The Iceberg Ahead: What Sport Industry Leaders Miss—and Why It Matters

Today’s guest columnists are professors John Cairney and Rick Burton.

Remember James Cameron’s 1997 movie, Titanic? Well, there’s a scene we think warrants discussion. It’s the one where lookouts spot the iceberg, ring the bell and phone the first officer, and by the time the bridge tries to avoid disaster, it’s too late.

Members of the crew saw the problem first. Leadership couldn’t. This operational dilemma is sometimes called the “iceberg of ignorance.” 

The concept is most often attributed to Sidney Yoshida, whose late 1980s research examined how information flows—or fails to flow—within organizations. The most intriguing finding was stark. Senior executives understood only a small fraction of the growing problems within their sphere of influence. By contrast, frontline employees saw almost all of them.

The research made one truth clear: Many leaders miss seeing operational inefficiencies, customer frustrations and cultural tensions because these issues are obscured or sit below the surface.

In some interpretations of Yoshida’s work, frontline employees recognized nearly all organizational problems, while insulated executives saw only a tiny percentage.

The implication is not that leaders are inattentive but impaired by the structure they control. In climbing the “corporate ladder,” they traditionally achieve a rewarded distance—hierarchical, social and psychological. Atop the ladder, pay grade filters keep leaders/owners/commissioners from seeing and hearing clearly.

The investigations into the NWSL in 2021–2022 offer a textbook illustration of our ignorance iceberg in practice.

Many of the issues that ultimately became public—cultural failures, inappropriate behavior and breakdowns in athlete welfare—were not sudden revelations. They were known, in different ways, within the system.

Players and some staff saw behavior patterns that raised concern. In several cases, those red flags were shared—within teams, across informal networks and at times through more formal channels. Unfortunately, the information did not produce timely, decisive action.

What emerged from subsequent investigations, including the Yates report, is not a simple story of ignorance at the top but rather a story of fragmentation. Signals were dispersed, inconsistently documented and often handled in isolation. Concerns were raised, but escalation pathways were unclear, responses uneven. Information existed but didn’t cohere.

It was only after investigative reporting by The Athletic and independent reviews that the scale and systemic nature of the problem became visible to the public and impossible for leadership to ignore (or survive).

Seen through the lens of iceberg management we note:

To be clear, the lesson is not that leaders lacked information. It’s that leagues, teams, clubs and suppliers can know more than their respective leaders are able to act upon. Knowledge is not absent, but it’s frequently disconnected.

Sport entities are never immune to this dynamic. If anything, they are especially vulnerable. Consider three recurring patterns:

1. Fan experience failures: Long lines, poor signage, confusing ticketing systems—these are usually first noticed by stadium staff and fans themselves. Yet strategic decisions about venue design or operations are sometimes made far from the lived game-day experience.

2. Athlete welfare signals: In high-performance environments, early warning signs—burnout, dissatisfaction, higher incidences of injury, cultural friction—are often visible to teammates, trainers or support staff long before they reach executives or boards.

3. Commercial misreads: Sponsorship activations or digital initiatives unveiled in boardrooms can fall flat in practice. Those closest to fans—community managers, event staff, even athletes—often see the disconnect first.

Sportico readers regularly see versions of this minefield across leagues and teams—from misjudged promotions to poorly received fan engagement strategies. The pattern is consistent: The organization knew more than leadership realized.

This brings us to a discussion of humility and hubris.

A classic study by Bradley P. Owens and colleagues (2013) examined the role of expressed humility in leadership. The authors defined humility through observable behaviors—acknowledging limitations, valuing others’ strengths and remaining open to feedback. Their findings showed leaders with these traits created stronger team environments, with higher employee engagement, better collaboration and improved individual and team performance.

The mechanism is relational. By reducing hierarchical distance, humble leaders make it easier for employees to speak up, share ideas and surface concerns. Information flows more freely. Not because systems change, but because people feel able to contribute.

In this sense, a critical leadership insight is revealed: Access to information is not enough. Leaders must create conditions under which bad or confronting news is willingly shared.

In sport, the implications are immediate. Leaders who spend time in venues—not just in VIP boxes, but in concourses, control rooms and behind the scenes—gain access to a different kind of information: how fans mover through a stadium; where friction points emerge; how staffers improvise to keep operations running.

The same applies in high-performance settings: training environments, recovery rooms and athlete-staff interactions.

These are the spaces where culture lives and, it’s hoped, problems surface first. Interestingly, seeing the iceberg requires more than proximity. It requires people willing to speak up. This is where psychological safety becomes critical.

If frontline staff—or athletes—don’t feel safe raising concerns, the iceberg remains unannounced, no matter how often leaders walk around. Candor is not a cultural by-product. It’s a leadership responsibility, and execs must consistently signal that critique and uncomfortable truths are valued.

Without that, Managing by Walking Around (MBWA) risks becoming theater. With it, those wanderings can generate insight. Still, even when leaders see more of the iceberg, they must decide what comes next. This is where another idea we’ve previously written about comes into play: paradoxical leadership.

The tensions are familiar:

The reality, of course, is knowing these are not either/or choices. They are both/and tensions.

Leaders who understand the iceberg “field” are more likely to see these pain points clearly. But seeing them is only the beginning. The real work lies in resisting the temptation to resolve too quickly on instinct alone, or too simply.

The enduring lesson icebergs give us is not that business captains are failing their crews but that leadership, by design, has blind spots. The key to addressing those blinds spots is how leaders prepare and whether they tend to do these three key things well:

In an era where sport is more complex, data-rich and commercially pressurized, the best sport organizations need their C-suites aware, even in an age of global warming, that icebergs remain … often dead ahead.