A Person Is Not a Process
What a football club can teach you about communication, ownership, and failure in public
In a professional football club, small mistakes rarely stay small. A seemingly minor change of plans can alter the trajectory of an entire career. A small piece of paper can become a large-scale political affair. A coach says the wrong thing on live TV, and by 3 a.m., an official apology has to be written.
These stories may sound like funny or painful media anecdotes. But underneath, they reveal fragile systems: unclear ownership, missing review loops, bad briefing, and communication failures under pressure.
In this talk, I use real stories from my time as a press officer in professional football to show why we all benefit when we speak openly about mistakes. We’ll look at how small failures escalate, why processes collapse when they depend on one person, how public visibility changes everything, and why the actual problem is often not the incident itself, but the system behind it.