March 2018 – IOF Reflections

Let’s get back to the sensitive question of IOF financials. In January I hoped that there might be some meaningful information shared after the IOF Joint meeting where finances was a surprise topic. Unfortunately, the slides of the strategy/finance presentation of the joint meeting were not published by the IOF despite some very positive vibes coming from that meeting. Only the formal minutes related to the meeting were published here and here.

The 2017 audited financial reports are probably already prepared, but we may have to wait for a long time before we see reliable numbers. Last year the audited accounts were not shared with member federations for 3 months. They were sent to members only after the Presidents’ Conference, maybe to avoid inconvenient questions on the conference.

In the meantime, there were bits and pieces of information shared by the IOF clearly with the intention to prop up confidence about the state of finances:

The January Council meeting minutes (#187) stated that the IOF had a “a cash position of 157 TEUR at the end of year 2017” under Point 10.2
In the same minutes under the same point it was stated that “preliminary financials showed a final result of approximately 16 TEUR”
The message of the non-public January meeting was that “the IOF’s financial situation is stable and balanced” as reported for example by the German Federation’s web page based on the report of German delegates.

In this post I would like to show you why one has to take these pieces of seemingly positive information cautiously, especially when they come from an organisation with stretched financials. That’s why I referred to these as “smoke and mirrors” in the title. They give the feeling of an intention is to strengthen confidence, they sound good to people not familiar with the ins and outs of financial reports, but they give no guarantee that the actual financial performance was good or not.

I hope this discussion may also help some Council members (many of whom read this blog) to have a more meaningful discussion next weekend on the Council meeting in Belgium.

Cash position

A “cash position of 157 TEUR at the end of year 2017″ must be good news, mustn’t it? Yes, it is definitely better to have some cash on the bank account, but there is not much more one can say. In an earlier post I wrote about how the amount of cash in hand does not correlate with financial stability. One less familiar with finances may want to read that post first.

Here I will show the balance sheet development of the IOF over the past couple of years to illustrate the same point with hard data.

IOF current assets vs liabilities v2

The above chart shows a simplified picture of the IOF balance sheet. Before we start to analyse it, I would like to explain the basics of accounting for the majority of readers less familiar with the black magic of financial reports.

Continue reading “IOF Financials – Smoke and Mirrors”

Just a quick detour into the realm of social psychology as a follow up article to my previous post on IOF elections. It presents a possible explanation why some members of the Council feel themselves highly empowered in discussions with practitioners as “member of a body elected by the General Assembly” – despite the fact that simply being selected for nomination by their national federations almost guarantees an “elected” seat in the Council.

I have to admit that during my 4 years as chairman of the MTBO Commission I got rather annoyed by Council members a couple of times . In discussions with different IOF commissions, when they ran out of arguments they simply declared that they were the ones elected to lead the IOF, hence they are the ones to decide. In some cases the Council did not even bother asking questions from practitioners, but made decisions that caused predictable confusion amongst athletes and organisers. The argument was the same: the Council was elected to make decisions, so they do what they feel like.

How can educated people who were well aware of the “election process” (or lack of it) as described in my previous post behave as if they would have won the US Presidential elections?

Most Council members completely ignored the fact that simply being selected for nomination by their national federation, almost guaranteed being elected. This was most comical for the Council sitting for the period between 2014 and 2016. In 2014 all candidates were “elected” without any voting for the simple reason that the number of candidates was equal to the number of seats to be filled.

Recently I stumbled on the explanation. The members of the Council may have fallen victim of a psychological trap explained by Paul Piff in a TEDx presentation below. Being selected to a privileged, dominant position (even if it is done randomly) may alter the way one perceives the world, talks to people, or thinks about their own achievements.

The short summary: Paul Piff, an Assistant Professor Of UC Berkeley, shows a footage of a psychological experiment – a rigged 2 player monopoly game where they randomly pick one player to be the rich guy with additional privileges. The rich player starts with more money, gets two dices to roll, and gets double the income for completing a circuit. As the selected “rich” player inevitably start winning, they start to act more aggressive, play louder, eat more of the free pretzels, mock their opponent, keep talking about their money. After the game, when they are asked to reflect on their experience, they talk about their superior tactics and strategy, rather than acknowledging the huge advantage given at the start.

Continue reading “The (s)elected ones”