🏁 THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES PLAYBOOK: Week 4 – The Decathlon Dilemma: Pacing Multi-Event Systems
Earlier in my career, during a major strategic roll-out, execution was kept completely isolated from governance and approval. Delivery teams were blocked from building core operational assets until final regulatory sign-off was secured.
By the time official sign-off came, only a few months remained to build out the full operational package before launch.
The organisational reaction? Leadership assumed it was a speed issue: The team needs to work faster. But it wasn't a speed problem; it was a structural balancing flaw. By treating a multi-stage project like a last-minute sprint, the process created severe emotional burnout, acute anxiety, and moral fatigue, leading to rushed execution and compromised quality. Key point right here 👇
Looking back, the solution was never to force people to sprint harder. It was changing the system: bringing operational teams into the loop early to balance development concurrently with governance.
Welcome to the final installment of the Commonwealth Games Series! 🥇📊
(And as someone who could only ever manage the 100-metre dash because I was completely out of puff any further than that, I have immense respect for decathletes who can pace themselves through ten grueling events.)
🎯 The "Sprint Every Event" Trap
If you watch the decathlon, you know no athlete wins by attempting to set a world record in every single event back-to-back. Decathletes win through strategic energy management, consistency across disciplines, and knowing when to push versus when to conserve. An athlete who goes all-out in the first event usually collapses before event ten.
In corporate strategy, organisations fall into the decathlon dilemma every day.
When key transformation initiatives stall or launch dates trigger widespread panic, leadership often diagnoses the issue through a reactive lens: We need more urgency. We need maximum effort across all fronts.
Using Carol Bacchi’s WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to be?) diagnostic framework, we must ask: How is the problem being represented here?
When leadership expects non-stop, maximum-intensity output across every single operational domain, they represent the problem as a lack of individual drive rather than a failure of system architecture. The implicit message becomes: Sprint through every event.
This creates a devastating double impact:
The Emotional Toll: Persistent anxiety, cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and acute launch burnout as teams carry the strain of relentless intensity.
The Performance Toll: Spiking error rates, compromised output quality, dropped handoffs, and high staff turnover right when stability is needed most.
🧠 Designing Systems for Multi-Event Balance
Elite decathletes don't rely on pure adrenaline. They build precise pacing strategies, manage energy expenditure across disciplines, and preserve their core strength for the entire competition.
To build sustainable balance into your organizational systems, focus on three diagnostic steps:
Integrate Teams Early: Bring delivery and operational teams in at project kickoff rather than post-approval, allowing work to be balanced steadily alongside governance.
Prioritise Strategic Energy: Stop treating every initiative as a top-priority sprint. Identify which operational areas need steady maintenance versus where true short-term sprints are required.
Protect Human & Systemic Capacity: Monitor leading indicators of team anxiety and operational fatigue well before total launch failure occurs.
High-performance strategy isn't about sprinting every event until your people break. It’s about mastering your system's overall balance so your team crosses the finish line intact.
Thank you for following along with The Commonwealth Games Series over the last four weeks! 🥇
If you missed the earlier diagnostic deep dives, covering task compliance, operational handovers, or workload capacity you can catch up on my profile.
👉 Hit follow and ring the bell 🔔 on my profile to stay connected for upcoming strategic insight series!
👇 To the leaders and strategists in my network: How does your organization manage energy balance across complex, multi-stage projects? Let’s discuss in the comments.
Originally Published on Linkedin
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