The Framework, Calibrated for Sports Organizations
Eight strategic directions. Deployed across prospect evaluation and internal investigations.
The Compass is calibrated for sports-organization work across two operational contexts: prospect evaluation interviews and internal misconduct investigations. Each direction maps to a specific moment where front offices and athletic departments routinely lose accuracy, character read, or defensibility.
1Direction One
TEACH
Explain the purpose of the conversation and the kind of information being requested. Invite specific experiences in the person's own words, teach them to identify uncertainty, and check understanding before interpreting a brief or incomplete answer.
2Direction Two
ACCESS Model
A six-stage investigative thinking framework (Assess, Collect, Collate, Evaluate, Survey, Summarize) applied to the full evaluation arc from initial scouting through final draft-room decision, and to internal investigations from incident notification through findings.
3Direction Three
Communication Adaptation
Observe how prospects, players, coaches, and staff use the conversation; make the smallest reasonable adjustment to pace, wording, structure, or response space; and verify its effect. Do not use interview behavior to type the person or predict future performance.
4Direction Four
Cognitive Interview
The most research-validated technique for improving recall accuracy, applied to interviews where the prospect's account of past events (incidents, decisions, off-field history) determines the evaluation. The technique that produces fuller, more accurate accounts than direct questioning routinely surfaces.
5Direction Five
Route Map
Pre-interview planning that anticipates where rehearsed answers will surface, where the conversation needs to branch off-script, and how to keep strategic direction when the prospect, player, or staff member tries to manage the interaction.
6Direction Six
Barrier Mapping
A rehearsed prospect is not a dishonest one. Image management is shame doing its work, and pushing on it produces reactance and better rehearsal. Barrier Mapping diagnoses what the prospect or player is protecting (image, teammates, family, a version of events) and removes the barrier instead, which is how an evaluation gets past the media-trained answer to an authentic read.
7Direction Seven
Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE)
Disciplined sequencing of what the front office already knows. Testing the prospect's account against the file without prematurely revealing what scouts have already verified, the technique that separates rehearsed responses from authentic ones.
8Direction Eight
Alignment Method
Challenge-and-clarify questioning that resolves contradictions in a prospect's or player's account without crossing into accusation. Particularly important in internal investigations where the organization needs a defensible finding, not a confession.
Every direction in this Compass deploys somewhere in the evaluation process. Front offices leave this course with the complete framework, calibrated for the prospect interviews, character assessments, and internal investigations the organization actually conducts.
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