The Plan Was Never the Problem
Phronesis Issue 3 | Performance x Operations, by Dr Jonathan D Bartlett
Every performance plan built in elite sport gets compromised from two directions at once. Almost nobody talks about either of them.
That is the argument Dr Jonathan D Bartlett, VP of Performance Solutions at Hexis, makes in the latest issue of Phronesis. Drawing on two decades across football, AFL, basketball, Olympic sport and elite cycling, he names the two forces that quietly erode every plan after it leaves the page.
What makes this piece worth your time is where it lands. The operational wall and the capacity front look like different problems, but Bartlett traces them to the same root cause: plans that exist as something static. A document, a spreadsheet, a set of recommendations built for one athlete, in one set of circumstances, at one point in time.
Static plans cannot adapt when the week changes, and they cannot scale beyond the person who built them. The fix, he argues, is a plan built as adaptable infrastructure: the practitioner's expertise encoded once, then personalised, adapted and reapplied across every athlete and every circumstance, automatically.
The result is not less expertise. It is expertise that finally reaches everyone it was written for, and survives contact with the real world.
Read the full article
The full piece unpacks both fronts in depth, including why high performance sport rarely admits any of this out loud, and what changes when the plan stops being a document and starts being infrastructure.
.jpg)
.jpg)
