In all my time in both sport and in research, one of the things that comes back to me time and time again is that inspirational people are absolutely central to the participant experience. This is particularly true for those who are not your typical sports fans. To take a few examples, in their review of Doorstep Clubs published in 2018 (1), Street Games reported that 58% of young people said that the coach or leader was the key to a good sport session for them. For teenage girls in Scotland, not liking their PE teacher or feeling that there was favouritism for the sporty girls proved to be a major barrier to engagement (2). In one study of a typical high school in a small Canadian town (3), one inspirational teacher transformed the attitude of her students towards PE from largely indifferent to it being a favourite subject. She achieved this in 3 key ways:

1. Creating a sense of belonging for students in the physical activity environment;

2. Promoting what students could do over what they couldn't; and

3. Finding relevance to their everyday lives in what they actually learned.

As I ponder the importance of these inspirational people, I find myself wondering about the impact they have on scalability.

A great idea and a bit of tenacity

Say you have some guy, let's call him Simon, who has a brilliant idea to deliver a fabulous participant experience in some kind of sports activity. Simon is a tenacious kind of guy, so he plans his session, does all the organising, schedules a start date and is ready to kick things off. He's not a whizz at marketing, but he's put some stuff on social media and he gets a few mates and acquaintances along to the first session. But Simon is one of those inspirational people and by the end of that first session everyone is leaving feeling energised and excited about coming back next week. They tell their friends and their work colleagues and before you know it the session is over subscribed. Simon has to start running a second session each week to cope with the demand.

That works - quick let's copy it!

It seems like we have a winning formula so at this point along comes a sponsor who wants to scale Simon's idea; but since there is only one Simon we have to create a blueprint of the experience which we can use to train new Simons. We write down all the factors that go into Simon's session - how long is it, what time is it at, what sort of activities does he do and so on. Maybe we write a few things about attitude too and how to talk to participants - how to be like Simon so to speak. But when we launch the new sessions, they just don't seem to have the same popularity. They don't get people talking like Simon's original sessions and they don't draw the same crowds.

There's only one Simon

So why weren't the new sessions a raging success? One obvious thing that gets talked about is the need for local tailoring. Perhaps there was just something special about the new locations which meant it was somehow different? Of course, there are important lessons to be learnt here and local intel is incredibly important; but we shouldn't underestimate how much of the problem is that the new session leaders just simply weren't Simon.

I don't know why I like you but I do

It can often be difficult to quantify exactly why a person is inspirational to others. In fact Robert Cialdini devotes a whole chapter in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (4) to the idea that we are much more inclined to comply with requests from people who we like. Nonetheless, a definition of exactly what it is we like can be somewhat harder to come by.

In my experience the type of person who sets up a session like Simon's is often pretty resourceful with bags of 'can-do' attitude. They have the confidence to think their idea is great and to back themselves to make it happen. These kind of entrepreneurial skills are not necessarily the norm and, until we learn to clone people, we can't guarantee that everyone we hire will have them.

So does this mean there is no hope and we can never aspire to scale a good idea? Well there are some great examples of successful scale-up out there already so I'd say thankfully, we're a long way off that rather depressing notion. There are however a few things to think about which might help us to be successful more often.

• Understand the ethos of your session - who is it for?, what is the aim?, how do you want to make participants feel? - and stick to it!;

• Whoever is in charge of scaling up needs to be a little bit inspirational themselves; not necessarily in the same way as the original leader, but they must really 'get' what you're trying to do and have a passion for the aforementioned ethos;

• Quality over quantity - don't try to scale too fast as you won't be able to keep track of what's working and what's not and before you know it you've lost any kind of consistency;

• Effective recruitment is absolutely critical - it requires thorough preparation and adequate time - getting the right people is 'make or break' so do not cut corners;

• Talk to your audience - if you want to capture the essence of what is special about Simon find innovative ways to ask your audience what it is they love;

• Use what your audience tells you to define the qualities you are looking for; and

• Prioritise the right type of person over technical experience - as I discussed in my Coaching is for Losers blog - you can teach someone the 'functional stuff' but you can't teach them how to be nice

If you're looking to recruit inspirational people or to scale an idea and you think Proper Active can help, get in touch on info@properactive.co.uk.

You may also be interested to learn about the #MoreThanSport Academy. The Academy has been set up as a collaboration between Proper Active and Sports Marketing Network to provide innovative training to develop a new workforce which can support inactive and non- sporty audiences. The Academy prioritises positive experiences over sporting excellence and will bring together a network of like minded people from a range of sectors who are keen to use physical activity to achieve a range of social outcomes. Find out more

(1) Insight Into Action: The lessons from the Doorstep Sport Club programme 2013-17 (2018) https://network.streetgames.org/sites/default/files/DSC-Lessons-A4-Full-Report-web-version_0.pdf

(2) Mitchell, F., Inchley, J., Fleming, J., & Currie, C. (2015). A socio-ecological approach to understanding adolescent girls’ engagement and experiences in the PE environment: a case study design. Graduate Journal of Sport, Exercise & Physical Education Research, 3, 44-62.

(3) Pierce, S. (2016). A Case Study of a Successful and Engaging High School Physical Education Program (Doctoral dissertation). University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

(4) Cialdini, Robert (1993). Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Quill William Morrow.