Most sports organisations never chose the way they now work.

It built up one decision at a time, under pressure, by people who came and went. I look at how your organisation really runs and report what I find, independently, and without judging the people in it.

Perhaps you recognise your organisation.

We say athletes come first. Where does that show in our budget, our selection decisions and our weekly schedule?

We keep adding specialists, rules and regulations. Which decisions has each one changed, and are we still what we were, or what we want to be?

Who is this organisation run for today? Look at our last three big decisions and our spending: who benefited, and was that a deliberate choice?

We added a department. What problem was it meant to solve, and what has changed in our decisions since it arrived?

Take our last selection decision. Did coaching, medical and analytics build one decision together, or did each department argue for its own results?

We are replacing our coach or manager again. Before we did, did we look at the role, the support around it and the targets we set, or only at the person?

Anyone who cares about an organisation can ask these questions, whether you sit on its board, play for it, coach in it, volunteer for it or support it from the stand.

What I do

I work inside your organisation, from a local club to a national programme, and establish how it really runs. What I examine depends on what your organisation needs: whether it does what it says it exists to do, and how strong its delivery is; whether its departments build decisions together or pursue their own results; why each function was created and what it changes; who decides and who answers for it in practice; what it depends on, and whether it holds when a funder, an owner, a coach or a volunteer leaves; whether people can raise concerns and anything happens when they do; whether it is ready for growth, a new facility or a change of ownership; whether earlier recommendations were carried out; whether the data it collects informs its decisions; and how a failure came about.

I begin by asking why the organisation exists, and I keep asking why until the answer reaches a structure or a process, never a person. What I find is set out in a written report with the evidence behind each finding, about functions, structures and decisions, never individuals. Each engagement is built around your organisation, with no template and nothing ranked against other organisations. I am independent and take no stake in what leadership decides afterwards.

The tools I use are described in detail here.

About

I have spent 35 years in sport, coaching and building high-performance systems, and twelve years playing at elite level. I have worked from local clubs and regional bodies to academies, national teams and the board of a national governing body, in more than one sport and in several kinds of role, in coaching, management and governance, so I know the pressures from more than one seat in the room. I hold the highest coaching and technical-director qualifications of the Royal Dutch Hockey Association and a master's degree in coaching science, with a thesis on culture change in elite teams.

I work with organisations in the Netherlands, Ireland, China and India, from local clubs to national programmes, across several sports, and I do not name them: confidentiality is part of the work. I do not work alone. Where a question calls for expertise beyond mine, I bring in specialists in their own fields, so that each part of the work is handled by someone expert in it. The Wortmann Methodology comes from all of this, and I use it where the question is alignment.