Does Anyone Really Know What They’re Doing?

It’s a fair question. When you take a closer look at personnel decisions in professional sports and in business, the patterns are hard to ignore.

Consider the NFL. Thirty-two teams. Billions of dollars in value. Elite executives hiring elite coaches to lead elite athletes in the most competitive league in the world. Everything is “professional.” And yet, in just the past year, more than half of NFL head coaches have been replaced. On top of that, 50–60% of players on many teams turn over from one season to the next.

The stated goal, of course, is to win. But if that’s true, why is leadership so unstable? Why are selection decisions so inconsistent? Why does “talent identification” seem so unreliable at the highest levels of sport?

The same pattern exists in business. Organizations hire, promote, and replace leaders constantly — often with enormous financial cost and cultural disruption. The root problem is surprisingly simple: there is no agreed-upon behavioral model for what success in a role actually requires. We rely on instinct, reputation, and surface impressions instead of measurable human factors.

One of the most famous examples is Tom Brady. Invited to the NFL Combine, he reportedly told organizers he couldn’t run well. They encouraged him to attend anyway. At the Combine, roughly 90% of evaluation time focused on physical performance - speed, strength, throwing mechanics. Very little attention was given to cognitive processing, emotional regulation, or decision-making under pressure.

Afterward, teams were warned about his lack of athletic speed. Weeks later, he was drafted 199th overall — in the sixth round. He went on to win seven Super Bowls and become widely recognized as the greatest quarterback of all time (G.O.A.T.). Reflecting on that journey, he later said, “I still can’t run — but I sure know how to win.”

So what happened? How could so many professionals miss so completely?

Because we confuse performance with talent.

Football was not stamped on Tom Brady ‘butt at birth’. What he was born with was a neurological wiring system — the way he naturally thinks, feels, and responds under pressure. That internal wiring shaped his decision-making, emotional control, resilience, and competitive drive. Football was simply the arena where those traits were expressed.

Across sports and business, we overemphasize what people do and under-measure who they are. We observe actions and physical attributes, but we rarely measure cognitive processing, emotional patterns, or behavioral consistency. Traits like grit, resilience, anticipation, and composure under stress are decisive - yet historically they have been treated as intangible. All of these ‘talents’ people believed Tom possessed these qualities all of which were not measured at the combine.

That is beginning to change, but the changes are slow to ‘show themselves in real life. Advances in cognitive and behavioral assessment are helping organizations understand how people process information, make decisions, and regulate emotions in real time. For example, cognitive performance systems are now being used in football to evaluate how quickly quarterbacks read the field and release the ball — capabilities that are far more predictive of success than sprint speed.

The broader lesson applies far beyond sports. In corporations, research consistently shows that organizations hire the right person for a role only a fraction of the time (actually 1 in 5 correctly). Too often, decisions are driven by likeability, confidence, or résumé optics rather than credibility indicators of behavioral fit.

We are not bad at seeing performance. We are bad at identifying the underlying drivers of performance. What organizations need are lead indicators — measurable human factors that predict how someone will think, feel, and act in a specific environment. These include cognitive style, emotional patterns, motivational drivers, and behavioral tendencies, alongside physical or technical skill. Together, they form a complete picture of talent and fit. Even as parents or teachers, who mean well, we ask the wrong question to our children who are growing up ‘What do you want to do?’, What do you want to be? We should be asking them ‘who are you’?

I’m currently working with an organization named Inner Athlete/ Inner You, under the direction of Steve Harrison, who along with me (Winning Profile, Behavioral Data) are examining information we are all born with. Performance Genetics, Blood Analysis, Nutrition Formulation, and S2 Cognition.

S2 Cognition is currently working mainly, at the moment, with Colleges and Pro football measuring cognitively the ability of quarterback’s natural talent to know when and how they ‘release’ the ball at the right time and to the right location.

Do you think that maybe this should have been done with ‘Tom’ and every other QB who is trying to be assessed to show ‘who they ARE’ and what they can DO’?

This is where behavioral alignment systems come in. By mapping how individuals naturally think, feel, and act, organizations can make more informed decisions about recruitment, role placement, team composition, and leadership development. Instead of guessing, they gain a structured, evidence-based approach to talent.

The goal is not just to select better performers, but to create environments where people’s natural wiring aligns with the demands of the role. When that alignment exists, performance, engagement, and resilience all improve — not by chance, but by design.

Because in the end, the real question isn’t whether people know how to run a business or a team. The question is whether we truly understand talent — and whether we are finally ready to measure what actually matters.