Football match where the defense completely ignores the midfield. You’ve seen it. Ball sailing overhead, attackers sprinting past like those defenders are just standing there for decoration. Painful to watch.
That’s most companies, though. From the inside, anyway. Marketing doing whatever marketing does. Finance hoarding spreadsheets like dragons with gold. Sales promising things engineering never agreed to build. Everyone technically on the same team, nobody actually playing together.
Coyyn works differently. Treats your business like a squad that actually wants to win – not the corporate retreat version where you’re catching Susan from accounting as she falls backwards. Real coordination. People knowing their roles, trusting the next person, adjusting when everything inevitably goes sideways.
Departments Already Have Positions
Marketing sits up front. Strikers. Trying to score, soaking up attention when campaigns hit, sulking when they don’t. Finance parks itself in goal – boring until someone messes up, then suddenly everyone remembers they exist. HR runs around like a coach, managing personalities, figuring out why Dave and Sarah can’t be in the same room anymore.
Operations? Midfield. Thankless work connecting everything. Nobody notices until it breaks, and then it’s all anyone talks about.
Sales are your wingers. Quick. Opportunistic. Occasionally infuriating when they close deals the rest of the company can’t actually deliver on.
Once people see themselves this way, behavior shifts. A striker who never passes isn’t skilled – they’re a problem. Marketing hoarding leads because sharing feels like losing control? Same thing.
Sports Actually Teach This Stuff
Not motivational poster garbage. Real skills transfer.
Athletes build pattern recognition under pressure. Reading situations fast. Communicating without five-paragraph explanations. Trusting teammates doing things you can’t see on the other side of the field.
Mental endurance matters too. Losing a quarter isn’t losing the game. Rough Q1 doesn’t kill you if the team regroups properly.
Championship squads watch tape. Hours of it. Studying their own failures, picking apart what went wrong, fixing problems before the next match. Businesses mostly bury mistakes in quarterly reports and pray nobody mentions them again. The Coyyn approach builds review sessions directly into the rhythm – weekly, monthly, whatever fits. What flopped? Why? Were people even positioned to succeed in the first place?
Annual Planning is Mostly Fiction
You spend three months building a strategic plan. Beautiful slides. Confident projections. Leadership nods approvingly.
Then a competitor launches something unexpected. Your best salesperson leaves. Economy hiccups. That gorgeous plan? Useless paper.
Sports teams huddle constantly. Halftime adjustments. Timeout strategy shifts. Quick conversations during actual play. Short, frequent check-ins where people talk about what’s working, what isn’t, what changed.
Not marathon meetings with seventeen agenda items. Ten minutes. What’s blocking you? What do you need from someone else? What’s different from last Tuesday?
Cross-Training Builds Depth
Professional athletes train beyond their primary skill. Quarterbacks doing footwork drills. Forwards practicing defensive positioning. Games get chaotic – you end up places you didn’t expect.
Companies skip this entirely. Finance genuinely has no clue what marketing does between 9 and 5. Product development assumes sales just golfs and lies to clients. Small misunderstandings compound into massive dysfunction.
Rotating people through different teams – even a week here and there – creates understanding. Also creates backup. Your social media person catches the flu, someone else can at least keep things running. Championship rosters carry depth for exactly this reason.
Goals Work Better as Brackets
Annual revenue targets are too distant. Big number on a slide, forgotten by February, panic in November.
Tournament brackets function differently. Can’t worry about finals when you haven’t won round one. Each match matters on its own, but they chain together toward something bigger.
Breaking yearly goals into sequential smaller wins builds momentum. Hit the first one, quick celebration, next target. Miss one? Not eliminated. Adjust strategy, move forward. Coyyn structures goals this way – keeps people engaged instead of staring at some abstract number floating twelve months away.
What This Actually Means
None of this is complicated. Applying what works in competitive sports to how companies organize. Coordination over silos. Communication that actually happens. Reviewing failures openly instead of pretending they didn’t occur. Changing strategy when conditions change rather than defending plans that stopped making sense months ago.
Championship teams rarely have the most talented roster. They win because individuals function as a unit, cover weaknesses, stay focused when everything gets tight.
Your company has the players already. Question is whether they’re playing together or just wearing the same shirt.