Leadership and Football

Leadership is not assigning roles. It is designing how the team moves.

That is why football, or rugby, are powerful metaphors for building teams.

Like great coaches, leadership is not about applying scripts.
It is about developing a philosophy of the game.

In organisations, that philosophy becomes the way you "animate" an operating system: the Product OS, the Brand OS, the Culture OS.

Like players, engineers and designers are not defined by a job title alone.
They should not be recruited to follow a fixed script, but for their ability to adapt to rhythm changes across the project and the team within a zone of expertise.

Leadership is about orchestration.
Ensuring, as in football matches, that movements do not overlap or create friction, while allowing people to evolve freely within defined zones.

This is not a widely formalised model of teamwork outside sports.
It is simply the approach I apply when I build teams.

And increasingly, it feels less like a preference and more like the future way to build organisations.