E40 | Bonus Episode: Through the Looking Glass

[00:00:00] Donnie Maib: Welcome to the team Behind the Team podcast. I’m your host, Donnie Maid. This is the monthly show focused on building conversations around the team-based model approach to ethic, performance, strength, and conditioning, sports medicine, sports science, mental health and wellness, and sports nutrition.

[00:00:23] Donnie Maib: Hello and welcome to the team Behind the Team podcast. This month we have a special episode with Coach David Joyce, who’s in town in Austin for a visit, and he gave a special presentation to all performance teams called, Through the looking Glass and it’s all the current research he’s done over the last couple years to give us a lens on what trends and current themes are coming down our way over the next 10 years, what we can expect.

[00:00:50] Donnie Maib: So special episode was an awesome talk. Thank you for joining in. Well, good morning everybody. Um, thank you for making [00:01:00] time. I know this is a crazy time of year for all of us. Gra thank you for making time to come here. Coach Choice today, good friend of mine. So I wanna do a brief introduction and I’m gonna let you have the time.

[00:01:11] Donnie Maib: So, um, you get in this profession, right, for various reasons, but what I’m gonna share with you right now, I mean, these are one of those moments that just is life changing and has an impact on you as a, as an individual. So coach, uh, over your career. And so, 2018 had the privilege of traveling to Australia.

[00:01:33] Donnie Maib: To present at the ASCA Australian Strength Coaches Association. Little did I know that I would meet the man on my right, right here. Uh, I’d heard of Coach David Joyce, uh, you know, being a strength coach. He’s like the upper echelon of performance coaches and he is known worldwide. And so a friend of mine, Timo, who works for the USA volleyball, started telling me about Coach Joyce.

[00:01:57] Donnie Maib: And he lived and said, Hey, you think. [00:02:00] You, you think he would ever connect with me? And he goes, yeah, I’ll give you his number. I was like, what? So anyway, I ended up reaching out to him, I think over WhatsApp or whatever when I was over there in Sydney. And uh, sure enough, he wanted to get together with me.

[00:02:10] Donnie Maib: So we, I can’t remember the name of the place, the little pub coach, but we, the unicorn, there you go. Pro properly named. So we met at the Unicorn and I think it was downtown Sydney and had a, I think we had a pint together. So we had a little. Little, uh, pint there and had fun. Couple things about that story.

[00:02:28] Donnie Maib: Number one, you know, when you, you hear about people and you know their reputation and their, the level of professionalism, respect, and knowledge they have. When I met Coach Joyce just blown away by just his genuineness and just down to earth, you know, uh, for a guy of his expertise. And number two, he we’re sitting there.

[00:02:47] Donnie Maib: This, this, I dunno if you remember this coach, but, uh, he goes, coach, do you like the. I’m like, of course I like the Matrix. I mean, I’m from the US who doesn’t like, you know, Neo and the crew, right? [00:03:00] He goes, well, the, the guy that played, I forget his name, Mr. Anderson was, he was sitting right there with us that day and was, was having a pint too.

[00:03:07] Donnie Maib: So got to meet Coach Joyce that day. Hung out with him. He is very gracious with this time. Got to know him a little bit and we stayed connected over the, the years since then. And, um, he actually, uh, Did a presentation with our staff coach Craig Wright, uh, over Zoom during the pandemic when we were all locked up in the house.

[00:03:25] Donnie Maib: He didn’t have to do that. I think he did a couple of them, but, uh, so we got to do, uh, some, some staff development there with him. But anyway, that’s my friend, coach Joyce. He’s an incredible, uh, obviously good at what he does in this profession and field, but he’s an incredible person. Uh, got a beautiful family, his wife Kay Matilda, and let me say about r.

[00:03:43] Donnie Maib: So you’ll get to hear about his beautiful family, but just super smart, but loves his family, loves people, uh, makes us all better. Every time I I, I spend time with him. I always feel and walk away like I’ve gotten better as a, as a husband, as a father, and as a professional in this, in this career field. So let me read a little bit about him again, and [00:04:00] then I’ll, I’ll turn it over.

[00:04:01] Donnie Maib: Uh, just some credentials here. He is the founder. He’s the lead consultant of Synapsing, am I saying it right, coach? Uh, it’s a global strategy and decision making consultancy linking the boardroom to the frontline of complex environments. So that’s what he’s currently doing. Uh, just a couple more highlights here.

[00:04:20] Donnie Maib: He has more than two decades of leading some of the world’s best athletes and teams across Australia, Europe, uk, and Asia. Including the AFL, Australian Football League, Olympic Games, Beijing and London, international Rugby Premier League and Champions League in International soccer. Author of three of the best, or the, I’d say biggest, uh, selling human performance textbook.

[00:04:46] Donnie Maib: This is the one that just, I was just updated. I would encourage you if you’ve never read this, to pick up a copy. It’s, uh, high Performance Training for Sport and the second edition came out. Several months ago, right? This past year. Yeah. So I would, I [00:05:00] I’ve got a copy if you wanna check it out in my office and, uh, get a copy.

[00:05:04] Donnie Maib: Uh, and then he’s got three master’s degrees, so he is super smart. MBA with excellent sports physiotherapy. So all my ats we work really close with our ats. Uh, he’s got a background in that, so that’s huge. And, uh, exercise science, s c with excellence. So, with any further, let’s give a warm welcome to my good friend, coach David.

[00:05:25] David Joyce: Thank you man. Uh, thank you coach. Um, thank you so much for, um, joining us today. Um, this is obviously a big thrill for, um, for me to come here and when I. Spoke to some of you guys over Zoom. Not, not that long after I, um, I got this package in the mail with a whole heap of Longhorns, uh, kit and, um, and I didn’t have a college team before then, but I’m sure as hell do now,

[00:05:58] David Joyce: And um, and it’s [00:06:00] funny because. Because I wear it all the time. Um, and it’s probably something we call availability bias. It’s in our head. Um, I see Longhorn stuff all over Sydney, so you know, the reputation of the school and, and you guys proceeds you. Um, so, um, Donnie spoke unnecessarily long about what I’ve done.

[00:06:24] David Joyce: Um, but essentially I trained as a physio. Really loved the problem solving aspect of that. Um, realized that it was good, but not enough to understand performance. Um, so I think I was the first person in the world to have done a master’s in sports. Medicine and a master’s in strength and conditioning.

[00:06:46] David Joyce: Cause I wanted to bridge those worlds and I wanted to, to speak different languages. Um, but for the last probably 15 years, my job has been as a, um, performance director and a performance director where, where I’m from. [00:07:00] So you’ve got the head coach that looks after the. Tactical, tactical side of things.

[00:07:04] David Joyce: And then my team would look after the strength and conditioning, the sports medicine, the sports science, um, nutrition, recovery, psychology, that box and dice. Um, . And then I fairly recently, like a few years ago, finished my MBA because I wanted to to look at what we can do in sport and, and transfer that in in other complex environments.

[00:07:27] David Joyce: So these days I do a lot of strategy work. Um, I’m less athlete facing, I still do a bit of athlete facing stuff cuz you can take the boy outta coaching but you can’t take coaching outta the boy. And um, but now I do a lot of work with. Big organizations, um, um, both corporate and sport. And what I wanted to speak to you today about was the culmination of about somewhere between 400 and 500 hours of interviews that I’ve done with people all [00:08:00] around the world about what we can expect, sport performance, the stuff that we do to look like, um, over the coming 10 years.

[00:08:09] David Joyce: And the reason that’s important is because, Fundamentally what we’re gonna see in what we do is going to change the X’s and O’s of how you get people fit. Fast and strong are going to be the same because they’ve been the same, you know, for millennia. Right? , but the way we do it is going to fundamentally change.

[00:08:31] David Joyce: And if we’re, if we’re forewarned, we can be forearmed. And that’s a really important bit of strategy is being able to, to bring the future forward to the present and be able to make your decisions about what you’re going to do so that future is desirable. Um, so effectively what at Synapsing, what we try and do is.

[00:08:54] David Joyce: Coaches, um, AEDs, um, business leaders sleep better at night [00:09:00] cuz that’s, that’s fundamentally their problem is they don’t sleep well because they’re so worried about what’s coming down the pike. Um, and so the, the strategy work that we do is, is primarily looking at some of these big complex issues. Um, now I’ve got a picture here.

[00:09:18] David Joyce: Do you, do you guys know what a rip is?

[00:09:25] David Joyce: Yeah, so in in the ocean there’s a, um, there’s a, uh, a phenomenon called a rip. And, and what a RIP does, it’s you, you always see surfers. What they do is rather than just get straight in the water, they’ll go for high land. and they wanna look down and see what the waves are doing and where the, um, uh, the sets are coming in, how frequently, all those sorts of things.

[00:09:50] David Joyce: But they’re also looking for the rips. And the rips are the things, the ocean current that take you out. Um, now [00:10:00] most people who die, uh, in the ocean die because of. Because they get taken out and they, they really worry and then they swim and they can’t, no one can beat the ocean, right? So they, they, they fatigue themselves and then they drown.

[00:10:17] David Joyce: But people who know what they’re doing use the rips to take them out beyond the wave so they can surf back in. So we often think of rips as being bad, but that’s, if you dunno how to navigate them. Because if you’re a surfer, if you’re an ocean, They’re the most helpful thing you can have, and a lot of the forces that we can expect to see in sport over the next 10 years.

[00:10:43] David Joyce: We can look at them as being helpful, or we can look at them as being really harmful. Depends on the lens that we’ve got. So, um, this hasn’t come up really well, but just to give you a, um, a background, these, [00:11:00] uh, were a number of the areas that I, I’ve taken a lot of the learnings from. So I tried to get a, a really broad sweep so it wasn’t just me speaking to fellow Australians and Americans and Brits because we’ve got the same language.

[00:11:13] David Joyce: I wanted to get a really broad sweep of what the world looked like from a number of different areas, because what they do in France and Spain is quite different to what we do. Um, and I always think that the best coaches, and I’m sure you guys would agree, the best coaches are the thieves. They’re the ones that sort of take something from here and take something from there and then put it into their context.

[00:11:35] David Joyce: And so what’s happening in Germany, we might be able to go, what a fantastic idea. We can take that in here. And so our program is better for that. Um, just a very small selection. The, the sorts of organizations that I spoke to to get this sense of where we’re, um, where we are getting this information from.

[00:11:56] David Joyce: Now, what I wanna highlight [00:12:00] here is there’s a vast number of different, um, nations, but there’s also universities. There’s. This organization here is looking at, um, healthcare in the home in the Netherlands because they’ve got a really interesting way of doing teamwork that I think we can learn from in sport.

[00:12:21] David Joyce: Um, we’ve got Niantic, which is a big gaming company, um, most notable for Pokemon Go. And so I’m really interested in, in how technology tries to solve, um, teams that are working across different, um, time zones, what we can learn from that. Um, there’s, I spoke to coaches, athletes, performance directors, um, strength coaches as they’re leaving university, veteran strength coaches, um, psychologists, physiotherapists, af, um, athletic trainers.

[00:12:56] David Joyce: So it’s a really broad sweep here. . [00:13:00] Um, and what I wanted to speak to you today about was of all the information that I gathered in somewhere between four and 500 hours of interviews, I’ve been able to put them together in in seven main themes. Now, I give a talk that’s similar to this to head coaches and some of the things are similar.

[00:13:25] David Joyce: And some of the things are specific to coaches. I give a talk that’s similar for psychologists that have got some things that unite them, but there are some specific psychology things. Same for nutrition as well. But, um, what I’ve tried to do here is look at the forces which are going to influence performance support.

[00:13:46] David Joyce: So for context in this area, I’m talking. Sports science, sports medicine, um, strength and conditioning, nutrition, psychology, the stuff that we do. Okay. [00:14:00] Right. The first thing is that sometimes. actually, what I wanted to do was sort of lift our vision a little bit so we are not just in the weeds of how we get an athlete fitter or faster, it’s a really important part of what we do, but in terms of the leverage that gives us, it’s quite small compared to some of these other things.

[00:14:24] David Joyce: Now, the first thing here, if, if you can read it and it, um, it might just be my eyes, but, um, so the first thing we need to consider is, , because that’s a really big leverage point for us. So we might think that we’ve got a really important job to do, which we do. Um, but everyone’s got a different perspective of what’s important, right?

[00:14:50] David Joyce: So the coaches have got something. The, um, the strength coaches will say something else. The athletic directors will say something else. They’ve all got different incentives. The university [00:15:00] wants something. . Um, everyone has got a, everyone’s got a boss. And even if you just think of if you are the boss, you will have a boss.

[00:15:14] David Joyce: They will have a boss, and everyone’s got different incentives as a result. So I think it’s really important that we understand that. . Um, everyone’s got different motivations, different, everyone’s got different incentives. Everyone’s got different disincentives sometimes. One of my criticisms of what of, of what we do is that we can just think that we’re the most important bit.

[00:15:36] David Joyce: It’s just that that’s the pool we swim in. So we think it’s most important, but the reality is, um, it’s not, so the more we can start to think about the, the broader power dynamics, the, the important, um, that’s gonna be really important. The next bit here says, advocacy and changes in relevance of individual disciplines.

[00:15:55] David Joyce: So when I spoke to the Ologists, [00:16:00] every single ologist thought that their GY was the most important . Um, and I get it right, like why would you invest 10 years of your life studying your ology not to be wanting it to be the most important one, but the reality is, Performance takes a village, and it takes ego to put yourself forward, but it takes being a good follower to be able to go, I’m, I’m maybe not the most critical person to solve this performance issue, but it’s hard because we’re dealing with humans, right?

[00:16:38] David Joyce: And so what we do see around the world is that there is increasing number of people that. putting their ology forward as the most important one. And so it’s a really hard one for the orchestrator, the head coach or the athletic director to be able to, to work out how do we solve this complex problem of performance.

[00:16:58] David Joyce: When you’ve got so many people, [00:17:00] um, piping up, it’s like if you go to an orchestra, you can’t just hear from the violins. For it to be an orchestra, you need to hear from everything. Um, and this last one, Um, which is obviously something which is a, a really big change over the last five years, says athlete Voices, D two C and dts.

[00:17:21] David Joyce: So D two C is direct to consumer. So when we see that now with N N I L here, um, it’s much bigger around the world because of social media, because of technology. The, um, our athletes now have got a direct line to the. Which is great, but it comes with costs. It comes with mental health costs. It comes with all sorts of attention costs as well.

[00:17:47] David Joyce: And athletes are much more direct to supplier DTS as well. So we see that much more in some of the bigger professional sports where athletes are now selecting their coaches [00:18:00] outside of their organization. We’re seeing, um, Kevin, Deb Broner, who plays for Manchester City has got his own performance team that run all his analytics and he uses that as leverage for his next contract, negoti.

[00:18:16] David Joyce: outside of the the football club. So this is a really big fundamental change in who’s got the power in sport. So for those of you who came expecting me to talk about rate of power development, all those sorts of things, unfortunately I am gonna disappoint you because I’m gonna talk a little bit about economics now because fundamentally none of us.

[00:18:40] David Joyce: If we don’t understand that bit. So, um, a big factor is the size, um, stability and allocation of funding. So, um, how much funding the department gets relates directly to the equipment that we [00:19:00] get, how well we can do our job. The allocation is really important. Does it go to the psychologists? Does it go to the strength coaches?

[00:19:07] David Joyce: Does it go to football or does it go to basket? , but the stability is a really interesting one. So frequently you’ll hear teams say, um, we want our teams to be really creative. We want them to be innovative, which is great, but they’re on one year contracts. And if you’re on a one year contract, it’s really difficult to take risk.

[00:19:34] David Joyce: and if you don’t take risks, you can’t be innovative. So fundamentally, if we want to have a really innovative, creative culture, we need to have some stability. So there is some acceptance of, of failure and learning. That’s a really, really important bit. Um, we see this in Olympic sports. We see this, it happens a lot in America of, of people being at will, people having one year contracts and there’s, it’s [00:20:00] a massive disincentive.

[00:20:02] David Joyce: to take risks. Um, we can’t ignore the macroeconomic environment, so particularly for, it may not be quite as big a deal here, but for other places around the world, it’s a huge thing in Australia cuz it costs us a fortune to go anywhere. And, um, flights have increased by about 63% in the last, um, six months.

[00:20:27] David Joyce: So that has a direct impact on the competitions that we can go to. Um, inflation purchasing power, like the, it’s great for you guys because the, the US dollar is so strong at the moment that you can buy a lot of things and for other nations around the world, it’s a, it’s a huge competitive disadvantage, the strength of the, the US dollar.

[00:20:50] David Joyce: Um, . Um, but I guess the other, the other bit too is there’s, there’s this [00:21:00] increasing competition for talent. So all of you have got degrees, you’re all really smart people. Um, all love working in sport, but you won’t get as paid as well as you might if you’re working at Google or Amazon or, or whatever, if with, with the size of your brains, you can take just about any job you want.

[00:21:20] David Joyce: Um, So previously we used in sport, we used to think that our competitors for talent were other teams. But the reality is our competitors are way broader than that now. And there are people that are really willing to say, I love sport, but I’ll watch it as a fan because I’ll get paid twice as much to work at.

[00:21:43] David Joyce: and it would be silly for us, and, and maybe not for us in this room, but for the athletic directors and, you know, the people that make the, the money decisions not to be thinking about that stuff. If we want to have the best and brightest, we, we need to be considering those things. [00:22:00] Um, this is probably the thing.

[00:22:04] David Joyce: Um, Came through the strongest in all this analysis was the, ah, it’s starting to look better now. Sociocultural. So when we are looking at Gen Z, gen Alpha, the expectations of of those generations are changing about what they want in a workforce. So much greater emphasis on diversity, equity, inclusion, a huge emphasis on belonging and inclu, uh, um, and, um, uh, feeling like you’re integral to the overall performance of the organization.

[00:22:40] David Joyce: And there’s purpose. That’s a huge thing going around the world at the moment. Um, and, and that’s fantastic. Um, this sense of belonging is so important. , um, and that you can think of this as we belong to the us, we then you can bring that down. We belong to Texas. Then [00:23:00] we can bring that to, we belong to University of Texas.

[00:23:03] David Joyce: But it’s also a belonging within the strength and conditioning department, belonging within the, the swimming team and how that is enmeshed is a really important bit of how we get teams to work well. And there’s much, there’s a lot more work going on around the world about that bit. Now there’s a fantastic book by, um, uh, Owen Eastwood called Belonging.

[00:23:27] David Joyce: If you’ve not read that, um, it’s a really, really good one. Um, it. Uh, I would say somewhere between 75 and 77 pages too long. Um, but it is really, really good. Um, the fantastic and inexorable rise of, of women’s sport is brilliant. I do a lot of work in this area about how we get more, uh, women coaches in, in Australian sport.

[00:23:53] David Joyce: Um, and it’s really important because certainly in Australia and I, and, and, and maybe [00:24:00] here as well, Marginal dollars now are getting spent on women’s sport as opposed to men’s sport. Um, and there’s a, there’s a much bigger conversation about, um, so our big stadiums, our big hundred hundred thousand seater stadiums are only really used for men’s sport, but are paid for by the entire community.

[00:24:24] David Joyce: Right. So there’s, there’s really interesting conversations about how that works. Um, And, and a lot of the decisions made about hiring are now preferentially going to go towards women, which I thi again, I think is, is fantastic in the right ways. Um, , but this is, this is a really big thing now, and we’re seeing it over here with the, um, the Yates, um, investigation, all those sorts of things.

[00:24:52] David Joyce: There’s a much greater emphasis on, on how we look after our, um, female athletes, how we look after our, [00:25:00] um, uh, women coaches. How do we have a, uh, a system which allows people who want to go and raise a family to come back. I was keying a, um, a conference in the UK in April, and there was probably about 400 people in there, and there was, I reckon, nine women out of 400.

[00:25:31] David Joyce: Um, there’s a lot of work to be done about how we get, um, women to feel more included. That sense of. within what we do, and I’m really passionate about this, that it’s, it’s not enough women’s activism. So, that activism from women is really important, but it’s not sufficient because we need men to help drive this as well.

[00:25:53] David Joyce: If we think that men are 90% of, of our performance, of our staff, um, we [00:26:00] can’t expect women 10. to be winning that battle against the 90%. We need men to help drive this agenda, cuz this isn’t just about performance of, of our teams. This is about ethics and morals as well. So that’s a really important bit.

[00:26:16] David Joyce: Um, increased noise around athletes and coaches is a huge thing that coaches talk about. So the bigger the teams get, the more people argue for their relevancy. , um, the, the harder it is for the coaches and the orchestrators to, to make the decisions about what’s the most important button to press and leave at a pool here.

[00:26:39] David Joyce: So there is a really strong move around the world to have much smaller teams around the coach and the athlete. So it, it, for, for a while there, it really exploded and you would have not just a psychologist, but a psychologist that specialized in, in, um, in eating disorder. . And so it’s starting to splinter [00:27:00] and get hyper-specialized, um, which is great, but it becomes really unwieldy and very, very hard to, to orchestrate, as I say.

[00:27:09] David Joyce: So there’s this, there’s this big move around the world to bring that together and for the coach to have a very small, trusted set of staff that to go to say, right, well, I need to bring this ninja in from the outside to solve this particular. because it’s just, in some places it’s just ballooning. So the fundamental shift there is, is being able to understand that, um, these people that are in that tight circle need to have an outstanding network, but they also need to be able to know what they don’t know, and they need to be able to be intellectually humble to say, I don’t, I don’t have the answer to this, but I know someone who.

[00:27:53] David Joyce: but it also requires the coach not to expect that person to have all the answers. So there’s actually a, a big [00:28:00] cultural shift going on there, which is very, very interesting. Um, and this, there’s a big thing, Australia and the UK about winning and winning well, um, and to be a great organization, but to be, be a healthy wellbeing organization as well.

[00:28:20] David Joyce: And we haven’t quite worked out this balance. because it’s not, it’s not quite the, the, the ba the, the needle is tipping towards athlete happiness. Um, which is, you’d prefer that than athlete unhappiness. Um, but it’s there, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done about how do we get the, how do we, how do we perform and be well?

[00:28:44] David Joyce: So there’s a lot of research going on in that. I expected in all these interviews to hear a lot more about this stuff than I actually did. But it also also does, um, um, require us to talk about it. So [00:29:00] there’s a whole heap of data that’s now available to us, which is fantastic. Um, it’s being driven by a lot of companies that claim they’ve got the answer to things, much of which has not yet been.

[00:29:14] David Joyce: But they’ve got a commercial imperative to, to push it onto you guys. Um, and so you guys need to be really smart about how you can go, well, I don’t believe this number. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t understand how this is working because the, the sports teams that just employ tech to solve problems, um, without that real understanding of.

[00:29:43] David Joyce: Are really vulnerable to snake oil salesman. And I’m certain that you’ve all come across people that are pitching things that are, that are not valid. Um, eh, it may not necessarily be, um, malevolent, [00:30:00] but it may not, um, be the right thing. So, um, really, really interesting work going on here. Um, task automation.

[00:30:09] David Joyce: I’ve put query employment threats. So the, um, The sport scientist that just reads GPS data and sends reports out, um, you know, not long for the world because that stuff is gonna get all automated. So there’s, there’s, there’s some tension to be played out there. Data validity and security. So we are, we are seeing this data security is huge at the moment.

[00:30:35] David Joyce: So in Australia, there’s just been a huge data breach from one of our big, uh, telecommunication, telecommunication companies. Um, We will see in the next 12 months, massive shifts in the way data is legislated. Um, we, and I’ll talk about that in the, in the next bit, but the concept that sport is immune to that it just doesn’t, doesn’t hold up at all.

[00:30:59] David Joyce: [00:31:00] Um, use of immersive tech in training, um, is certainly on the way. My, my sense is that you will probably be pioneers of that here. Um, much more than other areas of the world. Um, global citizenry and remote teams. So this is a really interesting thing that’s been accelerated by the pandemic. So, um, previously, um, a sports team, let’s just say in Australia goes, oh, we really want Travis to coach our sprint.

[00:31:27] David Joyce: But we know he’s not gonna come out to Australia cause it’s too far and he’s got family here. He’s just got engaged, all these sorts of things. But now we may actually be able to get him in for some master classes. That’s now been facilitated by technology. So that’s kind of half the story. The other half is we actually need some innovation in how we do some employment contracting that allows us to do that, to get.

[00:31:54] David Joyce: Um, to negotiate tax laws and things like that, which is [00:32:00] why all of a sudden you’re bringing in human resources into these conversations because actually human performance involves everyone in the organization. It is not just Travis, the strength coach. It is also human resources that allows him to do these sorts of.

[00:32:21] David Joyce: Um, augmentation of decision making with, um, AI and, and machine learning. Um, that’s, we’re seeing that a lot more now, particularly on game day in terms of, you know, when we need to run subs, all these sorts of things. Um, this is an existential threat. The environment bit, again, apologies for people that wanted to talk about rate of force development.

[00:32:47] David Joyce: Um, , there’s an increasing awareness of carbon footprint. Um, and certainly in Australia there’ll be decreased travel as a result of that and whether the, the team is not going to mold over, [00:33:00] um, or whether they don’t take as big a team for that. We know that of the, of the 20 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics in its history, Only 10 of those are expected to be able to have the climate to do it again by 2050.

[00:33:21] David Joyce: So there’s obviously big shifts going on here. And, and this is the slow boil one. This is not something that we’re gonna see tomorrow, but certainly in Australia, the, the, the summer of sport is under threat. It’s just so hot. And I don’t mean to tell you about heat, but, um, um, there, there, there’s, there’s big changes going on here.

[00:33:44] David Joyce: uh, and you know, so we are, we are, we are having to deal a lot more with heat stress. We’re in Australia, we’ve got huge rains, huge flooding rains at the moment, so we’re having to deal a lot more with that as well. Um, an uncertain global health [00:34:00] environment. This is a really interesting one. So, um, we know that there are approximately 2,500 different coronaviruses.

[00:34:13] David Joyce: of the 11 global pandemics. Oh, sorry. You know, sort of big mass viral things. You know, if you think of SARS and mers and bird flu and all those sorts of things, um, of the 10 or 11, um, that we’ve seen in the last hundred years, seven have occurred in the last.

[00:34:40] David Joyce: So this notion that we’re beyond covid and we’re, you know, we’ve got another a hundred years before we get to the next one, um, I think is gonna be severely tested. And we’ve seen just how impactful on the world of sport that has been, where we we’re expecting to see big [00:35:00] changes very quickly to sport. If another one of these outbreaks takes hold.

[00:35:07] David Joyce: Um, this is the bit that I started not knowing much about. Um, I still dunno much about it, but I’m much more, um, versed in it than I was. Um, I spent a lot of time speaking to sport ethic, ethicists a lot of time speaking to, um, lawyers, so I dunno what it’s like here, but certainly in Australia, in the uk there’s this concept of performance.

[00:35:31] David Joyce: do you talk about performance data and basically in what we do, performance data is often talked about is anything that doesn’t involve the doctor. So it’s not blood tests, it’s not heart rate, but it will be gps, it’ll be, um, it’ll be your Nord board scores. It’ll be, you know, your wellness data, your all, all those sorts of things.

[00:35:56] David Joyce: So I’ve looked at the legislation here. Us, oh, [00:36:00] sorry. Here, uk, Australia, France. Um, I can tell you there is no such thing as performance data. It is called health data.

[00:36:16] David Joyce: and because it’s health data, it needs to be governed as such. It needs to be secured as such. It needs to be, um, stewarded as such. Now, currently we don’t do that. We, you know, often I’m not, I’m not certain here, but around the world, gps, um, results will get emailed around. Um, it’s not going to be long until that is tested in court.

[00:36:38] David Joyce: Um, we’re expecting huge change. Uh, in Australia, big changes in the uk I expect big changes will be happen here as well about how we deal with data. Um, we are not going to be able to just, um, collect all this data and hold it. You, you’re gonna be able to, you’re only gonna be able to collect it for a very short period, and then [00:37:00] as soon as someone leaves, you’ve, you’ve gotta get rid of it.

[00:37:03] David Joyce: So we’re expecting big changes there. The interesting thing is gonna be about informed. . So currently, um, if you anything like me, you’ll, you’ll get this. Um, big thing, if you get onto a, a website and you, you, you give your informed consent. It’s not informed consent because there’s, you know, 12 pages, you just wanna get to the end of it and you click the button.

[00:37:23] David Joyce: Um, that, that will be changed. Um, you may be familiar with a group called Breakaway. Um, Is it, are people familiar with breakaway? Breakaway data? Okay. So are you, do you, what’s your athlete management system that you have here? So when you’re recording data, what do you, what do you use? Smarter base. Smarter base.

[00:37:45] David Joyce: Okay. So smarter base is, uh, b2b, right? So, um, fusion sells smarter base to the University of Texas. Okay? University of Texas owns all of that. What is going to be tested [00:38:00] in the next two to five? is that model because AMS is gonna go b2c. So, um, business to consumer. So they will be selling it not to the University of Texas, but to the quarterback of the football team.

[00:38:19] David Joyce: And the quarterback will get all the data and we’ll put it into his portal. The swimmer will put it into her portal. and they will release it according to who they want to see it.

[00:38:39] David Joyce: So it’s a fundamental shift in the business model. So no longer will we just have the automatic right, because not a B2B thing. Now the athlete is gonna own it and so we are, we’re sometimes you’ll hear something about we’ll bring the athlete to the table for some of these discussions. The athlete is the.[00:39:00]

[00:39:01] David Joyce: they will. They will invite the chairs. Now, the reason that’s such an important thing is it’s better to be pre-headline on this rather than post headline. And what I mean by that is if we’ve got really good trusting relationships with our athletes, they will want us to see their. , but we cannot take it for granted.

[00:39:30] David Joyce: We cannot just expect it. So this gets to that trust belonging thing. Um, we will be hearing these words over the next five to 10 years that they’ll get worn out. We’ll hear it that much. It’s a really, really fundamental. . Um, and this bit here is scope of practice regulations. So if I remember, I talked about the smaller teams that’ll [00:40:00] be around the coach.

[00:40:01] David Joyce: So let’s just say, um, the, the sport, and it probably won’t happen in a big program like this, but let’s just say the sport have, you know what, we’re not going to, we’re not gonna have a nutritionist. We’re gonna get the, um, the strength coaches to do the nutrition, which we see in professional sport, right?

[00:40:20] David Joyce: let’s just say as a thought experiment, let’s just say one of the athletes goes on to develop an eating disorder and the lawyers test this out and say, interesting. Who was giving you your, your nutritional advice? Ah, it was a strength coach. Okay. What are the qualifications of the strength coach? So it places.

[00:40:48] David Joyce: People, if they’re forced to multitask, it places them in really vulnerable positions, which we don’t think of now cause we’re just doing our best now. But actually what the job of people like me to do [00:41:00] is to accelerate forward and go, what would 60 minutes say in the future If something went pear shaped, what would 60 minutes say?

[00:41:09] David Joyce: And they will come straight at this. So it’s not irreparable, but we just need to iron out some wrinkles. . Um, the other thing here is about storage and sharing. So, um, I can’t give too many details about the case, but what we are seeing at the moment, and it’s about to go to the courts in New Zealand, is a professional rugby player with early onset dementia cuz of concussions.

[00:41:41] David Joyce: Now the. , the organization has collected that much data from that player over 10 years. The lawyers are now scraping all that data to show that this athlete [00:42:00] was training, sustain triangulating forces, sustaining impacts, which has led that they’re building the case to say this has led to this.

[00:42:14] David Joyce: So we may be collecting this for pure motives because we are thinking, you know, we want to get, we wanna know how far someone’s run this weekend, but the reality is this data thing is way bigger than what we can think of right now. And we talk about this almost like a tidal wave of, of data. We think it’s a tid wave.

[00:42:37] David Joyce: This wave is still fo four miles out. We have not even approached the breaking point yet. So we, we don’t need to be, we don’t, not everyone needs to be a data expert, but we need people that are, and we need people that are really well versed on the, the ethics and governance of this, because [00:43:00] everyone is vulnerable here because we don’t quite know what it’s gonna look like in 10 years time, but they will come back to what’s happening.

[00:43:09] David Joyce: So we’re real, we’re all really vulnerable there. Okay. And lastly, so I wanted to have a look at, you know, all the performance trends that are happening around the world. Um, and there’s, there’s, there’s so many that I can’t encapsulate it in just one slide. Um, so what I’ve done is I’ve, I’ve passed out the big four here, right?

[00:43:33] David Joyce: Um, there are still gains to be had in getting fitter faster. , no doubt. But I would say that they will be marginal compared to the gains that we will have in mental performance, mental wellness, um, and, and wellbeing, mental health. So we, that’s, that’s, that’s greenfield opportunity here. [00:44:00] Um, and full transparency.

[00:44:03] David Joyce: That’s the reason I’m here speaking with you today because, um, , I work with a company called Optimize I, um, and what we are trying to do is scale a solution for that bit to athletes around the world is how do we get, how do we shift that narrative from mental, um, health and mental illness? Because when still, when we talk about mental health, we’re in our brains.

[00:44:29] David Joyce: We’re thinking about mental illness. How do we shift that to go, well, what’s the performance advantage? And we’re convinced, and it’s not just us, it’s, this is around the world. There is a huge competitive advantage to even making incremental gains in mental performance. So we’re talking about, um, self-efficacy, emotional regulation, motivation, confidence, those sorts of things.

[00:44:59] David Joyce: [00:45:00] huge increase around the world. Um, but like a big thing in Australia, New Zealand and Germany, about not just how do we get better at our, at our, um, technical skills of being a strength coach or a, um, athletic trainer or a psychologist or whatever, but how we work together as a team to function. So negotiation skills, influence skills, these sorts of things.

[00:45:24] David Joyce: That’s a really big thing that’s starting to evolve around the world. Um, Bespoke training, prescription, um, genetic manipulation. Um, we’re seeing much more of that sort of, um, in experimental cases. Um, and looking at the gut microbiome, the skin microbiome, and the bone microbiome, there’s big research going on here.

[00:45:46] David Joyce: Now about how we keep our athletes resilient. So, um, I’m involved with, um, a bit of work with the skin microbiome and it turns out that, you know, um, shower gels and all that sort of [00:46:00] stuff, not that great for you. Um, you know, good, good for your hands and for, you know, social circumstances. But, um, but in terms of actual overall infection, not, not that great.

[00:46:13] David Joyce: So we are just starting to tip the ice, get to the tip of the iceberg about these things that we don’t really consider too much in what we do. Right? So that can be a bit overwhelming. So what I’ve done now is to, to look at this through a number of different lenses to say, well, what are the most important things that we should be fo focusing on?

[00:46:38] David Joyce: So I looked at it through. , I’ve looked at each force through its likelihood. So how likely is it to occur, um, and rank that as highly possible or unlikely? What’s the impact likely to be major, moderate, or minor? How many people are likely to be impacted? So major, so entire [00:47:00] categories like, um, . So the whole university or all of all performance support staff, moderate might be just the s and c coaches and minor might be a psychologist.

[00:47:13] David Joyce: And then finally the malleability, which is to what extent can we do anything the hell about it. So as an example, um, uh, inflation, highly likely, big impact. It’s gonna affect all of us. What can we do about. Three tenths of nothing. So do we set our strategy around that? Probably not. Okay. Um, little bit of background.

[00:47:44] David Joyce: So you can then use using a formula, work out what’s gonna be a tier one, a tier two, and a tier three force. And the tier ones are the ones that are, um, we see as imperatives to address and to harness. Um, high. They need to be highly [00:48:00] likely and. . Um, um, two of the other three need to be read. Okay. So if we go back to this bit.

[00:48:09] David Joyce: So it needs to be, um, major impact, major scope, or, or major majorly malleable. Okay. Um, now this is from coaching. So this is what we are seeing as, um, the, the, the force rankings that coaches around the. Believe to be the, the most important things. Interestingly, and this is why I’m involved with, with optimizing and, and Jack is the founder and CEO of, uh, optimize.

[00:48:41] David Joyce: At the back here, you’ll get to meet in a bit. Um, it’s, the reason I’m involved with this is because around the world, this is seen as being the biggest bit to influence. So mental health, mental performance, wellbeing, highly likely, huge. Affect just about everyone. [00:49:00] And over the next five years, we’ve got stuff that we can do about it.

[00:49:04] David Joyce: That’s why it ranks as the number one issue around the world. Um, the reason this is important to do it this way is because in strategy we’ve got, we’ve got finite resources, although looking. Your beautiful establishment. It, it appears that you you don’t, but, um, but we all do, right? Like everyone’s got finite resources and for every marginal dollar, it means that you spend it here, but you’re not spending it there.

[00:49:32] David Joyce: So how do you rank them? And that’s what we’ve tried to do here. Um, so these are the things that we need to be most mindful of augmented decision making, um, over the next five years. We don’t think it’s gonna be, um, highly likely that it’s gonna be wide scale. Um, impact’s not gonna be huge, scope’s not gonna be huge, and we, um, we can’t do much about it right now.

[00:49:56] David Joyce: Okay? So that’s why it’s, it’s important. But [00:50:00] you, you look at that once you’ve, you look at that once you’ve ticked off all these other things.

[00:50:07] David Joyce: But in terms of the things that we need to be really mindful, , um, rise of women in sport, mental health, performance, wellbeing, um, funding bits. Um, and it might be that in, at, at ut that we’ve got a number of these ticked off already. So you can start going down and you go, right. So our, our leverage point might be how do we win the war for talent of our staff?

[00:50:32] David Joyce: How do we make, how do we make our organization the most appealing to work? So we are not just having to pay extra money to get people to move to Austin. They want to come here because there’s a real sense of belonging. There’s a real sense of progression. There’s a real sense of of mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

[00:50:54] David Joyce: That’s how we win the war for talent. So we’re seeing this around the world in all sorts of businesses at the moment, and that’s why I [00:51:00] like speaking to engage groups like this because this is stuff that you can. , you know, why did I want to come to, why did I want to come here? Um, it’s kind of cool to see the stadium, but I wanted to come here because of Donny because he makes me feel like I belong here.

[00:51:17] David Joyce: And it allows you guys to, um, get to hear it from a whole range of different speakers as well. So there’s a really strong piece there. So, um, Uh, coaches are concerned about the advocacy of support services. So the stuff that that we do is, is how do they make the most out of their performance support staff?

[00:51:41] David Joyce: So, um, that’s, that’s a quick tour of, of, um, the last sort of 18 months of my life doing a load of this sort of work. I’m really interested to, to open up the conversation. Cause I, I, I do this and I, I speak about this around the world, but I’m really interested to learn from [00:52:00] your context as well. Um, and, and Jack and I are gonna be here for today and, and probably most of tomorrow as well.

[00:52:08] David Joyce: And I think we’ve got some meetings lined up that, um, Trav, you’ve, you’ve spoken about and. To speak to some coaches and how we can, how we can look to learn about this mental wellbeing and mental performance bit. But, um, I’m, I’m particularly interested in to hear your thoughts about what, what I’ve just talked about there.

[00:52:33] Donnie Maib: Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this episode of the team Behind the Team podcast. For future episodes, go to iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, or Stitcher. We definitely want to keep having great guests on the show and great content. So if you have a moment, please go to iTunes, leave a rating and review and let us know how we.

[00:52:55] Donnie Maib: I’m Donnie Maib and thanks so much for tuning in.[00:53:00]