Do you have a plan to win, or a wish to win?

A Dutch defender wins the World Cup in Lahore in 1990, in front of 60,000 home supporters who very much want the other result. He is a reserve that day. And the thing he remembers most clearly is not the final whistle. It is a conversation in a swimming pool in Kenya, weeks earlier, where two players stood in the water arguing about exactly how a stick should be presented so the receiver knows where the ball is coming. That is the whole masterclass in one image.

Harrie Kwinten played 15 seasons in the Dutch top flight, eight of them as captain, went to the Olympics in 1992, coached at Oranje Zwart afterwards, and then spent more than three decades in sales and business development. Usually we get the sports coach who goes into the boardroom to tell business what it can learn from elite sport. For this session he was asked to turn that around and bring the business lessons back to the field hockey coaches. His answer, and the title of his book, is that winning starts in preparation.

Harrie Kwinten argues that the single thing field hockey coaches could steal from the sales world is the idea of a staged process with entry and exit criteria. In business, you do not move from stage one to stage two until the stage is genuinely finished and everyone agrees on the evidence. Most preparation in hockey, by contrast, is a sprint towards the first match, with no defined gates and no mechanism to step back when something clearly is not working. Around that core lesson he adds a cluster of others: targets do not build teams, coaching the visible symptom is not the same as coaching the problem, players who always ask permission never learn to decide, reviews should follow wins as much as defeats, and most conflict in a squad comes from expectations that were never made explicit. The one thing he says sport already does far better than business is balance, rest and recovery.

In the sales process Harrie describes, a cycle has five stages, numbered zero to four. Each stage has a defined start and a defined finish. You do not advance because the calendar says so, or because everyone is keen to crack on. You advance because the criteria for that stage have actually been met. If they have not, you stay where you are.

His claim is blunt: "Business for that matter is better organized." And he thinks this is the biggest single lesson available to coaches. Think about how a pre-season usually runs. There is a start date, there is a first league match, and there is a long list of things that need covering in between. Fitness, basic skills, the press, the outlet, penalty corners, the low block, a bit of rest defence if there is time. The list is really a wish list bolted to a calendar. What it almost never has is a gate. Nobody says: our defensive organisation stage is not finished, so we are not opening the attacking transition stage yet.

The second half of the idea is the part coaches will find harder. When you hit a setback, Harrie says, identify the weak step in the process and go back one stage. In his words, in sport "we don't give ourselves the pace, the rest to take one step back". We are running very hard, trying to reach the final stage of the preparation, and the instinct when something breaks is to add, not to return. Another session. Another video clip. Another detail layered on top of a foundation that is not holding.

There is an honest objection to this, and it is worth putting on the table. Hockey is not a linear pipeline. A deal either closes or it does not, while a team is working on six capabilities at once and they all interact. You cannot really "finish" outletting and then never touch it again. But that objection only kills the extreme version of the idea. The usable version is this: for each block of your preparation, decide in advance what finished looks like, and agree it with the players before you start.

Which leads straight into the piece that makes the gates workable: observable evidence. In sales, Harrie says, it is a yes or a no. In hockey it rarely is, because too many variables sit on top of every outcome. His advice is not to pretend otherwise but to make the evidence shared. "If you have evidence, please discuss it with your team so that everybody's on the same page, that your evidence, what you see as evidence, is the same as the player's evidence as he sees it." A coach who decides privately that the press is now working, while half the squad thinks it is still guesswork, has not completed a stage. They have only completed it in their own head.

So what would this look like on a Tuesday evening? Probably something like three or four named blocks across your pre-season, each with a one-sentence exit criterion written in language the players recognise. Not "improve our press" but something closer to: every player can name their trigger, and in two consecutive small-sided games we win the ball back in the opposition half more often than we concede the outlet. Then a rule you commit to out loud in front of the group: if we get to the review and the criterion is not met, we go back a stage rather than press on. That rule is the hard part. It costs you a session you had planned, and it looks, from the outside, like falling behind. Harrie's point is that running fast through a stage you have not completed is the thing that is actually putting you behind.

And there is a payoff he is specific about. Good preparation does not mainly buy you knowledge, it buys you calm. His list of what a properly prepared team gets is focus, less noise because the plan was agreed rather than announced, better decisions, quicker decisions, and the one he rates highest, staying calm under pressure. Pressure is where players get anxious and forget the tactics. Preparation is the only thing standing between those two states.

That is also where his personal mantra lands. "Doing is the best way of thinking" is not a licence to wing it. He is explicit that it only works if you are well prepared, because in the heat of the moment there is no time to think. The thinking has already happened, in the swimming pool in Kenya.