England Cricket Team Turnaround: How the Wheel of Change Built Champions
After a humiliating Ashes whitewash in 2013-14, coach Peter Moores rebuilt the England cricket team using the same four-quadrant Wheel of Change logic every leader can use to turn around a broken team.
In the winter of 2013-14, the England cricket team was thrashed 5-0 by Australia in the Ashes — one of the most humiliating defeats in the sport's history. Eighteen months later, that same core group of players won the next Ashes series and were being spoken of as one of the best teams in the world again. What changed was not the players' raw talent. What changed was the method their coach used to rebuild them, quadrant by quadrant, using a tool called the Wheel of Change.
In short- England lost the 2013-14 Ashes 5-0 to Australia and were written off as perpetual losers.
- Coach Peter Moores identified four areas to fix: mindset, environment, culture, and performance.
- He mapped each area onto Marshall Goldsmith's Wheel of Change — Creating, Preserving, Eliminating, Accepting.
- England won the very next Ashes series in 2015 and returned to the top tier of world cricket.
- The same four-quadrant method works for any stalled team, department, or individual career.
Where this sits on your Winning Kite
The Wheel of Change is a PQ — Productivity technique on your Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework). PQ sits at the bottom of the kite — it is the discipline and output that carries the weight of everything you build on the EQ and RQ sides. A team can have brilliant emotional intelligence and great relationships and still lose, if it has no structured way to convert intention into action. England's story is a PQ story: talented players, a proud history, and a system that had simply stopped producing results — until the Wheel of Change gave them a structure to fix it.
The humiliation that started it: Ashes 2013-14
England had a long history of underperformance in international cricket and were, fairly or not, seen by many as a team that could be relied upon to fall apart under pressure. That reputation hit rock bottom in the 2013-14 Ashes series in Australia. England did not just lose — they were whitewashed 5-0. Senior players' careers ended in the fallout. The dressing room culture was reported as fractured. For any team, a defeat of that scale is either the end of an era or the beginning of a real rebuild. For England, it became the trigger.
This is worth pausing on, because it is exactly how most real turnarounds begin — not from a calm strategy session, but from a crushing, undeniable defeat that makes continuing as before impossible. In corporate life it might be a client walking out, a missed IPO, a toxic engagement survey score, or a team lead losing three good people in one quarter. The defeat itself is not the story. What the leader does in the eighteen months after it is the story.
Peter Moores names the four real problems
England's coach at the time, Peter Moores, did not respond with a single slogan or a new batting order. He pinpointed four distinct, honest areas that needed to change: mindset, environment, culture, and performance. This is the first lesson in the story — before you touch a single “solution,” you have to be brutally specific about what is actually broken. Most failing teams get vague diagnoses (“we need to try harder,” “we need better talent”) that lead nowhere, because a vague diagnosis cannot be acted on. Moores broke the failure into four addressable buckets, and then applied the same tool — the Wheel of Change — to each one.
What the Wheel of Change actually is
The Wheel of Change is a self-improvement and turnaround tool developed by the renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. It works on two axes: one runs from positive to negative, the other from change to keep. Together these axes create four quadrants that any individual or team can use to plan a realistic transformation.
The four quadrants are:
1. Creating
Introducing new, positive behaviours or capabilities. It is reinventing yourself — or, for a team, reinventing how you operate. Think of a cricketer developing a brand-new delivery, like off-spinner Harbhajan Singh's “doosra,” or a fast bowler crafting a slower ball nobody has seen from him before. Each new skill you deliberately create reinvents you and sets you apart. But creating must be a conscious, sustained choice — chase too many new things at once, the way a distracted professional jumps from a certification course to the next shiny subject and back, and none of it sticks.
2. Preserving
Holding on to what is already working, even when it feels unglamorous. Preserving rarely gets applause, but it is what keeps a good system good. In sport, think of Glenn McGrath's relentless consistency of line and length, or a chess champion's unshakeable daily routine. In business, it's the account manager who keeps giving the same close, personal attention to a client account long after the account has become “boring” — and keeps winning renewals because of it.
3. Eliminating
Removing the negative habits that are actively holding you back — even habits that once worked. A manager who succeeded early in their career through micromanagement may find that same habit now suffocates a larger team. A sales head who refuses to update an outdated reporting style after the company expands into new regions is eliminating nothing and paying for it every quarter. If a habit no longer serves the current situation, it has to go, regardless of the success it once brought.
4. Accepting
Making peace with what cannot be changed immediately — the hardest quadrant of all. This is not resignation; it is clarity. Many people, when they receive mixed feedback from a boss, mentally keep only the positive half and discard the rest. Many businesses refuse to accept a bad quarter's numbers and instead keep dreaming of a turnaround that never gets planned for. As Stephen Covey would put it, the discipline is to work within your circle of influence — accept what you genuinely cannot change today, and direct your energy at what you can.
How England mapped all four quadrants onto their comeback
Peter Moores and his coaching staff applied all four quadrants across the team's mindset, environment, culture and performance:
| Quadrant | What England did |
|---|---|
| Creating | Introduced new elements into the team's mindset — deliberate positive thinking and visualization — alongside upgraded physical and mental conditioning to lift on-field performance. |
| Preserving | Protected the parts of the team culture that were genuinely working — hard work, determination, and the strong personal relationships between players — instead of tearing the whole squad apart. |
| Eliminating | Identified and actively worked to remove negative self-talk and in-match distractions that had been quietly sabotaging performance under pressure. |
| Accepting | Came to terms with the past failures rather than denying or hiding from them, using the 5-0 whitewash as fuel for improvement, and stayed genuinely open to feedback and criticism from coaches and teammates. |
Notice what is missing from this list: there is no single “magic fix.” There is no new captain alone, no one batting technique, no single motivational speech. It is four ordinary, disciplined actions, applied consistently, across four different dimensions of the team's life. That is the entire secret of the Wheel of Change — it does not promise a dramatic overnight transformation. It promises a structure for gradual, purposeful improvement in the areas that matter most.
The result: from perpetual losers to Ashes champions
The turnaround was not instant, and it was not painless. But England went on to win the very next Ashes series in 2015 — a stunning reversal from the 5-0 whitewash less than two years earlier — and re-established themselves as one of the best teams in world cricket. The same players who had been dismissed as “perpetual losers” became champions, not because their talent suddenly appeared, but because their coach gave them a repeatable structure to convert that talent into results.
Applying this at your workplace
I use this story constantly in my leadership and productivity workshops, because almost every manager I train is sitting on some version of England's 2013-14 Ashes result — a project that collapsed, a team that lost faith, a department everyone has quietly written off. The instinct in Indian corporate culture is often to either blame the “talent” (transfer people out, hire fresh) or to give one big rousing speech and hope momentum returns on its own. Neither works, for the same reason a single tactical change wouldn't have fixed England: the problem is rarely one thing. It is usually spread across mindset, environment, culture and performance, exactly like Peter Moores diagnosed.
Try this with your own team this week. Take a sheet of paper and draw the same four quadrants. Ask honestly: What is one thing we need to create — a new skill, a new ritual, a new way of running our stand-up? What is one thing that is already working that we are at risk of dropping, and must preserve — a client relationship, a review cadence, a mentoring habit? What is one habit, in ourselves or in the team, that has outlived its usefulness and must be eliminated — outdated reporting, a manager's harsh feedback style, a founder's habit of jumping into every decision? And finally, what result or feedback have we been avoiding that we need to accept, so we can actually act on it instead of arguing with reality?
This connects directly to the program-manager case study I cover alongside this technique — a technically brilliant manager whose harsh, public feedback style was quietly costing the company its best people. The fix there followed exactly the same four-quadrant logic: create a softer “sandwich” feedback approach, preserve his genuine honesty, eliminate the blame and condescension, and accept that changing this habit would take patience and time. Read that case in full in the companion piece on Technique #2: The Wheel of Change.
Marshall Goldsmith's original tool was built for individual behaviour change, but England's story — and every corporate turnaround I have run in the last decade — proves it scales to teams, departments, and entire organisations just as powerfully. The discipline is the same at every scale: name what's actually broken, then work all four quadrants together, not just the one that feels most comfortable.
If your team is living through its own version of a 5-0 whitewash right now, that is not the end of the story — it is very often the exact moment a real turnaround begins, provided someone in the room is willing to name the four honest quadrants and work through them one at a time. I help leadership teams and intact departments run this exercise live, mapping their own Wheel of Change across mindset, environment, culture and performance, the same way Peter Moores did for a cricket team that nobody believed in eighteen months before they were champions again. Explore the full technique set inside my Signature Programs, or browse all Corporate Training Topics we run for teams at every level.
Bring These Ideas to Your Team
Avinash Chate turns the traits in Stars at India Inc. into live leadership & emotional-intelligence workshops. TEDx speaker · 11+ yrs training Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW & 1000+ leaders.
✅ Thanks! Avinash team will reach out within 24 hours.'}).catch(function(e){f.outerHTML='Something went wrong. WhatsApp +91 8793630001
'});return false;">Select ServiceKeynote / Motivational SpeakingLeadership Development TrainingTeam Building WorkshopManager DevelopmentEmployee TrainingBook Avinash Now →Or WhatsApp directly: +91 87936 30001
Work with Avinash Chate
- Signature Corporate Training Programs →
- The Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework) →
- All Corporate Training Topics →
Avinash Chate TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc. Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs. |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Wheel of Change used by Peter Moores to fix England cricket?
The Wheel of Change is a self-improvement tool developed by executive coach Marshall Goldsmith. It splits any turnaround into four quadrants — Creating, Preserving, Eliminating and Accepting — across two axes: positive-to-negative and change-to-keep. Peter Moores applied it to England's mindset, environment, culture and performance after the 2013-14 Ashes whitewash.
What happened to England cricket after the 2013-14 Ashes whitewash?
England lost the 2013-14 Ashes 5-0 to Australia, one of the most humiliating results in the team's history. Coach Peter Moores used that defeat as the trigger for a structured turnaround using the Wheel of Change, and England went on to win the very next Ashes series in 2015 and re-establish itself among the top teams in world cricket.
How can a workplace team use the Wheel of Change like England did?
Take the same four questions England's coaching staff asked: What positive habit do we need to CREATE? What is already working that we must PRESERVE? What toxic behaviour must we ELIMINATE? And what reality must we ACCEPT and stop fighting? Apply these across mindset, environment, culture and performance for your own team or department.
Where does the Wheel of Change sit on the Winning Kite framework?
The Wheel of Change sits on the PQ (Productivity) side of the Winning Kite — the bottom of the kite. It is one of the core techniques Avinash Chate teaches for converting stalled performance into disciplined, repeatable output, which combines with EQ and RQ to lift the kite towards Success.
Related Articles by Avinash Chate
- Dwight Eisenhower – Urgent/Important Matrix
- Do You Build More Than You Break? The Builder Mindset Every Leader Needs in India 2026
- Author's Lost Government Training Bid
Avinash Chate services
Corporate Training · Leadership Development · Team Building · Motivational Speaking · All service locations
← Back to all articles · Book Avinash Chate
By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. .