For instructors · Routledge · August 2026
A model course built on the book
A model syllabus for a one-term course built on the book: week-by-week readings, each chapter’s case and tools, class activities and assignments, with shorter versions. Keep what suits your program and change the rest.
How to use this
This is a starting point for instructors. Keep what suits your program and change the rest. Your department’s requirements come first.
It assumes a 13-week, three-credit course with three contact hours a week, for upper-year undergraduates or graduate students in sport psychology, sport management, kinesiology or a related field. Shorter versions are near the end.
The order follows the book’s seven questions, because each one rests on the ones before it. Whichever version you choose, keep the questions in order; if you skip one, tell students what it would have held up.
Course description
Why do culture problems in elite sport keep coming back after the coach is replaced or the workshop is run? This course treats organizational culture as a system that can be diagnosed, designed and maintained.
Students work through seven questions in order, from mapping pressure and testing whether people can tell the truth to how decisions get made and whether the work outlasts the people who built it. They use composite case studies and practical tools, and judge how strong the evidence behind each one is.
What students will be able to do
| Outcome | Assessed in |
|---|---|
| Explain why culture problems usually trace to structure, and diagnose the structure before labelling the person. | Case analysis, capstone |
| Map the pressures on an organization and classify the silence they produce. | Case analysis, capstone |
| Tell a demanding environment from a damaging one, and trace where a problem starts. | Case analysis, capstone |
| Design working systems for speaking up, making decisions, supporting transitions and clarifying staff roles. | Design brief, capstone |
| Weigh the evidence behind a tool, including what it can’t claim and how it could be tested. | Evidence audit |
| Plan how an organization handles outside pressure and keeps the work going after its leaders leave. | Capstone |
| Recognize where organizational work ends and clinical care, safeguarding or legal advice begins. | Design brief, capstone, discussion |
Teaching this material safely
- Content. Chapters 3, 7, 8 and 10 deal with toxic environments, mental health disclosure and online abuse. Some students will have lived this. Tell them in advance, point them to campus support, and make it easy to step out.
- Disclosures. A student may disclose harm in class or in an assignment. Know your institution’s reporting duties and safe-sport routes before term starts. The course isn’t therapy, and neither are office hours.
- Real people. Many discussion questions ask about “your organization”. Let students answer with a public case or an anonymized composite, and never require them to describe a team, coach or employer they could be identified with.
- Public cases. Use published reporting, treat allegations as allegations, and don’t have students contact the people involved.
- Live organizations. Before any project with a real organization, get its written agreement and check with your research ethics office.
- Scope. The book covers organizational systems. It doesn’t cover clinical treatment, coaching technique or tactics, and it doesn’t replace clinical supervision, safeguarding training or specialist mental health support. Neither does this course.
- Tools. Many of the book’s tools are practitioner-developed and unvalidated. Teach them that way, and don’t let students treat them as psychometric measures.
Week by week
“Q” numbers refer to each chapter’s own discussion questions. Chapters run about 5,000 to 13,000 words, including references.
| Week | Question and reading | Case | Main ideas and tools | In class | Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Why treat culture as a system? Preface; Introduction | None | The seven-layer framework and why order matters; dysfunction as adaptation; how the book treats evidence; speed of truth, voice normalization, decision clarity | Take a publicly reported culture failure. Sort each fix as a change to people or a change to the system. | — |
| 2 | What are we actually dealing with? Chapter 1, The Pressure Landscape | The Video Coordinator Who Stopped Staying Late | Eight pressure dimensions; conflicting time horizons; the silence calculus; fear-based, architecture-based and network-based silence; how weak signals become crises | Trace one pressure through an athlete, a coach and a support staff member (Q1). | — |
| 3 | Can anyone here tell the truth? Chapter 2, Psychological Safety | The Assistant Coach Who Stopped Disagreeing | Safety versus trust, inclusion and comfort; false cohesion; the Safety Diagnostic; voice channels; the 90-Day Sprint; blameless post-mortems | Run a short meeting using the chapter’s disagreement protocol, then debrief it. | — |
| 4 | What is actually broken? Chapter 3, When Cultures Turn Toxic | The New Coach Who Inherited the Silence | Demanding versus damaging; early signals; tracing the cascade from office to field; the Toxic Triangle; the Weekly Diagnostic Triad | Sort scenes from the case as demanding or damaging. Draft a first-week diagnostic. | — |
| 5 | How do we decide when it matters? Chapter 4, Vision, Values, and Decision Architecture | The Welfare Officer Who Mapped the Pattern | Stated values versus values-in-use; conflict archaeology; behavioural anchors; a discipline decision tree with a safeguarding gate; how decision systems fail | Apply conflict archaeology to a public case (Q1, adapted). Walk one incident through the decision tree. | Case analysis |
| 6 | How do we decide when it matters? Chapter 5, The Transformational Leader | The Room Went Quiet | Disclosure zones; game-day regulation; performance safety zones; deselection and procedural justice; losing streaks; the 72-hour moratorium | Practise a deselection conversation in pairs. Debate when urgency should override the 72-hour rule (Q3). | — |
| 7 | How do we decide when it matters? Chapter 6, Building Championship Culture | The Equipment Manager Who Stopped Enforcing | Reinforcement loops (cue, behaviour, consequence); stated versus enacted culture; season-aware change; the Wobble Protocol; the Culture Continuity Document | Map one reinforcement loop. Ask what would survive if the head coach left tomorrow (Q3). | — |
| 8 | Are we listening, and using what we hear? Chapter 7, Transitions | The case in Box 7.1 | The Transition Support Audit; Schlossberg’s 4 S’s; threat and challenge in rookie integration; veteran identity; injury rehabilitation; mental health disclosure | Map a star athlete’s disclosure of panic attacks through a reporting system (Q3). Mark where the clinical line sits. | Evidence audit |
| 9 | Are we listening, and using what we hear? Chapter 8, The Invisible Architecture | The Analyst Who Stopped Flagging | Staff silence; burnout versus moral injury; Fix/Skill/Fit; RACI; homophily in hiring; compassionate accountability | Build a RACI for return-to-play decisions. Mark where formal authority and real power differ (Q2). | — |
| 10 | Are we listening, and using what we hear? Chapter 9, Your People | The Prospect Who Stopped Asking | Selection bias, including maturation timing and relative age; the Selection Decision Record; the acquisition–extraction cycle; monitoring versus surveillance; pipeline design | Run the five-step Selection Bias Audit on a fictional roster. Debate monitoring versus surveillance (Q3). | — |
| 11 | How do we stay grounded when everyone is screaming? Chapter 10, The Stakeholder Ecosystem | The Communications Coordinator Who Stopped Saying No | Stakeholder salience; voice versus veto; crisis communication in the first 72 hours; triage for online abuse; boundaries with agents, families and sponsors | Simulate the first 72 hours after an athlete’s medical information leaks (Q2). | Design brief |
| 12 | Will this survive us? Chapter 11, Future-Ready Organizations; Epilogue | The System That Worked Until It Didn’t | Phased implementation; the ownership spine; measurement that feeds back into the plan; the custodianship cycle; governing AI and wearable data | Argue for or against combining culture survey data with performance analytics (Q2). | — |
| 13 | What does the framework leave out? Introduction, “Scope and Limitations” (reread) | None | Individual sport, para-sport and other settings; organizational readiness; what a framework can’t do | Capstone presentations. Close on what each team still doesn’t know. | Capstone talk |
Assessment
Weights and lengths are suggestions. Word counts are for a graduate section; use the low end or less for undergraduates.
| Assignment | Weight | Due | What students do | Length |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discussion | 15% | Ongoing | Take part each week, and lead the discussion of one chapter once. | None |
| Case analysis | 20% | Week 5 | Choose a case from Chapters 1–3. Classify the silence, decide whether the environment is demanding or damaging, trace where the problem starts, and recommend where to intervene first. | 1,500 words |
| Evidence audit | 20% | Week 8 | Choose one tool from the book. Report its evidence status, the research it draws on and what it can’t claim. If the book doesn’t state a status, say what you would call it and why. Propose how to test the tool in sport. | 1,500–2,000 words |
| Design brief | 15% | Week 11 | Build one working system for a fictional or public organization: a voice channel, a decision pathway with a safeguarding gate, a transition plan, a RACI or a selection record. Say who owns it and how it could fail or be gamed. | 1,000–1,500 words, plus the system |
| Capstone | 30% | Talk in week 13; report one week later | In teams of three to five, audit one organization and write a 12-month plan. | 3,000–4,000 words, plus a talk |
Capstone: a culture audit and 12-month plan
Teams choose a publicly documented sport organization or use a composite from the instructor. The report should:
- Read the organization question by question, using public evidence.
- Name the lowest layer that isn’t holding, and start the plan there.
- State one Culture Hypothesis, in the book’s form: “If we change this consequence, this behavior will change in this domain within this timeframe.”
- Set out 12 months of work, with owners named by role and timing that fits a real season.
- Track speed of truth, voice normalization and decision clarity.
- State its limits: what public sources can’t show, which tools are unvalidated, and where clinical, safeguarding or legal help is needed.
| Marked on | Weight | A strong report |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis | 30% | Looks at structure before people, and backs each judgment with evidence. |
| Order | 20% | Starts at the right layer and shows what depends on it. |
| Plan | 20% | Names owners and timing, and could survive a losing streak. |
| Honesty about evidence | 15% | Separates validated tools from practitioner judgment, and says what isn’t known. |
| Scope and ethics | 15% | Handles people and allegations with care, and refers out what belongs elsewhere. |
Other versions
- Upper-year undergraduate
- Lean on the in-class activities and public cases. Shorten the written work and skip the added readings.
- Graduate seminar
- Add the readings below and have students lead sessions. The evidence audit includes an evaluation design. The capstone adds an implementation lens.
- Six-week module
- Week 1: Introduction and Chapter 1. Week 2: Chapter 2. Week 3: Chapter 3. Week 4: Chapter 4. Week 5: one of Chapters 5, 7 or 8, by program. Week 6: Chapter 11. Assess with a case analysis and a short evidence audit.
- One class
- Assign the Preface and Introduction, which are free here, and run the week 1 activity.
- Sport psychology program
- Go deeper on Chapters 2, 3, 7 and 8.
- Sport management program
- Go deeper on Chapters 1, 4, 9, 10 and 11.
- Kinesiology or coaching program
- Go deeper on Chapters 2, 5, 6, 7 and 9.
- Sport medicine or psychiatry training
- Run Chapters 3, 7, 8 and 11 as a seminar series, focused on where clinical and organizational boundaries meet.
The book says plainly where it stops. Its evidence and experience come mainly from professional team sport in Western, English-speaking settings. Individual sport, para-sport, collegiate systems under NCAA oversight, centralized government sport models and high power-distance cultures all need more than its adaptation notes provide. These are good places for a local reading, a guest speaker or a student project.
Added readings for a graduate section
All are cited in the book. Full references are at the end of each chapter.
| Week | Reading |
|---|---|
| 1 | Fletcher & Wagstaff (2009), organizational psychology in elite sport; Bernier et al. (2025), psychological interventions in elite sport |
| 2 | Morrison (2014), employee voice and silence |
| 3 | Edmondson (1999), psychological safety in work teams; Frazier et al. (2017), meta-analytic review |
| 4 | Padilla, Hogan & Kaiser (2007), the toxic triangle; Stirling & Kerr (2009), abused athletes’ perceptions |
| 5 | Argyris & Schön (1974), theory in practice (selections); Dekker (2012), just culture (selections) |
| 6 | Gross (2015), emotion regulation; Haslam, Reicher & Platow (2020), the new psychology of leadership (selections) |
| 7 | Cruickshank & Collins (2012), culture change in elite sport performance teams |
| 8 | Schlossberg (1981), adaptation to transition; Reardon et al. (2019), mental health in elite athletes |
| 9 | Litz et al. (2009), moral injury; Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter (2001), job burnout; Rivera (2012), hiring as cultural matching |
| 10 | Cobley et al. (2009), relative age effects in sport |
| 11 | Mitchell, Agle & Wood (1997), stakeholder salience; Coombs (2007), situational crisis communication theory |
| 12 | Damschroder et al. (2009), implementation research; Stirman, Baumann & Miller (2019), the FRAME for reporting adaptations |
Get the book for your course
Routledge offers inspection copies to instructors considering a book for a course. The Preface and Introduction are free to read here, so students can start before the books arrive.
Dr. MCB gives talks built around the book and can visit your class, in person or online.
Ask about a class visit →A model course by the book’s authors, for instructors to adapt. The book →