Rick Cost on structure, freedom, psychological safety and helping teams think for themselves
A blog and Substack article by Andy Hosgood, Unlock with Coaching
Most leaders say they want initiative, creativity and ownership. Then, often without realising it, they build systems that leave people waiting for permission. Every decision travels upwards. Every process becomes tighter. Every risk is managed out until the team is orderly, compliant and unable to think for itself.
Rick Cost offers a more challenging view of high performance leadership. Great environments need structure, but they also need the right amount of disorder. They need clear values and boundaries that help people feel safe, alongside enough freedom and challenge for better ideas to emerge. Rick calls this the edge of chaos.
In this episode of the Unlocking Human Potential podcast, I speak with Rick, a human movement scientist, physiotherapist and high-performance leader whose career has included Olympic sport, Feyenoord, U.S. Soccer and Olympique Lyonnais. We explore what elite sport can teach leaders about performance culture, curiosity, recovery, shared leadership and the conditions that allow people to surprise themselves.
What does the edge of chaos mean in leadership?
Rick introduces the idea through entropy. In physics, entropy is associated with the way energy disperses and with the number of possible arrangements within a system. Rick uses it as a leadership metaphor for productive disorder. If an environment contains no disruption, nothing meaningfully changes. If it contains too much, people lose clarity and the system becomes chaotic.
The leadership task is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to create the amount of challenge the environment can use. That point sits between rigid order and unmanaged chaos.
The strongest environments have enough structure to create safety and enough freedom to create growth.
This challenges the assumption that good leadership means having every answer. If people simply reproduce the leader’s blueprint, the organisation can never become more intelligent than the person at the top. The better outcome is when a team member develops a solution the leader had not considered.
As Rick puts it, strong leaders do not steer people towards a predetermined answer. They help people move in a direction while leaving room for judgment, creativity and ownership.
Psychological safety needs strong foundations
Freedom without clarity is not empowerment. It is abandonment. If leaders want people to operate with autonomy, they must first make the foundations clear.
Rick describes organisational values as pillars. They provide something people can return to when a situation is unfamiliar and no procedure contains the answer. Clear purpose, standards and decision principles reduce unnecessary uncertainty. That security allows greater agility elsewhere.
This is where psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood. A psychologically safe team is not one without pressure, challenge or accountability. It is one where people can think aloud, question an assumption, admit uncertainty and offer an unfinished idea without being diminished for doing so.
The stronger the relational and cultural foundations, the more productive disorder a team can tolerate. Trust creates room for experimentation. Values stop that experimentation becoming directionless.
Shared leadership means everyone owns a piece of the environment
One of Rick’s clearest principles is that everyone is a leader within their own area. Leadership is not a privilege reserved for the most senior person in the room. It is the responsibility to bring insight, judgment and care to the space you influence.
That principle changes who gets heard. Rick asks interns questions because an intern may notice something that a more experienced practitioner has stopped seeing. A colleague from another sport or discipline may bring a useful pattern, not because they know more about the existing system, but because they are not trapped inside its assumptions.
Too many teams recruit intelligent people and then reward them for staying inside narrow role descriptions. Rick argues that leaders should be curious about a person’s brain, not only the qualifications on their CV. Someone may hold an idea outside their formal domain that changes the whole organisation.
The leader’s ego matters here. When a junior team member produces excellent work, do you take the presentation because you are more senior, or give them the platform and let them own the impact? Rick’s answer is clear. Do not steal their thunder.
Belonging grows when people can complete meaningful work
Belonging is often treated as something created through social activity and team language. Those things may help, but Rick connects belonging to contribution. People want to finish work that matters. They want to see how their effort improves the wider environment.
He gives the example of a sports scientist working with an under-15 team whose research is later used across older age groups and the first team. The value is not only technical. That person can see that their thinking mattered beyond the boundaries of their role.
Recognition is strongest when it is attached to genuine ownership. Praise is useful, but it cannot replace the pride of seeing your idea adopted, sharing it with others and knowing that you helped the organisation improve.
Stop giving people high-burden, low-impact work
Rick uses a simple test when helping people prioritise. What burden will this work create, and what impact is likely to come from it?
Low-burden, high-impact work should move quickly. High-burden, low-impact work may need to wait, change or disappear. Yet many leaders repeatedly give capable people heavy tasks with limited value, then mistake the lack of progress for a performance problem.
Good management is not the endless addition of activity. It is the disciplined allocation of attention. Leaders must understand what their people are capable of, what the environment needs next and where effort can create a visible win.
This is especially relevant when a team is already stretched. More work may create movement, but movement is not the same as progress.
High performance cannot come at the cost of recovery
Rick also speaks candidly about the personal cost of a career in international elite sport. Constant travel, demanding roles and a drive to keep learning shaped his family life and eventually forced a deeper reflection on what sustainable performance means.
Leadership culture often glorifies doing more. Fourteen-hour days become evidence of commitment. Rest becomes something we prescribe to others while quietly refusing it ourselves. In performance sport, that contradiction is particularly stark. Practitioners may advise athletes on sleep, nutrition and recovery while modelling the opposite behaviour.
Leading by example does not mean working harder than everyone else. It means behaving in a way that makes the desired culture credible. If wellbeing matters, leaders must demonstrate that recovery, boundaries and self-care are legitimate parts of performance rather than rewards for finishing an impossible workload.
This aligns closely with the work we do at Unlock with Coaching. Sustainable high performance is not soft leadership. It is an honest recognition that human capacity is finite, even when ambition is not.
Curiosity and preparation can coexist
Rick’s career has been powered by curiosity. He reads, researches, asks questions and actively seeks knowledge from people at every level. Yet curiosity does not mean turning up unprepared and hoping good questions will rescue the conversation.
He is deliberate about preparation. Agendas are sent in advance. Unfamiliar subjects are researched. Potentially difficult topics are considered before the conversation begins. Preparation creates a stable platform from which real curiosity can operate.
The two qualities reinforce one another. Preparation protects people from avoidable confusion. Curiosity prevents preparation from becoming certainty. Together, they allow a leader to bring a point of view while remaining open to a better one.
Failure is evidence that the system is learning
Rick is unusually relaxed about failure. If he cannot fail, he suggests, he may not be trying anything genuinely new. That does not mean reckless experimentation or causing harm. It means accepting that responsible progress includes attempts that do not work.
A team that never disagrees, never questions and never produces an unsuccessful idea may look harmonious. More likely, it has learned to stay safe by remaining silent. Rick sees questions and disagreement as signs that the environment is alive.
Feedback helps move thinking closer to the truth, but only when leaders genuinely welcome it. Asking for challenge while punishing the first person who provides it is not openness. It is theatre, and teams spot it quickly.
Three practical actions for high performance leaders
1. Assess the maturity of your environment
List the major services, responsibilities or capabilities your team must deliver. Score each one from one to five based on where it is today and define what the desired level looks like. This creates a more objective starting point for decisions, priorities and realistic goals.
2. Let people build their own development plans
Invite each person to identify their strengths, development needs and goals. Do not disappear and call it empowerment. Help them improve the plan through several conversations, then give them room to adapt it as they learn. Ownership grows when goals are created with people rather than handed down to them.
3. Look again at the capability already inside your team
Before assuming the answer is a new hire, become curious about the people you already have. Are expectations clear? Is someone in the wrong role? Have they been invited to contribute beyond a narrow job description? People can surprise you when the conditions finally allow them to.
The small change that moves the whole environment
The edge of chaos is not a call for dramatic disruption. Most organisations do not improve because a leader arrives with a grand transformation programme and turns everything upside down. They improve through small, deliberate changes that people can absorb and build upon.
The right question is not, ‘How do I control this team more effectively?’ It is, ‘What small shift would create enough clarity, trust or challenge for this team to think better?’
High performance leadership is the work of shaping conditions. Structure gives people somewhere firm to stand. Freedom allows them to move. Curiosity helps leaders notice what is emerging. Psychological safety makes contribution possible. Recovery keeps the whole system human.
That is where potential is unlocked. Not through the absence of disorder, but through learning how much change the system can use and having the courage to trust people with it.
Listen to the episode
Listen to my full conversation with Rick Cost on the Unlocking Human Potential podcast for a thoughtful exploration of high performance leadership, entropy, team culture, curiosity, recovery and the conditions that help people do their best thinking.
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2T4b1cfLt1vDndxameZgLV
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-edge-of-chaos-rick-cost-on-leadership/id1870292360?i=1000757112408
Rick Cost: https://www.rickcost.com/
Unlock with Coaching: https://www.andyhosgood.co.uk/
