After two hours of football, the teams in last summer’s European Championship Final couldn’t be separated. It came down to kicks from the penalty spot. At that moment, every pair of eyes and a few dodgy tachycardia narrows onto two people: the penalty taker and the goalkeeper.
Spain’s keeper, Cata Coll, has a routine. Sip of water. Then, as each England player walks up, she checks the sticker on her bottle: the list of English players and the side they usually favour.
England’s keeper, Hannah Hampton, clocked it. Of course she did. Everyone in football knows the trick.
So Hampton takes a drink from her bottle. Walks across. And when Coll isn’t looking, she quietly swaps the bottles. On the way back to her goal, she casually lobs the Spanish bottle into the crowd.
Next time Coll reaches for her crib sheet, there’s nada. No names. No arrows. No comfort blanket.
It rattled her, for sure. England went on to win.
Now, you might decide that’s poor form. Or you might cheer it on. But that’s not really the interesting part.
Afterwards, when Hampton was asked if she also had a list of players taped to her bottle, she said:
“No. I keep my list taped to my arm where no one can get at it.”
She didn’t see what she’d done as unfair; she was competing on a different level. She saw what her opponent did as ill-prepared.
She’d already thought one step further ahead: if it can be taken off you, assume one day it will.
And then: act accordingly.
Don’t assume someone else will keep your tools safe.
Don’t assume the system will protect your preparation.
Don’t assume “that bit” is someone else’s job.
If it can change the outcome, you’re responsible for it.
Our team lives the water bottle moment every day. We look at everything that can change the outcome of our work, and make sure we’re on it, a step or two ahead.
The lesson came very close to home over the past eight months.
We were invited to compete to redesign and build the new campus for UWCSEA Dover on a new site in Singapore. We weren’t invited once - in the space of 24 hours we were asked to join two of the fifteen teams competing for the most ambitious school design this decade.
Two world-class architecture firms. Two competitors. One school to redesign.
The same project.
The same client.
The same constraints.
And two completely separate routes to a winning proposal.
We had to keep a strict firewall between them. No cross-pollination. No comparisons. No “oh, the other team is thinking this way—maybe we should too.” We had to behave as if the two projects existed on different planets.
If something mattered, we had to hold it ourselves.
Twice. Without relying on a single shared note, idea, or conversation.
Each team needed its own strategy narrative, its own design drivers, its own, interpretation of the school’s future, its own way of turning pedagogy into spatial logic, its own safeguards against misunderstandings or dilution.
Every detail of the brief had to be held and protected in both streams, even if the answer - the winning concept - would ultimately be only one.
No shortcuts.
No “reuse that thinking from the other team”.
No assuming someone else in the other camp would keep the details safe.
In other words:
We had to tape the list to our arm twice.
This wasn’t about secrecy or trust. It’s about responsibility.
When people hear “two teams” and “firewall”, they often imagine politics and the dark side of competition.
In reality, it was something far more demanding: discipline.
Because a firewall doesn’t just keep information apart; it forces you to verify everything yourself. It stops you reaching for an “easy” version of the work. It prevents the lazy assumption that someone, somewhere, will hold the missing detail for you.
This is the essence of Hampton’s lesson:
If losing one piece of information could cost you everything, then you never allow that piece of information to be held anywhere vulnerable.
You take responsibility for the whole chain of meaning, every time.
And in our case, across two chains.
When the winning concept emerged, after eight months of parallel effort, it wasn’t because one team “got lucky” or had a better pitch.
It was because both teams took absolute responsibility for carrying their version of the brief, the strategy, the learning experience, and the design intent from start to finish.
One team won. Ours.
Our other team came second.
The other performed at the same level, just with a different answer.
That’s what responsibility looks like.
We avoided leaving critical details on someone else’s metaphorical water bottle.
Leadership isn’t about your job description. It’s about what you choose to own.
This is where it can get uncomfortable for some school leaders. There are so many things it would be convenient to treat as “someone else’s department”:
The way architects interpret your educational vision.
The way your strategy gets translated into timetables and staffing.
The quality of the story being told about your school in the community.
The everyday experience of students in spaces you signed off two, five or seven years ago.
It’s tempting to say: “That’s operations.” “That’s facilities.” “That’s marketing.” “That’s the architect’s call.”
Goalkeeper Hampton’s logic cuts straight through that: Anything you choose not to take responsibility for can affect the outcome. You’ll still live with the consequences.
So, a few questions for this week:
Where, in your next big project, are you trusting the list on the bottle will always be there when you need it? (A consultant’s slide deck. A set of minutes. A beautiful one-off workshop everyone’s already forgotten.)
What would “taping it to your arm” look like for you?
Writing design drivers your staff and students can repeat from memory, not just read.
Building a small internal Design Team that lives and breathes the brief alongside you.
Testing early sketches or options with real learners before you ever see a 3D render.
Where do you need to step beyond “my job” and quietly take ownership of something that could make or break the outcome? The community engagement. The story you tell your board. The way you bring sceptics into the process, instead of hoping they’ll come round at the end.
In football, you don’t get to replay the penalty shoot-out. In a major campus project, you don’t get a second build. In a strategy, you’ve only got the time you have to make magic happen.
So: what are you still leaving on the water bottle? And what, starting this week, are you prepared to tape to your arm?