A relocation. A new operating model. A system migration running well past its original deadline. At some point in any significant organisational change, something shifts — not in the plan, but in the room. The team is still there, still intact, still showing up. But the collective momentum that made the early weeks feel possible has quietly thinned.
This is not a people problem. And the answer, oddly enough, has been visible on rugby pitches for a long time.
What keeps a team functional through a difficult season
What keeps a rugby team functional through a difficult season is not a motivational speech before the match. It is what happens at training on a wet Wednesday in February — the repetition, the rhythm, the fact that the group has done this together enough times that it starts to feel like second nature. Commitment follows from that repeated experience. It does not precede it.
The Brussels Citizens youth school — children from four to twelve, every Saturday — runs entirely on this logic. You do not ask a seven-year-old to commit to the season. You make the session worth attending. You create the conditions — enough structure, enough enjoyment, enough belonging — and the commitment takes care of itself. Week after week, the same gestures, the same team, the small satisfactions of getting something right. That is what builds a group that holds.
The neuroscience is not optional
There is something in the neuroscience that supports this directly: the brain consolidates behaviours that produce positive signals, and stops consolidating those that produce nothing. Thorndike called it the Law of Effect in 1911. Columbia University confirmed the neural mechanism in 2018. The point is not the science — it is what it explains about why enjoyment is not optional. Without it, practice does not become instinct. The team keeps executing, but stops learning.
Organisations going through change tend to invert this. They ask for commitment first — visible, stated, top-down — and assume the experience will follow.
On a rugby pitch, that sequence does not work. Neither does it in a team navigating a relocation or a two-year programme. The experience has to come first: regular cycles where the work produces something real, felt by the people doing it, not just reported upward.
Collective levers outlast individual heroics
Thomas Dermine put it clearly on Almendra: collective levers are far more powerful than individual ones. A system that creates the right conditions compounds. An individual effort model burns out. The same distinction applies inside organisations. A team that is held together by a structure — clear roles, real feedback, genuine shared purpose — will outlast any team held together by individual heroics.
Maud Larochette described trust as an operational method on Almendra — not a cultural aspiration, but something built deliberately or quietly eroded. The same is true of enjoyment in a team under pressure. It does not sustain itself. It requires attention, rhythm, and leaders who are visibly part of the effort — not watching it from a distance.
When respect stops being structural
Respect in rugby is not a value on a wall. It is structural — the thing that makes the game playable. Respect for the referee, the opponent, the teammate is encoded in the rules, modelled by coaches, and felt immediately when it breaks down. A team that stops respecting its own process — where errors get managed rather than learned from, where disagreement goes underground — does not fall apart dramatically. It just stops improving. The match keeps going, but the ground is being lost.
What holds
What holds a team together through a long transformation is the same thing that holds a rugby team together through a long season: a rhythm of practice that makes the new behaviour familiar before it is expected to be automatic, the experience of small wins that are genuinely felt, and enough enjoyment in the daily work that people are not merely enduring the process — they are still, genuinely, part of it.
We may be slightly biased on the sport of choice. But the logic holds across any field.
Related reading: Thomas Dermine on changing the frame — Almendra · Maud Larochette on trust and coherence — Almendra