For the love of fuck… Here we go again:
Please click on the Davies tweet to see the video I’m about to reference.
Then buckle up.
Okay, take a breath. Most of you probably agree with this guy. And the other really “smart” comments made by others bashing this drill.
I was once in your shoes.
I was once lost in the academics, the “best practices.” I was the puppy who lost its way in Billy Madison.
But when the storybook told Billy to “give up looking for the dog” most took it at face value.
The sleeping kids are the equivalent of legions of coaches not challenging the advice and narratives of the academics that say, “Everything must be representative and chaotic in practice or it won’t transfer.”
Lulled to sleep by:
Constraints-Led Approach (CLA)
Ecological Dynamics
Fully representative training where a ball and a wall are looked down on
Measuring every stat underneath the Sun as if it’s a massive gamechanger
Instead of falling asleep to the narrative, we need to throw our hands up like Billy and say, “we need to go out there and find that fucking dog.”
My goal in the rest of this piece is to help you find your way by explaining how I found mine.
“You’re Not Thinking, You’re Merely Being Logical.”
I’ll give you 1 guess who I’m quoting…
It’s Rory Sutherland again. Well actually it’s Niels Bohr, but it’s in Alchemy. Here is Sutherland speaking to our obsession with ‘best practices and academic-based solutions.’
Take a deep breath:
No one would doubt that it is possible to have too much randomness, inefficiency and irrationality in life. But the corresponding question, which is never asked, is can you have too little? Is logic overrated? I didn’t set out in this book to attack economic thinking because it is wrong – I think we should absolutely consider what economic models might reveal. However, it’s clear to me that we need to acknowledge that such models can be hopelessly creatively limiting.
To put it another way, the problem with logic is that it kills off magic. Or, as Niels Bohr* apparently once told Einstein, ‘You are not thinking; you are merely being logical.’ A strictly logical approach to problem-solving gives the reassuring impression that you are solving a problem, even when no such process is possible; consequently the only potential solutions considered are those which have been reached through ‘approved’ conventional reasoning – often at the expense of better (and cheaper) solutions that involve a greater amount of instinct, imagination or luck.
Remember, if you never do anything differently, you’ll reduce your chances of enjoying lucky accidents.
This pseudo-rational approach, with its obsession with following an approved process, excludes counter-intuitive possible solutions and restricts solution-seeking to a small and homogeneous group of people. After all, not even accountants or economists use logic to solve everyday domestic dilemmas, so why do they instinctively reach for calculators and spreadsheets the moment they enter an office?
The conventional answer is that we deploy more rigour and structure to our decision-making in business because so much is at stake; but another, less optimistic, explanation is that the limitations of this approach are in fact what makes it appealing – the last thing people want when faced with a problem is a range of creative solutions, with no means of choosing between them other than their subjective judgement.
It seems safer to create an artificial model that allows one logical solution and to claim that the decision was driven by ‘facts’ rather than opinion: remember that what often matters most to those making a decision in business or government is not a successful outcome, but their ability to defend their decision, whatever the outcome may be.
Sutherland, Rory. Alchemy (p. 343)
In Alchemy, he uses “logical” interchangeably with rational. If substituting rational for logical helps you with this quote, use that.
It’s easier to justify responding to a tweet like this with rationalizations of what you’ve learned from the academic world. From the small group of people that have been in charge of programming your thinking:
I sent this tweet to 3 of my coaching friends as soon as I sent it, with the question:
What are the odds this tweet incites violence today?
I thought for sure I might break the internet the day I tweeted it. But nobody took the bait on HockeyTwitter. So I’ll make my point using Strength and Conditioning Twitter.
A.K.A. one of the worst places on the planet. But one of the best places to observe the concept we are discussing.
These Guys Aren’t Thinking
A few weeks ago I heard the advice that you “should never get into a pissing match on Twitter.”
So I decided to go against that advice for a day. And I knew which field I should attempt this in. Strength and Conditioning.
I scanned for about 10 minutes and found the hornet’s nest I wanted to stir up.
So I replied with something that would get people going:
And this comment got CSCS trending on Twitter for the next 24 hours. Here was his response:
And then more piled on:
There’s no way I could be certified if I thought the way I thought right?
You’re being rational and defending your ego if you think people off the street can’t buy the CSCS book, read it twice, and pass the certification test. You don’t want to believe that the field you’re in is kind of a joke.
The problem is, there is even more gatekeeping.
I’m confident my girlfriend who has a master’s in Swine Nutrition and currently trains dogs could pass this exam and be a pretty good strength coach. But she’d have to go back and get a 4-year degree in Kinesiology or a related field to even sit for the test.
Here’s the thing that people who don’t think and merely are being logical fail to see…
Everything is a skill. Everything can be learned. No prior formal education is required. It’s fucking 2023. If you can’t see that by now, you’re lost with no chance of being found.
How is the detour I just took relevant? Great question. This thing will come full circle.
How to Start Thinking for Yourself, Instead of Defending Academic Arguments
You didn’t write the book on CLA or representative training, yet some of you defend it like it’s your own life’s work. Your identity is in it. Like Tim did about his certification that’s for sure hanging on the wall in his office.
So how do we start thinking for ourselves? How do we open the door to seeing things from a different perspective? How do we change our minds? Crazy concept, I know.
This is how:
I’ll share one personal example at the end of this piece and some more in Part 2. The examples might guide your own discovery of how great it is to live outside of your ego and biases. But before we go there, we need a mental model to this process of change more clear.
50 Shades of Grey
The world is programming you to see things in Black and White. To be binary thinkers.
You’re either:
Republican or Democrat
Educated(formally) or Uneducated
Driven, obsessive and bound for success or a lazy piece of shit that is destined to fail
But there are infinite possibilities that lie between the extremes. This is the grey area.
We’re losing the grey every day.
And that ain’t okay.
If you truly are open to changing your mind, here is what a polarizing tweet like my troll of certifications can do for some…
It can reset your baseline. It can open you to a new perspective that might change your mind. Think of a number line like this one:
If you’re on 1 side of the argument and you see a polarizing tweet that is on the 10 side of the argument, reading and thinking about that tweet could bring you closer to a 5. If you don’t do what Tim did…
When you stop defending ideas like they are your own kids, you can start to see the nuance and the grey that should exist in our coaching.
Hopefully, this part of the article has diffused your triggers, now we go looking for the puppy that lost his way instead of falling asleep without thinking.
Finding the Dog
I’m so grateful that I didn’t go from coaching the tier 3 junior team to the next level right away. I’m glad I was ignored by coaches, forced to not coach for 1 year, and then 2… Because the space made me a better thinker.
See I used to be the junior hockey coach where every single thing we did at practice needed to “be representative of the game.”
I scoffed at former coaches that did “dumb drills” that I didn’t think transferred to the game.
I studied CLA like it was an MBA.
I was the kid that got a Kinesiology degree and thought, “there’s no way anyone could pass this certification without my degree.”
I was the asshole that wasn’t thinking. I was just being logical. Defending the ideas and narratives that I didn’t even write.
Then I took 2 years off coaching and training athletes and my world changed.
I read tweets that moved me from one side of the argument to the other.
I learned how to see my side of the argument as a joke to find the holes in it. Which allowed me to live more in the grey area.
I remembered that I was once the kid in the driveway.
Academics have ruined coaching. They’ve also ruined other parts of your life.
Maybe stop listening to “them” for 7 days. Try a detox.
Listen to yourself, you’ve got thoughts too.
“I’d like to order a small cup of thinking, To-Go”
One last thing. They still don’t know how the bicycle works. They can’t explain airplane flight yet, what makes you think they have CLA and all the other stuff in coaching academia nailed?
Experiment for yourself.
The kids say ‘fuck around and find out.’
Related Podcast:
Provocative again eh?... I haven't consolidated much of a value add thought yet... but if nothing else. It makes one consider the idea of... being brave when, you do feel compelled to go against convention, or just even do or try anything that would make you vulnerable, knowing you will face challenges and conflict.