Anne Marte Pensgaard: Why does Norway dramatically outperform at the Olympics and what can business learn from it?

Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Welfand, and today we are doing something really great fun because Norway happened to smash every record in the Winter Olympics. And today, we are joined by Anna Nattep Penskor, who is the professor over sports psychology, and he's basically the person who's shaped the whole mental training of the Norwegian Olympic athletes. So warm welcome. Thank you so much. Now, how do you explain all these medals? Oh, that's a really complex question. It it, goes a long way back because we tend to think about what we do today. But it, of course, it has been a long tradition for maybe twenty, thirty years now where we have worked on this culture. So I think it's there's many pieces in in that puzzle. When did you decide to because it was after Turin, I guess, which was or when did it when did you think that, hey, we need to do some stuff here? Well, it's even even later or before that actually after the Calgary games, we didn't take any medals. And then we started to think what should we do about this and we had to do something about the whole top sport level system and also work more together as a as teams And also, think long term to develop athletes. Okay. So you are in Calgary. It's the the worst game, the country's ever had. So you sit down. What do you what do you do? What kind of plan do you come up with? How do you Unfortunately, I was not there. So so I started later. But, but, and then, Torel Remiura, who was the one who kind of, founded Olimpettopen, which is our kind of top sports center where we where everybody meets, and collaborate and share ideas. And that, was a really important starting point. And then we had some good, leader leaders who really focused on on on, expertise, I would say, in in different areas, but in physiological, nutrition, psychology, and and, also more kind of training insights into the training regime and also how to develop talents. So many things happened, in kind of the late eighties and early nineties. How long time does it take from you start a process like that until you really see the results? That's I think that's a good major point is that this takes time. It's not a quick fix in any way. And, of course, you need to have athletes who really wants to be dedicated, who wants to put in their hours to do this, immense training. So you need to be patient. And and also, but of course, you want to have results fast as well. So you kind of have to have, to focus at the same time, try to develop instant performances, but also think long term in order to sustain that kind of performance over time. Mhmm. There is something called the Norwegian …