Remember the first time you were stung by a bee?
I was 8. At my brothers’ baseball game one evening. Kicking a soccer ball with a friend.
I felt something on my ankle as I passed the ball and as I looked down, it stung me.
There’s the initial “keep calm” stage because you’re with your buddy.
But then it starts to hurt and you’ve learned about bees and their stingers, maybe it’s inside of your leg now. You know the horror show that teachers and parents make up about bees…
So I freaked out a bit.
But we’re not here for more of that story…
We are here to learn about what that bee taught me.
That bee was alone in the field that day. He was “going rogue.”
When the Hive Goes Right, a Few Go Left
Certain bees that are a part of the same hive choose to go “rogue.” From Rory Sutherland’s book, Alchemy:
There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random.
In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance.
However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.
Rapper, Chris Webby can half-life the message for us:
“The beaten path was not for me, I went left.”
Coaching Still Isn’t Ready for “Going Left”
The “hive mindset” is alive and well in most hockey circles.
The hive mindset coaches say:
We can win a few more games if I sleep in my office and run my assistants into the ground with pre-scouting work
We can win a few more games if I skip a few more dinners with my wife to take a few more recruiting calls
We can win more if I can get everyone on the team to play a “simpler game.” Playing “my way” will help
I can get ahead if I keep ignoring those who reach out for advice or help
This is what most coaches have been doing for the last… Well, too many years to specify.
We are still going to the same fields, day after day. We’re optimizing for the short-term and it’s this short-sightedness that will kill us off.
Go Rogue
The rogue bees/coaches are the secret sauce.
We’re fighting an uphill battle.
People laugh in our faces when we tell them we can be a contributor at their level of junior hockey.
People ignore the new ways of looking at coaching via problem-solving concepts and communication skills when it’s presented to them.
Coaches can’t stand the fact that rogue coaches think we can work less and be at the rink less than any coach has ever dared to do before.
That we can revolutionize teaching systems so we can deepen our relationships with players.
That we can scale things that matter to make room for things that matter more…
Be one or hire a few, but don’t ignore them.
Be open to rogue… Because we’re going to change the coaching game.
If you want to think a little more on the “rogue” side. You’ll love Part 2 of our newest book. Check it out here: