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In his fourth year at Barcelona as head coach Pep Guardiola couldn’t find any way to make his team win.

After three of the most successful seasons in the club’s history, in any club’s history, Barcelona stopped winning.

Effectively the players were the same, the stadium was the same, the fans were the same but the formula didn’t work anymore.

This isn’t a common problem, it’s an ‘always’ problem.

If that wasn’t the case Celtic would always win the league in Scotland (although they’ve done it for a few years – they won’t do it forever now)

Federa would always win at tennis and Edwin Moses would never have lost at the 400m hurdles in the end.

Teams and individual fluctuate in their performance levels, short term, medium term and long term.

If this is a fact of life then why is it that we expect it to be anything other than this, why do we expect a high level of performance without interruption for an indefinite period of time? (and we do, or at least I do)

The First Class cabin on Emirates airplanes set their customer service level at 130% of what they believe is acceptable to allow for a 30% reduction on any given trip.

Despite this they get complaints about their service (which is extraordinary) on every single trip.

If this is an accepted part of life then we should plan for it, but we rarely do. We expect exceptional indefinitely and make no allowances when we receive anything else.

Blog Post Number: 1818