A repost to the drills killing creativity argument

This week I am featuring a guest blogger in the shape of the genuinely awesome Bob Wood. Bob is a physical development specialist who can be found ranting about the world of sport and in particular how people move on his website http://www.physical-solutions.co.uk. I would highly recommend this super sarcastic and hilarious poke at the sports shoe world

I worked with Bob several years ago to development a series of movement games to help young golfers develop the physical capabilities to be able to play the game at the highest level. He has a sharp mind, a cutting wit and a genuine passion for what he does and i think this comes through in this repost he wrote in reply to my recent article on 'Why coaches like drills and why they are killing creativity'.

I really enjoyed this article and wanted to share it with you all. Bob comes at the discussion from a different perspective and I think it adds some interesting balance to the discussion.

I will let you read and then throw up some thoughts about this at the bottom

A word of advice if you ever meet him or work with him...

Never play him at Table Tennis!

Enjoy the post

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Stuart Armstrong’s excellent blog article “why coaches like drills and how they are killing creativity” can be found here. It is bang on the money. A message that needs to be heard, and you could opt to read it before this. My favourite line is:

“Imagine a world where trying new things was applauded rather then met by side of the mouth whispers by arm folded tracksuits on the sideline.” I’ve seen a lot of that.

Now I know Stuart and he sees the bigger picture, but he likes poking people with thinking sticks, which is a good thing. In this blog he is playing advocate for “Creativity”. It’s like an episode of courtroom drama Suits and Stuart has slicked back his hair, pulled on something sharp, and is taking on the giant corporate coaching mantra of “repeatable predictable automaticity”, or in short the drill. So it’s quite a brave move and rattled my cage enough to write this repost.

In the blog, Prof Kaufman describes these incidents of creativity as being “original, meaningful and surprising”. He’s giving the loose and unpredictable nature of creativity some structure. He describes the creative incident as going beyond the standard repertoire and transcending expertise. And the very appearance of the creative incident is a surprise “not only to oneself but to everyone”. A surprise! It’s not often you hear the profs talk about those… they generally don’t like or take to surprises… it’s not what we pay them for. The problem is that you do get a lot of surprises in sport. Thankfully. I tend to ask my students to steer clear of too much logic and cold reasoning when it comes to thinking about sport. In fact I encourage them to apply and accept some “messy thinking”. That way they might find some sense.

So in the lawsuit we have “freewheeling creativity” on one side, and “predictable automaticity” on the other. Could be a sticky and long case. I thinks it’s best we settle out of court. Here’s why...

Let’s present some messy thinking arguments. Here’s one you will all be familiar with. It’s anecdotal. Anyone who knows me knows that I rate myself as a table tennis player. Anyone who’s played me may find otherwise. Anyway down the village club during the knock up I often find myself attempting and sometimes achieving creative incidents. I have a good knock up mentality… I just loosen my goose and let it happen. Wild slamming looping forehands off the wrong stance whilst pinned up against the wall are pulled off. I honestly don’t know how I do it (which is a good title for a sports psychology book). It is certainly a surprise to me and by the swear words a surprise to my opponents. And then the dreaded phrase is uttered; “are you ready?”. The match proper commences and I play in earnest… far too earnestly to allow the goose out. Safe backhands, chop returns, keep it in play, trust what I know works and what I feel I am reliably capable of. If its enough I may scrape a win, but infrequently. The messy thinking phrase here is “reliably capable off”. What I am capable of is knock up magnificence, but it is shackled by my current level and perception of competitive competence. Messy.

Lets try a contribution from an expert in the field of creativity… Michael Jordan. He was outstanding and undeniably creative in his approach to his sport and the basket. I remember a press interview during his peak when a reporter asked a simple question… “how come you are so much better than the other guys”. Jordan took quite a long moment and gave an equally simple answer… “its because I do the basics better than anyone else”. I don’t know whether he came up with it, but I’ve heard it used an awful lot since. It’s a different kind of a surprise when a mercurial creativity merchant such as Jordan credits his mastery of the basics as his cornerstone. Messy.

We could look at a move. Let’s take the Cruyff Turn. Surely one of the most recognisable creative incidents within sporting history… an I was there moment of genius. I found it described in the book “Sports Around the World: History, Culture and Practice”:

“He pioneered a move which has been dubbed the Cruyff Turn in which he looked as if he was moving to pass the ball but instead dragged the ball behind his planted foot leaving the defender off balance.” Perfect, I can see it, and anything pioneering must be scoring very high on the creativity scale. But then there’s the next sentence: “This move is commonly taught to young soccer players around the world”. That’s gone and messed me up. The most famous incident of football creativity has become a drill. So is the creative incident only creative once, and then it becomes common practice via deliberate technical practice… reduced to a drill skill?

I’m getting proper messy now. Is the creativity expressed as an incident or is it really an attitude. Is the creativity a skill itself, or the willingness to attempt to use that skill. Are there actually any new skills, or are there new ways to use established ones. The latter would really mess the court case up.

Stuart’s blog lists some of his own favourite sporting “new moves” and describes them as “techniques created by these great players as solutions to problems that are presented by changes to the rules, changes to equipment or changes to the nature of the way the game is played in order to find a technical advantage.” He goes on to describe this as “creative endeavour”. I like that… he’s straightened up my mess a good deal.

So how do they do that? Quite clearly it’s because they can… but that isn’t an acceptable answer. I can pull off occasional ping pong miracles, but never genuinely appropriately, when it matters, reliably, accurately, under pressure, or as successfully as these great players and their moves. The astute will have just noticed I used the word “reliably” whilst describing creativity. Council for the defence would be objecting. But I think it’s appropriate. I’m a movement man. I want my athletes to be creative, but I need them to be reliable. They need to stay athletes for a long time, not just have moments. But they will be playing other athletes who may be equally well prepared. So they need to be more reliable and have more moments.

Jordan was probably right. What underpinned his proliferation of creative moments was his own homage to his foundation of basic reliable skills. We could argue that these are fundamental movement patterns, acquired technical competency or rehearsed higher level game specifics… it doesn’t matter, they are basics. Somehow they were honed. Freestyle or guided. Definitely repeated. Always revisited. The basics are the foundations that allow him to express his creativity… and his basics were better than yours. Even if they weren’t he believed they were and he was gonna get creative on your arse anyway. See how this works… it’s messy.

So if this is a repost then do I think that the drills are killing creativity? They are if coaches let them. However I don’t think we should pitch the drills against creativity. We need to keep them out of the divorce court and they need to learn to live together. The drills are the strength in this relationship, the creativity is the spark. And you simply won’t get one without the other. If the relationship gets stale then it’s easier to just press on with over familiar unimaginative drills… you get my analogy. It’s a shame but sport will never be about the glorious chaos of unbridled creativity. But pushing the boundaries of performance and technique means that you do have to unbridle the young athletes regularly. Every training session should have it’s “licence to thrill” moments. But we shouldn’t throw all the drills out. It’s just that if a “surprise” pops up during a drill coaches should sometimes go with it, encourage it, learn to expect and even facilitate it… whether it’s a success or not. You never know it could be the next Fosbury Flop, or you could be watching the next Messi.

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Boom! There you have it...I guess we should have expected a bit of balance from a movement specialist!

Principally I agree with the theme of Bob's post...I do think that there is a need to attend to certain activities and provide the opportunity to rehearse them to ensure that they have the level of repeatability that is required for them to perform effectively and also (in his case) be resilient enough to avoid injury.

I guess where I would challenge would be in the use of the drill as the method of achieving this level of movement repeatability. In my mind a drill has no context and without context it lacks realism and variability. I would question whether the drill actually prepares the player for the movement in the game and as such whether it has the desired effect at all.

After all we all thought that static stretches in a warm up prevented injury in games but now we have realised that this doesn't have the effect at all and now everybody is doing for functionally representative movements before sports.

I just think that the drill is lazy coaching, it is coaches reducing sport to its constituent parts and then trying to reassemble the parts and expecting that this with translate to the game. Just, whack a load of cones down, get kids to move from one to the next, do something, move to the next. It looks good (to the uninitiated), it has order and parents will think that the coach knows what they are doing. But anyone can do that! There is very little skill in that! It is the coaching equivalent of painting by numbers. As Bob says, "...it’s easier to just press on with over familiar, unimaginative drills…".

There are always better ways than that. There are always ways to make any isolated movement more representative and therefore more open to variability and crucially...adaptability.

It strikes me that while Bob wants reliability (and I totally agree that kids should learn to move better) he also wants adaptability. Movers or players that can't adapt are too one dimensional and eventually something will happen that will mean that they break.

I know that Bob believes this because I have seen his workshops and he is passionate about getting kids moving through movement challenges and games. He is genius at creating them and helping coaches understand their application. Bob's skill is in looking at the whole mover through something he refers to as "the kinetic chain".

Bob works with a lot of golfers and he laments the S&C world which has golfers doing isolated exercises in order to help them develop more power, he always wants the movements to be more representative of the whole golf swing movement and he would prefer that activities that are chosen are much more representative of the full movement. He likes to train players using the equipment that they use to play with, he likes to do it in the environment that they play in and he likes to do it from the perspective of as full as movement as possible.

All of this made me think about this video I saw with another movement specialist called Ido Portal. He believes firmly in the concept of functionally representative movement and uses a variety of methods to achieve this that I think readers of this blog will find interesting.

This approach to movement using constraints presented by the environment is very aligned to the way that so much of the coaching and expertise literature is directing us. The model for the acquisition of skill is one of learning through experience and this learning can be expedited greatly by a coach with the skill to design and manipulate tasks and environments in a way that will turbo charge the development of athletes.

"I agree that drills live on the learning continuum but in the ecology of coaching methods they are the evolutionary equivalent of pond spawn..."

I agree that drills live on the learning continuum but in the ecology of coaching methods they are the evolutionary equivalent of pond spawn and I exhort coaches to stretch themselves to go beyond the drill and design practices that are much more engaging and also much richer with learning possibility.

And here's the kicker...

If we do this then the kids have more fun. They also learn more and get better faster.

More fun and get better faster...what's not to like about that?

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In the video with Ido, he talks about a concept called 'Kinetic Coans' which is a kind of movement challenge that he sets for his athletes and gets them to work towards it.

This has prompted me to start writing a post about how coaches can create 'Perceptual Puzzles' to challenge player learning. I am not sure when it is going to land but when it does I will beam it direct to your inbox if you sign up for my email alerts here.

Also as an extra bonus I am writing a book and I have asked my subcribers to help me with the editing and the feedback. I will be writing a chapter every month for the next 6 months so if you want to get each chapter sent to you as I write them then sign up for the email list and I will send them through as they get written.

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.

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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!