Matt Dawson won the Rugby World Cup in 2003 with England and has a successful media career presenting for the BBC. He is now forging a new career in business, first with food and facilities group Sodexo and now with The Instant Group.
In this, the second in a series of blogs, Matt talks about what business can learn from sport’s use of data.
Only 20 years ago rugby was an amateur sport. Today, rugby union is utilising data, technology and science at an increasing rate as professionalism revolutionises its approach. But rugby is not alone in this, many other sports are pioneering the use of data to improve performance and, in my view, business could learn a lot in terms of the importance of data analysis from their approach.
Over the summer, we saw the remarkable moment when performance data from cyclist Chris Froome – the eventual winner of the Tour De France – was leaked to the press. Team Sky decided to try and get ahead of the gossip and released its own detailed assessment of the critical moment when the 2015 Tour was won. The cycling world listened intently as Tim Kerrison, Sky’s head of athlete performance, explained the detail behind Froome’s massive power output as he surged past his rivals on the hill of La Pierre-Saint-Martin.
As a former professional sportsman, I was amazed to hear the detail that Team Sky produced to prove their man’s innocence but also that data had now become the “story”. We have now become so accustomed to using data in all spheres of life that interrogating the performance of sport’s stars is now commonplace.
Rugby union has moved on greatly from when I was playing in terms of its use of data to assess performance. One of the figures behind British Cycling’s Olympic success, Matt Parker was hired by the RFU to revolutionise England’s rugby squad. As “Director of Marginal Gains for British Cycling”, he led a team of experts in biomechanics, nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, performance analysis, physiology and physiotherapy, to assess every aspect of performance. It was aligning all these different disciplines that produced meaningful metrics to gauge an athlete’s fitness. But can this approach be transferred to a team sport where thousands of decisions have to be made across the pitch every second and with opposition interference?
When I first played rugby – as an amateur – there was nowhere near this level of scrutiny. And while I feel that there are some elements of performance that cannot be ascribed to data alone, the sport has benefited greatly from understanding the critical moments that shape games. Richie McCaw and his All Blacks are masters of instinctive rugby but much of their play hinges around clinical decision making – they make the right choices at the “big moments” in the game.
Is it really this simple? Maybe the All Black’s analysis of the game is superior? Do the coaches teach the players techniques other teams have yet to master? Are the superstar players from New Zealand simply better at repeating their core skills under pressure against any opposition? When I watch Dan Carter, he does not do anything that any other international #10 could not replicate. He just delivers more often against the best opposition. All the matches he has played have endowed him with a bank of reactions to certain scenarios, which he can replicate again and again. But if England’s players have more data at their disposal will it allow them in the future to make the right decision in that nanosecond they have to react to their opposing number’s action?
What has struck me since entering a career in business is that many companies are still behind the curve on use of data in their key decision making. There is such a wealth of easily available data now on hand to make critical decisions, but I do not believe that the “big data” revolution has sunk through to all parts of business as yet.
From my understanding, big data refers to the comparison of large data sets from different information sources to make key decisions. Only 15 per cent of Fortune 500 companies in the US are using such data to drive their business strategy, which is remarkable, and I suspect the number is lower in the UK.
There is so much widely available data that we can now use in a constructive way to drive business decisions and my time at The Instant Group is bringing me up to speed on this. The most simple to access is probably Google Analytics, which not only shows how visitors to your website are behaving online but can also be used to show how they interact with the brand (or so my marketing team tell me!). But the most potent way of using this information is to combine it with other sources of info.
For example, at Instant, we have recently been assessing all the new company registrations from across the UK to get a better understanding of where and when new business starts ups are originating. Furthermore, we have now cross referenced that research with population size to generate a better proportionate view of where entrepreneurialism is picking up. These numbers are a lot more meaningful when you can understand that Liverpool may have less than 10% of the number of new starts ups over the past year. But when you assess that in light of the relative population sizes, you can grasp that Merseyside has nearly twice the number of entrepreneurs than the capital.
Given the hundreds of meetings I have had with businesses in the past year, I believe that one key area of business that would benefit from a more data-led approach is its use of property. Office space is the second biggest cost for many companies and therefore a huge area for potential cost saving. But there are many firms out there, which are constrained by long leases on property that prevent them from taking a flexible approach, which actually reflects the nature of their business.
With modern, project-based working, workforces ebb and flow and what companies really require from their workspace is the ability to expand and contract. If business executives could gain a better view of space occupancy they would understand more how their team use this space. Even more, they would benefit if the right teams across the business worked collaboratively to drive productivity and creativity. Imagine if you could ensure that a key project team could be parachuted into a space near their client to ensure the maximum exposure for the successful delivery of the project? But this rarely happens due to space constraints and the rigidity of the leasing model.
Much is made of professionalism in sport and, on the whole, what is meant by this is the ability to adopt a strategic, progressive mentality that allows a sportsman or woman to deliver a result. The widespread adoption of data analysis to drive results and assess performance has become a phenomenon in sport as shown by Team Sky and the (fantastic) fact-based film, Moneyball. In the latter, the manager of the Oakland Athletics team used an evidence-based, analytical approach to create a championship-wining baseball team with scant resources. You could argue that now might be the time for business to challenge some of the conventions around office occupancy by assessing the data available to them and making some big decisions on how its staff work.