With Crisis Comes Opportunity: Redesigning Performance Departments of Elite Sports Clubs for Life After a Global Pandemic

Abstract

The suspension of major sporting competitions due to the global COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial negative impact on the sporting industry. As such, a successful and sustainable return to sport will require extensive modifications to the current operations of sporting organizations. In this article we argue that methods from the realm of sociotechnical systems (STS) theory are highly suited for this purpose. The aim of the study was to use such methods to develop a model of an Australian Football League (AFL) club’s football department. The intention was to identify potential modifications to the club’s operations to support a return to competition following the COVID-19 crisis. Subject Matter Experts from an AFL club participated in three online workshops to develop Work Domain Analysis and Social Organization and Cooperation Analysis models. The results demonstrated the inherent complexity of an AFL football department via numerous interacting values, functions and processes influencing the goals of the system. Conflicts within the system were captured via the modeling and included pursing goals that may not fully reflect the state of the system, a lack of formal assessment of core values, overlapping functions and objects, and an overemphasis on specialized roles. The current analysis has highlighted potential areas for modification in the football department, and sports performance departments in general.

Dataset Analysis of the Risks for Russian IT Companies Amid the COVID-19 Crisis

“…The difference in the research conducted with previous studies is that the improved authors' methodology, applied in this paper, allows for the in-depth study and clarification of the specifics of the influence of the COVID-19 crisis on IT companies with different market shares. The existing literature (Abbas Zaher et al 2021;Bajaba et al 2021;Eid et al 2023;McLean et al 2021;Shehzad et al 2020;Su et al 2022), based on the experience of previous economic crises, in particular, the 2008 world financial crisis, assumes that the COVID-19 crisis should have led to the monopolisation of the IT sphere.…”

“…The existing literature notes the significant growth of risks for IT companies under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis because of the reduction in financing of R&D (Błaszczyk et al 2022;El Khoury et al 2022) and the decrease in demand for IT products (Sudershanaa et al 2021). It is also noted that a logical result of an increase in business risks, under the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis, is the monopolisation of the IT sector (Abbas Zaher et al 2021;Bajaba et al 2021;Eid et al 2023;McLean et al 2021;Shehzad et al 2020;Su et al 2022), since, in the high-risk business environment, only the largest, most competitive, and most flexible IT companies with the large financial strength could survive Desai et al 2023).…”

Optimizing Future Advanced BCIs: Using WDA to Identify Potential Pain Points in BCI Systems

“…The findings from this evaluative process can be used to inform system design changes that seek to improve safety and efficiency. To date, the STS-DT prompts have been used to support the in-depth analyses of AH models in areas such as railway level crossing design (Read et al, 2016), pandemic response (Salmon, Stevens et al, 2021), and elite sports clubs (McLean et al, 2021).…”

Challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence implementation within sports science and sports medicine teams

“…Sports science and sports medicine MDTs typically include different roles with varying specialties across performance and medicine/rehabilitation focused roles such as sports scientist, strength and conditioning coach, performance analyst, physiotherapist, rehabilitation coach, and doctor. MDTs may also include technical/tactical coaches, surgeons, nutritionists, massage therapists, sport psychologists, biomechanists, and other practitioners ( 10 , 11 ). The exact makeup of this team will vary according to the environment (e.g., professional vs. semi-professional vs. amateur), the resources available, and the sport (e.g., team vs. individual sport).…”