In this solo episode, Trisha opens a new series on sport, and how it can both build bridges and burn them.

Every sporting event has three kinds of people: those playing, those watching, and those running it. Are they all having the same experience of connection — or is being near someone quietly different from being with them? Using Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis, Trisha tests a Saturday morning at the local park against a World Cup, asking who might be getting more out of it than we assume.

If a sporting moment has ever shifted you, or told you that you didn't belong, Trisha wants to hear it in your voice.

Make sure you join Trisha in this journey of growth and discovery throughout the year via Substack or LinkedIn.

Resources mentioned:

• "The Nature of Prejudice" by Gordon Allport
• Parkrun

Referenced in this episode:

• Episode 70 - Ned Legaspi, on storytelling and the Bamboo Framework
• Episode 75 - Chika Miyamori, on building bridges across differences
• Episode 76 - Dr. David Livermore, on Beyond CQ
• Episode 77 - Dr. David Livermore, on Prism and leadership
• Episode 82 - Mike Newton, on music and perspective
• Episode 84 - Music Is Universal, Music Is Particular.

I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.

Hi there, everyone. I'm Trisha Carter. I'm an organizational psychologist and an explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness, the shifts in our thinking.

Today is another solo episode, and it's the entry point into our new series about sport. And if you're just joining us, you might have heard that this podcast is about cultural intelligence, CQ, and how we need to be able to change our cultural perspectives to shift our thinking, which is part of CQ strategy.

You might be wondering why I'm talking about sport. Well, this year, we've looked at a number of different ways that people can shift their thinking and see different perspectives. We have had some episodes that have spoken to the aspects that many of you who are trainers or coaches or working globally with people from other cultures would be expecting, sort of the traditional unpacking of cultural intelligence.

And an excellent one that is an example of that this year was episode 75 with Chika Miyamori, Chief Culture Officer and founder of the CQ Lab in Japan. She spoke about building bridges. And in episode 76 and 77, Dr. David Livermore spoke about his recent research into CQ and leadership. But yes, we have stepped outside what we traditionally think of as the training room or conference room environment, and we've looked at some other things that might shift people.

In episode 70, we spoke with Ned Legaspi

Ned has written the book on culturally intelligent storytelling, and we spoke about movies. And then in following episodes, we had some fun analyzing some movies using his bamboo framework that he writes about in his book. Go read it. It's a great book. We also reflected, in a subsequent episode on Artemis II, the space rocket, and how the astronauts from this and previous missions have reported how seeing Earth from outer space has changed their perspectives.

Now, I appreciate that the option of putting all your trainees or your coachees into a spaceship and taking them to outer space is not really open to all of us. But something that might be a bit more accessible is music. And in episode 82, we spoke to Mike Newton. He often acts as a DJ when he isn't in his day job as director of organizational health and wellbeing.

And following up on that episode where we spoke about how music shifts people, we then gathered a number of voices from different continents from you, dear listeners, and your experiences of music and how it has shifted you. And we even had playlists. If you're just joining us, you could go back and find them.

But around that time that we were thinking about music, the Football World Cup was taking place in the USA. We had stories of kilts and bagpipes and street gatherings in Boston. There was a town called Lawrence in Kansas that adopted the Algerian team We heard stories of Japanese supporters continuing their ritual of cleaning up stadiums after games, and how other team supporters joined them.

And we heard about small teams whose country names many of us would have never heard before, like, and again, there's a couple of different pronunciations of this, but Curaçao or Kuse and Cabo Verde, two small countries who became favorites, in different places and over different times. So sport caused alliances to be formed between places and people, and it really did seem like people were increasing their cultural intelligence through the whole process.

You know, there was CQ drive, that energy to reach out to people who are different to you. There was definitely CQ knowledge. We had to learn how to pronounce places' names, but also we learnt to recognize flags. We learnt national anthems, and we learnt about some of their local customs. And yes, people's CQ action also increased.

They joined in with rituals of other teams. They ate different foods. They drank different drinks. They learnt some languages that they might have never heard before. And their CQ strategy, that ability to think about our cultural perspectives and to see things differently, to shift, yes, I think that happens sometimes, too Now, last episode, we talked about how there's a shadow side to music, and I made you a bit of a commitment because I know that the World Cup wasn't all rainbows and unity.

And I said we'd look honestly at sport from its two faces, and we will. I want to start our look into sport using Gordon Allport's work. So he was a psychologist who wrote a book called The Nature of Prejudice in 1954, and that emerged into what is known as the contact hypothesis. But before we do that, I want us all to visit somewhere less exciting and much smaller than a World Cup.

I want to start with a Saturday morning. So picture your local sporting event. Maybe you've seen it regularly on a Saturday morning. But let me tell you about one I know, which I do see regularly. So it's 10 to 8 on a Saturday morning. I'm at my local park called Park Menai. And at this time of year, r- because, dear listeners, I'm in the Southern Hemisphere in Australia, it's a bit chilly 'cause it's winter.

So people are in their exercise gear, their track pants, their shorts, their leggings. They're gathering together, twos or threes, some on their own, but they're talking, smiling, breathing out visible, um, breath into their cold air Some people have brought the dog on a lead because it's Parkrun. And if you've never heard of Parkrun, it's a free timed five-kilometer community event held every Saturday morning in parks and open spaces all over the world.

There could be one near you. Anyone can walk, jog, run, volunteer, or just watch. It's open to all ages and fitness levels, and a tail walker always finishes last, so no one is ever left behind. If I'm without injury, which in the last year or so has not been consistently, but if I am, I try to jog my fastest.

Although I have to confess, I am yet to achieve my goal of running from start to finish at our local event because I have to stop at the hilly parts. But for me, it's an opportunity to move my body and an opportunity to connect with other people. So there we are, back at Gordon Allport and his contact hypothesis.

Does Parkrun provide that contact opportunity? Well, like so many things in this world, dear listeners, it depends. You see, there are three different types of participants at most sporting events, and Parkrun is exactly the same. In Parkrun at my Saturday morning, there's the runner, jogger, walker, those of us who get out there and we are doing it.

There's often a few supporters sitting on a bench with a coffee or maybe looking after the dog that won't run or the kids that don't want to participate. And there are always the marshals, the volunteers in their fluoro vests, waving people around the corner or giving the time or,

Being the tail walker. So it's the same event at the same time in the same community, you'd think. So here's the question I want to hold up to the light today. Are those three people in their different roles having the same experience of connection? Because by the end of this episode, I'm going to suggest that they might not be.

And in fact, I think we might least expect who might be getting the most connection Because we say it all the time, sport brings people together. And it does. It genuinely does. I wouldn't be making this series otherwise. But together is doing a lot of quiet work. So let's slow down and ask two better questions.

Who exactly is being brought together, and what are they actually doing while they're there? Because being near someone is not the same as doing something with someone. You can stand shoulder to shoulder with 80,000 people and never exchange a word. You can share a postcode, a stadium, a finish line, and never have the same goal And you might remember from episode 83 when we gathered the voices from you all, and you told your stories, and I came back to one of them in the last episode, and it was Lucy's moment in the crowd. She was surrounded by her people, or so the jersey said, and she was as near to each other as can be. But she said she had rarely felt further away.

Nearness didn't protect her. Something was missing. And today we're gonna think about what that is. So back to Gordon Allport. In his Nature of Prejudice, the book, he made a claim that sounds obvious until you read it all. Contact between different groups can reduce prejudice and build connection. That's the part that everyone remembers and everyone hopes is happening.

And in some situations during the World Cup, that was happening. In some situations at my local park run it happens. But Allport never said it was automatic. He said it works under conditions. Not always, under conditions. He named four. First, equal status. The people in contact who are meeting together, who are connecting, need to meet as equals, at least within that situation.

So you could be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a tradie, unemployed, a mother from home, a student. And at park run in your exercise gear, you are equals. Second, you have common goals. You need to be aiming at the same thing. Hmm, that could be a little bit different. Some people are aiming at slightly different things at park run. Thirdly, cooperation. They need to be working together, not competing against each other And fourth, there needs to be support from the institution around them. Might be a club, might be the organization, as in Parkrun. It could be the code if it's football or cricket or, you know, any other major sporting group.

It could be the authorities, the associations. So the norms of the place need to back up the connection, not undermine it

So those are Allport's conditions, and 70 years of research have followed, hundreds and hundreds of studies gathered and weighed, and the broad finding has held up. Contact tends to help reduce prejudice, and it helps most reliably when the conditions are in place. One of the big reasons it works, the research has found, is beautifully simple.

Contact under the right conditions lowers our anxiety about each other, and when the anxiety drops, curiosity gets room to breathe Now, here's what makes sport so fascinating to me, and honestly, it is a little bit sneaky. Because sport can meet all four conditions, and I'm sure you already picked it up when we mentioned common goals.

It can violate them in the same ninety minutes. So think about it. Your teammate, if you're in a team sport, gets the full Allport package, equal status under the same rules, a common goal, literally, we want to beat the opposition. Cooperation because you cannot win alone. Institutional support, the code, the coach, the club, all of them supporting you.

If Allport had wanted to design a laboratory for connection, it would look a lot like a team. But your opponent, your opponent gets contact of exactly the kind that Allport warned us about. Same field, same rules, but everything's pointing the other way. There's no common goal, no cooperation, and a crowd behind each side making very sure everyone knows which group is which.

Same field, same ninety minutes, but the opposite mechanisms. So that, dear listeners, is why sport can both build bridges and burn them within the same match. It's not a contradiction. It's the conditions working exactly as Allport described it in both directions So let's take Allport's conditions back to your and my Saturday mornings, and we'll run our three people through them.

The one taking part comes closest to the laboratory. If they're in a team or a training group or even a loose pack of regulars. Shout out to my Parkrun mates, some of whom get together for coffee afterwards, but all of us ask each other, "How did you go? How did you feel?" We support each other. We've got shared goals, cooperation, repetition week after week, and a structure holding it all together, Parkrun organization.

When people tell stories about sport changing how they see others, it's so often this. Maybe the teammate they'd never otherwise have met, the season that made a stranger into someone they'd defend. And at Parkrun, we have those shared goals. Finish the five K, feel good about myself, connect with others.

Okay, now the supporter on the bench. And here I have to be honest with you because I said I would be. For the spectator, most of what is happening is nearness, not contact. There's no shared task with the stranger beside you necessarily. It could be. You might be wanting to start Mexican waves together. Um, but often not.

Not necessarily cooperation, no necessary equal status exchange. Presence, yes. Feeling, hey, yeah, absolutely, and we'll come back to that feeling. But if we claim that simply watching sport builds connection through contact, we're claiming something that the theory doesn't offer. If spectating shifts us, and I suspect that it can, but it must be working through other doors

And then the marshal in the fluoro vest, the volunteer, maybe the sausage sizzle in Australia or New Zealand at the football match or the netball match. Here's my quiet suspicion. I think that the volunteer might be the one getting the best of Allport's deal. Think about the conditions. Cooperation towards a common goal?

Absolutely. Keeping the organization going so that your kids get a chance to play, or that we all get a chance to participate. Equal status? Definitely. There's no superstars behind the sausage sizzle or at the registration table. Repeated contact week after week? Yes, definitely. Institutional support? Well, the entire event depends on the institutional support, and everybody knows it.

So the people we picture at the edges of sport may be standing closer to the center of connection than anyone on the field. I think of Michelle at our local Parkrun. She was the reason I came back after my first, um, my first time at Parkrun, and the reason that I went for coffee afterwards, and the reason that I volunteered a few weeks later.

Everyone at Parkrun knows and appreciates Michelle and her work. Thank you, Michelle. So next time someone says sport brings people together, you might gently ask the Allport questions. Together with whom? Doing what? Backed by whom? Because the conditions are the whole story. Now, I've said that spectating might work through other doors, and contact, I think, is not the only mechanism that I want us to explore in this series.

So let me just put three questions out there, and if you're a regular listener, you know how this works by now. Hold onto these thoughts. So question one, does getting better at something physical make you braver somewhere else? When you finally run the distance or learn the skill or score a try, kick a goal, shoot a goal, or you finish the thing you thought you might not finish, or you you beat your previous PB, does that confidence stay on the track, or does it walk with you into rooms and conversations that have nothing to do with sport?

I have a guest coming whose whole story lives inside that question. Question two, can watching, spectating shift us? The supporter who's never left home seeing their team's faces and hearing their stories. The rugby crowd on the far side of the world going quiet as the haka begins. If contact needs the conditions, what exactly is reaching us through the screen?

Something is. Question three, what happens when the institution itself decides that connection is the goal? Not as a byproduct of the game, but as the mission. There's been a few stories about that, and I want to unpack it as well, and if all goes well, we'll get to hear from it from an insider. And one small fourth thought, though you already know this one from our music series.

Remember the bodies moving in time, the crowd that claps as one, the chant that rises without anyone conducting it, entrainment. It didn't stay behind when we left music. It is there in sport as well. So that's something to reflect on as having possibly the capability to shift us So here's your practice for the week.

Next time you're at sport in any form, maybe you're playing, you're watching, you're volunteering, you're ferrying your children, maybe you're watching TV, notice which role you're in, and then quietly run the check. Am I doing something with people who are different from me, or am I just near them? No judgment either way.

Nearness is a fine place to start, but noticing the difference, that's CQ strategy doing its job. And if you spot a small way to turn near into with, offering to help pack up, or taking a turn on the roster, or learning the name of the person you always stand beside, that's CQ action right there at the fence line.

And dear listeners, the voice notes, the two questions from last episode still stand. A sporting moment that shifted you, and a moment sport told you that you didn't belong. Today, I'm adding a third Has getting better at something physical ever made you braver somewhere else? Tell me the story. Send me a voice note or message.

Connect with me on LinkedIn if we're not already. All the details are in the show notes. Thank you everyone for being part of The Shift today. Cultural intelligence is something we develop together, and these conversations are part of our shared learning journey. If this episode resonated, please share it with someone, maybe the person on your team, at your fence line, or behind the sausage sizzle.

Make sure you've pressed follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, and I look forward to meeting with you again on the next episode of The Shift