A few weekends ago I joined players, coaches, and referees from across the Greater Victoria Area at a “basketball superclinic” that was delivered by Canada Basketball’s Mike Mackay. The coaches spent the morning learning about a practice we would be teaching to players in the afternoon. We also learned tactics for fostering performance safety and leadership agility in players and teams. This approach aligned excellently with Canada Basketball’s commitment to stewardship, which means that all partners – players, parents, coaches, referees – work together to build healthy communities through basketball.

Concepts like performance safety and leadership agility enable and empower teams to “perform in the storm” of basketball (have you ever seen 11-year-olds hoop?! It’s chaos a lot of the time). These concepts are also super relevant to workplaces, neighbourhoods, and classrooms, all of which are a tad too chaotic for many peoples’ liking.

Build performance safety

Athletes need two things to be able to perform in the storm. First, players need physical safety, which means that the space and equipment they’re using won’t injure them and the practice design won’t put them at unacceptable risk.

Players also need psychological safety, which means questioning or challenging the boss (or coach) in front of the team without fear of retribution. Psychological safety is the secret to unlocking high performing teams.

During the clinic, coaches were encouraged to adapt activities based on players’ feedback, which noticeably increased the kids’ engagement and ownership of the activities. At work, leaders who surface issues, negotiate unrealistic timelines, and uncover blind spots more than likely have a psychologically safe team helping them navigate gaps and opportunities in real time.

Embrace ecological coaching

Ecological basketball emphasizes “task outcomes” over perfect technique or rigorously rehearsed plays so that players can continuously adapt to changing conditions.  By embracing the chaos of a basketball game, as opposed to trying to control it with well-designed set pieces, this systems approach to basketball enables and empowers teammates to make decisions in the moment based on the data in front of them. In basketball, this is called “read and react” offense, which is popularized by the democratic approach to basketball taken by the Miami Heat/ (popularized by the Miami Heat).

As priorities shift and change at work, leaders need to constantly adapt by considering what is the next best thing we can do here? Waysfinding is an adaptive planning approach that enables leaders and teams to navigate complexity by expecting multiple ideas or products to be simultaneously and collaboratively attempted based on the potentialities from each starting point. Pretty perfect for a basketball game, sure. The model is also idea for adapting strategies at work.

HBR’s Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun propose that leaders ought to design “Octopus Organizations” to be more flexible and resilient during times of spectacular change. Octopus leaders serve as architects rather than controllers. Their responsibility is to create environments conducive to growth, articulate clear objectives, eliminate obstacles, and foster trust within their teams.

When we think of our experiences in work and life as part of a complex (if not chaotic) system, then the tools and tactics we use for navigation should be flexible and connective.

Fuel learning with reflection

Learning happens every day and all the time when we reflect on our experiences. We learned the CARL tactic for debriefing activities at the basketball superclinic:

C – what challenge did you face?

A – what action did you take to address the challenge?

R – what was the result?

L – what did you learn from the experience?

I love this approach because it builds on the science of how high performing organizations get more out of their people by encouraging leaders to ask more questions and give fewer directions (“ask more, tell less” was the call to action from a coaching program I helped deliver at Vancity Credit Union).

When we ask questions and invite reflection, players and workers have to use more, different, and better (or at least more interesting) neural networks in their brains to solve the problem. When we think of scoring a basket or delivering on a project amidst unclear circumstances, teams that feel empowered to solve their own problems by reading the situation, reacting to the data, and doing the next best thing in service of the team’s goals outperform the teams that rely too much on a perfect playbook or procedure guide.

Captains perform in the storm

Learning skills to perform in the story is critical for all of us. Seth Godin argues that building the skill of “Captaincy” enables communities in work and life (and probably on the court) to perform in the storm:

Captaincy describes someone who doesn’t just go to meetings–they change the outcome of the meeting. Someone who doesn’t depend on authority but is eager to take responsibility. It’s not about having a great idea… it’s about leading when the great idea collides with reality.

Winston Churchill and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf showed up as captains when that skill was really needed. So did Alexander Hamilton, for a while.

Captains set the agenda, create tension and lean into possibility. Captains aren’t just doing their job, they’re creating something that others thought was unlikely. They rarely have all the answers, but they’re very good at asking questions.

On the basketball court, captains perform in the storm by reading chaos as it unfolds. When the play breaks down and the defense collapses unpredictably, captains don’t freeze – they improvise, communicate, and create new possibilities in real-time. They’re comfortable navigating uncertainty without a playbook, asking “what does this moment need?” rather than “what was I supposed to do?”

In our work and lives, captaincy means leaning into turbulence rather than waiting for calm. We become captains when we take responsibility without authority, when we guide teams through ambiguous situations by asking better questions instead of pretending to have perfect answers. It’s the product manager who ships improvements nobody expected, the colleague who transforms meeting outcomes – it’s anyone who doesn’t just weather the storm but charts a course through it.