting up this kind of adventure breakfast or adventure lunch where we spot things that are pretty cheap or free to do in London, and we do that every month just as a way of getting out of the office and being inspired. And none of none of these things have come from the management, they come from people within the business, and it's it's really interesting to kind of spot those things as building blocks of culture versus you know, kind of traditional top-down, you know, value engineering or you know, etc. Um, so certainly I've reflected on on that part of the conversation from last time, particularly.

SPEAKER_04 38:18

Um, yeah, it's uh it's definitely interesting how you know run club and tasting menus and other bottom-up grassroots efforts that can can change culture. And we kind of get answered that in the conversation, so maybe it's best just to dive into to our original conversation and then catch up on that.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

That is a great idea, present-day Niels. Let's rewind three years ago and see what past Niels has got to say about that.

SPEAKER_04 38:48

Value pluralism. The way that I look at uh responsibility might not be the same as you. Yeah, so it's it's much more in flux. A little bit harder to work with, but probably closer to real-world contexts and uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, that's interesting. That lovely soundbite again around value pluralism that there might be some values up on the wall, but the way that they impact people, the way that people interpret those can be completely different. And actually, the reality of the culture might be not described by those values, but something else engineering. It can just be engineered and kind of plonked on top of a an organization or a culture and go, right, that's our values. When you know, as as you say, the the reality is everything on the on the coal face is ground up and it's evolving, and it's I think you mentioned the word influx the whole time, which is quite interesting. Excellent. Well, welcome back from that little detour from last time's conversation. Uh so yeah, Neils, is there anything else that has changed in the last three years when you you look back on that conversation?

SPEAKER_04 40:03

A lot of the things we spoke about back then were building blocks to to the work that I've done since then. We talked about this, we didn't talk about tacit power, how power kind of flows between people and gives rise to different initiatives. You know, brief chat before this conversation conversation. Now it gets really mad. You mentioned like run club and all that stuff. Um so one of the things we've done since then is with a master's student, uh Martina, she she carried out a study in professional Norwegian football clubs.

SPEAKER_01 40:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 40:41

And we looked at how you know multinational and multilingual professional football clubs they are influenced in organizational culture, how it kind of flows over time. Um one of the things we did we saw was this self-organizing tendency in in the clubs. So culture didn't come necessarily from the top down, but it was much more self-organizing amid among people. And there were groups that lasted for some time, but not necessarily for perpetuity in a way, and you know, subgroups formed in the sport in the football clubs among well, along identity markers. So identity markers could be you know, age, life stage, language, religion. And one thing we thought we saw, which was quite interesting, was that one of the clubs had Muslim play players from different countries speaking different languages. Yeah, so they had Norwegian players speaking Norwegian but not Arabic, but and then they had Arabic players not speaking Norwegian, and they had French Muslim players in the same club. And all of the uh those players, they you know usually found other subgroups in the club along other identity markers, often language. But then during Ramadan, all of them came together to to form a shared subgroup around Ramadan, where other players, especially French-speaking players who were not Muslim, they kind of had to find different subgroups during that time. And then it disbanded after. Not that it wasn't as cohesive, but it just disbanded and went back to subgroups along other identity markers. So I think that's that's a big difference uh to how we see this tacit power now.

unknown 42:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

That's really interesting. So okay, so what I'm hearing there is tacit power that influences organizations. I think we talked last time as well around how it you know it is quite difficult to kind of engineer values for a one size fits all everyone because people do come to work or come to their sport or come to their performance every uh area every day for different reasons. Um people might be motivated by money, some people might be motivated by learning and growth, some people might be motivated by legacy, leaving a legacy. Yes, you see that in the NFL, there are some quarterbacks who are the best, but will purposely take less money because they want to win the Super Bowl and they want to leave a legacy of winning. I think Tom Brady was famously underpaid for a long, a long time in his career. I suppose these these different subgroups are almost kind of reflective of that, because you know you might organize by that motivation, but you also could organize by other things that bring you together, whether it's language, religion, etc. And and I suppose management paying attention to that is probably important, knowing that you know your organization is made up of these subgroups who. Operate in certain ways or motivated slightly different from each other.

SPEAKER_04 44:04

Yeah, I mean you're kind of pulling on another string of what we've been seeing is the research on time in organizational cultures has matured quite a lot in the past three years. The research on time. Yeah, time, the influence of time at different levels.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 44:20

Um, so one of the things if we if we go back to the organizational culture at the more macro scale is we've been looking at how organizational memory, organizational history, it influences culture at the present, but also as a starting point for the future. So even though you change a full roster, you change the training group, there will still be policies and regulations put in place by previous generations that will influence organization culture today and will again influence organization culture in the future at a much bigger level. But then if you move down to the individual level, we have these individual journeys that influence how people they make sense of values, basic assumptions, rituals, ideas, myths in the organization. So if you're uh in Trondheim, uh there is a club where they have a 16-year-old player who plays in in the attack. Okay, the way he relates to the organizational culture is a lot different to the captain of the club. The captain of the club has been brought, played internationally, he's come back and and bring in, and he remembers the culture from before he left, and he he's a lot more focused on preservation or uh which creates kind of an inertia in in the culture. You will have that in in most clubs. You will have people who are a bit longer further along in their career. Yeah, and they are some will call them power brokers or cultural architects. But yeah, what can often happen is that they are more interested in you know preserving what is, preserving what they know. They're not really interested in the next stepping stone for an international career. But a 16-year-old, a 19-year-old, 20-year-old who might be on the springboard of either a big international career, moving from a lower-ranked team to a higher-ranked team, they will relate much, much differently to what we commonly call the organizational culture in the call in the club.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

Yeah, really interesting. I'd I've never heard this organizational memory, this sense that an organization is an organism in itself, and therefore instead of a history, it has a memory. And I I I kind of love that. It makes me think of we're in the UK, the the football culture here is just all-encompassing. And I I grew up uh in the 90s when Newcastle were probably the most exciting team. Man United were the best team, and Newcastle under Kevin Keegan were the most exciting team. They had Alan Shearer and Deva Ginela and Faustino Spria, all these incredibly exciting players that kind of set this expectation for the Newcastle fans of what they could see on a Saturday, you know, winning 4-3 and 5-4, and you know, goals galore. They they never won any titles, but people came to the games and were excited and they paid their money and they enjoyed it. And it's almost like that set this kind of expectation in the organizational memory of Newcastle that successive managers have had to try to live up to since then. And almost regardless of whether they win or not, like they expect to be entertained when they they pay their money and they come on a Saturday. And every manager since then has kind of lived in this kind of shadow of that kind of Keegan team, and it's really interesting hearing this kind of organizational uh memory concept because you can definitely connect the dots when you look at certain sports teams over the years and then the expectations around that sport team almost set by this kind of this moment in time where they were at their best or their most flamboyant or their most entertaining.

SPEAKER_04 48:21

Yeah, it it almost serves as a blueprint that's to success. That's what we found here. That you know, that's again when we look at the macro culture, because oftentimes when when we as scientists or practitioners, we go into a club, we look at the culture of the club or this the team or the training group, and we just look at a very small part of it. But if you start expanding your view and look at who follows this group of people, if it's football, if it's rugby, if it's cricket, that might be a blueprint in the in the fans, in the other staff, because there's sporting staff, there's administrative staff, and administrative staff they often live way longer in a club than a sporting uh sporting staff. And and here in in Trondheim, uh there's a really clear blueprint that to be successful, they have to play a certain style of football that was that came in with like a coach who was hugely successful and they played in the Champions League in the 90s. So now, right now, they're struggling quite a lot, and they had a new coach in who has come and gone. He was fired later. Oh, right. But he uh but he came in and he changed the formation to a different type of playing formation from I think 4-3-3 to a 3-4-3. And even the board of directors, they were like, This is not the blueprint. Uh, so you see these, um you see it in many other clubs like the Liverpool Way or Manchester United with you know a turntable of managers, um, and you'll see it in other sports too. But the organizational memory that it creates inertia but also creates uh blueprints for what to do if you hit trouble, if you hit challenge. You can kind of go back to the less saved version of success in a way.

SPEAKER_00 50:18

So we've talked about self-organizing, we've talked about identity markers, widening the lens on time and cultural research, organizational memory, blueprints, the last day version of success. What a soundbite that is, by the way. We're going to pivot now from that organizational memory to then how is that action then and how is that then measured and what are the measurements and the metrics. And we're still living in 2020 for this part of the conversation. So screenshotting from one part to another. Let's go. I mean that that sounds like an incredibly crucial point around what metrics are markers of of success in a process and and having something as all out and blunt as medals, and obviously you you wouldn't want to dull people's enthusiasm for gaining medals, that is it's a huge part of the Olympic movement. But when you look at some of the accounts around the extreme striving just for that, it feels as an outside onlooker that that then creates the conditions for some unideal situations within the culture. And I know Kath Bishop um was on Simon Mundy's Don't Turn Me the Score podcast not too long ago. She she won a silver medal with Dame Kathy Granger. She was talking about this idea of kind of creating a new definition of winning or success. She calls it the long win. I think she's got a book coming out about it, but around baking in some more aspects around growth and development and the journey being meaningful as well as those outputs being important as well. So it's not so blunt as to say if you get a gold, silver, bronze, then that matters, and everything else doesn't matter. The whole thing matters, and the whole thing is meaningful. And if we can win a gold or silver or bronze on top of that, then that's absolutely fantastic. So if it feels like it's building more kind of richness and depth into that that journey and appreciating some of the, I suppose, the growth side of things as well as just the outcome.

SPEAKER_04 52:32

Yeah, and and I agree to to some extent. Elite sports is very tip of the pyramid and the things that elite athletes they go through to get to the pinnacle of their physique that's used in their sport is sometimes grueling. And perhaps it has to be. But on the other hand, if we talk about success, like there is a the definition of successful environments, elite sports environments, or talent development environments, is how many athletes or successful history of developing athletes into senior senior elite athletes? We also know from research that it's only about one or two percent of any athlete that will ever make it to the very top. So how can we have a success factor which is only 2% or 1%? I mean, that is if you have a company and you only sell 1% of your commodities in a way, or only 1% of your investments give any yield, it's a very poor, poor business. And that's where I mean Henriksen again comes out with this culture of excellence, where it talks about how mental health thriving is a part of a culture of excellence that we might not think about success just in in terms of medals or how many athletes can we actually get into the first team or into the elite sports realm. It's also can we develop thriving? Can we develop excellence? Can we develop mental health excellence? And and on that, if we look at the data on depression, anxiety, rumination, we also see that athletes are not impervious to it. We've kind of break uh we've broken this idea of the victor standing on the top of the mountain, completely impervious to any kind of harm. Because athletes are people too. They experience depression, they experience anxiety, they experience rumination, they experience lack of meaning, just as every everyone else does. We've seen that on research of career ending, but it also happens throughout a sports career. After an Olympics, we often see this post-Olympic blues or post-u-Olympic low mood depressions. So, of course, these people are human. We can't shield humans from up and down, but we can create a system where we can make it conducive and we can make it stable and we can create the conditions for them to be as good as they possibly can, win a gold medal if that's in the cards, but still the people who are not on that same trajectory who might exit the sport at 18, who might exit the sport at 20 or 21 or 25, we have to have an environment that can also cater and support them so they're not left by the wayside. We're not just leaving them in the rubble uh and following the victor to the top. And that's that's probably this culture of excellence, it's culture of culture of potential thriving. But yeah, as Kath Bishop says, it's probably something like a longer win. If if you're uh if you finish being an athlete at 30 and you're still supposed to live your life until you're 85, 90, that's a long, long time to live with something, uh, unless you've had the support to develop the um to develop the skills, the competencies, to work with ups and downs in in one's mental health. So I think it's it's a step on the way is to recognize that athletes are people too and and take it from there.

SPEAKER_00 56:05

Yeah, I like this notion of we can't shield people from ups and downs, but we can support them and recognize that because of the one to two percent reality of what we're doing, that there's an enormous number of people there that could fall through the gaps if we don't support them in the right way. And that is a culture of excellence, yeah, because it's it's striving to create those winners, but it's also supporting not just them, but everyone within that system that goes through it, not just from a performance perspective, but from mental health and thriving, thriving, all the stuff that you're saying. Uh look, we're gonna pivot now from kind of talking about your research, but we'll we'll probably I imagine keep talking about it in discussing the pie, the psychologically informed environment on this 18-month action research journey embedded in these in these worlds. Has that influenced how you see or how you view what a psychologically informed environment might look like?

SPEAKER_04 57:09

Of course it did. I think the biggest change actually came from just moving to a different country. Moving from Denmark to the UK and living in a different culture for such a long time really opened my eyes because Scandinavia is great. Everybody are tall and blonde and reasonably happy, at least if we look at the statistics. But it's also a very calm and collected and a bit idle society. There's not that much change going on all the time. But when you come to Liverpool, you just experience almost like living in chaos all the time. Everything moves so quickly. And the same in British Olympic sports, it's very different from Danish and Norwegian Olympic sports, the way that it's moving. And when I came from Denmark, I really thought about this creating this cohesive culture, a coherent culture where everybody are the same, everybody thinks the same. But when I arrived in Liverpool and started working with uh NGBs in the UK, I really saw this value pluralism that we spoke about earlier, that everyone can have a different idea of what these values mean to themselves or what a culture means to themselves, what the sport means to themselves. Instead of trying to indoctrinate everyone into a cult where everybody thinks the same, I think a psychological informed environment from a cultural perspective is one where we are more open, we accept differences, we accept that people have different approaches to life, and we seek to find consensus or we seek to have these conflicts that are ongoing all the time. Because if we don't have the conflicts, it might bubble underneath the surface and then explode one day. So I think it's much more important to accept that everybody has a different idea of what it takes to be responsible, accountable, work hard. I think that's one of the big things in a psychological informed environment. Going back to the definition of successful environments, it's often about developing elite athletes or winning gold medals. But again, if only a couple of like 2% become professional or win anything, I don't know if that's success. So when I think about a psychological informed environment, I also think about something that's conducive, something that creates stability in the relationship between the athlete and the environment. And that's something we should strive for rather than just create an environment and say, okay, this is our environment, it's only like this, and we we can't change it. You have to change and fit into this. We should think about okay, so each athlete is different. We will try to create the person context interaction and make that as conducive as possible to help them go as far as possible. I think that's as much more psychologically informed than just looking at something that's incredibly successful, or on the other hand, looking at something that's the polar opposite. We need to look in between these more neutral or outliers to understand how to create a very, very conducive environment. It's probably the best word I can I can come up with. Uh it's probably maybe it's still because I'm uh I'm a non-English and non-native English speaker, but this kind of conduction. Um, I often think about it. Have you ever played? I had Nintendo 64 when I was a kid, and I also always played Super Mario uh racing. Oh, yeah. What is it called? Mario Kart? Mario Kart. And in Mario Kart, you can get these little boxes, and one of them has a little mushroom in it. If you use that, you you go really fast. The speed boost. The speed boost, exactly. That's basically what we should think about environments is that it's a speed boost to the people who come into it. We should we have to like channel the development throughout the time that they're there, make it a speed boost in a way. Maybe my ideas of uh psychological informed environment are based on uh Mario Kart.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:05

Yeah, well, I think adding to that rather playful analogy might be quite interesting. And in in Mario Kart, there are some levels where if you veer from the path or what is expected of you, then you'll hit a brick wall or you'll go off the side of the rainbow road into oblivion. Um, and that's a good example of an environment that is not conducive because it's not flexing for that person's individuality or their behavioral expectations or their dreams or whatever. And then there are there are more forgiving levels of mario cart where if you hit the side, it's a nice bouncy tie that kind of pushes you back onto the path again and allows you to keep going. So I thought I quite like that little analogy of of the uh the mario cart. And and when it comes to the kind of the native speaking thing, you know, I've I've worked in the the marketing world with many, many talented Scandinavian creative directors, actually. And I think that coming from another language makes you think really hard about what you want to say when you say it in English, and so it you actually end up avoiding just shortcutting to cliches or rhetoric that everyone says because you're actually thinking quite hard about how you want to put across your point. So I think the the communication and how you've have summed all of this up is really good, actually. Um, but I like the word conducive. The other thing that I picked up upon there again, which I think is really interesting, is this idea of it's okay for people to have different goals and different dreams and different values. It doesn't all have to be the same, but we can have a discussion about that. Uh, and it's not necessarily finding a consensus that dilutes all of that, but just having a kind of a consensus or an appreciation of the varied viewpoints in the group so that we can kind of start to move forward together. For some reason, it just reminded me. I have absolutely no idea why mother, when I was younger, used to play a lot of Belinda Carlisle in the car on the school run. And there was a song where there was a lyric which was we dream the same dreams, we want the same things. I'm pretty sure it was a Belinda Carlisle track. And I think we kind of grow up with that, you know, either through TV or movies or songs that the kind of there's this kind of harmonious world where we're all kind of pulling together. But the real the reality is quite different, isn't it? We all are individuals with our our different biases and our different perspectives and our different goals. Yeah. And being open about that is is a good step.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:33

Yeah, and I think that's that kind of the the differences and different goals is one of the things that is done really well in Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Denmark is six million people. The UK are 60 million people. There's just a much bigger base in the UK than there is in Denmark. So I used to work as a sport uh psychology practitioner in Danish rowing with the under-23 national team and under-19. And it's just much different because we can't afford not to have everyone with us in the boat. We need everyone with us all the time because otherwise we just won't have enough people to set an eight or a four. We need everyone in. That means that we need to be much more inclusive. And if you do that and you really keep the same group of people for a very long time, some people who you might not think might be the best or become the best, they emerge as these as the one that goes all the way. But in the UK or the US, the base is so big, the base is huge. So you have to make choices at some time at uh at different turns to who's in or who's out, which is a very hard choice. But if we can take this Danish model and apply some of the notions or learnings to the UK, where we actually keep more in the fold for a longer time, the people who we might not think is the best at 16, 17, or 18 could become an Olympic champion at 18, uh 28, or 29, or 30, 35. So it's it's also changing the environment to be a bit more inclusive. And I can give another example from coming from Denmark. Denmark is a small pond, but it's also very hard to have a very rapid career because it is a small country and there's only so many spots on the next tier and the next tier and the next tier. Whereas in the UK, again, huge country, and there's way more opportunity to progress. There's it's much higher in a way. So you can really, if you if you come into an environment where you're thriving and you're uh you work hard and you're happy, you can really develop a lot. And that kind of dichotomy or the difference was was quite striking when I arrived in Liverpool because I was used to being a small fish in a small pond, but now it's suddenly uh a small fish in an And PhDs in Denmark, a couple of my friends are PhDs, and they sit down with their supervisors every day or every week and have lunch with their supervisors. And there they are this talent development where you're thinking about really investing in the person is prevalent. Really investing everything, making sure that this person can be as good as they can be and supporting their development is incredibly important in Denmark because it is extremely expensive to get a PhD in Denmark. It's about 200,000 pounds for three years compared to the UK, where it's about probably around 60,000 pounds. And that's just salary, of course. So it's much more expensive. So you can't really afford not to support this uh this developer as much as possible. But my experience in the UK was that it is so big. We were 45 PhD students in Liverpool John Morris in sports psychology alone, 90 odd PhDs in the whole sports science department. So it was huge. We did not see our um supervisor every day. We didn't get the same kind of support that we that my friends got in Denmark. But on the other hand, what we got or we received was immense freedom. I could have gone anywhere with my research, and and that was incredibly conducive for me to have that freedom. Having that big base, a lot of people, giving them the freedom to develop as much as possible. But if you can just add a little bit of that investment from coaches, from supervisors, from managers, from your boss, you can add that investment into the system, you will have something quite special.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:41

Yeah, some really nice perspectives. And it's it's so refreshing to get the cross-cultural perspective on here as well, coming from a part of the world that is seen politically and economically as quite a supportive place, you know, kind of evidenced by the amount of tax people pay and you know, free university and healthcare and stuff like that. And it's it's it's really useful to see how those kind of underpinnings of society can kind of bubble up in in other unexpected places like high performance sports. It's really interesting. Also reminded me uh about a I don't know whether it was Clarence Saydorf. I think there was a Real Madrid, very famous Real Madrid player played against Jav Javi, and it was one of Xavi's first ever games for Barcelona. And I think they said yeah, he was one of the worst, worst players he'd ever played against. This was one of his first games. And um, and by all accounts, you know, he he he wasn't he he wasn't very useful for Barcelona in his kind of teenage years in his early 20s, but then you know they they kept him around, they they cultivated him. Obviously, that from Lamasia and the the Catalan side of things, they really do like to bring those guys through, so they they give them lots and lots of time and support, and then eventually became one of the best players in the world. So interesting perspective to there has to be choices made within talent development and pathways, but does it have to be as black and white as you're in or you're out? Is there a is there an option to be where you go back into a a reprochage to use your rowing um rowing speak where you kind of you you still get to develop and have another go?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:19

I think I think there's there are some organizations in the UK that do that, but there's definitely others where where it doesn't happen. I think professional football is a very interesting area to look at, to to look at the the nomadic youth players who move from club to club, travel from academy to academy, and also players who come through really late. Most striking example in in the UK, of course, is Jamie Vardy.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

Um v9. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:46

Yeah. There are so many examples of that. If you look at research, late specialization or late intensifying is the way that is proven to be the most successful way of talent development. The way it is in practice is that it's often not. It's early, early development, get them in early, train them from their eight, just football, football, football, or canoeing, canoeing, canoeing. Um, it's get them when they're young. And people often say it's not rocket science. Researchers who who study talent development or elite sports, they are incredibly diligent. They carry out very, very good research. And it is rocket science. The only reason why it's not rocket science in sport is because people they keep getting them while they're young instead of listening to research. Imagine if that would happen in creating the next rocket that will take us to Mars. It would be like MIT saying the best way we can do this is if we create an engine which runs partly on hydrogen and partly on solar power. And Elon Musk saying, Well, I don't really believe in the progress of science. I think we should fire it by coal. That's probably the way to go forward. Research into sports in lead sports in Taliban is rocket science. And one of the things to be a psychologically informed environment is probably to have someone who gets deep into the science to take advantage of the lessons we can get from there. Um and in the UK, there's one team in the UK Sport EIS who does do that, the performance pathway scientists. So that is um that's probably one of the biggest advantages the UK has in in all of their system. Just these people who sit there every day and working and looking, how do you become an elite athlete and how do we create a strong environment in 2024, in 2028, looking to the future? So you have people who do that, but if you could spread that out to pro football, pro rugby, cricket, yeah, that's another big gain for better, more uh holistic development of talent. It's probably a big gain in performance, and it's definitely a big gain in thriving in mental health. It is a trifecta that could be really be powerful.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:04

Great stuff. Nice to end on a rallying cry there to bring practice and and research still closer to together. So that was the end of the 2020 conversation, but when we caught up last month, there were still a few more things left to talk about, and we will end on that segment now. We're doing well. Covered a couple of meaty topics and reflected on our conversation. Is there any other last pieces of of the puzzle reflecting back on on that conversation from three years ago that it's it's worth updating or commenting on in hindsight?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:44

Since then, I I kind of still carried out research in sports organizations, but also added some from you know more grassroots boards. And lately I've been doing research on traumatic neurological injuries. Okay. How those how those organizations they change and adapt dependent on you know the health system funding, patient demographics, because these are big scale changes again, that's in the macro, uh, whilst the actual day-to-day functioning of these rehabilitation organizations, they they they need to always adapt. So it's a risk reciprocal or mutual adaptation um between yeah, between again the societal shifts, but also the people who who come in. So I think that's we spoke about that in in the last conversation, and that's something that has matured more into looking at organizational memory and uh seeing that there might be the most general values, basic assumption rituals, myths, they are the ones we call organizational culture, just the most general, the most shared, the most widespread. But that doesn't mean there are not many, many others in subgroups. And it doesn't mean that just because they're most general doesn't mean that everybody relates to it in the same way. Um, we just talked about individual journeys, we just talked about multinational, multi-multi-religious groups. So looking at organizational should all organizational culture should always look at more global patterns, um, the consensus patterns, but they also should look at dissent. Where do we actually disagree on these things? Um, and how is that influenced by you know bigger, bigger streams, bigger waves in society?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:36

Just thinking about cultural architects or power brokers and bigger themes in society that that might change over time. Obviously, we had the World Cup, Rugby World Cup semi-finals played over the weekend, and England, who were not very fancied at all to even be in with a shot against South Africa, led for most of the game, and then agonizingly lost right at the end of the semifinal. And then you cut to the studio for the end of the game analysis, and you've got the presenter on ITV, I can't remember his name, trying to lure the pundits into that age-old dichotomy between winning and losing. Oh, how upsetting must it be, you know, to fall at this hurdle, etc. And then you've got Johnny Wilkinson, who has very publicly been through a very long journey with his own mental health and how he sees life and how he reflects on the things that he's won in his career, completely go against the presenter and say, Well, no, actually, I've been there. Winning the trophy is great, but that enjoyment quickly dissipates. And what lasts is the memories you make with your teammates, going into battle with them, having their back, that connection in that dressing room, those are the things that matter. And yeah, I just I was sitting there going, I am so pleased how many millions of of young people are going to be watching him say these things. I mean, that there must have been millions of people watching the broadcast at the end there. And you know, it's it's it's great to see that you've got you know important people like Johnny Wilkinson who can they can start to change the the rhetoric, the view on on some of these things. And yeah, just a recent example from from the weekend that kind of popped into my head there.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:37

That's another thing we haven't had time for, we won't have time for, but you know, how language in the widest sense of the word influences culture. Um, not just language as a spoken word, but also body language, you know, the clothes you wear, the shoes you wear, the uh the colors um in buildings, the architecture, language in the widest possible sense. Um, but we'll we'll keep that for another time though.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:06

Yes, the language point would love to dig into that. And I suppose we're on a good cadence now of meeting up every three years. So maybe we maybe we pop that in the diary for three years' time and we can uh do another podcast episode on that.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:22

I know, autumn of uh 2026, perfect.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:25

Yeah, good stuff. I'm looking for well, I'm sure, I'm sure there'll be some kind of life or career or something, something else changed to to talk about as well.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:36

I think that's uh we didn't even get into this because you know, isn't the way that we predict the future, because our way our ability to predict the future is ultimately based on our ability to remember the past. We can get into that because if you start having fussy memories and the further you go back, the further you go into the future, it starts getting really fussy too. That's why organizational memory is so interesting, because it kind of creates uh extremely clear memory in quotation marks, which can last, which can provide extreme promise for the future. Uh sometimes, which is often based on hindsight bias and romanticizing the past and and stuff. But uh yeah, let's see what happens in three years if we can enter it then right and then yeah, yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:25

Love that little soundbite there around the ability to predict or envisage the future is related to remembering the past. Lovely soundbite to to end on. Look, thanks, Nils. Really appreciate the follow-up conversation on the conversation and looking forward to to putting this one out soon for for other people to benefit from. Likewise. I will, as always, pop any any links in the description so people listening can follow what Nils is doing on social media and from a research perspective. Thank you again for coming on the podcast and really appreciate the time.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:02

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Uh, I've thoroughly enjoyed both conversations. Yeah, but yeah, you should probably uh update my socials.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:10

So, okay, so what what are the what are the new socials?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:13

Um, so people can still just look my name up on LinkedIn. Feel free to just write me a message. My Twitter is Niels underscore moving. Um, or what's it called now? It's called X. Um, it's another thing that's changed. Exactly. Twitter or X, Niels underscore Moving. Um yeah, those are the two main ones. So just shoot me an email. I'm on the Nih.no website.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:43

Um yeah. Good stuff. Oh well, I'll put all of those those links in the description so people can follow up. Well, thanks again, and uh see you in three years, I suppose. Yeah, take care. Well, there you have it. A hitchhike back and forth, three years in time, from 2020 to the end of 2023, and the first podcast of 2024. Huge thanks to Niels for both the original conversation and the update conversation, and and what a great idea from him. Maybe we will do that again in the future with our next guests. And speaking of next guests, as I mentioned in the podcast, I'm now completely out of recordings. I interviewed a huge number of people through locked down in 2021 and then in 2022 as well. So I'm looking for more guests. So if you know anyone, if you are that person who wants to come onto the podcast and talk about the psychologically informed environment or well-being or performance or culture, then let me know. In the meantime, thanks so much for listening. Have a good one, enjoy the start to your 2024. Cheers.