Here come the Easter bunnies

Bunny - Australian and New Zealand slang - a person made a fool of; a victim.

As the American author, humorist and sage Mark Twain (1835-1910) famously remarked (in full): “Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

Life is full of inconvenient contradictions and uncomfortable paradoxes. The eternal battle between Truth and Fiction, or 'Post-Truth' since we’re all too grown up and sophisticated for truth now, is once again thrown into sharp relief by recent events. 

We’ve heard for instance how allegedly the UK big data firm Cambridge Analytica used unauthorised personal data extracted from Facebook to help its paying ‘clients’ to secure the results they wanted from democratic votes across the world, including the 2016 UK EU Referendum and US Presidential Election. Also, it seems that money from wealthy backers was channelled via other organisations to circumvent election spending rules in the EU Referendum. This is old news - I read about it at the time - but 18 months on an ex-Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower is now willing to confirm it. Pesky nuisance, those whistle-blowers – they keep cropping up when you don’t want them, a bit like TV cameramen at international cricket matches……

Which brings me to the extraordinary events of the last week in the sport of cricket.

I am a lifelong lover of team sports, particularly cricket, football (soccer) and rugby. Cricket has traditionally had a Corinthian spirit and culture; in recent years, even as it has succumbed to big money, professionalism and subscription television it has managed largely to retain its image as a clean-cut game played with integrity.

The reality under the surface has been different for a long time. To borrow again from Mark Twain, money has slowly been replacing virtue as the basis of ‘respectability’. Each year Indian Premier League teams now buy players from all over the world at auction and pay them millions. In 1977 Australian media magnate Kerry Packer caused consternation when he set up World Series Cricket and hired top international cricketers away from their national sides to come and play in it for serious money. What is it about Australian media magnates from generation to generation that makes them so anti-social?! In 2006 I was part of the Keep Cricket Free campaign, which tried with cross-party support from members of Parliament to persuade Tony Blair’s Government not to renege on a longstanding all-party pledge to keep live Test cricket (international 5-day matches – the highest form of the game) on free-to-air TV in the UK. Sadly, we lost out to the money men - the contract for live cricket coverage was awarded to subscription channel Sky TV belonging to......Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch.....where it has remained since.

Last Saturday in the Test match between Australia and South Africa in Cape Town the Australians were caught on TV cameras trying to change the surface of the cricket ball using sandpaper to get an advantage. At first the key protagonists, Captain Steve Smith, Vice-Captain David Warner and batsman Cameron Bancroft, denied it and brushed it off, with catastrophic personal consequences. There was an overwhelming, visceral negative reaction, across the cricketing world but most significantly in Australia, which has a reputation as a take-no-prisoners competitor when it comes to cricket, or any other sport for that matter. Australian patriotism is defined by sport, especially cricket. The national team captain sits on a pedestal in people’s minds, arguably above the Prime Minister. Without warning, it seemed, the desire to win at all costs had turned cancerous - cheating and lying. Suddenly Australian cricket fans and business sponsors realised with horror that things had gone way too far and they were collectively up the creek without a paddle.

Over the last week there has been an astonishing national meltdown – an outpouring of emotion from the supposedly tough-as-nails Australian public. Many have rung into radio chat shows in tears, distraught at what they see as the betrayal of their country’s noble sporting reputation by Messrs Smith, Warner and Bancroft. This is deeply ironic for Englishmen like me, traditionally dismissed as ‘whinging Poms’ (Australian vernacular for soft, crying Englishmen) by our Aussie cousins – some tendency to gloat is thus inevitable!

Veteran Aussie cricket commentator Jim Maxwell, loved and respected around the world, struggled to retain his composure during a radio broadcast and described it as the worst thing he’d had to talk about in cricket. With the greatest respect, Jim, you and the other Aussies have short memories – the cricketing world was devastated by the death of Phillip Hughes in November 2014, an Australian Test player who was hit on the neck by a fast bouncing ball whilst batting in a domestic match in Sydney and never regained consciousness. Anything which tops that in the list of perceived Australian cricketing nightmares has to be pretty serious.

As a result of last Saturday's events, which they claim was an isolated incident, Smith and Warner have been banned from top level cricket for 12 months and Bancroft for 9 months. Smith and Warner have been stripped of their leadership positions and the governing body Cricket Australia have said that Warner will not be eligible in future for any leadership roles. Jim Maxwell described Warner as “beneath contempt”; former England captain Michael Vaughan wouldn’t even mention him by name, referring to him dismissively as “the other guy”. Meantime, having said initially that he would stay on, Australian coach Darren Lehmann resigned from his post, saying he recognised that he could not risk getting in the way of the necessary root and branch cultural change in the Australian national side over which he has presided for the last 5 years. In truth his position was untenable.

Why has there been such a hysterical response from different quarters, for different reasons? That’s the interesting element in this sad and unedifying saga. After all, it is widely acknowledged that ball-tampering has been going on for years, and is not a uniquely Australian practice.

An Indian broadcaster reflected the widespread mood of the cricketing world outside Australia when he admitted to feeling “a touch of schadenfreude”. In other words, the overwhelming view is that they had it coming to them.

"This Australian team are so friendless in cricket because of the way they have carried on," ex-England player Graeme Swann told BBC Radio 5 live. "They have set themselves as this higher-than-high, pious team who set the benchmark for what is right and what is wrong in cricket, when everyone who has played against them knows it's an absolute joke."

South African Mickey Arthur, abruptly replaced as Australian coach by Lehmann on the eve of the 2013 Ashes series with England, tried unsuccessfully to change the culture of Australian cricket during his tenure. Writing in PlayersVoice, he has been brutally unsparing: “Unfortunately, it was always going to end like this. Despite generational change, independent reviews and too many behavioural spotfires to list, Cricket Australia and the national team had demonstrated no real willingness or desire to improve the culture within their organisation from season to season. That could lead to only one conclusion. An explosion. A deterioration of standards that would culminate in an incident so bad, so ugly, that it would shame the leaders of the organisation into taking drastic action to change the culture, or risk alienating fans, sponsors, broadcasters and other stakeholders. I have been bitterly disappointed watching the Australian cricket team over the last few years. The behaviour has been boorish and arrogant. The way they’ve gone about their business hasn’t been good, and it hasn’t been good for a while. I know what my Pakistani players were confronted with in Australia two summers ago. I heard some of the things said to the English players during the Ashes. It was scandalous. And I have seen many incidents like Nathan Lyon throwing the ball at AB de Villiers in this series. There has been no need for the Australians to play this way.”

Jim Maxwell said he had previously emailed James Sutherland, Chief Executive of Cricket Australia, to warn him that the team’s aggressive attitude on the field could spill over in unwanted ways. He described it as “one of the most ruinous passages I can recall – the ship is a Titanic at the moment. Smith’s greatest failure is a lack of leadership. Warner has always coveted the captaincy. He seems to have been subject to abuse and lost the plot.” It looks as if Warner’s involvement in the plot to secretly tamper with the cricket ball was triggered by bad blood between him and the South African player Quinton De Kock in the previous Test match at Durban, behaviour for which Warner was fined. Warner said after the Durban match that De Kock had made “vile and disgusting” allegations about Warner’s wife. The problem is that Warner has apparently been making cruel, vile and disgusting comments for years to opponents on the cricket pitch (a practice known as ‘sledging’) to try to spoil their concentration. It should come as no surprise to him that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

This episode has reminded me spectacularly, both personally and through my knowledge of organisational research, of the critical differences between healthy and potentially toxic cultures. As ever, everything looks obvious now in retrospect, yet as the ship was heading towards the rocks (or the iceberg) over a long period of time it was seemingly impossible to stop it. I have been caught up occasionally in similar situations, as an employee, consultant and coach – these painful experiences have fuelled my drive to find a better way, which led me to distil what I call the Top 1%-inspired guiding principles, which I now devote myself to teaching and instilling in leaders and organisations.

The catastrophe, temporary at least, that has befallen Australian cricket and the sporting psyche of the Australian nation could be the subject of a much more detailed analysis based on Top 1% principles. However, I will summarise the key issues as follows.

Jim Collins’ rigorous team research studies between 1989 and 2011 – Built to Last, Good to Great, How The Mighty Fall and Great by Choice – form Top 1% bedrock. For those who are interested you can also download from my LinkedIn profile a summary of 33 titles from multiple authors representing a sample of the plethora of research available into Top 1% organisational performance, in business and sport. 

How the Mighty Fall describes the five stages, empirically observed, which characterise declining organisations and which strongly resonate in an analysis of the Australian national cricket side over the last 5-10 years:

1. Hubris Born of Success - a permanent air of superiority seeps into the culture
2. The Undisciplined Pursuit of More - ego, greed and power/status demand ever greater successes
3. Denial of Risk and Peril - worriers, whistle-blowers, experts and troubling events or indicators are dismissed; problems are trivialised and brushed off
4. Grasping for Salvation - as things start going seriously wrong, quick fixes are sought
5. Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death - if things are allowed to go too far, unforeseen, catastrophic and irreversible events occur.

Great by Choice systematically uncovers the characteristics which enable some organisations to thrive in volatile, chaotic and disruptive circumstances whilst their peers and competitors fail, often disastrously. It boils down to a set of fanatically disciplined behaviours which seek to control those things which can be controlled in an environment where so much cannot be controlled. One of the critical areas is the management of risk – top performers are rigorous about it, or 'productively paranoid' as Collins puts it. There are four key areas of risk – death-line, asymmetric, uncontrollable and time-based risk.  The Australian cricket team left itself open to all four. Death-line risk means the game is now over for Messrs Lehmann, Smith, Warner and Bancroft for the time being, if not possibly for good. Asymmetric risk means that the consequences of the risk occurring, however low you consider the possibility to be (and you are usually wrong) are so bad that the risk is not worth taking. Uncontrollable risk is self-evident – look how events have spiralled out of control since the ball-tampering incident last Saturday. Time-based risk means that the risk profile can change over time and you need to be alert to it. Arguably this happened too – with the passage of time the Australian team, and the governing body Cricket Australia opened themselves up to greater and greater risk by ignoring the multiple warning signs and voices of concern. They became utterly complacent and convinced of their own moral invincibility.

For these and many other reasons one of the most critical attributes of Top 1% leaders is humility, which is NOT to be confused with weakness or mental sensitivity, as it so often is. Top 1% leaders are fiercely resilient and enduring, but they understand that fundamentally they are not in control and they behave accordingly. They pick their fights carefully.

Neuroscience is rapidly advancing, teaching us much that it is essential we grasp. The following diagram illustrates the composition of the brain, and the crucial need not to ignore the overwhelming strength of brain levels 1-3 (brainstem, diencephalon, limbic), which have evolved over 65 million years, compared to level 4 (the neocortex), which defines us as homo sapiens (supposedly - the sapiens bit, that is) and has been around for roughly 250,000 years. As I’ve said before, mixing brain levels 1-3 with level 4 is a bit like a 6 year-old who finds the key to dad’s Ferrari in the bedside drawer – you know there’s going to be trouble….

There are key lessons for business leaders to reflect on, honestly, from what has happened with the Australian cricket team in the last week. Some of it may be quite close to home. Those who recognise the parallels can perhaps take steps to put their own house in order. As Jim Collins puts it, Great by Choice leaders recognise that whilst the probability of any individual ‘black swan’ (unforecastable) event is usually extremely low, the probability that you will be subject to one or more black swan events is extremely high. So you must prepare accordingly, and deal with them sensibly when they arise.

A few weeks ago, I published Resolve’s values in a post on LinkedIn. I include them again below. The first one in particular (‘Putting deserving others….’) aroused some confused comment – some folk did not seem to understand it, or its importance. It may make a little more sense now in the context of the Australian cricket debacle. There is only one coherent way to distinguish people, irrespective of race, creed, colour, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or any other form of segregation, i.e. tribe, and that is by character - how they behave under pressure, and how they treat other people.

I feel sympathy for Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft. It was agonising watching Smith's press conference when he broke down in tears. Depending on what he does in "going away to find out who he is as a man", I may yet develop some sympathy for David Warner. Ultimately these are all young, inexperienced men, catapulted into a globally exposed hothouse which is a brutal test of character. They have been let down appallingly by Lehmann and the coaching staff, and particularly by the 'leaders' at Cricket Australia, who appear to have turned a blind eye and allowed a culture to fester over many years in which misplaced loyalty to the team (the 'tribe') meant ultimately that the ends justified any means whatsoever. I have seen exactly the same behaviours in business.

A word of humble advice for Cricket Australia. In my own very ordinary and mediocre sporting efforts I have found that the greatest form of competition is pitting your wits against your friends. It's far more fun, and it drives you in a much healthier way to reach heights you would not otherwise scale. In the context of international sport played under a global microscope, which is required to set a great example to youngsters, it breeds a creditable and sustainable ethos.

I've often said that arrogance and naivety are two sides of the same coin - sadly that is painfully true in this case. I've also observed people whose arrogant manner I detested who became far better people after a major setback, and I've ended up liking them. I've been through enough reverses in my own life and career, many of my own doing. Business, like international cricket, tests your character to the limit, as well as your skills and talents. It requires inexhaustible stamina, resilience and the ability to accept and learn from mistakes. That's why I called my business Resolve Gets Results.

If anyone wants to explore Top 1% principles in more detail and how they may apply to their own situation I am always happy to talk informally.