Professor Anthony Montgomery is a leading scholar in occupational and organizational psychology and a Full Professor at Northumbria University. Together, we unpack why even the smartest organizations, including elite sports clubs, keep making foolish decisions. From functional stupidity and skilled incompetence to the illusion of expertise and the myth of heroic leadership, this conversation explores how culture, conformity, and systemic pressures shape bad choices. Professor Montgomery also reflects on the power, and limits of reflexivity, and why sports organizations often repeat the same mistakes despite all their resources and data. Along the way, they discuss powerful examples, including football’s obsession with scapegoating managers, the contradictory demands of modern sport as both business and community anchor, and how short-term pressures crush thoughtful decision-making. If you’ve ever wondered why clubs hire the “best” managers who still fail, or why organizations so often avoid asking hard questions, this episode will challenge your assumptions. Listen now to explore how stupidity isn’t just an individual flaw, but a systemic issue woven into how we organize, lead, and compete.
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Read Professor Montgomery articles on football and dysfunctional organisation HERE and HERE.
Mathias Alberton (00:04)
Hello everyone, this is Mathias Alberton. I'm the creator of Martial Attitude. This is a Martial Attitude Voice. As you know, we try to discover a bit more about sports psychology. We speak about visual impairment as well. As I created the Martial Attitude Training for visually impaired and blind people with workshops running every Sunday afternoon in London. If you're interested, you you just poke in, you send an email. I let you know how to reach for us.
Today at Martial Attitude Voice I am joined by Professor Anthony Montgomery, a leading authority in occupational and organizational psychology. Professor Montgomery is a professor at Northumbria University in UK, is absolutely internationally recognized for his work, research on job burnout, healthy workplaces, organizational culture. He has written something like more than 100 papers and edited books and secured a large amount of pounds and fundings for research. Beyond academia, Professor Montgomery has been a consult psychologist for decades in healthcare, also in the military. So there is really some work there that links academia to real world impact. Has been attending podcasts, of course, popular media is really a great pleasure to have Professor Montgomery here on the podcast. Welcome. How do you do?
Anthony Montgomery (01:47)
Good morning, Matthias. Nice to be chatting with you.
Mathias Alberton (01:51)
I came across you in not the most funny way, but an interesting way. A couple of months ago, as we are recording in July, 2020-25, I was reading The Psychologist, April, 2025 issue, and there was an article of yours at the very, very back of the magazine. And, you know, after the section books, movies, letters from the readers. It was this article and it was quite lengthy upon stupidity. And I said, hold on a second, why is this here and not before in the magazine? And I was kind of intrigued by your process of talking about stupidity. And there was an ending to it.
If I don't remember wrong, is a quote by Flaubert saying that stupidity is like granite, is hard and unshakable and immediately popped out in my mind Oscar Wilde that was saying instead that there is no sin except stupidity. So maybe there was a suggestion from Oscar Wilde's perspective that there is a possibility to redemption out of stupidity. What do you think? Is something that one can avoid or not at all?
Anthony Montgomery (03:27)
I don't know if it's something we could avoid. I guess my interest in stupidity came from my sort of my interest in I start writing about organizational cover ups. And one of the really interesting things about organizational cover ups is the degree to which to cover up the effort and the the energy that sometimes organizations put into covering up certain things which then turned into a scandal, seemed to me to be arguably worse than the the offence they had initially committed, which caused them to engage in the cover-up. So I became kind of interested in this idea of the degree to which, you know, there was a lot of inverted comma stupidity out there with regard to our behaviour, with regard to the things we were doing. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence in, you know, psychology generally about our rational behaviour. So I suppose my article was a tongue in cheek. was just really asking, you know, I was going to say all this evidence we have about the malleability of our thoughts, feelings and behaviours and all this evidence about our irrationality. And if you think you can think here of very famous people like Daniel Kahneman and his book about thinking fast, thinking slow, the level one, level two thinking.
I was kind of tongue-in-cheeky asking, listen, are we just a bit too embarrassed to actually call it what it is, which is kind of stupidity.
Mathias Alberton (05:02)
And well, it's interesting you mentioned this because, you know, just to double check, I went on Cambridge Dictionary looking for stupidity. And the dictionary says that stupidity is a state of being silly or unwise. Would you agree on this definition? And secondly, and most importantly, how do you know if you are stupid at all if you are indeed stupid?
Anthony Montgomery (05:33)
Well, I think the definition is a bit too limiting in the sense that it makes one of the classic mistakes that I think a lot of the times we do and that we bound psychological concepts at the level of the individual. So I think stupidity is a kind of a systemic and a much more widespread organizational issue. It's something that is can only be reflected on at the level of a system. you may you and I individually, sometimes we do things and we feel stupid. That's that's a very valid feeling we have. You we we kind of why did I do that? But I think psychologically, the more interesting question is, what is it in the system which leads in verticom is intelligent people and people who, know, who have who have good motivations? Why?
Why do we end up in situations where very, very stupid things have happened and have been done? And I think that's an interesting question. the definition is way too limiting in terms of the psychological understanding. So to really get at stupidity as a concept, I think we have to take that broader view of, you know, what has happened, which has led to this particular thing, which unreflection. And that's the thing about stupidity is something that we can only really see unreflection a lot of the time.
How do we get to that particular point that we ended up in this very, very, you know, very silly and stupid situation? Sometimes it's, you know, the word stupid is kind of, it's a little bit, it doesn't fully convey sometimes the seriousness of some of the things that happen in society.
Mathias Alberton (07:15)
Also, it's kind of important to point out that there are other words like imbecil. I take imbecil because it's very close to the Latin word for it, or the Italian word, for instance, for what that matters, which is imbecile, which is imbaculus. So without a stick, meaning that you don't have the proper support, intellectually speaking to recognize things around you, which is the same idea of differentiating between someone who is intelligent from someone who is wise or knowledgeable. And normally the things are misunderstood, they are misspoken, the words are switched over one to another. So to be an imbecile is that you actually don't have the cognitive capabilities to understand whatever is happening to you and interpret them correctly or in any way, and to be stupid instead, as you say, maybe has something more to do with the environmental stances that you are in or people surrounded by. We could agree on something like this. And in your article, I highlighted a couple of things. The first one was the idea of functional stupidity.
And how do you see this functional stupidity showing up in, for instance, sport organization, for example, in the way clubs or governing bodies avoid questioning harm of traditions or policies?
Anthony Montgomery (08:56)
Yeah, first of all, just to, it's not the idea about function of stupidity is the idea of Albertson and Spicer. So it's, just want to be clear. It's not my idea. I'm just using some of their research to talk about stupidity. They talk about functional stupidity as a kind of an absence of reflexivity, a refusal to use kind of intellectual capacities and other than myopic ways and the avoidance of justifications. They also talk about stupidity management, which is quite interesting, which refers to processes that press or marginalised out and block communicative action. I think in terms of sports organisations, mean, we can talk about examples which are quite serious and ones which are less serious, but also kind of important. I also wrote an article about, I think in sport, one of the interesting kind of contradictions we have is that we have more more evidence that sports teams, especially elite sports teams, are adopting research and strategies and analytics and approaches, which recognise that the performance of the sports team is dependent on many, many different factors. So we have this kind of sense in which we have this idea about Moneyball, for example, in sports, which everybody's familiar of, this idea of using statistics in order to identify players who have certain qualities which fit very much with your team. In contrast to that, we still have this very kind of interesting and this is very much driven by the media, this kind of focus on the manager or in the British, you know, in the UK to talk about the gaffer, the manager, the boss. So we have these two very contradictory things going on where on the one hand, we have all this acceptance and realisation that the performance of a sports team are dependent on so many different things.
This older idea that the success of the sports team was simply down to this one person who was the manager or what Americans like to call the coach. So we have these kind of two very interesting contradictions going on. And even now in a lot of at least Premiership teams, you also see this recognized by the fact that not only you have football managers, have directors of sport, you have people who responsible for certain elements of the football team. So the team itself is highly, highly dependent on many different factors all the way through the club. I was writing an article for the conversation where I was kind of just, I just picked Man United as one example where you have this kind of very interesting situation where they were successful under, you know, their manager Ferguson, but that there's been a sort of revolving door of manager since. most of the media, I think, especially in sports journalism, there's a, there's a reluctance to also talk about, well, what are the organisational conditions which might be contributing or detracting from the sports team on the field? So yeah, that's where I'm coming up with that.
Mathias Alberton (11:57)
Also, as you just mentioned, revolving doors on coaches or managers of elite sports, let's say clubs, regardless of the sport. It is also interesting to see that there is this idea of the leader. And of course, in sports psychology, there is a lot of talk about leadership. What does a leader do? Who is the leader? What kind of characteristic the leader has? But then you end up in being a put in front of the reality that, yeah, you might have something, someone who is particularly charismatic in a way, and other people in the team look up to him, maybe like to liaise with the upper management. So it's the one that can translate a bit the feelings of the team and make it viable when talking with, I don't know, the economic board or some sort of organization. So it's a kind of a spokesman for the team. But then you do have leadership in the field. So like, let's say the captain. I remember an old book like the art of captaincy, which was in cricket. And, you know, it's very difficult if you assume that there is a leader and then that leader, for instance, in the team, connects with other parts of the organization, then therefore you already state that there is something on the field and there is something else and we need to blend things, to blend parts. So the responsibility cannot by default fall on just one person. And it's also interesting, as you said, because of the evolution in sports, if you... if we take sports in the last 40 years, every sport is now very different than what it has ever been before, just because the sponsorship, the media, all the circus that goes around sport. And therefore it's not anymore a play, it's very much of a work, not only a competition. And therefore certain rules should apply, but seems not to apply because it's much easier for the crowd, for the fans for thousands of fans everywhere to point out, well, look, the problem was this one and this is the guy responsible. Is this just stupid to simplify in this way or it is stupid for them to believe that this is actually the truth? So is a communication problem or is a reality? They really believe this is the case.
Anthony Montgomery (15:00)
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a couple of things, but fundamentally, you know, when a football team will just stick with football in your example, when a football team is not performing the way they should, understandably, it's a very natural psychological kind of tendency to want to find a scapegoat, to find a person who they can sort of, you know, who they can identify as being solely responsible for what's going on.
Now, listen, just to be clear, obviously, you know, football managers and captains, as you mentioned, they do actually serve an important function. But I think the function they serve psychologically is more to do with sense making and sense giving, which is what we talk about in psychology. I think their role, especially if you look at successful managers, I think if you, you know, if you look at their role is that they're there to make sense for everybody else, especially the rest of the team about sort of what's going on. is sense making, sense giving is an idea that's been researched by an organisation psychologist called Karl Weick. You know, if any of your listeners want to read about that, should. He's written a lot of books about this particular topic. So it's about locating, you know, the kind of the influence of the manager or players or different people.
So it's about trying to understand how influential they are and the limits of their influence they can have as well. We have this very nice idea in organizational psychology about organization, person, fit. So I think this is very nice way to think about people who get hired to be managers of football or players when they're moving across different teams. the more interesting question might be to what degree is there are the players or the manager fitting with that particular organisation? And a lot of the time, mean hindsight's always 2020, but a lot of the time when you read books about what's happened in the past about different managers, when they were successful or not successful, that seems to emerge a lot. The sense in which that the particular set of players or the manager, their values, their understanding all fit with that particular goals or the particular methodologies that were being used by the football club.
And consequently, alternatively, when there hasn't been success, there seems to be also the evidence that there was a real strong lack of fit between those particular clubs and what they were saying and all those kind of things seeing it more as sort of the team group dynamic, I think is very, very important as opposed to the media, which is constantly getting us to focus on the individual. I mean, I think this is I think one of the most difficult things for footballers must be, I mean, I'm not a professional footballer, but it's the sense in which, let's say you're 80, 19, 20, and the media have either A, already written you off. They said, this person should leave, they should get somebody new. So it's strange that in an environment in which you're meant to be developing and you can get better and the coach or the training staff are there to make you better, that the media pushes us towards either writing off people or alternatively, if you happen to be going through a particular good patch suddenly the expectation bar has raised substantially and the expectations towards you now are completely unrealistic. So I think, you know, we talk about stupidities, there's this sense in which there's kind of, you know, inability for us to kind of see the bigger picture and the wider field of what's happening in something in a sports organization, for example.
Mathias Alberton (18:37)
And talking about organizational psychology, there was another thing that I highlighted in your article, which was the idea of skilled incompetence and an idea derived by Chris Argyris, which was an organizational psychologist who actually, I researched a bit upon him and he created this idea of single loop and double loop learning and, of course, hearing about speedity, we're kind of bound to this idea of the single loop learning, meaning fixing errors without questioning any underlying assumption. So you just regulate the thermostat without even figuring out if it is hot in the room already or why is hot already. Do you see this happening a lot?
Anthony Montgomery (19:38)
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I suppose the degree I suppose you'd have to give a specific example, but I guess, yeah, the the phenomena you talked about is quite prevalent, not just in sports and many different industries, let's be honest, this kind of limited approach to reflexivity. I think that's the thing that's that's most interesting about our ability to see. mean, sports and business and sport is a business business in general has a reluctance to be reflexive for obvious reasons sometimes because you know market demand because of you know the mission of the organization is to make a profit for example that reflexivity sometimes doesn't have the place it should have in these particular organizations.
Mathias Alberton (20:25)
Because the idea of skilled incompetence is about avoiding the question, isn't it? So is the idea not to indulge into the difficult questions?
Anthony Montgomery (20:34)
Yeah, maybe I'll give you a good example from a different industry. in healthcare, for example, we have a lot of this is very much recognized in the literature, what they call workarounds. you have these in healthcare, you have these very skilled, very intelligent professionals. And sometimes they have situations where, they don't have all the resources they need. Now, rather than, mean, because they are so highly motivated to help people, their response is not to suddenly stop working and to tell the management, listen, we don't have all the resources we need. You know, we can't continue. don't have all the staff we need. For example, some staff didn't show up today, we're understaffed. What they do is they, you know, they creatively get around these problems by using what's called workarounds, which is good in the short term and obviously good maybe in the short term for the patients. But in the long term, that's a very dysfunctional strategy.
Because what that does is it prevents the organization understanding and reflecting on that there's some deficiencies in the system, which if they're not addressed at some particular point, are going to lead to very bad outcomes. So a lot of the time in many different industries, we're doing these sort of creative workarounds to try and address situations where we just don't have all the right resources or we don't have everything. And it's kind of a natural tendency for people to do that because we all like, psychologically, we all like to feel confident, we all like to feel in control. So solving problems is very gratifying for us. However, a lot of time we don't have the ability to have that kind of bigger picture and say, well, listen, if I solve this problem today or tomorrow or the next day, is that going to mask the problem from the system? Meaning that the result of this masking will not appear until some critical point is reached, which will be very bad for the system.
Mathias Alberton (22:33)
I give an example or let's say it comes to mind an example and let's see if you agree if this is the case. Time ago, there was something called the CBT cognitive behavioral therapy and of course NHS was providing it to people in need. And cognitive behavioral therapy when it was theorized across one, first, second, third wave, whatever the wave it is, it was okay.
We can do this. It's a process. You work with your therapist. I give you homework. We do some cognitive work. We reframe what you're doing. We change the behavior. So we change the feeling associated with the behavior. I'm over simplifying here, of course. And let's say that it is reasonable to consider that 20 sessions should be all right.
And then you optimize, you cut the edges, you arrive, you know, something like, okay, we can make it work with 12 sessions. And now if you read, I don't know, cognitive behavioral therapy manual, you know, something between eight and 12 sessions is fine. It can be done. And then you see plenty of research where you see what kind of intervention has been given to patients: Where you consider, well, we've given this kind of therapy to this one, psychotherapy to this one, placebo and whatever training exercise to this one, and we compare which one is best. And normally you end up in having some 8 to 12 CBT sessions. But then the NHS discovered that it was very expensive to get 50 minutes ⁓ sessions for 8 to 12 times. So now... I did have a friend actually who told me recently that after asking the GP, asking, making a point, finally landed on having some CBT and she went to meet the therapist and this is not about the therapist by the way. She went to meet the therapist for half an hour and she would have met the therapist for other three times for half an hour.
So in the end, perhaps, perhaps, there is less queue because you can give more therapy to more people. But actually what you're giving is not therapy at all because in four sessions split in half an hour, you barely come to know the patient or supposed to be patient names and surname, never mind what kind of problem, what kind of approach, what kind of work, what kind of journey should have been done. So someone at NHS, figured that years ago I said, well, look, this is costing too much. Can we arrange it differently? And someone very keen, very intelligent said, well, actually, you know what, we could do this because if we just address more people, we can deliver much more the numbers, the statistics at the end of the year, the quarter looks much better. And now we end up having CBT to more people who actually land to meet a person for roughly a couple of hours across four weeks and nothing has been sorted at all. This fits the bill with what you were describing before.
Anthony Montgomery (26:10)
Yeah, mean, listen, I'm reluctant, I'm not an expert in CBT to be sure. And I think you have to be very careful about reaching conclusions without looking at the evidence. The only thing I will say is the last time I read a meta-analysis and systematic review about CBT, the meta-analysis and systematic review was suggesting that the impact was becoming less and less based on all the studies they looked at. And the authors tried to speculate on some of the reasons why this must be. And one of the reasons, for example, was that sometimes you have this situation where CBT initially, as you said, became very, very popular and maybe the popularity of the particular approach also made it seem it was easier or easier to do. So the original intention of the developers of CBT, the question we've got to ask ourselves is have those original ideas and original intentions, have they been followed through right to the end? And so is the CBT being delivered consistent with the original ideas of people who developed the original procedure, I think that's really behind your question. That's the question. We don't know the answer, obviously, but the bigger question is the degree to which is the CBT that these individuals are getting. Does that mirror what the intentions were of the individuals who start developing and writing about CBT? And that's an interesting question to ask for sure.
Mathias Alberton (27:39)
Back to stupidity and back to the idea of teams, football teams, whatever teams. So there is an idea of culture. There is the culture of this team, we're different because of other teams, we're blue instead of red, instead of yellow. And of course, there is an idea of conformity: If you belong to us, you are such and such versus anyone else. So many sports of organization kind of, you know, are very proud of themselves because they have a strong culture. But do you think that the same culture can sometimes suppress the critical thinking? So encourage conformity and conformity leads to poor decision.
Anthony Montgomery (28:34)
Yeah, listen, this is the double edged nature of sports itself. So Noam Chomsky very famously wrote about sport as being managed consent. So for him, you know, he written very nicely about the fact that, you know, one of the kind of maybe not too nice aspects of sport is a degree to which it helps kind of get people to kind of distract them from some of the more serious problems in their society.
Alternatively, I mean, you also have to try and kind of have a more balanced view that, you know, yes, sport does lead to conformity. Sport can sometimes especially look at sport washing. It can be something that, you know, distracts people from those bigger issues. However, we also know from talking to people who are involved in sport and are part of football clubs at all levels, that is also not a positive element to sport. There's a sense of community, a sense of feeling. And so it has, you know, we have to we have to kind of... we have to juggle both those aspects to it, that it does have a positive influence in terms of people's emotional connection with it. mean, people are always emotionally connecting with different kind of groups and different organizations, whether it be religion, whether it be sport, all those kind of things. I suppose one of the positive things you could say about sport is that at least ultimately what's at stake is, you know, very kind of interestingly silly. It's just, you know, people putting a football in the net and then somebody getting a cup and all those kind of different kind of things.
So at least one of the positive things we can say about sport is that the majority of people, I think, understand that what's at stake is very, very unimportant in a sense. And this also helps to the enjoyment process, you know. But still, at the same time, you cannot avoid critiques of sport who talk about a degree to which it sort of, you know, pitches people against each other. I mean, one of the more interesting aspects of sport, and one of them are very complex, is the degree to which racism is part of sports. Yeah. So there's this, there's this, there is this campaign and it has very good intentions to kind of take racism out of sport. And, you know, there's been a lot of very well detailed and very well cataloged instances where individuals received a lot of racial abuse from fans, sometimes from their own fans, actually, sometimes from fans of opposite teams.
But it's a bigger question. The bigger question, more interesting question maybe is, you know, it's not just about racism in sport, it's about racism in society. So just placing it or kind of, know, ring-fencing it inside sports itself is not seeing the bigger picture. It's that, you know, sport in that particular situation is being used by individuals who want to express for myriad reasons, racist views about things. And sport allows them to do that in a particular way football clubs and the FA and FIFA and UEFA, they're all carrying out campaigns to try and address that. But it's also that bigger question as to, know, is this a symptom of something in society? Because if it is a symptom of something in society, then it has to be dealt with at a societal level and simply kind of dealing with it only at the level of sport is maybe going to be less effective.
Mathias Alberton (31:47)
Of course, comes to mind immediately a couple of examples in Italy. Recently, we do have a new swimming phenomenon, young lady who actually managed to make a better record than Federica Pellegrini herself. And she is a colored lady. she is coming from parents with different nationalities. She's been Italian all her life, but she got so much hatred because of the color of the skin that even with the record, she said, okay, fine, enough, enough. I just go to US and I train there. She will wear Italian flag, of course, at the World Championship and the Olympics. But she said, well, this is... absolutely unbearable. mean, it's because people could not identify some people apart, a small amount of people. Just they didn't identify with beyond the result is a funny thing because the sport is there on its own, right? Is it acted out by an athlete or another? But the people watching, the audience, the fan, the crowd, is actually watching themselves. So they need to identify to themselves, each one individually on their own. So it's a very strange, as you said, suicidal problem, which is a bit wider, has nothing to do with the athletes, of course, has much to do with the other people identify themselves.
Anthony Montgomery (33:32)
Yeah, think another aspect of this is, which also is complex, is the degree to which, I mean, things have changed now, but to the degree to which does sport represent the full sort of rainbow of individuals in society? I mean, more and more it is. But if you think in the past, it didn't. know, when sometimes, you know, when you have the reaction you just described, it can also be a clue to the fact that this sport is not representing a full rainbow of individuals in its profile. There should be interesting reflections on that, the degree to which, why is it that suddenly a person who appears to be a bit different from what people normally consider to be a person in this role, why is it evoking such a strong reaction?
And it might also, you know, we have this idea that old sport or not so sport education business is all about meritocracy. But of course, that's a bit too simplistic. There's a lot more going on to degree to which people succeed or don't succeed in different walks of life. And it's not simply it's not only based on merit. That's for sure.
Mathias Alberton (34:56)
And also there is this idea of, let's say, let's call it illusion of expertise. If you see in elite sports, there is often an assumption that the most experienced people are always right. So as we are talking about, of course, stupidity in organizational settings, how do you believe this belief of expertise is sometimes blind to organizational mistakes?
Anthony Montgomery (35:29)
Yeah, mean, it's when people go out, it's when organizations go out and they hire inverted commas the best rather than they hire the person who fits best with their organization, with their values. Now, I'm sure if you talk to organizations, I'm sure they quite rightfully say that they, for example, the selection of a new football manager is a very exhaustive process. There's an interview.
There's a degree in which that they're, you know, trying to get the view and division of the football manager. And there's also the view and division of the organization. And I'm sure in their mind, they've done quite an exhaustive job in trying to fit all of these things together. But I guess the more interesting question is, you know, who are the people who made it to the shortlist? And were there any particular inherent biases in the individuals that were made from the shortlist? So in a sense, the problem, you know, so the organisation is saying, we've done due process, we've been exhausted, which is correct. They're not lying. I they have done an exhausted job. But the more interesting question might be for them, well, you know, who didn't make it to your shortlist and why? And maybe, you know, there's a lot of very interesting missed opportunities in terms of football management based on the fact that the individuals who ended up in the shortlist were, you know, fitted a particular profile.
But maybe those particular individuals, maybe they're not the ones who fit that particular organisation or who fit those particular players. there does seem to be this other thing about, you know, the kind of, I think there's an interesting problem where you have situations where they try and pick the best new manager, which maybe he was the best new manager in the club he was previously with.
And there's maybe also another problem that I find that it's, you know, it's, it's also unusual for clubs to pick older managers which I think is kind of interesting as well, that, know, there's this sense in which it's almost like, you know, it's this assumption that managers as they get older, sometimes I don't know, are less knowledgeable and the sport has changed. But I think that's a, I think that's like an empirical question. I think that's something that I'd, you know, I'd want to see tested. I mean, we've seen lots of examples where it hasn't been so, where there have been older managers who have been very successful.
So regardless of age, again, I think it's about the organization person fit, and the degree to which that works. And it's also the recognition that this person is just one piece in a very big jigsaw. That, you know, yes, you go out and you find the person who is going to be a very good manager and you these particular players, but there's lots of else going on. There's the buying and selling of players, there's financial rules, there's the way the organization itself is run.
There's a degree to which all the footballers get on or don't get on. mean, all these factors can't be controlled simply by a football manager. mean, that's just too irrational. That expectation is too big that you could simply go out and find one person who could fix all of these problems all by themselves.
Mathias Alberton (38:33)
And you mentioned bias. There are many different kinds of bias. I was thinking, you were talking, I was thinking, well, for instance, in sports environment, you know, our pressurized system, they are pressurized, pressured to deliver short-term results. And how do you think this urgency contributes to, let's say, poor thinking or foolish thinking?
Anthony Montgomery (39:01)
Yeah, we don't have a lot of data on that. We only understand that later on in a sense, because we only get the full story after many, many years after the event has happened. it's quite possible. talked about Daniel Kahneman earlier. We all have this problem where we all think we're engaging in level two thinking, which what Kahneman was effortful thinking, but we're mostly engaging in level one thinking, which is, know, this kind of automatic thinking. maybe the more scary thing, the thing I like about Kahneman's work, the more scary thing is that, you know, we think we're engaging in level two, but we're actually still engaging in level one. And that's probably even more dangerous than level one and level two. It's this illusion that you're engaging in level two when you're actually engaging in level one. I mean, maybe, you know, as I said, you have to, you have to, the only data, interesting data we have is kind of after the fact, because we only learn about the information further down the line. But I guess, the one that stands out as being interesting is when Brian Clough was fired from Leeds after think it was 44 days. I mean, now they've made movies about it, been books about it, there's always kind of, you know, there's a lot going on. That is a very interesting example of, you know, them trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Yeah, that's a really, really interesting example. And even the movie, I thought what I really liked was a movie made about it with Michael Sheen.
You know, even though movies have a lot of dramatic license, I think one of the things they captured very well in the movie was the sense in which that the character of, you know, in the movie, the character of Brian Plough, the degree to which, you know, he was trying to kind of, he was trying to fit in with this particular, this other entity, which at the time was Leeds United, and he was trying to grapple with or make, you know, make himself feel important in that particular environment.
And so, that's one of the problems, of course, about reflexivity that, you know, because we only get all the information, all the interesting data very much down the line. So it's something we can't correct in the short term, I guess.
Mathias Alberton (41:05)
I'm glad you mentioned the movie. would have had myself as is. I can't remember the name of it out of my mind right now is. Damned United, yeah, the Damned United. Phenomenal movie and there is a lot of the idea of culture. So do you fit the culture first and foremost? And secondly, you know, after this guy that we love so much, you are a very cute guy, but you are not fit because you are not him by default.
So you don't even give them a chance to prove you're right. Then you can learn from it whatever you want. However, the story is incredible. Also because of what happened to this guy after that eventually went away from the dam, united, and then he achieved just because the environment was different. He was not a different person.
Anthony Montgomery (41:53)
Yeah, I think one of the most interesting parts of that movie, and again, we have to be careful because the movie's got a lot of dramatic license, but it goes back to the point I was making about sense making and sense givers. So I think what that movie tried to show was that Clough in the movie was trying to create a different sense of Leeds United, which those players did not share. So he wanted to go there and he wants to kind of complete a whole new different of who they were and what they were which did not fit at all with the sense they had of themselves. So in that sense, it was a good example for me anyway, for my students of where sense making goes wrong in a sense that he was trying to create a whole different kind of picture of them, which to me was a very, very high risk strategy.
Mathias Alberton (42:51)
And this actually leads pretty nicely to another question, if you wish, I wanted to pose to you, which is the idea of, well, know, after failures. Why do you sports organizations often repeat the same mistakes?
Anthony Montgomery (43:13)
Well, you know, think luckily, as I said at the beginning, of the arguments in favour of sport is that, you know, the most serious thing that can happen is that, you know, you don't win the European Cup or you don't win the league or those kinds of things. And it is a business ultimately. And a lot of the times what we see is that organisations, football clubs don't necessarily have to win cups or win trophies to be financially successful. I Manchester United is a very good example of that. So I think this is an interesting conflict between the fact that, you know, it's what are the what are the business goals of the organisation and what are the sort of the goals that the fans might have and who don't always overlap or they don't always, you know, correlate. And, you know, for example, it has been a lot of analysis, for example, at a club like Tottenham.
The sense in which they have been very, there's been attempt to keep everything very financially tight, but this has limited our ability to go out and buy more and more players. So there is a tension between football as a business and football as a kind of a pursuit for group, for fans and the success and all those different kinds of things.
Mathias Alberton (44:28)
I'm aware of time, so I will make a last question to wrap all this idea of stupidity in organizations and eventually in sports organizations. Is there anything that we can do? I mean, if you could design one interventional practice to help sports organizations recognize and counter their own stupidity, what would it be?
Anthony Montgomery (44:58)
Well, I think first of all, at the risk of throwing the question back to you, I think the most inverted, common, stupid thing we could do is try to find the one thing or the one intervention or the one, the magic bullet, if you like. I think the first thing is that we have to disabuse ourselves of the notion there is a magic bullet to do that. I think more broadly though, I think in all organizations, not just sports, it's about reflexivity. The degree to which it allows itself to have reflexivity in what it's doing.
And also the wider goals of the organization. know, football clubs should be businesses. They should be, you know, their ongoing business, but that's part of their reality. But that doesn't mean that business can't also have bigger goals about the community, about, the way in which they influence the places in which they're set open. So I think that's something also that, you know, could be very helpful that they have this wider picture of the communities in which they're in. that I think, I think sport, I mean, one of the ways I'm a huge fan of Noam Chomsky, I said at the beginning that he talked about sport as the management of conformity and was about managed consent. But I think one of the positive aspects of sport is I think it does have a huge positive influence in societies and in communities. And so in that sense, it's a little bit special. We shouldn't treat it simply as it is a business. shouldn't deny that. We shouldn't just simply see it as a very narrow business. We should see a broader picture a bigger canvas to it. you know, we should support the government should support it, we should support it. But we should also give it reflexivity about itself. We should allow it to, to sort of also see itself as having very positive contributions to the communities in which it's in. mean, that's something we should talk a lot more about the degree to which is it contributes positively to the communities in which it finds itself because I think it does have this broader characteristic and this broader purpose, which we should never underestimate. you know, you're saying, I mean, well, football clubs do go into liquidation or they do dissolve or they do have serious financial problems. I the impact on the communities around them are huge. know, it's kind of like these anchor organizations sometimes in communities, they have these kind of financial implications.
They also have implications about the mood and the wellbeing of the people who live in those particular communities. So I think we have to think of sports organisations as having this bigger purpose. Of course they have to be sustainable, of course they have to survive, they have to be well run financially and responsibly. But we can also think about them as having this other function, which is very important.
Mathias Alberton (47:40)
It is beyond sport.
Anthony Montgomery (47:43)
Yes, yeah. the sport, you know, sports, it's it's, you know, it's interweaved in our cultures and it's interweaved in who we are. And, know, I mean, okay, yes, a lot of us like looking at the kind of the very end of the process, which is the 11 players playing with these elite clubs. But in between that, there's a huge process of people giving up their time for free coaching young children all the way up, you know, from very young ages. There's a huge sort of a kind of unrecognized, if you like, background, all of the sport where people give up a lot of their time for free to kind of to develop people to manage, you know, football clubs at much lower levels. And also, listen, it's just it's something that we I'm sure you've experienced yourself. I when I was in university, you know, a big element of socialization was just, you know, playing sports with other some of my university students, you know, whether it be rowing or football or table tennis or tennis or anything. So sport is a very positive outlet in terms of our socialisation, terms of us getting on with people, terms of promoting, I suppose, appropriate competition between us, in a sense.
Mathias Alberton (48:59)
Anthony, thank you very much for the time you dedicated to Martial Attitude Podcast. I really appreciate it. I learned a lot. Thank you very much for being here.
Anthony Montgomery (49:10)
Yeah, no, I enjoyed it too. Great conversation. And I really like the free flowing style you engage in. It's good fun and very relaxing.
Mathias Alberton (49:18)
And thank you everyone who has been listening to the podcast. If you do have any questions, if some kind of information has triggered some thought provoking ideas from your side, please let us know and I will forward them to Anthony Montgomery. And of course, Martial Attitude is working hard to create a training system for visually impaired and blind people to enhance confidence, better body posture, in social settings. We are running workshops every Sunday in central London. And you know it, if you're interested, if you know someone who might be, as usual, you keep in touch.