The off-season is not a reset. For most organisations, it is a confirmation.
There is a moment that happens in almost every organisation at this time of year. The season is over, the debrief has been conducted, and the room has said the things that needed saying. There were agreements. A collective acknowledgment that certain things needed to change. And for a brief window — sometimes days, sometimes a couple of weeks — the air felt different. Lighter. Like something had genuinely shifted.
And then, quietly, it did not.
I have written about this before. Some of you will recognise it. But I keep returning to it because the pattern keeps returning — reliably, predictably, and at exactly this point in the calendar. Which tells you something worth sitting with. The problem is not that people do not understand what needs to change. The problem is that understanding and changing are two completely different acts, separated by something most performance environments never adequately address.
We tend to speak about bias as though it were a thinking error. A lapse in judgment. Something that happens to leaders and organisations that are not rigorous enough, or self-aware enough, or honest enough with themselves. But that framing lets everyone in the room off the hook — including the people who are closest to the problem and perhaps best positioned to do something about it.
Thirty+ years of working inside elite sport has shown me something different. The people who carry the most consequential biases are often the most intelligent people in the room. The most experienced. The most genuinely committed to getting it right. Bias does not discriminate by intelligence. It discriminates by exposure — and the people with the most at stake are the most exposed to it. Which means the performance practitioner sitting inside that environment is not a neutral observer. They are part of the system. And that is both the challenge and the opportunity.
Because bias is not a failure of thinking. It is the brain protecting the person who carries it from the most threatening thing a leader can face. Not failure itself. The public acknowledgment of failure. A head coach can privately understand that a decision did not work. Can feel it in the dressing room, read it in the data, sense it in the quality of the conversations happening around them. But the moment they change course visibly — restructure the system, reverse the direction, publicly release what they publicly committed to — they are no longer just correcting a decision. They are exposing their judgment. And for most leaders, judgment is not a professional tool kept safely at arm's length. It is identity. It is the authority that makes the room listen. The brain will construct an elaborate and entirely convincing case for staying the course before it will allow that exposure to happen consciously.
This dynamic does not stop at the head coach or the General Manager. It moves through the entire support structure — and this is where the practitioner needs to look inward before looking outward.
Think of it this way. We all carry a straw. A narrow tube through which we observe the situations around us. What we see through it is real — the detail is accurate, the focus is genuine, and the confidence it produces feels entirely justified. The problem is not what the straw reveals. The problem is everything it silently removes from view. And the longer we look through it, the more the straw begins to feel like the full picture. It stops feeling like a limitation and starts feeling like clarity.
The strength coach who returns to the programme he knows because he can defend it. The sports scientist who reports the metrics everyone already understands because introducing a new framework risks being questioned on ground he is not certain is solid. The physiotherapist who manages load the way he managed it last season because the protocol protects him if something goes wrong and he needs to explain his reasoning. None of this is dishonest. None of it is laziness. It is the exact same mechanism operating across the entire performance department — the retreat to familiar ground not because it is the best answer, but because it is the safest one to carry into an uncertain room.
And here is the part that is rarely said out loud. When the support structure around a decision-maker is operating from that same place of protected habit, the bias at the top does not just survive. It gets fed. The performance staff become — without ever intending to — a confirmation system for the very assumptions that most need challenging.
This is what makes the off-season so structurally dangerous. And it is worth naming it precisely, because practitioners are often the first people to see it operating and the last people invited to say so.
The post-season review process is a good example. The 360 was designed, in theory, to widen the straw. To surface perspectives that the decision-maker cannot see from their own position. And when it works — when the culture receiving it is genuinely ready to hear it — it can be one of the most valuable processes an organisation runs. But when the culture is not ready, the 360 becomes something else. It becomes a document. A structured format through which people say what they are willing to say, inside a container that feels safe precisely because it is temporary.
The container closes. The agreements are made. And then the organisation returns to its actual operating conditions — where those agreements have to survive without the container — and most of them do not.
A few weeks into this off-season, in most of the organisations you work with or work inside, this is already visible. Not dramatically. Not in any single moment you could point to and name. But in the texture of the meetings. In which voices are carrying weight and which have gone quiet again. In the decisions being made in the same language as the decisions that preceded them. The habits that needed breaking have begun to feel comfortable again. And comfort does not announce itself as regression. It announces itself as stability.
Here is where advertising — an unlikely source — offers something genuinely useful for the practitioner trying to navigate this.
The image sitting above this piece is already doing what I am about to describe. It is not arguing with a belief about how organisations change. It is changing the context around that belief before a single word of the case has been made. That is not a design choice. It is a principle — and it is one the best advertising minds in the world understood decades before most leadership cultures thought to apply it.
You cannot change what someone believes by confronting what they believe. The brain does not receive direct challenge to a deeply held position as information. It receives it as threat. And the response to threat is not reflection — it is defense. Every practitioner who has ever delivered an honest assessment to a coaching staff and watched it dissolve in the corridor has experienced this. The message was accurate. The relationship was solid. The timing felt right. And still, nothing moved.
What the great advertisers did instead was change the context around the belief without touching the belief itself. Volkswagen in the 1960s did not argue that small cars were equal to large ones. They made choosing small feel like an act of intelligence — and let the audience arrive at that conclusion believing it was their own idea. Dove did not tell women they had been wrong about beauty. They created conditions in which a different truth felt safe to consider. They made their audience feel understood first, and challenged second. By the time the challenge arrived, the defenses were already down.
For the practitioner, this is not a lesson in communication technique. It is a lesson in sequence and in the architecture of trust. The reframe has to feel safe before it can feel true. The question has to feel curious before it can feel challenging. And the person asking it has to have built enough genuine relational credibility that when the straw begins to widen, the leader does not instinctively reach for it and narrow it back down.
This is where the practitioner's role becomes something more than technical. And it is also where most practitioners underestimate both their position and their responsibility.
The straw does not widen because someone tells you it is too narrow. It widens because someone shows you something worth seeing that you cannot quite fit into the current view. That is not a process. It cannot be scheduled into a debrief format or captured in a 360 document. It happens in the quality of the ongoing relationship — in the questions asked over coffee before the meeting, in the observation offered after the session, in the willingness to name what is happening without making it personal and without making it a confrontation.
Offsetting bias in a performance environment does not require a new methodology. It requires a different kind of presence — someone with enough standing to name what is happening, enough patience to name it without accusation, and enough trust built over time to make the naming feel like service rather than threat. Someone who can look at the agreements made in April and ask, plainly and without drama — how many of these are we actually still honouring? And what happened to the ones we are not?
That question, asked in the right room by the right person at the right moment, is worth more than any structured review process ever designed. Because the review captures what people are willing to say inside a format. That question captures what the organisation is actually doing when the format is gone.
The coaches and leaders who have navigated this most effectively over the years share one quality I have never seen adequately described in any competency framework. They had learned to separate what they believed from who they were. Not permanently. Not completely. It is not a destination. It is a discipline — returned to repeatedly, especially in the moments when it costs something to do so. They could hold a conviction firmly enough to act on it and loosely enough to release it when the evidence required it. And the practitioners around them had learned to create just enough space for that release to happen without it feeling like a defeat.
That space is what we are trying to build. Not a new system. Not a better review format. A genuine gap between the leader's identity and their last decision — wide enough that a new question can move through it without triggering the defense mechanism that usually closes around it the moment one appears.
The window for this off-season is already narrowing. The clarity that follows a hard year — the particular honesty that exhaustion and disappointment can briefly produce — has a shelf life. For most organisations it is already shortening. The habits are returning. The straw is narrowing back toward its familiar diameter. And the people who felt heard in April are watching, quietly, to see whether what was agreed in that room is going to survive contact with the one they are sitting in now.
Your job, in part, is to keep that question alive. Not loudly. Not as confrontation. But with enough consistency, enough craft, and enough genuine trust that the room does not fully close before something real has had the chance to move through it.
That is not a small thing. In the right environment, at the right moment, it is everything.
Magnus Ågren
Performance and Leadership Development · Consultant · SHL - NL - DEL
Thirty years in elite sport. Seven seasons as Head of Performance and Medical in the Swedish Hockey League. Olympic cycles since Sydney 2000. Designs the systems that integrate coaching, medical, and sports science into one performance structure.
www.magnusagren.com
People. Purpose. Performance.
