Round #01 - Delivering on the promise
The outline of this story was drawn long before Sam Darcy was born. He is colouring it in, and it's red, white and blue.
The expectations on him are extraordinary. He has been described as a 'unicorn'. Spoken about, in the most compressed of time frames for a player of his size and type, as soon to be the best player in the game.
Luke Beveridge's expectation is simpler. Be a role player. Know it, accept it, and play it.
"Culture is an experiment."
The quote is from Dr B.F. Skinner, the distinguished Harvard psychologist, captured in the outstanding Apple TV series "1971 — The Year That Music Changed Everything."
His short-back-and-sides presence among the long-hairs of the era was as incongruous as it was profound.
He is quoted in the show as the world tries to make sense of the decade just lived, all its cultural change, the free love and youth movement of the 60s, all its optimism and hope, with the angst and disappointment of their current context.
His views were highly influential but not uncontroversial.
I wrote it down. 'Culture is an experiment.' I then wondered why it had taken me so long to see it. The advantages of thinking of culture as such are clear, and in truth, it may be the only way we can think of it.
It was an insight that now seems intuitively obvious but was hidden in plain sight.
____
I now reflect on decades of personal and collective efforts to build cultures in high-performance environments without this context.
Was it a blind spot or a weakness in my leadership? I cannot be sure. The outcome is the same, but what it said about me is very different.
A lack of insight can create a blind spot, but once known, it says something far more profound about your leadership.
To confront everything that the 'experiment' will ask of you is to meet the expectations of the role.
The 'experiment', by definition, is ambiguous and uncertain. The future is unknown and unknowable, and the 'experiment' is required if only to reveal another unknown, and leaders must hazard themselves in this pursuit.
This is what it asks of us.
A scientist working with a hypothesis is unconcerned by sunk cost. So it must be for a leader seeking to build a high-performance culture.
A failed iteration is data, not destiny.
Make mistakes.
Go again.
Make better mistakes.
Go again.
Try to make the best mistakes you've ever made.
This is what it means to deliver on the promise.
____
Some of the most important experiments happen in the most uncontrolled environments.
Rockets crash.
You learn.
You go again.
A football club is one of the most complex experimental petri dishes imaginable. It is a rich hormone soup of personalities, behaviours, egos and ambitions, all wearing the same jumper, all being judged in the most binary of ways, every weekend.
And inside a club, everyone knows the game is not team vs team, or club vs club, as it is judged from the outside. It is system vs system. The experiment is running against seventeen other experiments, all managed and led by equally capable scientists and laboratories, each trying to find its own unique chemistry.
____
Building a culture is articulating the promise.
The values, the standards, the principles — these are the promise a leader makes to the group.
But a promise stated is not a promise kept.
It is only kept through behaviour, day after day, in the moments that matter and in the moments nobody is watching.
We are defined by what we tolerate.
Not what we say we stand for. Not what is written on the wall. What we actually tolerate — in ourselves, in our people, in the standards we let slip when it gets hard.
That is the culture.
That is the promise.
____
It is the competition that sets the standard.
It might be, for the briefest of times, you are that standard.
Brisbane has held the flame in recent years, as unforgiving as it is. They have come into 2026 a little underdone, and such are the margins, they have lost their first two games.
In recent years, the Western Bulldogs have been judged harshly against that standard. I don't share that judgement. What I see is a club doing the work — iterating, adjusting, building — knowing the experiment never really ends.
It is a game never won.
Sport is, as Simon Sinek describes, the ultimate 'Infinite Game'.
____
I have known Luke Beveridge since he was 15 years old. I recruited him to the Melbourne Football Club in the mid-1980s.
He had what I have come to describe as the three 'mindset' characteristics I look for in leaders in high-performance environments—the three Cs: coachability, competitiveness, and connectedness.
Even as a teenager, he was an independent thinker. It was a mindset that enabled him to extract the very best from himself as a player.
It is the less gifted players who manage to forge careers in the sport, who find a way, through effort and insight, who are then gifted the lessons and learnings that are so often the platform for great coaches.
So it is with Luke Beveridge.
He is still that same independent thinker, and I am naturally drawn to these people. They straddle both the art and science of leadership, as great craftsmen do.
The independent thinkers, such as Luke, have a form of courage they often underestimate in themselves. Inside your organisation they are incredibly valuable, but can be unsettling, even intimidating, for those around them. Outside, they face a different challenge, the judgement of those who hold leaders to an expectation they would never have of themselves.
My oft-quoted 'In the Arena' speech by Teddy Roosevelt captures it wonderfully:
"…who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
They back their hypothesis even as the crowd calls for a different experiment altogether. They are unconcerned by the noise.
Noise is not data.
Hence, the need for courage. Allowing the experiment to continue, and right now, for the Bulldogs, it is producing something very watchable.
____
In the middle of Saturday's 81-point demolition of GWS was Sam Darcy, whom my drawing celebrates.
He is 22 years old and a third-generation Bulldog.
His grandfather, David, played 133 games for Footscray in the 1960s. His father, Luke, a former Bulldogs captain, played 226 games, won a Charlie Sutton Medal as Best and Fairest, and is a Member of the Bulldogs' Hall of Fame.
The outline of this story was drawn long before Sam Darcy was born. He is colouring it in, and it's red, white and blue.
The expectations on him are extraordinary. He has been described as a 'unicorn'. Spoken about, in the most compressed of time frames for a player of his size and type, as soon to be the best player in the game.
Luke Beveridge's expectation is simpler. Be a role player. Know it, accept it, and play it.
On Saturday, Darcy was the 15th-ranked player on the ground. Three marks, four goals in his 47th game. Doing exactly what the team needed of him.
That is the experiment working.
Not the unicorn.
The teammate.
___
I have learned that culture isn't some form of endowment you receive. It is something you have to work for, to learn, and like any skill that is hard to master, it is a process of constant iteration.
You have to do the reps.
While I cannot speak to the Bulldogs' journey, I can share my experiences in this area, and the reps look something like this.
A group that has won but mostly lost together. They made mistakes and, over time, learned to own and share them, so everyone benefitted. It got stormy, with individuals and cliques turning on the system and one another. They doubted it would ever happen, but then watched less talented teams achieve more, felt envy, and started asking, "Why not us?"
Then, just when they felt bereft of ideas and inspiration, they dared to try new things. A small light flickered. Their light.
Hard conversations were had. Some people were cut loose. But throughout, they were learning to prevail, building trust and belief in the system and in each other, finding their way to win.
And finally, everyone understood, accepted, and played their role.
This is not a description of Saturday's game. It is a description of the culture that made Saturday possible.
They are delivering on the promise.
____
Culture is a search for chemistry. You will know it when you've got it, but you can never be sure you are getting it.
For me, the simple measure of whether the experiment is working has always been the same.
"Do your people understand what we are trying to do, and how their contribution matters?"
Brisbane under Chris Fagan found that answer through their own courageous leadership journey.
The Bulldogs are finding it.
That is what delivering on the promise looks like.
Play on!
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