Great leaders prepare for the moment

I wasn’t expecting to learn anything about leadership from the AFL Grand Final.

I’m not really a football person. Even at Grand Final parties, I’m generally watching bits and pieces between conversations and a few party pies.

This Grand Final day, I was at home with my husband and thought we’d put the game on while I did something else, probably cleaning the kitchen. What I didn’t expect was to be completely hooked. Somewhere along the way, I decided I was going for Freo. They were the club I chose when I was about 13, so that seemed reason enough.

By the fourth quarter, Fremantle were 17 points up with just over four minutes to go. Surely we were in the home straight. I even checked with my husband that Brisbane couldn’t really come back.

Then I saw something about “Wharfie Time”. I had no idea what it meant.

And then it hit. Brisbane came at the game with extraordinary intensity. Four goals in those final minutes and a Brisbane win. I was gobsmacked.

After the match, I looked up Wharfie Time. For Fremantle, it had become a powerful ritual. Late in a close game, the lights dim, Hells Bells plays and the crowd knows what it means. This is the moment!

What I discovered was that Brisbane knew it was coming too. The day before the Grand Final, Chris Fagan reportedly played the music to the team and asked what they would do when they heard it. Josh Dunkley later said they had talked about using it as their energy.

Brisbane's leadership didn’t dismiss Fremantle’s ritual. They prepared for it. Before Fremantle were 17 points ahead with four minutes left, Brisbane had already talked about what that moment would mean for them.

And it made me think about schools.

Schools have their own predictable moments of pressure.

• Week 7 or 8 arrives and people are tired. Small interactions become sharper and things that might have rolled off someone’s back in week 2 suddenly create tension.

• NAPLAN data lands and the improvement people hoped to see isn’t there.

• Challenging behaviour ripples across the school, disrupting classrooms and putting everyone under pressure.

As leaders, we often know these moments are coming. We might not predict the exact incident, but we know the patterns. Yet we can still respond as though they are unexpected.

So what are our own versions of Wharfie Time?

• What are the predictable moments when our teams are most likely to be knocked off course, and what conversations could we have before they arrive?

• When week 8 gets hard, how do we want to work with one another?

• If the data disappoints us, how will we make sense of it before jumping to conclusions?

• When behaviour escalates, what do we want our collective response to look like?

Brisbane couldn’t control whether Fremantle would call Wharfie Time, but they could decide beforehand what it would mean to them.

We can’t remove every difficult moment in schools. But some are predictable enough that we can prepare for how we want to respond when they arrive.