Strengthening organisational resilience across the Welsh sport sector.

Transformation

 

Sport organisations are operating under increasing pressure, balancing competing priorities, limited capacity, resource constraints, and the need to increase efficiency across the sector, while being expected to remain resilient, effective and future‑focused. Sport Wales commissioned CMC to support a pilot group of funded organisations to better understand organisational resilience and efficiency, using a structured and comparable approach that could be scaled across the sector.

We supported Sport Wales and its regional partners by…

  • Creating a consistent, evidence‑based baseline: We applied our organisational maturity model to quantitively assess resilience and effectiveness across strategy, organisational effectiveness and operational excellence. This enabled fair and transparent comparison across diverse organisations.
  • Validating real, lived experiences: Through facilitated workshops and engagement, we gathered evidence-based qualitative insight from leadership and wider stakeholders, ensuring findings reflected how the organisation operated in practice.
  • Balancing organisational insight with sector‑wide value: We developed bespoke findings and recommendations for each organisation, while also synthesising cross‑cutting themes, risks and opportunities for collaboration across Sport Wales at a sector level.
  • Designing collaboration opportunities: We identified and prioritised opportunities for immediate, medium and long‑term collaboration across the sector, from shared communications and peer learning, to recommendations for future technology and procurement opportunities.
  • Sharing knowledge and skills, not just insight: We transferred knowledge of our approach and techniques, diagnostic tools, templates and guidance to Sport Wales, enabling them to repeat the approach independently across future cohorts and continue building sector resilience over time.

So what was the impact?


  • A clear, evidence‑based view of organisational resilience across the pilot group
  • Practical recommendations and collaboration opportunities to strengthen the sector as a whole
  • A repeatable model handed over to track progress against baseline
  • A repeatable approach handed over to scale across the wider sector