Hi I'm Ben Darwin, I'm a former wallaby. I
was lucky enough to play in 28 tests for
Australia, I was also part of the the
Brumbies, we won the Super Rugby title
with the Wallabies, we won the Bledisloe
Cup and I was very lucky to be
part of an enormously successful team.
But part of the reason, y'know, why I
was so interested in the work I'm doing
now is, it didn't make a lot of sense to
me because I knew individually I wasn't
particularly skilful and I knew some of
the guys around me were no different to
the to any of the players around today,
but there seemed to be this thing about
the team, about the way that it was put
together allowed us to be enormously
successful. So I've always
wanted to understand those those parts that a said a team of champions, y'know, does
better than a champion team or 
particularly the term that was, that was
used a lot about those teams was they
punched above their weight and I wanted
to understand that. So when I when I
first retired from playing I started
coaching, and as I started coaching I was
moving from organization to organization
and sometimes I would do something and
to be fantastic and the team would go
undefeated other times I go to a team
and they lose everything. So I started to
understand this isn't necessarily me, I'm
not that great as a coach, or bad as a
coach but there are other things in play
that are helping this team to be
successful or causing it to fail and I
wanted to understand that. When I first
started my business in 2013, I'd come off
a background of data analytics, and what
I was finding a lot of the time was a
lot of data analytics was just another
version of the score. People weren't
necessarily focused on, why are some
teams dynasties and other teams just
constantly never finding the answer and
constantly turning over to try to find the
answer so when I first started the
company one thing we noticed was,  is that we were looking at a lot of list
management's of clubs and we went back
30 years in about nine different sports
and we found the clubs who remained the
most stable, it seemed to have two
impacts. One, they improve the skill of
their team. Two, they seemed to be a lot
more able to be successful over the long
term. Clubs who were doing things the
other way, which was constantly churning
trying to find the answer in skill
acquisition, we would actually find would
dramatically underperform. So in between
seasons if a team made a number of
changes, we would find the next year. No
matter how much talent they bought, they
would tend to underperform, particularly
comparative to the market. Whereas teams sometimes were actually forced to keep
the people, even if they didn't want them, would
invariably do better than the market
thought they were going to go, and so
this you know really early area of
research is where we really started a
look at cohesion analytics and its form
that we've researched now.
