Please read the following think piece about the current sport landscape in Canada.

What are we missing?

What kind of response by the sport sector makes sense?

What should matter most to Sport Matters?

Please send your ideas to info@sportmatters.ca

Cheers,

Ian and Liz

Change of an age?

From time to time it’s valuable to step back and survey the landscape that you’re working in. It’s so easy to get caught up in day-to-day activities, that we forget the value of the long view.

For some of us in sport, we often set aside time for reflection at the end of a training cycle or on the heels of a competition or when an organization finishes a particular project.

My interest in this brief paper is on a different scale and at a different point in time.

First, I want to ask us to take an even bigger step backwards and to consider the sport landscape in Canada writ large. Second, I want to do so in the midst of the changes and preparations that are generating new dynamics in our sport system.

What do we see? What are the big drivers of Canada’s sporting future? Are we experiencing a change of an age?

Analysis first

One place to start is the deep end, where the global financial crisis is creating waves and where we’ve set out significant sport performance goals.

My sense is that Canada is experiencing the impact of the economic downturn with a kind of 2010 halo overhead, benefitting from the spillover effects of the Games in Vancouver which is assisting not only B.C. residents but also sport organizations, some of which are buffeted by their affiliations with the big show. On the ground, community sport is adjusting to fewer operating resources with registration fees and local sponsorship trending downward and with recreation budgets trimmed by municipal budget crunching. As always, the regional and provincial networks are being squeezed the hardest with only the larger and more diversified operations able to sustain (and even grow) their impact.

It’s difficult to miss how far we’ve come in the performance part of our sport system in the past few years. International results are coming in at a best-ever clip and many sports are closing in on their own turnaround moment, with success just a season away. The system requires some tweaking in the months ahead to consolidate these gains but 2010 will surely mark time in Canadian high performance sport. Outliers to this trend, like team sport systems in Canada, are now organizing and it’s not unrealistic to anticipate changing fortunes on that front in the coming decade.

Sport participation trends are also turning the corner, for the better, just as we are beginning to see changes in physical activity rates among certain groups of Canadians. What’s driving this? Hard to say, but some might point to the fact that we are closer to a comprehensive strategy aimed at the social determinants of sport participation, not simply the technical requirements for sport to take place. It just might be that the mix of policies and interventions from the last few years – targeted programs, tax measures, infrastructure investment, messaging campaigns, health and social correlations, financial well-being (until just recently), new municipal sport strategies, and better sport opportunities – are now significant enough to tip the numbers.

It’s timely then that governments, for their part, are embarking on such a significant public sector capital investment into sport and recreation infrastructure – now booked at over $2 billion – in the coming 3-4 years. With new demand and with new needs for both increased accessibility and economic stimulus, the provision of dedicated funds for facility and park renewal makes clear sense. What it also means is that the years of a market-based sport paradigm are waning and the re-emergence of public sport systems will be coming soon to a community near you. This might be the biggest trend in sport for the first quarter of this century – the re-framing of sport as one of Canada’s most important public assets.

Amidst such promising circumstances, there are also downward trends. Private sector investment has come to a screeching halt just as demand has risen from community sport groups. We are still a full business cycle away – at least – from a change in forecast with experts disagreeing on whether we’ll ever return to the kind of partnerships that characterized the last 30 years of sport development buoyed by private sponsorship interests.

Two important but less recognized elements of concern are best described as pressure points.

First, leaders and relationships between leaders are increasingly strained as external pressures and demands beyond their control are on the rise. Time is a scarce commodity. Performance goals are close at hand. Focusing, targeting, efficiency gains, execution and integration are the buzz-words of choice. There is little room for innovation, long term planning, or the so-called soft requirement of relationship building. The politics of power is returning alongside the politics of engagement that has served us well these past 8 years. Leaders are under pressure.

The second pressure point is a global-local one: sport has yet to square the circle on the environmental crisis. While Vancouver recently hosted an international conference on sustainability and sport, there is no plan at hand or dedicated policy to help us shift our sport systems in an age of peak oil and climate change. Will our sport system be able to lead in this regard? Or be left to adapt quickly as others set the course for us? With only a handful of people even thinking this through, it’s hard to see how Canada’s environmental vision for sport will come about – and that’s a shame.

Leadership is changing

As you move beyond the macro-settings described above - the sport system, our economy, public-private investment circumstances and key pressure points - you quickly arrive at the micro-settings of Canadian sport organizations and its leadership.

What is noticeable at the moment is how much is either in significant flux or stuck in a holding pattern; there is little new development underway. Clearly, the changes of the past 8 years are being absorbed but it’s also evident that the major players are awaiting a more transformative change agenda.

Sport Canada is in neutral: focusing inward, welcoming new career public servants as leaders within the sport branch, and sustaining strategies that have been in the pipeline for the past number of years. The demographic situation in-house suggests that some major turnover is in the works at 15 Eddy Street.

Major games organizations are also in flux. Nearly all of the franchise holders are working through significant changes in leadership at the volunteer and professional levels or surveying changing opportunities for Canada to host (or not) one of the big prizes of their international sport property. These changes have implications for the technical leadership at Own the Podium, too.

National sport organizations and service providers are working through multiple windows of accountability, relating to each of these moving parts, and responding with more sophistication than ever. This is one of the key trend lines, growing management and leadership capacity at our national organizations.

In fact, the 4 key response strategies to these changing times are extremely promising:

1. Mergers and mergers-lite.

A recent SMG meeting produced a 5 point agenda to work on strategies which facilitate mergers for sport organizations, develop alliances and consortiums, implement standard operating procedures which unite NSO-PSO-LSO networks, implement shared service agreements for back of house functions like finance, and encourage new initiatives to co-locate sport organizations in most major centres (Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, and Ottawa come to mind.)

2. Sport organizations are defaulting to collaboration.

In the 90s, external pressures led to competitive strategies. Not anymore. Leaders are conditioned to look for win-win opportunities; the new instinct is to cooperate and collaborate.

3. Canadian Sport Policy renewal is underway.

Along with infrastructure investments, this is the bright spot on the policy agenda for the next 2-3 years. The prospect of building the next Canadian Sport Policy with governments and sport communities working together holds real promise.

4. A reform minded federal Minister for Sport.

Minister Lunn’s idea of finding a better way for sport leadership and governance is one of the best things we’ve heard from the political suites in Ottawa for some time now. With ambitious goals to deliver on this idea in the next 6 months, he’ll need the support of leaders who are ready for change. Which we are, right?

Innovation Agenda

Finally, here are a few things to keep an eye on. Not so much surveying the current landscape, as anticipating what lies ahead.

Horizontality. What are we going to do with all of the related priorities that want sport to get on board? Help with obesity? Develop a skills agenda for youth in Canada? Tune up our ability to welcome newcomers to Canada? Sort out real, meaningful engagement of Aboriginal youth and communities? Address municipal priorities for urban renewal?

From a rural Canada to an urban Canada. For the most part, sport struggles to succeed in high-density urban environments. Yet urban planners remind us that this is our future. We’ll need more than “night hoops b-ball” to meet the needs of young urbanites.

New technologies. It’s hard to imagine that Twitter will survive the current craze. But web2.0 isn’t going away. How ready are we to make the most of networked web technologies? Or will those same technologies own our kids’ unstructured time?

Community development agenda. I think we’re onto this. It’s as if on our way to the podium finishes and sport development goals that we’ve long sought, we also managed to stir up a third strategy that takes into account how to use sport, intentionally, to address what communities want. Sport for development will soon be a mainstreamed field of work in Canada requiring new skills, new storylines, and new leadership.

As my colleague Richard Way likes to say, “that’s a lot, Ian.” But I think it reflects some of the increasing complexity and public value of sport today. I think it means that we need to retool and to become even more sophisticated in how we lead and manage change. I think it means we’ll need a new vision and a new frame of mind for the next decade. And I’m sure it will demand more connectivity and interaction with one another, not less.

Maybe what matters most is that it means we’ve come a long way - that we’ve come through an age of change and are now ready for a change of age.

Ian Bird