New study recommends that kids should specialise early, do 10,000 hours and be genetically tested to

*not really!

OK so I might have slightly over reached here...but there are some very interesting recommendations being proposed in this paper which has some really strong challenges for the talent development community.

The paper presents a consensus position based on a 'meta-analysis' of the available research into talent development in sport that has a number of wide ranging implications for the sporting landscape including some interesting conclusions that may raise a few eyebrows.

Below I have lifted the headline recomendations and added some thoughts and field notes under each one.

Genetics

“We therefore recommend that policy makers and practitioners consider the possibility of using genetic profiling to help athletes make more informed and appropriate decisions about sport type and discipline during their development years”.​

• This is something new and it is the first time I have seen an academic paper make a recommendation if this type. It suggests that the genetic research has now reached a point where there are certain elements that can be reliably tested for which could assist practitioners, children and parents to make informed decisions about sports to persue.

• The concept of sport selection based on some genetic markers starts to move away from the idea of the 'mixed sport diet' advocated by supporters of the late specialisation model. This represents a potential paradigm shift in sports development where we move away from a broad participation model where the child selects the sport that the enjoy the most towards a concept where the 'sport selects the child' based on their genetic propensity to succeed.

Anthropometric

“We therefore recommend that practitioners make use of physiological testing for purposes of informing the training process, and make use of anthropometric profiling and physiological tests for both talent selection and development purposes, but policy makers and practitioners should ensure that such action is accompanied by appropriate procedures (considering biological maturation) to ‘re-capture’ lost/missed late maturers”.

• Dr Sean Cumming from the University of Bath is leading a global team of specialists in assessing growth and maturation of players to assist in providing competitive opportunities that are based on biological age rather than chronological age. Some early findings provide some interesting support for this recommendation. I did a vlog on this a few posts back.

• It is important to stress that, as the authors point out, this is very dependent on the sport. For example, Dr Ben Jones and Kevin Till at Leeds Beckett University have some interesting research in Rugby League that shows physical size to be a less reliable predictor of elite prowess than agility and power. Sir Steve Redgrave was famously deselected from the GB rowing programme at the age of 14 based on his lack of hieght.

• Sports will need to have some relaiable and clear ideas of which measures offer reliable predictions of elite success. My concern is that the tape measure will replace the coach as the mechanism to identify those with potential.

Psychological

“We therefore recommend that practitioners make use of psychological profiling for talent development purposes. Key questions for future research include examining the causes of exceptional levels of motivation, resilience and mental toughness, including assessing whether and how psychological skills at junior level influence long-term adult elite/super-elite performance. How do exceptional performers use their anxiety in a positive way? How do the world’s best performers maintain focus and concentration, while avoiding lapses into conscious control? How can these skills be trained?”.

• My observation is that we seem under resourced here across the landscape! I see very little provision for psychologocal support for the talented athlete and even in the elite space the provision feels like an after though in comparison to the resources allocated for other more 'hard science' domains. It seems that everyone wants physically robust players but they are less interested in mentally robust players!

• Having spent several years working in the talent field with a range of sports organisations I see the lack of dedicated resources to support young athletes develop the behaviours and mental skills

• Surely this needs to be addressed if we are going to really produce athletes with the qualities required to reach elite levels?

Personality Profiling

“We therefore recommend that practitioners might make use of personality profiling for talent development but not talent selection purposes. Future research could focus on whether there are other important (combinations of) personality characteristics that are necessary for the development of a strong competitive personality and how these characteristics might be best developed”.

• I have often felt that if coaches are to truly be player centred and begin to understand how players respond to various environmental influences or coaching methodologies then these tools become crucial to supporting this process. At the moment I think that many coaches do this intuitively but if this can be supplemented by insights then we can refine and improve our ability to engage with an audience of players.

• Nick Levett (@nlevett) wrote about this in his blog recently when talking about how so many academies invest heavily in analytics to track visible performance metrics but don't invest the same in insights that will help to enhance the learning process and drive performance.

Birthplace

“We therefore recommend that policy makers and practitioners at least take consideration of birthplace when designing talent search initiatives as well as profiling athletes during talent selection and development. Understanding more about the physical and social environment, organisation of resources and the number of participants competing for available places in sports are key areas for research—i.e. understanding more about the environments and neighbourhoods that potential sporting talents are exposed to, and less about birthplace population size.”

• I have been campaigning for talent coaching to become more mobile for a long time. At the moment we tend to be very facility driven and we then require the players to come to us when in actual fact we should be looking for ways to take our best coaches to the players. In my mind this would offset many of these location specific disadvantages and challenges.

• We also need to make sure that we get the right amount of provision according to the number of potential players in a given locatuon rather than using historical geographic boundaries.

Coaching

“Evidence from non-elite, junior elite, elite, and super-elite athletes attests to the influence of support networks (including family, coaches, other athletes/ peers and support staff). In addition to their key role in the provision of expert coaching and training, coaches can help to enhance the development of psychological skills and mental toughness in athletes during their developmental years. Non-elite data suggest that the supportiveness and feedback effectiveness of coaches is dependent on a unique fit (and common identity) between the characteristics of the coach and the personality of the athlete.”

• I have written previously about how well equipped our youth and talent coaches are to develop these psychological skills in players? Current coach education hardly touches on these areas and the vast majority of coach education course do not allow enough guided learning time to truly explore these concepts.

• In so much of my work as a talent coach I find myself working to try and help young athletes overcome mental challenges that are holding back their development. I have had zero formal training provided by any NGB coach education system in this area but have spent my own money to develop the capabilities having recognised the need.

• In most cases psychology support comes in once a player reaches the elite ranks but this is a 'retrofit' model of development where we are 'back filling' definiciencies in the athlete once they get selected. In my view this both is enefficient and inneffective. If the development of mental skills are important to futire performance then shouldn't these be core to our development curriculum in the same way that technical and tactical abilities are?

• Should we be advocating for 'mental literacy' as well as 'physical literacy'?

Deliberate Practice - 10,000 hours?

“Despite wide variation across sports, most junior elite, elite and super-elite athletes have accumulated enormous volumes of organized practice and training [149, 230, 241– 260]. Extensive sport-specific deliberate practice (DP) is thus a pre-requisite to world-class performance in sports with a large participant base”.

“We therefore recommend that policy makers and practitioners continue to promote deliberate practice, but consider the present evidence before routinely increasing practice volumes with junior athletes, and acknowledge the potential benefits of automaticity, implicit learning and also enjoyment in practice and play”.

“Future research should also further explore the roles of explicit and implicit/incidental learning in the development of expert performance. This implies scrutiny of the intentions and specific activities performed during practice/training and play, their combinations, variability, potential interactions and relative influence through different developmental age ranges”.

• The paper expressed support for the idea of practicing deliberately but is not supportive of the existing definition of ‘Deliberate Practice’ proposed by Ericsson, et al. Instead it is suggesting that the practice construct should move towards a more exploratory 'implicit learning' approach which I would suggest would require highly skilled coaches capable of using constraints led / game sense approaches. This may necessittate a radical overhaul of the coach education and coach development system in many sports. I would question whether the current linear, 'competency based' approach is producing coaches that are able to use these methods confidently.

Early Specialisation

“Both early specialization and sampling (and play) may be routes to expertise under optimal conditions. However, the probability of attaining elite or super-elite level may be enhanced by the coupling of a large volume of intensive, organized specific training/practice in the main sport with appreciable amounts of organized training/practice and competitions in other sports and/or non-organized play in the main or other sports.”

“We thus recommend policy makers and practitioners to draw on this evidence, bearing in mind the need to minimize the potential hazards of early specialization when such specialization is necessary, and with regard to promoting opportunities for young athletes to experience non-organized play and sampling in a variety of sports”.

“Future research is needed to understand how participation in various sports benefits super-elite performance in one main sport. Further, how does the process of late specialization following prior diversification or ‘talent transfer’ proceed? Are there certain sports or clusters that lay the best foundation for super-elite success in a final sport”?

• This message chimes well with a post a wrote on the subject recently and is is a shift away from the rigidity of ‘early specialisation is bad and late specialisation is good’ message towards a more nuanced position around ‘it depends on the individual and the sport (with caveats)’ position.

• It is also saying that we might start looking at complementary sports and start to recommend them to support a 'main sport' which I think is a very dangerous recommendation as it presupposes that kids would have a 'main sport' which leads to the early specialisation model that many have been fighting to avoid.

• I welcome the idea that 'one size doesn't fit all' in this area but I want to urge caution here. There are strong correlations between later specialisation and better performance as well as reduced drop out rates. We definitely don't want to throw out the late specialising baby with the potentially early specialising bathwater'!

The upshot of all this is that the paper has some pretty strong recommendations that will present a challenge for a number of sports that will need to respond with some fairly significant system changes if they are going to act on many of these recomendations.

It won't surprise readers of this blog to know that I am pleased to see so many of the recomendations having such heavy emphasis of the role of the talent coach and the need to develop and support this army of unsung heroes far better than at present!

Decision making in complex environments

Every now and again I come across something that captivates me and leaves me wanting to know more...

I was first introduced to Complexity Theory and the work of Professor Dave Snowden by Al Smith at www.myfastestmile.com when we were delivering a seminar together in South Africa. At the time I remember that Al had a group of coaches wrestling with the conept and I was definitley one of them.

Having said that it was something that interested me and although I didn't totally get it I knew that it was something I needed to know more about. I made a mental note to learn more.

I was researching creativity and decison making on You Tube recently and discovered this seminar delivered by Professor Snowden thinking that I would see what it was about and take away a couple of nuggets. 70 odd minutes later and I was still rewinding the video so that I could take down the latest nugget that he had just uttered.

I highly recommend watching this talk if you have the time but if you haven't got and hour and a half to spare I have summarised the talk by sharing my field notes interspersed with some of the big takeaways underneath this video.

Enjoy!

"Humans are basically pattern based intelligences. Not information processing machines".

"We basically evolved to make decisions very quickly based on partial data. Using half remembered memories of our own. And the vicarious memories of other people which we hear through stories or what are called 'micro narratives'".

We make sense of the world by being exposed to situations repeatedly and recognising the patterns. Without exposure to these scenarios enough times we do not have the opportunity become skilled at the pattern recognition.

Does this mean that players who can 'read the game' are actually players who have a lot of exposure to similar scenarios and can recognise patterns quickly?

If this is the case then perhaps we need to have talent systems which are all about scenario exposure so that players can begin to recognise patterns and develop solutions to what they recognise.

Adaptation is a linear evolution in biology. It can take a long time but it is shorter than we think

Epigenetics is showing this

"If you give bright mice, dumb mice to bring up, the children of the dumb mice are bright!"

Culture changes chemicals which activate or deactivate DNA. Within 1 or 2 generations, culture can change biology!

Significant changes can be 'exaptive' instead of 'adaptive'.

'Exaptive change' is when a particular set of characteristics or behaviours are repurposed due to a change in the ecological environment.

"The cerebellum in apes evolved fine motor skills to enable the ape to pick seeds from within seed pods. This fine motor skill ability then exapted to become speech and grammar".

We all want to develop players or athletes that can 'adapt' to situations or circumstances but how can we encourage more 'exaptations' where players explore totally novel ways of overcoming a challenge. Do our current development environements encourage this or are we focussed on 'the basics' or 'the fundamentals' which means that we discourage genuine creativity.

Most innovation happens at the elite level and then trickles down to the lower levels once it becomes 'acceptable' (think of Sonny-Bill Williams , one hand off load in Rugby or Kevin Pietersen's 'flamingo shot' in cricket.

How many of those techniques would have come from one of our talent environments?

"If you use high abstract, symbolic scenarios things will associate in completely novel ways. If you use concrete problem solving scenarios you will get good solutions with known capability against existing problems but you won't get completely novel ones!"

Are we sacrificing the emergence of completely novel solutions that might give us the point of difference in favour of functional solutions that achieve a certain level of competence but won't be world class?

Is this why so many world class performers emerge from outside of NGB pathways rather than through them because they are free to explore solutions that are thrown up by the challenges of their environment?

"The idea that human systems are like manufacturing is very dangerous."

"We are shifting from an engineering model of human systems to an ecological model".

Have some of our talent systems become too mechanical? Are we actually working against ourselves by putting kids into system that is obsessed with technical outcomes and overcoaches them when we would be better to create environments that force players to develop novel solutions and watch them emerge?

We need scenerios which foster 'co-adaptation' and 'co-evolution'. This process develops resilience...the organism or system can experience shock and recover.

"Resilience is surviving change without loss of identity. Robustness is just surviving without change".

Systems become hyper specialised and then when the system receives any shock it collapses catastrophically.

That is the process that human systems go through unless you deliberately disrupt the system.

This makes me think of Alex Ferguson who deliberately disrupted the Man Utd team when things became too comfortable. I think he instinctively knew that he had to use controlled disruption to ensure that the system adapted which then made it resilient and developed sustained success?

Some of this might have been forced upon him but I can't imagine that level of success for that long without some design in the background.

.

Nobody has innovated by following industrial best practice.

'Imitating a dominant predator makes you a jackal' all you do is end up serving the dominant predator

How many sports organisations look to the organisation that is top of the tree and seek to emulate them? As long as this continues the top organisation will always prevail. Seek to find new solutions by breaking convention and being brave enough to explore approaches that are not immediately obvious.

Types of system

Ordered system - fixed constraints - everything is very predictable, lots of 'rules'. It can be excessive.

Complex system - Adaptive - partial constraints. Use a lot of 'heuristics' - 'rules of thumb not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect but sufficient for the immediate goals'.

Heuristics can be mental short cuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.

Chaotic system - No constraints - complete randomness. Nothing is connected to anything else. It won't happen for very long. Humans will create order.

Most aim for an ordered system as they want simplicity and structure. This feels comfortable but actually comfort is the exact opposite of what you want if you aim to innovative and challenge convention. If you are looking to maximise potential in any sports organistion you should embrace complexity as that will lead to adaptive behaviours which can take advantage of emerging dynamic situations.

Can we use chaos to take advantage of the natural human disposition to create order and in so doing encourage self organisation towards complexity?

We can't say, "if you do this it will produce that effect". We can say, "if you do things like this it is likely to produce effects like these."

Future states can't be defined but you can map the present. We move from measuring goals to measuring vectors.

"Are we going in the right direction at the right speed?" instead of "have we achieved a specific goal."

Developing humans in any arena is complex and trying to measure this using discrete goals is not only inneffective but can also be counter productive.

If we focus on a 'critical path' based on our ultimate destination and then track the progress of our journey using regular orientation stops to check on progress (a virtual 'sat nav' if you like!) we can ensure that we don't go too far away from our intended route and don't waste too much time.

But by allowing the flexibility to deviate from this path we can explore areas that we did not originally consider and benefit from adapting and assimilating what we learn.

There was a lot more than this in the presentation and the there is a second part that I haven't had time to get to yet but hopefully you got as much from this as I did.

All the best

Want to know if the players have learned implicitly? Test them.

In a previous post I talked about implicit learning...can you remember what that is? Yes! Great what a diligent type you are!

Let me just check...I have a couple of questions...

Q. In the post, how do I define implicit learning?

No, no...don't just read on...stop, think, can you remember? Resist the temptation to click on the link above. Really try and remember and write down what you think.

Q. What is a technique I described that can be used to ensure that implicit learning is taking place?

Depending on how you found that little task will depend on whether you feel that you passed the test. Either way well done for being diligent and commiting to your learning...If you didn't pass the test ask yourself the following questions...

Q. How deeply did I read the information initially?

Q. Did I use any techniques to help retain the information like making notes, drawing a pictogram or linking some of the ideas to things I have done before?

Now we can move on to the next level....

I think you might be seeing where I am going with this...

This is one of the biggest things that I see missing in most coaching sessions I observe...

A lack of testing...

This becomes increasingly important if we are using a 'contraints led' or 'game sense' approach to coaching which involves 'implicit learning' as opposed to an explicit instructional approach where athletes simply repeat actions that are prescribed to them by the coach.

One of the challenges that 'implicit learning' poses is how do we know if learning is taking place. I see a lot of coaches standing at the side of practice and saying nothing which is obviously better than shouting instructions all the time. But I am not always sure that they have given thought as to how they can establish that learning has taken place.

In the sports landscape a well designed challenge or game can serve help to establish learning by serving as a test. In this sense the coach can put the players into a scenario that will require them to perform certain actions if they are going to succeed in achieving the objective and thereby show that they have actually learned a concept.

Coaches can choose to be 'overt' or 'covert' when applying these tests to see if the players are able to apply the concepts that have been learned effectively or not.

In an overt test the coach would pre warn the players that they are going to be observed and they may also provide information about what they are intending to observe.

In a covert test the coach just gets the players into the scenario and then observes whether the players make the correct decisions based on concepts that have previously been applied.

In this way the coach can be clear about what has or hasnt been learned implicitly and can then make informed decisions about whether or not to move onto the learning of another concept.

I know that some people reading this would have reeled at that statement...testing, in sport, Really? Sport isn't school!

Tests are a dirty word at the moment. There is a lot of debate going on about if they are good for children's development or if we should be putting this much pressure on youngsters just so that we can identify if a school is failing or not.

At one time I would have agreed with that response but I have found out a lot more about the educational power of testing and Inow think that it is an essential tool for the coaches toolbox.

Peter Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel make this case in their excellent book "Make it stick: The science of successful learning", and argue that testing needs to be viewed as a learning tool rather than merely a way of assessing.

As they say...

"There are few surer ways to raise the hackles of many students and educators than talking about testing. The growing focus over recent years on standardises assessment, in particular, has turned testing into a lightneing rod for frustration over how to achieve the country's education goals".

They go on....

"But is we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning - if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than "testing", we open ourselves to another possibility, the use of tasting of as a tool for learning".

This method of learning is known among education scientists as 'Retrieval Practice'. This is explained by one of my favourite education writers Annie Murphy-Paul in a series of articles that are all about a concept of something she calls 'Affirmative Testing'.

As Murphy-Paul explains...

"Retrieval practice does not use testing as a tool of assessment. Rather, it treats tests as occasions for learning, which makes sense only once we recognize that we have misunderstood the nature of testing. We think of tests as a kind of dipstick that we insert into a student’s head, an indicator that tells us how high the level of knowledge has risen in there—when in fact, every time a student calls up knowledge from memory, that memory changes. Its mental representation becomes stronger, more stable and more accessible".

And this approach has been proven to work in the class envoronment as well. Murphy-Paul's article makes forther reference when quoting some teacher who have been at the coalface of this kind of teaching...

“I had always thought of tests as a way to assess—not as a way to learn—so initially I was skeptical,” says Andria Matzenbacher, a former teacher at Columbia who now works as an instructional designer. “But I was blown away by the difference retrieval practice made in the students’ performance.”

So we we can see that testing is an important part of learning. Tests are used routinely to ensure that students have understood key concepts and have mastered specific skills that they will need to be able to work out other more complex tasks later on.

The video below shows this perfectly, it is worth observing how the head coach remonstrates (rather colourfully, PG warning here!) with his assistant coaches to say a lot less so that they can actually observe what the players have learned without being told what to do.

So what are the takeaways here...

1. Well designed games make great tests of learning

2. Use games to test if learning has taken place.

3. Use tests as a way of strengthening learning

4. Tests can be overt or covert

5. Usually use the starting game as a way to test what has been learned from the previous week

Let m eknow how you get on!