About the Project
Headline Outcome
The WAIS Strategic Plan for 2025-2032 is a comprehensive roadmap aimed at supporting Western Australian athletes to achieve success at the Olympic, Paralympic, and Commonwealth Games. The plan is built on three key pillars: Athletes Winning Well, People and Culture, and Organisational Sustainability. It emphasises the importance of athlete wellbeing, a values-driven environment, and the sustainability of the organisation. The plan also outlines WAIS's commitment to collaboration with athletes, sports, and partners to realize opportunities and overcome challenges.
The Challenge
Since the previous strategic plan was developed, WAIS and the broader high-performance system had shifted significantly: a new Board, CEO and Senior Leadership Team, greater emphasis on people and wellbeing, and a need to rebuild trust with key stakeholders and the WA community. At the same time, Australia’s High Performance 2032+ Sport Strategy (Win Well) reset national expectations and language.
WAIS needed a refreshed strategy that:
Clarified its purpose and role heading into the Brisbane 2032 cycle.
Balanced medal performance with athlete and staff wellbeing.
Aligned measures of success, systems and culture with a Win Well philosophy.
Provided a clear framework for Board and SLT decision-making.
Our Approach
Purpose Driven Performance worked with the WAIS Board and Senior Leadership Team to design and facilitate the strategy process.
Our approach included:
Context and insight: Review of the existing strategic plan, Olympic and Paralympic cycle performance, and Australia’s High Performance 2032+ Sport Strategy to identify alignment gaps and future priorities.
Board & SLT workshop: A structured half-day session focused on refining purpose and vision, surfacing key strategic issues, re-examining measures of success, and reshaping strategic pillars – with psychological safety and open dialogue as core design principles.
Strategy design & refinement: Translating workshop outputs into a cohesive strategic narrative, including a Win Well-aligned purpose and vision, updated values, strategic pillars, success measures and enabling systems, iterated with the CEO and Board.
Outcomes & Impact
The final WAIS Strategic Plan 2025–2032 delivered:
Clear purpose and vision: “To support Western Australian athletes to Win Well at Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth Games”, underpinned by a vision of developing athletes who Win Well, leading in high-performance sport, and inspiring community pride.
Values and culture reset: Four core values – United, Care, Lead, Inspire – that anchor expectations and behaviours across athletes, staff and leadership.
Three strategic pillars:
Athletes Winning Well
People and Culture
Organisational Sustainability – each with clear “what we will do” commitments and annual performance measures.
Enablers for execution: A simple framework highlighting culture, people, resources, governance, performance systems and data & intelligence as the key levers for delivering the strategy.
Together, these elements give WAIS a focused, Win Well-aligned roadmap to guide investment, leadership and performance decisions through to 2032.
