The Hidden Architecture of Human Performance Under Load with Clare Sadler | Episode 38

In this episode, Simon and Rusty sit down with Clare Sadler, founder of Beyond Instinct, to explore the architecture behind performance under load. 

Clare draws on the architecture of Human Systems Development — the discipline that shows what drives human performance under load and what determines whether capability becomes available, collapses or expands. The discipline is underpinned by decades of her work across elite sport, Olympic programmes, defence and intelligence‑related contexts, and complex leadership environments. Rather than simply working harder or adding more skills, she shows how the real opportunity lies in understanding the human system itself. The conversation challenges common assumptions around performance and the brain, revealing how people can access greater clarity, capacity and precision in high‑load moments.

Clare shows how this architecture reframes resilience and performance, and how making these underlying mechanisms visible helps individuals, teams and organisations unlock hidden capacity in real time. Grounded, practical and thought‑provoking, this episode explores what becomes possible when people learn to leverage the architecture that drives human behaviour and performance. 

In this episode:

• The conditions that determine whether capability becomes available, collapses or expands
• Why simply pushing harder is the wrong answer in high‑performance environments
• How misconceptions and inaccurate neuroscience about how the brain operates under load and challenge lead to wasted effort and inconsistent results
• How elite teams and leaders create clarity, precision and decision quality in complex situations

Find out more about Clare and her work here:

LinkedIn

Beyond Instinct

Please like, subscribe or follow, so you're notified of any new episodes coming up, and if you're keen to reach Rusty or Simon with any suggestions, feedback or comments, you can contact them via the show's LinkedIn page here:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-bouncebackability-podcast/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Simon Rusty here with the Bounce Bakability podcast who podcastly explores how to deal with obstacles, stepbacks, and changes. Hope you enjoyed the pod. Looking forward to it later on. Hi everybody, this is Simon on his own with Rusty. Um just as a quick intro, because this is an incredible podcast with Claire from Beyond Instinct. So this is a very short intro to get us started. Welcome to the pod. Yeah, I'm alright. Not bad.

SPEAKER_02 0:30

You've not met this guest, so this is another kind of surprise for you. Have you? We spoke.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Yeah, did you? We did. In your face, I'm sure. You can't ambush me this time. No, we we um we've I mean we've not met face to face, have we, Claire? But we've we hung out online supposedly for half an hour and it ended up being quite a lot longer than that. Because uh Claire's pretty fascinating person. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Oh well you should do the intro then if you're the expert.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I'm not an expert. There's a big difference between ambushed and expert. In between there, there's some other things like someone who's met someone once. Come on. So Yeah, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

So so look, uh, I do a bit of work with uh Ollie Phillips, an optimist. Claire does a lot of work with us, and then uh from my past, she would also have been around England Sevens in another lifetime, which must feel like another lifetime to you as well, Claire. Um, and so yeah, I just thought the stuff that she's uh doing uh would be super interesting and probably a slightly different perspective to some perspectives we've heard previously. So uh without any further ado, Claire Sudler. Thank you very much. Hi, Claire. Nice to see you once again. Hi.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Yeah, good to see you. So do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself then, what your what your background is and what you do? Because I think it's quite interesting. Different, very different perspective, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yes. Um so I have spent uh almost three decades working um with clients that all look different on the surface. So elite sport, complex, uh corporates and global companies, um defense-related institutions and organizations, national infrastructure, science, kind of emergency response. So they all look very different on the surface, but they all have one thing in common. Well, they have two things in common, really. They all work under what I would call uh intense load, load being pressure of some type or other, and their decisions all have real-world consequences, either for themselves or for other people. Uh, sometimes those consequences are individual and sometimes they are national. Um and the work that I do is based around one thing in lots of different contexts, which is what is it that causes human systems to collapse under load? And how can you use the same conditions for the same system to thrive and unlock hidden capacity and more capability? Um, and that what that looks like and what that translates to depends on the context. So in elite sport, it might be um faster, stronger, more adaptive. In um corporate business, it might be more effective leaders, more effective teams. In other conts in other situations, it might be people who become more effective at saving lives or preventing risk. It just depends on the context. So I love my job because it involves something that I've been fascinated with for a really long time, which is people and why they do the things that they do and what makes them tick, and what makes them succeed, and what makes them struggle.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

So, how did you end up doing that?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Um I think I've kind of always done it on some level because from a very young age I've always been really curious about what is it that makes people do the things that they do, what makes certain things stick for particular people, and how is it that you can have the same two people in the same situation, but they respond totally differently or they might see things differently. So I've always been interested in patterns and um the reasons why people do things. Um and the first kind of work that I did wasn't related um obviously to this overtly to this kind of work at all, but I very quickly realised that I'm interested in what you might call performance and ended up working, worked for a small um coach development company. I did some training, I retrained, and then after a year I went out on my own and I haven't looked back since. Um, so it it's it's been driven by a lifelong fascination with people and what makes them excellent and what makes them struggle, and that's kind of the core of it, really. And um the work that I do, um I didn't set out to work in those areas. I've it's all been word of mouth. I work with one person, I was introduced to one team and they passed me on to somebody else who passed me on to somebody else, and it's kind of grown like that.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Well, I mean, uh having spent a little bit of time with you, uh you might not agree with this. Um, you definitely come at it from a different angle for me than most people I come across, um, which I think's absolutely fascinating. Um I don't want to steal your thunder. What do you what do you think you what do you think you do differently to others? Because I I think you come at it from a very different and very interesting point of view.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

So yeah, I'm trying to um well the the feedback that I get from people is this is completely different, you have a totally different perspective. Um, this wasn't what I was expecting. In fact, it's better, it's quicker, it's faster, um, it's deeper. But I guess um I I think about patterns, I notice information that other people don't, and I think about things from a an architecture perspective. Um and that translates in the environments that I work into. Okay, so if the outputs or the symptoms of behavior or mindset or confidence, what is it in the core that actually drives that? And and and it is core, that's that's the neuroscience, that's the mechanisms. But the the way that I've kind of developed that is through those years of experience trying to understand, okay, so how does that how does that apply from context to context? What does what do special operators have in common with um a leader in a science institution? Or what do uh victim survivors have in common with an elite athlete? I kind of see patterns across context and I'm I naturally take information from one context and pull it together and combine it with others. It's just the way that I think. I'm I'm a kind of a what-ifer by nature. You know, what happens if I had this and this to get that? What if that person or that team or that organization could do this? What would it take? What's what's the thing that's driving this rather than what we're being presented with? And I think that's partly because of the different types of training that I've had, but it's also partly, I think, back to that kind of innate in curiosity that I've had since I was small, which is, you know, if we look at that kettle over there, how do I know that you see what I see?

SPEAKER_03 8:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

How is how do I know it's the same thing? And if it is the same thing or it's similar, how does that affect how you respond to it or what we do? Um, and and in my experience, that's not the way most people think.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

Um it gets me well, so I think expertise is in the eyes. So when you start talking about noticing, like it's interesting that you might notice something different to someone else, and then also like, and then I'm interested in your options. So one of the things when we had the call and I was skiing in Denver, and I was like, I was skiing, but I was on the call and like listening in was around yeah, just some of the some of your options felt like they would be different to most people's options, and then some of the stuff you spoke about noticing. So I think about this. So our job is to like notice stuff, and then we have options around what we can do next. And you were, I think you spoke about something like well, I might look at like the depth of their breathing at that point, or I might pay attention to like their heart rate, or and and so you were talking about more sustainable change and uh habits and that type of stuff, I guess. Yeah, but I'm summarising it badly, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

No, no, no, it seems that you're gonna think you are, and you and you dropped a massive flex in about skiing in Denver whilst listening to things.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

I mean, just to say I got to the top of the mountain and there's an optimist coaching pool, which I knew Claire was doing, and so I was like, I need to go on because I learn loads, and then like I was like, Oh, I really want to ski, but I can't get it for school. Like, it's like really helpful. So I did both at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

So, does that feel like a particularly resilient way to listen to an optimist coaching call while skiing? What do you reckon, Claire? You're the expert.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

I was skiing, and then I'm I'm learning at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Like, that's that's pretty cool. I suppose there's a few things. Um, you came on the call because he wanted to learn something. And most people think about learning in context of repetition or context or facts, but that's not what actually dictates what you learn and what your system takes in. What dictates what you learn is your state. So, in some ways, it was probably the best place to be if you were in your happy space.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Awesome. Um I completely hear that.

SPEAKER_02 10:23

Uh and it and it's what do you mean by state? Like, give me an example of like a state that will be unhelpful and a state that will be helpful. I'm now thinking about GCSE revision last night when my daughter was crying. I'm smiling, I'm shivering maths down her throat, which I wasn't, by the way. We had a hug, we calmed down, it was all good.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

When I say state, I mean neurobiological state, your the state um that your uh your system, your because when I talk about human systems, I'm meaning individual systems inside of you, relational ones in between two people inside of teams and also organizations as well. So it's kind of scalable this idea. Um and one of the if I kind of back up a second, the way that our systems work is through a mechanism called prediction. So if you're uh you're an individual human or a team or uh organization has a finite amount of energy that it can use and resources. So it like when you budget, like an accountant, the only way you can make sure you don't run out of energy is to forecast to guess. And that process is called prediction in humans, it's um uh neuroscientific uh process that we do. And when the system's in a resourceful state, those predictions update. So if a system has a best guess, I'm gonna go in this situation, X, Y, Z is gonna happen. And then something different happens that produces a mismatch or an error, and your system exerts a lot of energy to try to understand what's going on, what's happening here, how what's what's working. And when you're in a resourceful state, when you're able to access all your capabilities and your system's working the way that it should, then those predictions update. But if you're not in a resourceful state or conditions externally or internally prevent you from doing that, then what happens is your your system starts to close down and become rigid, and you default to old patterns. Doesn't matter if those patterns are appropriate or not, what matters is they're metabolically or energetically cheap. And that's why you get people demonstrating behaviors or teams doing things that they're not supposed to be doing. So one way of thinking about learning is prediction updating and what what your system needs to do that. So it it's a it's an architectural way of thinking about learning. And most leadership performance models are exposed to neuroscience, which is older. They're older models that don't fit the way that we work. So the older version of learning is if you repeat something enough times, uh neurons that fight together wire together, repetition equals learning. But it's more complex than that we know now. That can happen, but only if your system's in the right state to update. So the state that you're in, you can think of state as a a doorway or a gate. And if that gate is closed, it doesn't matter what capability or skills you've got, you can't access them. So learning like change, like performance is state dependent. So going back to what you were saying about well, what is a state? State is neuro from a neuroscience perspective, is the right metabolic state to be able to be flexible enough to update to take in that new information. But the way that people experience it is well, I feel good, I feel curious, I feel open, I feel able to take in the information, I've got clarity about what the person's saying, I've got all the situation, I've got the bandwidth, the capability to understand what's happening, I've got perspective, which means I can think about different options and um different scenarios and how this might be applied, and I've got um presence, I'm here, I'm able to relate to the people in the room or the situation, and I'm making good decisions, my decision policy is good because I'm able to discern of all the options that I've got, which ones are most suitable. But when the system's not in a resourceful state, prediction shuts down. You can't take in new information. Strategic thinking is the first thing to go. So people lose perspective, um, and all those other capabilities, those universal capabilities shut down. And the experience becomes oh my god, I've got 50 tabs open in my brain and I can't think. Everything feels urgent, but I don't know what to do next. And people become externally, they look like they're really focused on the details. They're not able to see the bigger picture, they don't delegate, they everything is short-term horizon. Um so this it looks, it looks like issues with performance, but what it actually is, is a capacity issue. So if you think of capacity as like your pipeline or your access, because that's what gives you access to the capabilities that you've got. So if we google full circle and we're talking about learning, and really what learning is is change, and in the in a context we've talked about, whether you're working with corporates or elite athletes or special operators or whatever the environment is, that individual or the relationship you might be working with, or the team, or the organization's ability to perform well and also to be resilient, depends on their ability to take in your information and update. And um that process is not well understood. People start talking about threat, and they start talking about um their you know, prefrontal cortex being hijacked, they start talking about repetition and all of the things that people normally go to for performance, learning, resilience, quality decision making, strategic thinking, innovation, creativity, they're usually outputs of a system that's working well. And the problem with that is if you're in an environment where there's no load, happy days. As soon as you've got load, they don't work anymore. And what what I found is in my career, the situations, the context that I've worked, and the people that I've worked with, the teams and the organizations, they operate under really high load. So all of those other things that might be mistaken for solutions or levers are stripped away. You can see they don't work on the load. Sure. So for me, learning is a really interesting concept for some me, learning's about change, but that's not how people always look at it. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 17:25

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean, it makes sense to me. I think learning is about transfer, but and I guess that's change as well. I'm sure you've uh I think you might have maybe you've recommended, but uh makes it it made me think of hopefully it's the right book, seven and a half lessons about the brain.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yeah, Lisa Feldman Barrett's research, uh Miller, uh Carl Friston, they all operate in the same space, which is modern neuroscience shows us that the way that we function in any environment, but particularly under Loden in terms of performance and learning, depends on our ability to update those, whether you call them old programs or you use the correct sense of predictions. So that book I think is great because she very eloquently lays out these key things you need to know. This is what makes us function. And it flies in the face of what most people know and accept about performance. You know, so the the whole idea that learning takes a certain amount of time and you've got to put in the hard work and effort, and those things are not levers for performance or learning.

SPEAKER_02 18:34

It made me think about so Kirk's been on the Google, uh on the pod who's at Google, and he talks a lot about that busy is the new stupid. Or maybe load is the new stupid. Um, but that kind of 50, I love the the uh analogy of having 50 tabs open in my head, which I often do. Um and it's pretty hard, like your brain's a busy beater at that point. It's actually really hard for you to think about other options.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Because you're trying to do it from inside a state that's not right. Yeah, you the the access is not there anymore. You know, there's a universal response that all human systems have under load. Load can be uncertainty, it can be lack of resources, it can be, you know, tight time frames, it can be real risk and those things sort of combined. But under load, people don't lose their skills or their experience or their knowledge, they just lose access to them.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

So when you're in that state of, oh my god, 50 tabs, can't think. It's feedback, it's a symptom, it's an output, not the thing to actually try to resolve, which I think is where most people can spend a lot of time trying to do that, but they're working at the wrong level.

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Yeah, and I'm trying to connect some more stuff in my head. So I'm thinking about like Gary Klein and Pri Mortiman performing mental simulations. I don't know whether this is the type of stuff you're talking about with people, or like Roger Nebone stuff where how you access, how you become more experts so that you have less moments of surprise. There might be like moments of load where, like, oh my God, I've never seen this situation before.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

I'm just curious, like But they can all they can all also be the opposite because arms are load what dictates whether the system collapses or accesses hidden capacity and grows more and does faster, quicker, stronger, depends on how the system's able to take in that information. So what you were saying about rehearsal, visual rehearsal particularly, it works very well for certain situations, but it doesn't change the state or the access that somebody has. So if you there's a few videos on uh LinkedIn at the moment of um the Formula One drivers and other athletes going through the circuit in their mind before a race, and that that's a different kind of preparation because they're in the right state to do it. That doesn't allow them to learn, but what it does is it creates uh a certain amount of certainty at an architectural level so that um there's less load on the system. So, what I mean by that is if you if I go back to some of the more high-pressure environments or people that I've worked with, you know, extreme, high consequence, high pressure, complex environments force people and teams to create certainty in different ways. So if you take special ops, they create certainty in the same way that they do in aviation or in the theatre. There's routines, there's checklists, there are standard responses to certain situations. You might not know the content of the situation, but the certainty comes from the response. So you can put a human system or a team of human systems into a very volatile, uncertain environment, and they can operate well because they've got the Infrastructure to do that. So if you think about that in a leadership context, most people would assume that certainty is about content of messages, but it's not. It's about structure and how people message and how often their reliability in terms of response, not content. So those things all affect state as well.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

So let's imagine you're working with Simon to change him. Which he probably needs. My immediate thought when when you were you were saying that was the amount of coaches that get videoed after a match and go, oh, we spoke about that in the week, or we, and actually there's no real thought about the how, which I think is what you're speaking about, like the skill of that stuff.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

Well, yes, and no, but you usually the assumption often is the person or the team hasn't changed or done what they've been, what they've had the feedback about because they don't want to, there's resistance, or because they're not capable of it. But if they're if the environment and the individual doesn't have the conditions that they need to be able to update those predictions, to take in new information, their system just says, okay, what's the cheapest option? The cheapest option is the one that's most familiar, which is why people revert to type in terms of behavior. So in terms of changing and learning, there are lots of other considerations that aren't about here's my insight. Insight doesn't equal change. It's helpful, but there are other conditions that that govern that. So a lot of the work that I so go ahead, Simon.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

I just think it's quite I I mean, it's fascinating. I was thinking about a lot of management leadership type strategies to deal with that is to try and access people's automatic state and sort of put blockers in the way of how they might that so to make it more expensive for them to take an action consequence. So if I say to somebody, um, please can you go and do this um thing and they don't really want to do it, but yeah, just give it a go. They they might well not do it because it's cheaper and easier not to. Um and they don't really want to do it anyway, and they don't feel like there's any real pressure on them. But then leaders will then apply pressure to that situation to force them to overcome their automatic response, which is then from what you're saying, increasing load and creating some really poor outcomes by saying, oh, this is really serious, and if you don't do it, you're gonna be in loads of trouble. And I think we all instinctively know that's probably a bad idea, but it's really nice to hear some really quite strong and I guess forehead-slappingly obvious theory behind why that actually really does not work, because you're just increasing load, aren't you? And yes, okay, it's no longer cheap to do the easy thing, but you're just creating some other really complex process in someone's head that is making everything work badly.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Yes, that you're you're absolutely right. And often the solutions that leaders or organizations reach for not only don't solve the problem, they can exacerbate it, because they are thinking about it in terms of the outcomes or the outputs or the symptoms. So behaviour, you know, confidence, motivation, all those kinds of things. They're not they when you look at it from an architectural perspective, if you work with the right mechanisms and levers, you get the change immediately and it lasts. And um the work that I do, the consistent feedback that I get is I didn't know it could be this simple or this quick. And people are often shocked, not only at the speed of the change, but the fact that it lasts, because traditional thinking is back to that old model of repetition, you've got to practice. And repetition is helpful, but it's not helpful for learning. Repetition does something else. Repetition creates the structures and the infrastructure I was talking about before, so people know what to do. You know, if you go to AE and a crash team is waiting for you, they might not know what's coming, but they know what the protocols are. But when you apply that in a corporate sense or even an elite sport, that's not the way it works. People are trying to pull the wrong lever, and that's why accuracy in the if it is neuroscience, and that's what people are being told is so important. Because if they're not told the accurate um version, they're reaching for the wrong lever. And not only does it not work under load, you get inconsistency, it actually exacerbates the problem they're trying to resolve.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah. My golf prey, who who tries to help me play golf a bit better, and yeah, poor chap, he's got a pretty thankless chart to under get me to work to play golf better. But I mean he he talks about practice making permanent. He also says, or you know, um, practice makes perfect. And he just says, well, practice makes permanent. If you're practicing the wrong thing, you're just making you're just creating very poor habits and you're also reinforcing habit that isn't really helping you very much. Does that speak to what you're saying? I don't know if that's I think uh as I've said it out loud, I've realised that that probably doesn't actually make any sense to what you're saying. But anyway, what did that provoke?

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Well that the the practice often reassures people or gives them false confidence and then they wonder what's wrong with them when under load they can't do it. Yes. I guess the abuse happens with teams and organizations as well. So it's it's so it's not that practice doesn't have a use, it's just the wrong um output for what people are actually trying to change.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

It doesn't create high performance, it just it just creates a process.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

No, and and when you use the right process, the change can be, you know, it can be very, very quick. And what happens is is that so a lot of the work that I do in terms of what I would call recoding is if you think about those situations that I was talking about where if someone or if a team is under load and their system is deciding, and this is all unconscious, which way do I go? What's cheaper? What energy have I got? Uh what energy can will allow me to do what I need to do? Do I have to take the cheaper option, stop updating, or can I go the way that I choose? One of the things that I do is I give those the prediction in terms of resources that the person wants, whatever it is they want to be able to do, the right weightings they want to load, it's cheaper for them to do that option. So if I take a really simple example, like a I don't know, something like a phobia.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

The um the kid the the I'm scared of needles. I mean, my first thought was can you stop eating biscuits? I mean, but I'm cool to go with that, I'm really cool to go with.

SPEAKER_00 29:03

So I'm really Oh, and I train to go to the Olympics, you know, when talking about biscuits.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

I'm scared of needles. Like I'm a real phobia of needles.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Well, so under load, the the option that your system chooses is to respond in the way that you call a phobia. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

So the traditional approach to that is repetition. Well, practice, I'll tell you, I'll give you insight, it's not gonna hurt you.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

All of that kind of stuff that we do in corporate consciousness. You don't think it's at school? They took me into a room full of needles to warm me up to say me and Kelly Easy and Joe Devere, they took us into a room and said, Oh, we just want you to get comfortable with the 200 needles in the game.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Is that what you're calling cognitive load?

SPEAKER_00 29:45

There's no I'm underloaded. And this, you know, and at that point, your experience, which is the load, is is is probably complete terror.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Terror. I can remember, I can remember going in the room. It's a little bit like we were talking earlier about GCS exams, like go back into the sports hall at school, and yeah, that's the first thing it makes me think of.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

Like so, so the the cost-effective prediction is this is gonna hurt me.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

So your system responds in a way that that's gonna happen. Don't worry, I haven't got any needles anywhere. Yeah, good. But you can you can change, you can recode that response, you can update it so that is no longer the cheapest option. So if you think of it in terms of this might sound like a weird comparison, it's a bit like the weather forecast, you know, when they say, Oh, it's gonna rain when I was younger, it's gonna rain, it's gonna be sunny, it's gonna snow, whatever. These days it's there's a 30% chance of rain, or there's a 20% chance of, I don't know, a windstorm or whatever it might be. Which means it's probability, that's all it is. It's the weighting, which is most likely to be true. And your system has a series of options like that based on your personal history, your experience that you is unique to you in the same way that um, you know, England rugby will have the same as a unit or a corporate team will have the same, even as an organization. I've seen this as organization levels as well. Um, and then when you recode that, what happens is instead of you know going from with the phobia example, bad to worse, sheer terror or just a little bit, you know, plus sweating plus you know, whatever it might be. Fainting. Yeah, fainting, which is is common. Um, the other option that you recode becomes the most probable that the brain thinks is right and the cheapest metabolically or energetically to run. And that translates into it's a needle. So what? And I can say this because I've done this with lots of people. Yeah. And I've I've doing something in the next two minutes. I'm joking. Not joking. Not online, but yes. And and and on average, that process takes between 20 and 40 minutes, so there's nothing else happening. Sometimes there are other things going on. And you know, some people might be thinking, well, why are we talking about phobias when we should be talking about leadership or performance? But the mechanism's the same. The architecture is the same.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

I totally get it.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

It's just the difference between instead of it being a needle, it might be a room full of investors, or it might be, do you know what? I've got to make a split-second decision. Um, you know, a client of mine went to the world championships. You might see my post on LinkedIn, 13-year-olds, indoor skydiving. Came seventh, did a fantastic job. You know, it's like Formula One on a column of air, except there's no car and you're just wearing a helmet. And, you know, here's routine. There is no time to think. But even in those conditions, the recoding that you do can make massive jumps in clarity and performance. So, you know, his coach, his experience, and his dad was like, wow, we couldn't believe it. You could see the before and after. And that excites me because it shows what the what human systems are capable of, whether that's an individual, a working relationship, you know, a team or organization. And I find that fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Yeah, me too. I remember when I was skiing you, it's because you were one of the things you were talking about was like almost like that contrast between almost like the old way and the new way, type of thing. That was in my head. So I I mean, I would use old way, new way a bit of coaching, but I didn't know whether you can like like delve into that stuff a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 33:24

Well, I mean, you you you keep using the word coaching, and I guess I want to say I would say what I do isn't coaching, but it's the closest proximity because um it works from a completely different mechanism. What would you call it? Recode. Well, to me, it's architecture. And it and it's recoding those predictions because what we're doing is we're working with the levers that drive performance. So, you know, those universal capabilities that I was talking about before are the they're what dictate and the basis of all human performance. So learning, innovation, creativity, um, decision-making, leadership, excuse me, whatever you care to say. And from that, everything else grows. So it looks like coaching, it looks like leadership development, but it's from a totally different mechanism because it's architectural, not behavior-based or psychology-based or whatever. And those, those, the things that coaching, psychology, et cetera, deal with are the outputs that those systems produce. Um, so we can talk a little bit about it if you like, but I, you know, it's like I was saying, like I said, before we started recording, you know, there's a parallel between human systems and cyber systems. You might go, what are you talking about, Claire? That's crazy. But they're both architectural, they both operate in the same way. And when it comes to something like resilience, cyber systems are ahead of what most people think in terms of resilience for human systems, which is related to what you're asking me. So, you know, traditionally in cybersecurity, it was all about strong perimeter, got to be tough, can't let um, no breaches, basically. But and then, you know, move back to whatever stability there is afterwards. But that's not the accepted standard now. The accepted standards now is you plan for breach, and what dictates the resilience of the system is either being able to maintain access when something's going wrong or someone's being hacked, and to regain it quickly afterwards. And human systems are exactly the same. So, what dictates resilience, or what you were saying about learning before, is the human system, so the individual, the team, the organization's ability to maintain access to those capabilities under load or when something is, then the conditions destabilize, and then an adaptive, dynamic um adjustment afterwards. So it's not return to baseline, there is no baseline. You know, if you look at cyber systems, even a week old is obsolete and it's the same with people. It's about adjusting, reconfiguring to where you are now, because in the neuroscience terms, that's what your system's doing all the time.

SPEAKER_02 36:19

Yeah. Just you made me think about uh you won't mind me showing this, Aiden, and and guess this is I'm just interested to see what you think about this. Uh I was doing a bit of work with uh coaches over in Ireland and we chatted about some stuff, and then he went to the camp and then he rang me afterwards, he said it went really well. He said, But if I'm honest, Rusty, like the night before, I debated aborting everything we chatted about, and like had this MM. It was interesting, like, and then he didn't, but I guess I mean you've worked with lots of of coaches as well, like performance coaches, yeah. Performance coaches. I think like often they're in environments where there is just so much load and so much pressure and judgment and yeah this stuff, and they've got like often quite narrow, like their identity is quite narrow and it's tied to it. And so I I think some of this stuff can feel hardened, like it's taking forever.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

I mean you're talking about a very cheap option for them to take, which is speaking that language. I'm trying to reflect what Claire's saying, but it sounds like they've got a standard way of doing things which it doesn't require a huge amount of decision from them, does it? So under pressure, they're gonna do what's the easiest and they know what's convenient. Every knowing they're not gonna get judged or shamed or all the rest of it. They're gonna they're gonna do what they think is quickest and easiest, or what their system says is quickest and easiest.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

It's unconscious, and I think really careful here because it can sound like people are taking shortcuts, but that's not what's happening, and that's when you get that mismatch between do you know what? Next time I'm in this environment, I'm going to do XYZ, and then blow me, I get there, and something different happens. What happens? And the way people often describe it is I was absolutely fine, and then out of nowhere, XYZ. And and what's happening is is it's that unconscious processing, because you know, unconscious processing precedes conscious awareness by at least half a second, which is the other reason why um the way people might have been taught previously to change things isn't really effective because it's like trying to steer a train from the last carriage, as a good friend of mine says. I think it's a great analogy. Because by the time, you know, you might be thinking about what you want to be doing, but your brain's already decided. So if you look at the research, you know, Barrett and Mel have published a paper very recently that shows that we don't respond to the outside world and make decisions. We predict first based on past experience, brain predicts first, and then the incoming information either reinforces that or says it's not right. So our whole kind of the whole normal view of stimulus response is the wrong way around, which means that it's even more important to use the right levers. And I and I see this all the time in in leadership and also in elite sport as well. You know, just take a moment, take a breath, create a pause, think about it, and then you'll be fine. But what people don't realize is the ability, the capability to take a pause is dependent on load because that's what collapses your bandwidth and your access or not. The door's shut, doesn't matter what tools you've got.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Sure, sure. And I mean that makes me think of Victor Frankel, the in between stimulus and response, there is a pause, and in that pause lies our growth and our freedom. So what you're saying is that's possibly the wrong way around.

SPEAKER_00 39:57

The modern neuroscience shows us it's the wrong way around.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

So uh so part of that process of the brain figuring out what's actually happening in here, and do I have the metabolic resource, do I have the energy to be able to deal with this situation? Um is based on my past experience or the team's past experience, what's happening now? So we don't actually predict based on the real world, we predict based on our past. Which, when you think about it, is quite interesting because that's not the way that people approach performance development or learning or leadership development. It's the other way around. People try and do it the other way around. So they're given data, they're given information, they're given insights, and then somehow that's expected to update that. And this is what I was saying before about those high consequence, high-load, complex environments. In those environments, all of that stripped away and you can see how that doesn't work, and that's why they have different protocols.

SPEAKER_02 41:08

And I guess the implications are that if you're in like a team environment, then those protocols become even more important.

SPEAKER_00 41:15

They do, because you know, somebody said to me the other day, you know, all this stuff you've been saying about uncertainty and you know, load. So what are we are we all stuffed? You know, is it is it hopeless? What do we do? Because many industries and you know, elite sport, you'll know from your experience as well as you know, mine, that you can't predict what's going to happen. It is uncertain, but it's not about the content, it's about the structure and the processes and how people communicate because that's what builds certainty. So, in a in a um an elite sport environment, if you particularly if you've got somebody new, say they've never been to the Olympics before, or they've never taken a free kick for England or they've never filled in a blank, it's not about being able to tell them this is what's going to happen, this is the outcome. It's about creating the right structure for the architecture for their system to feel certain so that those that mechanism can continue to update so they are actually present in the environment that they're in rather than reverting to old um stories or predictions or you know defaults.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

So I love this. I love the fact that you're just holding your head.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

I know, it's blowing my mind. So I'm thinking with your brain live. I know my brain, I think my brain may be oozing out of my ears, but fortunately, my headphones are keeping it in. The um I'm thinking of time travel. So time traveling. Yeah, so we're going into the future, saying this is what's likely to happen, and so this is what we're saying isn't really working. We're going into the future. This is what's likely to happen. You're gonna take a free kick for England, and this is what's gonna happen, this is how we're gonna do it. Um, those kinds, it's this future prediction. Whereas we've learnt lots of things in the past that are actually gonna then kick in under pressure that are gonna create an outcome for us. So, really, we need to go back, we need to time travel into the past and think about what we've learnt and try and unpick that. Is uh or am I I'm trying to simplify it for my poor brain.

SPEAKER_00 43:22

You could do that, but really, really, what it's about is it's about maintaining the conditions so the brain can keep updating that information. So if you take the example of a free kick, suppose that, you know, I'm thinking of one particular person here that I've worked with before. Suppose you've had bad experiences on a world stage. Suppose things have happened that were physically as well as psychologically and emotionally painful. When you go back into that environment, your brain's already decided the likelihood of this happening unconsciously is X, Y, Z. And if the load is high enough. And their conditions in the system can't maintain that ability to update, then they're gonna choke. They're gonna do something that they don't want to do. So it in that situation, you can do a couple of things. The team structure around that is really important. So if you borrow from special ops, the way they do that, um how you actually prepare that person and the the um I was gonna say tools, but tools are important, only as important as what they can access. How you help them consider and prepare for that situation, and then how you either um update those old predictions or stories. So there's been plenty of times that I've worked with people, elite athletes, where because of injury or sometimes situations that had nothing to do with the sport were derailing, they were defaults that they were defaulting to that they didn't want to, where we've updated those. And then what happens is that the situation where the brain would predict one thing, it starts to predict the recode instead. So the result is you get the behavior that you want. So you kind of glide by the natural tendencies of the nervous system to have the output that you want, but what you're doing underneath is you are changing the weighting, you're changing the choices that that if there is sufficient load for that to collapse, they revert to the one that is actually most useful for them. And most of the time the collapse doesn't happen. You just get you just get what they want. So the experience for the athlete is do you know what? If we think about rugby, when I used to play such and such up against whoever it is in New Zealand, it just didn't perform very well. But actually now it makes me feel good. And their experience is just I'm more confident, I'm stronger, I think quicker, I've got more time on the ball, because you've made the changes under the hood that mean that that's what they access under load.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Okay, so when you're playing the needle example, yeah when you're playing New Zealand, it's they're gonna be really they're gonna be really great, we're gonna lose because we always lose. Um that's the sort of automatic programming that then kind of means you're gonna lose anyway. But it but if you reframe that in terms of this is really exciting, they're the best in the world, it's a great opportunity to demonstrate what you can do. Is it uh no?

SPEAKER_00 46:31

Oh no, sorry, it's deeper than that. You can do you can help someone reframe that, but basically what you're doing is um you're creating a default. So I'm creating a default for the system to use under that, that which is the cheapest under that particular load. So the athlete doesn't have to do anything, they go into the normal circumstances the way they would any other time, but their res the way their system responds is different, it's automatic. So if I if I use the example of a needle, instead of you thinking about because you your skin crawls when you think about the needle, I could see it, yeah. Instead of that happening, you're just like, well, it it's like it what if thinking about a needle would be like thinking about a pen? And you were just like, so scared of pens as well. You don't have to do anything different, lighter than the sword. The updating's already coding's already happened, but in my experience, people aren't aware that you can do that, then they're not aware that you can do that. So, you know, I I've done this with players that have been injured and come back from recovery, and what happens is you get compensation, um, and that compensation because of the memory or the experience of what's happened changes the way that they load their muscles, which makes them more open to injury, or they can't they can't do the thing that they could be before, they can't drive the same way or swim or tackle or whatever it might be. And then you make that change and you can see it is instant. And elite sport, sport in particular is the purest expression of this architecture, so which is why I love it so much. So you make that change, and there is a distinct before and after, and when it's made right, it never goes back, and the person doesn't have to think about it. So, in if I go back to the needle example, you don't have to think, oh, needles are fine, everything's okay, it's all same. You just like, well, it's just another day, it's just you know, just one of those things. And you can do it in context of um recovery from whether it's injury or maybe bad tackle, or I don't know, you go to the Olympics and you do something you shouldn't do and you end up um not doing as well as you could do. But it also goes the other way as well. So people who already perform well, when you recode their systems in this way that I'm talking about, and you can help them maintain the conditions that deliver more consistent access to capability under load, suddenly you unlock all this hidden capacity so they can do the same things more quickly, with less energy, without thinking so much, and it's more enjoyable. And then that also creates conditions for new capabilities and skills to grow faster, more easily. So you get this massive jump in performance and people just keep going, which is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 49:26

How's your brain sound? It's it's melted. My brain's performance is definitely under load. Um it's absolutely fascinating stuff. I mean, we could talk for hours. Um could you give us a practical example of something you've done with someone where you've actually seen that, what you've actually said, or actually you did. Because I because I'm fascinated by the I mean, what are you what because I I am struggling if I'm completely honest. I hear what you're saying. There's this like there's the architecture, and it's habitual. This is how I behave in this situation when I'm under pressure, and you can't it's not conscious, so you're not pausing and going, I'm gonna choose to do X, Y, and Z because you can't, because that's just how you're gonna behave.

SPEAKER_03 50:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

So what do you actually do for that person so that that becomes automatic for the what they what they actually desire?

SPEAKER_02 50:22

This is me, by the way, because I've eaten the full packet of biscuits before I pause. Yeah. And I go, Oh, I shouldn't have eaten the whole packet of biscuits. Because I just it just yeah, it just happens.

SPEAKER_00 50:33

And that's exactly what just happened. How you know um, and give you a couple of examples. So the one which I've already talked about, which is is not the I've eaten a whole packet of biscuits, it's that I'm already doing well, and then there was a big jump, which is um the young lad that I was talking about who went to the indoor skydiving championships. So I he I've never been inside a wind tunnel. I've never done indoor skydiving. I've jumped out of a plane, but I've not done it indoors. So he explained to me what he was doing well and what he wanted to be able to do better. And some of that was related to time out of the tunnel, some of it was related to time in the tunnel. And thinking about this in terms of the architecture, I could see what the levers were. There was clarity and there was bandwidth in terms of his ability to do what he wanted to do. So clarity is being able to understand what's going on and update, and bandwidth is having the capacity to hold all the different scenarios all at the same time. Yeah. And then we we ran through the protocol. It took 20 minutes, and then he went to a training session, and then he messaged me, and his coach messaged me to say, wow, massive jump in performance. He's doing something so much better, he's his moves are sharper, because what that translated to for his system was to be able to react faster, to be able to do more of the things that he wanted to do without necessarily having to consciously think about it, which is often where people get stuck and they kind of struggle. And it took less energy, and because it took less energy, it released the load that was compounding the problem in the first place. So you get this kind of feedback loop that improves. And since we've done that session, we've done other work as well. His performance continued to jump and improve because it's a it's a feedback system. Because the less load there is, the more able he is to update, to respond quickly. And what people see is this is a situation where there is no time for conscious thought, which is why it's a really good example.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

So, what loads did you take out?

SPEAKER_00 52:48

There were some things that were intruding on his clarity that were stopping him from being able to do what he wanted to do. So, what I did was I um I changed the way that his system was in neuroscience speak, I changed the loading that the system gave to those options. But in uh the kind of example that we were talking about, what I did was I tied those two things together. So instead of in that situation, his system reacting one way on the underload, it was doing something different. So if I give you another example, maybe it might make sense. So I worked with a senior leader a couple of years ago, very experienced, um global company, real expert, fantastic at what he does, could talk incredibly eloquently in front of small groups, large groups, whatever you choose to. Put a camera in front of him, problem. Not logical. Why is it? I see a camera and I can't do this. So we changed the way that his system was responding under that particular type of load, so that instead of uh going to the default of whatever it was he was choosing, it was he was choosing the same default unconsciously that allowed him to communicate well in groups. So you can think of it like overwriting or recoding, but really what it's doing is it's changing the automatic choice that the systems make in that particular situation. Another example, I've not been to the Olympics before, I'm really nervous. What do I do? Because my coach has got me doing breath work, which can be helpful. You know, my my mum's told me to do this, my teammates are telling me to do this, but actually I'm really stressed about this and it's affecting my performance. Okay, so what what are the what are the the particular predictions or defaults? What are the situations that that's happening in? How do you want to be different? Okay, we choose those predictions, wire them together, recode it, and then he's not nervous anymore. In fact, not only is he not nervous, he's looking forward to it. He's excited about it, he's curious, which means that the load dissipates, which means his performance goes up as well, which is a feedback loop. Actually, I'm more excited now because I'm performing even better. And even if I do make an error or a mistake, I know it's just part of the learning and I'm moving forwards. So there's a bunch of things that happen in terms of reframing and those kinds of things, which become automatic when you change those defaults. Whereas the traditional approach is to try to work with the reframe, which is the output itself. It's a bit like um internal dialogue is the one I hear a lot about. Imposter syndrome, I'm not good enough. Try to work with a voice, tries to pause, all that kind of stuff. That's a symptom of the state that your system's in. So the the dialogue, the chat is not the lever, it's the indicator. When you work when you shift the system, it goes away by itself. You don't have to do anything.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Okay. Are you a little bit clearer? No, I'd say you'd be like, No, I am.

SPEAKER_01 56:12

I I I've I I get it. And you've got to recode what's going on and change how your system is working. Not and that can be um adjusting how much load there is in that situation.

SPEAKER_00 56:35

Yes, and and and the conditions are internal and external, so they're inside the human human system. So the individuals, the team, the organization, and they're also the environment as well. So in an ideal world, you do both. A lot of the work that I have done in pressured environments is on the individuals and the teams because for whatever reason, without saying too much, they can't change the environment. They can change the company or the system that supports them in that environment, yeah. But they can't change, you know, if you're who's gonna shoot at you or whatever it might be, you know, or how the other team might compete.

SPEAKER_03 57:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:13

Or if you're in an away ground, how the fans are gonna behave towards you, you can't you can't say, please can you not shout at me and call me with bad names.

SPEAKER_00 57:21

But what you can do is you can change the way the team as a system responds to that, yeah. And the certainty that they create within that team themselves, in the same way that in an organization, how you communicate, how leaders show up makes a difference to the level of uncertainty and therefore load that the teams and the individuals have to deal with every day.

SPEAKER_01 57:41

So when there's a penalty, we know exactly how it's gonna go. This is what's gonna happen, this is the person that's gonna get the ball, this is what we're gonna say to each other, this is how we're gonna behave towards each other, it's very certain what's gonna happen. And then that that all of the uncertainty around who's taking the penalty and what's gonna happen is taken away. So that's gonna help you perform better because it's a system and it's removed quite a lot of uncertainty.

SPEAKER_00 58:09

Exactly. And that's the external side. The internal side is for the person who's taking a penalty, what is it in their history in terms of prediction that may or may not be useful? Because there might be some really useful stuff, or there might not be.

SPEAKER_01 58:23

So, how would you get them to s to um how do how do you remove that? Because that sounds quite challenging to me to remove.

SPEAKER_00 58:30

The recoding. That's that's the recoding stuff. So you're excavating people's fast.

SPEAKER_01 58:37

So it sounds like is it is it electric therapy?

SPEAKER_02 58:41

I mean you're asking me about the how, or then that that's my other immediate thought with this is it's like all of all of my work, like you it's cool, but it doesn't work on my family. I'm thinking, can I use this with my kids?

SPEAKER_00 58:58

You you're decoding those unconscious, um I hesitate to say the word responses, but they're predictions. That's what that's what I'm doing. Yeah, and I'm doing it using a variety of different tools. And the reason I have to do that.

SPEAKER_01 59:12

And that's the secret source. Yeah, I I get it.

SPEAKER_00 59:15

It's part of that, but the architecture is is the thing that makes the difference because if you don't think about it architecturally, all they are is tools. And you can have all the tools in the world, and if the person can't access them and they're no good.

SPEAKER_02 59:29

Yeah. And in the same way that you have tools, that again, we don't we wouldn't like we wouldn't be, I wouldn't be a good enough notice to go, oh, I need to use this tool now.

SPEAKER_00 59:39

Well, uh, I I think it's it's about what your system's comfortable with rather than not being good enough. It's not that you're not capable.

SPEAKER_01 59:47

What's the cheapest, what's the cheapest uh you're gonna choose? That's the thing, isn't it? That's what your system's gonna go for. Least resources, I'm gonna do that.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

That and and and that point is really misunderstood because people talk about threat. And it's not that the system is scanning for threat, it's scanning for energy. The threat, if there is one, is metabolic. Do I have enough energy to execute whatever it is I think that's going to happen?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:18

That's something that we see code all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:23

More energy. Yeah, but um, so all you know, these models that talk about social threat and all those kinds of things, those are metaphors and they can be helpful ways to have a common language and talk about things, but they don't change the function of the system because they're not levers.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:39

Yep. I I I mean, I think I'm getting it. I definitely I think it would be hard for me to say I've got it, but I think I'm getting it. I get uh I understand. So in leadership, in a in my world, I'm generally working in business with entrepreneurs, um, business leaders, they are often trying focusing on the individual. And we we talk about environment a lot, Rusty and I talk about this a hell of a lot, don't we? Um if we are thinking about how do we reduce load, we are likely to be helping them perform better generally.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:16

Yes, and and and it's not reducing load in terms of workload, it's load in terms of uncertainty, conflicting signals, how people communicate, um how many changes there are. And that doesn't mean to say that people can't thrive in those environments, about it's about how you manage those signals and how you as a leader demonstrate consistency because you know consistency is in can and consistency in terms of how you respond, not the content, but the way you respond. So if you go back to what I was saying before about those um high-load environments that are forced to create those infrastructures, if you think about um emergency surgery, there's a protocol, there's a list, aviation, there's a checklist, there's there's a there's a process. People know what to do in certain situations. They might not know what the situation is. And it's the same thing in corporate world. But what happens is often is that people might say, Well, I've got nothing to say, so I'm not going to communicate. But that consistency of message might be the thing that generates certainty for your team. Because this universal collapse under load or um jump or leap to hidden uh capacity, whilst it's a universal mechanism, the way it's expressed is different in individuals and teams depending on their experience. So being able to map that is helpful. So you know for this team it's XYZ that does it. For that person, it's this. For this organization, it's XYZ. But at the moment, I'm not aware of any other tools on the marker that do that. So I have my own set of diagnostics that do that, that map across three um diagnostics that combine, and they're scalable individual, team, organizational. What is what do your capabilities do under load? What capabilities do you have? What conditions disrupt or support access? And how much hidden capacity have you got? So I did a I did an assessment for an individual last week and part of the team, and her individual hidden capacity was 14%. So she was operating at almost half what she's capable of, and across the team, it was 60.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:44

Which is massive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:46

We've lots of sports teams though, in my experience. As you were talking now, I was thinking about I mean, again, spoken to a few players recently in the Pram, you know, I'm not going to do this on a Saturday rusty because I know what the reaction's going to be, or I think I know what the reaction's going to be on a Monday, and inconsistency of behaviors from leaders, and so people are just like it makes a difference, and it and it's not the conscious response, it what it's what it does to the system architecture.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:15

This is absolutely fascinating. I think we're gonna have to get you back on.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:18

I mean my notes for a week.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:21

I've got a right now. I might stick my head in a bucket of water first, but yeah, I'd I definitely um I I've got a lot of notes. I mean, it's fascinating. It really resonates with some stuff that's been happening to me in my work recently where I've really helped a few people with some structure. They just had no structure and everything was coming at them from left, right, and centre, and they've they've put boundaries and structure in place, and they can't believe how much better they're performing. Is that is that what is because that and it really I mean, I don't think I'd thought of it in this way, but I guess that's what we'd been doing together was working out how because we talked about perfect days. What's your perfect day? What would it look like? Let's try and create that, and then let's build some boundaries around that so that you can perform at your best. You know you're better in the morning. Let's do difficult things in the morning, let's get stuff done in the morning, and then let's let let's let some things come in in the afternoon when you are probably a little less able to do complex tasks, but loads of stuff can come in and you can sort of cope with it because you know you've got a whole load of things off your plate because you've nailed it and it's reduced your load. So even though it may not be the best time to have loads of extra stuff coming at you, because you've got rid of so many things in the morning, your capacity is suddenly much higher because there's less load. You're able to deal with things in the afternoon. There's many other things that are that are blowing up, but a couple of things have clicked. Tell me it's not correct.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:05

No, that wasn't what I was going to say. What I was going to say is it sounds like for that particular individual, clarity and bandwidth are the conditions that make the difference to them under load. Because what you're doing by establishing those things is you're giving them clarity and you're releasing bandwidth. So bandwidth is the amount of things that they can hold all at the same time. And for some people, that's that's the thing that when it goes collapses everything else.

unknown 1:06:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

Remember, I said there's this the architecture is universal, the way it's expressed is individual or unique to that team or organization. So if that's what you've had a response with, clarity is is really helpful as well. And that's one of the things that boundaries can give you. But there might be somebody else that you do that with and they go, Yeah, great, that's nice, but it hasn't actually changed how I feel, which all that means is that they're the conditions that apply to them are different.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:00

Sure. Sure, it's always individual. I mean, I get that. I think I've learned that the hard way. You don't apply the same tools to every person and expect the same result, it's just not going to happen. So you've got to you've got to tailor, you've got we've got to listen to people in here and understand.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:17

And you can map it across the team as well, because the way the team functions is not just a sum of the parts. So if you have a team where, for example, three people, there might be clarity and bandwidth, and then that doesn't necessarily mean that the team as a whole responds to that. So you can the way it's expressed across the team might be different too. Yeah. But that's when it's important to be able to have measures for those things. And I guess I suppose the other thing I want to say is I feel like this is coming across as really complex. It's actually really simple. As far as the client is concerned, we have silence just might be concerned. No, no, we have a conversation or the teams they we have a conversation, I'll ask them some questions, and then they feel different because we've done I've done that, I do that process mostly out of conscious awareness. Sometimes I do conscious stuff as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:08

I was gonna ask you that, like how mature would be that as well. Because in sport, there is both.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:13

We've got to do both.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:13

There's time when the ball's out playing, you are like not like in the moment, it's actually your time to think and chat and communicate and yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:21

Well, with with with with each sport particularly, I mean it's it's people often talk about flow state. Flow is one of the outputs when this architecture works well. So um often the way that people describe flow is that um when you you can either be in one of two states, very detailed down or very external out. When you're in flow, you do both at the same time. So your ability to update becomes frictionless. So you that you're no longer your system's no longer selecting defaults from previous times. It's just consistently updating. And the experience is actually I'm not I'm not trying. There might be effort, but I'm not trying. It's just happening, it's just well, flowing, I guess, for better once I better. I can ask one more question because like there's a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:17

These interesting is quite uh lots of people are making redundancies, people are probably starting to make more choices around like where they want to work. I think there's like a bit more of that going on. And I guess when a team changes, like, which is quite common now. Um do you think that like like when you start to talk about this and their system, like if if we drop one more person in, can it change lots of things?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:46

So yeah, yeah, that's what it can, and and it can go either way. Yeah. So I'm not saying, oh no, it's always bad. It it it it could be the thing that unlocks hidden capacity for that too. It depends on the balance of how the conditions work across. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:01

Um and so this stuff that we're talking about, and I guess people's impact on others, like, yeah, I think it's interesting around like recruitment and how we, you know, there's there's some people in teams that are actually really good at like like I work with some people that were they have been really good for like my load and like me feeling that I can be myself and I've unlocked stuff, and there's been times where some one person's come in, Dean Ryan, and um did this other.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:29

I found it really I I work with them, I enjoyed working with them.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:32

Did you?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:32

Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:32

But anyway, that's um yeah, and then that just completely like you know changed everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:41

But what you're talking about is one of the capabilities, the university capabilities, you're talking about presence, which is an individual's ability to have coherence inside themselves, things lined up, but also to be able to do that for other people. So the way that people experience that is my system feels comfortable. I've uh my experience is I can talk to this person, it's easy. The the relationship, how you relate to each other is easy. But what's happening is that is that they are creating coherence in your system and in the team as well. And when I say coherence, I mean coherence in the engineering sense that things are lined up. So another metaphor might be if you think of an orchestra, coherence is when all parts are playing together in the right timing. As soon as one section, maybe the brass or the percussion, kind of the timing starts to go, then suddenly you've got incoherence and that causes problems and that increases load. So you can have people join teams that disrupt coherence or bring coherence to it. But what your experience is is you've had that relationally as a human system with other people.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

And but you can train that, which is exciting, but that's probably a whole other conversation.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:56

We can I mean we are gonna have to stop. It is um annoyingly, because if I'm completely honest, I quite fancy having another hour or two of this, but we must stop. Um I mean, ridiculously good, absolutely fascinating stuff. And I I don't know, Rusty. This is yeah, I my brain is blown. I I do get that this is super simple, by the way. I really do, but it's just it's the it's blowing my mind on the application, and I think that's possibly where somebody like you comes in who has real clarity around application of what you're talking about. Whereas lowly people like me, um I'm struggling slightly with how on earth do I completely rethink how I'm working with this. I mean, I kind of not.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:43

But it's a new way of thinking about it, and that's that's why it is new because it doesn't fit old models.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:49

I I love it. I like a bit of change, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:53

But you know, the the the architecture is is simple, updating and the recoding is a bit more complex because there's other neuroscience. It's the how, yeah, it's the how. That's why my company is called Beyond Instinct because it goes deeper. You know, that that's that's the whole kind of point, which is you're not working with a surface level, you're working with the mechanisms that actually drive and change these outputs and and dictate.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:21

And my system, my system keeps trying to take us into a deeper conversation rather than in the podcast, which we've massively overrun because it's so fascinating. So I think we are gonna have to have to close it there.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:34

Um people want to reach out to you, Claire would be the best place.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:38

They can find me on LinkedIn or you can look up my website, beyondinstinct.com. I'm always open to interesting conversations. Um, as I said before, you know, what keep people are capable of, what human systems are capable of fascinates me.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:52

So thank you, Claire. I really, really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:58

Thanks so much for joining us on the Bands Macability Podcast with Samuel Russell. We've really enjoyed your company. If you want to reach out to us, Simon, where can I reach you up?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:07

Um LinkedIn's best place. Simon Ursell, UR S for Sugar E L L. Send me a message. Rusty, where can we find you?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:14

TikTok, no, not really. LinkedIn, Russell Anchor, and then the same on Twitter, but please uh ignore all my political thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:22

Yeah, second that over and over.