The All Blacks Triple-A Principle: How to Build a World-Class Learning Culture

The All Blacks are the most successful sports team in history, undefeated in over 75% of their international matches in the last 100 years.

What makes them and other high-performing teams so successful?

One key ingredient is a strong learning culture. A culture that strives for continuous improvement toward excellence. A culture that celebrates wins and understands losses as a learning opportunity.

The Case for a Strong Learning Culture

Now, you may ask: why is a strong learning culture so important both in sports and in business?

1. Innovation & Creativity: It allows the players to play at their best every game without the fear of being judged. This allows them to be more innovative and creative and come up with new solutions.
2. Personal and Organizational Learning: In a world-class learning culture open communication and feedback, sharing knowledge, and supporting each other is the norm. This improves individual and team performance.
3. Bonding, Fun, Belonging: Players feel like they are part of a team with a bigger common mission, where everyone is contributing at their best and is being supported by the others and the coaches. This, in turn, leads to a better team feeling and, you guessed it: more retention. People just want to stay longer within such a team.

While reading this, you have probably already thought about how these principles also apply not only to sports but also to your management team and how to use them. Here, the Triple-A Framework is a simple, yet effective tool that can be implemented in any management meeting:

The Triple-A Framework

Triple-A stands for:

• Acceptance
• Analysis
• Action

Let's dive deeper into each of the steps:

Acceptance means: What is may be. Accepting involves acknowledging what is not going well, ideally even owning mistakes without blaming others or making excuses. It's important for team members to acknowledge the situation and take responsibility.

When things go wrong, emotions often come out on the table. This is an important part of the acceptance step: when we are highly emotional it's hard for us to find solutions. Therefore, we give plenty of room in team coaching sessions to let these emotions out and make emotional room for new solutions. When done right, this creates a safe and non-judgmental environment where mistakes are viewed as opportunities for growth rather than failures.

Analysis is traditionally seen as a root cause analysis, where people tend to ask "What went wrong" and "Why did it happen"? However, in complex systems that involve people (companies) the mindset of "find the error and fix it" is a cumbersome process that seldom leads to good results. As Steve de Shazer said: "The solution does not care how the problem came to be".

In our experience, it is more effective, faster, and also a lot more creative and fun to focus on the solution. If we tweak from a problem to a solution focus, teams create better solutions with more personal buy-in at a much higher speed. Also, you automatically avoid singling out people and blaming them for mistakes. The team feeling remains intact. Therefore, this step is the analysis of solutions, not the problems.

Action is about taking the first action steps to implement these solutions. In my experience, three concrete next steps as an outcome of a good leadership meeting are much more valuable than an elaborated 3-year strategy. I'll use a coffee example, because I LOVE good coffee: Change is like a black coffee into which you add a drop of milk at a time. Each drop changes the color just a bit, but overall the small drops make the difference. Needless to say that these action steps should be actionable, measurable, with a person accountable, time-bound, and followed up upon. Don't fall into the trap of accepting "one should" or "we should" fallacy.

The All Blacks?– Sweeping the Sheds

One memorable example of a top sports team that exemplifies the Triple-A principle is the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team.

The All Blacks have a strong culture of learning and constantly improving their performance. After each game, the team conducts a thorough review, known as "sweeping the sheds", where players and coaches reflect on their performance and identify areas for improvement. Also, top performance by individual players and the team is pointed out –?what made them so successful on the field today? What went particularly well? What should they do more of?

This process allows the All Blacks to learn from their mistakes and continuously strive for excellence.

What you may not have known: these sports superstars actually sweep the sheds (their locker rooms) themselves after the game as a ritual of contemplation, excellence, and groundedness. This is what I call leading by example.

The Verdict?

Teams do not win championships by accident. You don't get to the top of the mountain by accident. High-performance teams, in sports as in business, have a strong learning culture that goes beyond psychological safety. By fostering learning, innovation, action, and accountability, this culture leads to strong results.

Who would not want to be part of such a dream team? It starts with one first drop of milk in your coffee…

… and if you'd like some help with that: get in touch. We at ONEDAY love supporting good teams to become great teams and we're experts in making coffee, even outdoors. So that your change doesn't only happen but also looks, feels, and tastes good.

Cheers!

Oliver?

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PS:?Culture before IT, at least when it comes to learning. This week, I talked to a product owner of a multinational manufacturing company who has started to establish a learning culture between the different product leads. Before the implementation of learning principles, the different owners did not talk to each other at all – the preconception was that they all had different problems.

As it turned out everyone was facing similar problems and together they created better solutions. Before investing in knowledge management systems – start with a learning culture either as a grassroots initiative or in the leadership team.

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Sources:

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Ford, M. B., & Coughlan, R. (2018). Learning from mistakes in elite sport teams: An empirical examination of the role of acceptance, responsibility, and uncertainty. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 29(4), 345-364.

Kerr, J. (2013). Legacy: 15 lessons in leadership. Audible.

Hansen, L. (2016). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Random House.

Heims?th, A. (2018). Sportmentaltraining. Pietsch.