Hi everyone, this is Dave Wright and welcome to the Play Development Project podcast. I hope you're having a top week working with your team. As always, a quick content recap from some of the recent work we published at PlayAdvelopmentProject.com. Firstly, we've recently pushed out a new Q&A video with both Dan Wright and myself discussing how coaches can find the balance to avoid overcoaching.
This was a really enjoyable discussion and one which involves plenty of considerations. More recently, we featured a blog from a new contributor, David Garcia. David is a UA for A-License coach based in the United States who has kindly shared an article called the Age of Chaos. This piece dives into the importance of chaos and learning environments, discusses how coaches can find a balance when creating an appropriate challenge and how it can support players to become adaptable.
That's a really interesting read. Our latest content is the focus of today's podcast. In this long-form and wide-ranging discussion, I was delighted to host Mark Upton, a longtime PDP contributor and founder of My Faster Smile. Mark has a wealth of coaching and sports system experience and he joined me today with PDP Lead researcher Jimmy Borne to talk about creativity, control, culture and more.
That includes Jimmy's recently published academic paper, Creativity of Wicked Problem. A bit of a warning this chat goes off on some interesting tangents and hopefully helps you take a different perspective on your coaching and also encourages you to consider your environment, your culture and the systems that we all work with. I really enjoyed hosting this one more so because when we planned and discussed the conversation prior to the call, we had a lot to discuss and ended up diving down some pretty cool rabbit holes. We've also published the entire conversation on the podcast for free and it's available on the website and video form under the Masterclass discussion section.
As always, if you're yet to sign up to the PDP website, you can choose from a range of membership options at PlayDevilmentProject.com to suit you as an individual or organise a club membership for you and your colleagues. We've got some more great initiatives on the way in 2020 for members, so we hope you can join our community. If you get signed today, leave us a review via your podcast app and I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Hi everyone, my name's Dave Wright and welcome to another PlayDevilmentProject Masterclass discussion.
Today I'm delighted to be joined by two very special guests, one of which is Mark Upson, co-founder of My Fast and Smile. Mark, how are you? I'm my old homey, Matt. Really good to know.
Looking forward to this. And of course, we've got our lead researcher Jimmy Vaughn here. Jimmy, how are you? I'm good thanks, mate.
Really good to have you guys on board. I'll sit here for a few people and I've been saying to both of you for a while, I've wanted to tee one of these up because it's been a long time since the three of us have sat on the call and talk to all things coaching. We're going to dive down a few rabbit holes and probably go off in a few tangents and that's what we're really hoping to achieve out of this conversation to challenge some things and hopefully shed some light on some of Jimmy's recent work as well and just discuss that. So Jimmy, first of all, I want to congratulate you recently had your paper published Developing Creative Leader with Heart Student Potential in Sport.
Now, this is a pretty heavy read. There's almost a decade's worth of work probably there. I know that over that decade, things have evolved massively for you in terms of the direction and the way you've gone about this research. Talk to us a little bit just on the surface level about that journey, perhaps personally, and some of the challenges they've gone with putting this into an academic journal.
And I guess a little bit of the background. Yeah, it's a big one. I think the first thing to highlight is that it can be a pretty painful process. So talking about it might be pretty catholic and helping me get beyond the review process itself.
So, yeah, there's plenty of rejection to get over and then the review process can be a little bit torturous at times. But it was a big milestone to finally, and I say finally get this paper published. Like you say, it's been something I've been working on for a number of years and I suppose it really started at the start of my PhD journey. These ideas in this paper kind of started to, I mean, the seeds were planted then.
And as you pointed to, it's evolved over the course of what's been four years now as I've learned, different things and getting different perspectives. So it's really nice to finally have it out there. And what's been interesting is then talking to people about it afterwards. I've found that more challenging than I thought I might.
And I think it's, I mean, a lot of that is to do with using scientific language in order to be precise with what you're saying and get published versus how we then communicate day to day and finding some stories and some analogies to kind of bring the ideas to life has been where I've been at in the last few years. But yeah, it's really interesting looking back on some of the conversations I had with Mark and Al and yourself like two, three years ago even. And there's times there where I've been having that conversation furiously scribbling things down. And then like I look back at that now and like, oh, that's where I started to kind of understand this thing.
And that led me down a rabbit hole that led to that. So yeah, I'm extremely grateful for the conversations we've had previously and with Al and Mark at my first smile. I'm more recently with John Iler as well. So Jimmy, obviously the topics creativity and I know the ecological dynamics, it depends a lot of this.
And this is a concept that both of you are pretty familiar with. I mean, we started to taking some of these findings, some of the, I guess conclusions that you came to through this process and challenging questions that you put up and starting to sort of share that approach and understand what it means. Well, I mean, maybe I throw to Mark here. He's a pretty expert in terms of communicating this stuff.
What do you think, Duppy? I think you wrote the paper, didn't you, Matt? Yeah. Well, I mean, if you're back track a little bit, Jeff, like Jimmy, I think it was interesting, you know, just recalling those chats where you'd have a few years ago where it felt like you kind of, you had, you had something, or a few things kind of you wanted to say, I think like personally from your June, but you also, I think kind of stood like there was a lot that you were trying to get your head around and understand.
I think it's been just interesting to watch out to bold, like, I guess, kind of not sort of that being the why, but what and how you've been involved, those ideas or those thoughts to then pull the paper together. So some of the theories you do, I guess, creativity being central. But then, yeah, so if you do want to have a crack at what sits around creativity. So if it's like things like complexity or ecological dynamics and what's ethnography, for example, as a different method or lens of looking through, I think those are really interesting kind of almost natural evolutions in terms of the approach you were taking throughout it.
Yeah, well, hold on to that for me because maybe I'll shoot right to the end, to the practical side of it and what it might mean and then maybe we can kind of work back towards that. So for me, as you pointed out, the big interest has been creativity but creativity and culture. So how does culture and buzz culture influence people's ability or does it create conditions where people can be creative? And then the litmus test for that has been football.
As something kind of standardized rules that you can look at in different cultural contexts. And for me, what comes out of this paper, and perhaps there's a little bias there at the beginning that's led to these types of conclusions, is that understanding our culture is way more nuanced than I originally thought when I started out. So when I started out, it was motivational climate, it was really how I was looking to understand culture and through discovering the different lenses of ecological dynamics, complexity in general, it kind of opened up to other ways of understanding how culture influences the way people move through the world. And I suppose the emphasis on ecological dynamics, which is a theory found, we developed skilled movement, that kind of opened up a completely different rabbit hole to go down.
But in saying that, coming back to the core of it is if we can better understand where we stand, the cultural context, and if we can appreciate that there are different levels that are going to influence what happens in our practice, whether that's macro, economics, the system that we're in at the moment, how that shapes organizational structures, how organizational structures will have an influence on the motivational climate that we experience and will amplify certain values and dampen others, how that then relates to day-to-day interactions between people, whether we're more likely to compete with each other or collaborate with each other, and then that trickles down to the way coaches interact with players and players interact with players, and parents interact with each other on a sideline and view what's going on on the pitch. All of that is involved, I suppose, the journey has been about how much of that can we include, to how broad can the slope be and still be considered somewhat valid in terms of, or not be taking in too much, that we can't just be paralyzed by the complexity of it all. So how broad can our scope of inquiry be, so what, rather than, rather than from a scientific point of view or research point of view, going, what we want to know about X, Y, Z, and everything else we're just going to, for now, we're going to leave. It's kind of like, we know how much of the alphabet can we include, so what is it possible to include and understand about our cultural context, and then the more holistic and the more nuanced that picture, the more helpful it can be in informing our practice.
And suppose that's why talking about wicked problems resonated so much, because that's recognizing that any issue, or many of the major issues that we face today are wrapped up with other issues and reliant on other cultural contexts or the groups, and so we change one thing, and it leads to a ripple effect and change many other things in unforeseen ways. So recognizing creativity and creative development and human development in that way becomes a starting point for going what we need a broader scope to really understand the problem here, and then arguing for a transdisciplinary point of departure is going, well, rather than starting with a discipline, starting from the point of view of psychology, or the point of view of biology, or the point of view of pedagogy, or what is the challenge in front of us, and then what are the appropriate lenses that we bring to this specific issue, and then there's wider questions about what are the most appropriate lenses to view certain phenomena, and then I suppose coming back then to what that means on the pitch, well, should we talk tactics with our players? And when we do that, what is the reason for that? Because are we, and even just the place of verbal instruction and the type of verbal instruction, when you look at the reality of us being, or what the perspective of us being complex adaptive systems, and perception action being what leads to skill acquisition, well, then if that's the, we feel that that's the primary way of learning a sport like football or a team sport, then the perception action cycle, if you like, doesn't necessarily need to involve like verbal communication or declarative knowledge.
So where does that sit in terms of how we go about working on the pitch? So that means that manipulating constraints is probably a really good place to start. It means that when we do talk to players, maybe it's about setting a more broad intention, rather than going into the details of specific movements, and when you might do them, and how you might do them. So the communication becomes like more abstract and broader.
So these are some of the ideas that I'm now playing with, having been on this journey. So how do we shape an intention in a training session, which comes from the idea that we're working with an athlete environment, a player environment system, and system intentionality is the direct in the software system. And wrapped up in all of this is just realizing the issues that come from communication that can be over, overly controlling, and it can kind of dictate, and it can be cohesive, cohesive, it can be controlled. So we're knowing that that's a problem that we've had, and where we've been and where pedagogy is now, and how do we move away from that?
Jamie, there's a couple of threads there that I'd love to dive into with you guys, and there were two things that really stood out to me, and what is obviously a very in-depth answer. And there was one thing that was screaming at me, which was control, so you're talking about the environment, which is culture. And that's the second part really to this that I'd like to throw to you guys, because we get a lot of questions from coaches, PDP members, who say, how can I change my culture? I've got this cultural issue in my club.
And there's a sense of control that goes with that, and you also touched on the idea of communication and control the way we talk. So when you challenge the idea of a coach talking tactics, that people might go, well, of course, you've got to talk tactics, you're a coach, that's your job. And of course, what we're trying to do here is challenge the tradition and the role of what coaching is. And so we'll do you because you're suggesting, and correct me if I'm wrong, that if we create your own environment and we create that more of a theme, then perhaps ideas will emerge, as opposed to saying we're going to work on X, Y, or Z, it'll take a linear approach.
So maybe I'll throw over to Mark on this as well first, just because, Jimmy, you've had a few minutes on that topic. And Mark, do you sort of see out of those two threes of control and culture, how do they tie together? And if you've got other thoughts on where Jimmy was going, feel free to take it in a different direction. Yeah, I was having similar thoughts today as well.
If they're around culture, that's what I was going to give you to, I guess, about is how he's positioned culture and described culture, as how does that compare to maybe how psychology has in the past, but maybe specifically for coaches, how it's come to be talked about and understood in sports teams in particular, because I think in the last 10 years, as that there's kind of interesting, there's a culture around culture, but there's now some assumptions and beliefs that this is how you do culture, which I think you've already described over fairly common approach, is kind of the leader or someone higher up in hierarchy, kind of sets the vision in pose, culture, controls, culture. And we talk about it as almost like, as very objectively, like it's an actual entity or it's a static thing. And I know James is obviously talking about in much more dynamic way than that. He's already eluded to the fact that it's much much broader than that as well.
And I think that ties in with control, which is maybe we're getting out of date as well. I see a lot of culture work really being about controlling or it's really about compliance. So it's a tool of control to try and get an output, which is some kind of performance, however we want to define performance. That's kind of working at a meta level, but that's the beliefs about how that's the actual culture we've got at the moment.
Yeah, I think I actually saw a really interesting example of this. It was something I'm probably going to share with people on the PDP Slack community. And it resonated with me because I'm an RRL fan, a rugby league fan, and I saw a clip this week from CEO standing at the front of the room, basically saying, we're approaching things with the season mentality, saying the whole world's against us, we're going to close ranks, we're going to get in the trenches and hack each other, we've got to support our mates. There was some colorful language in this particular clip.
And I thought to myself, I find that massively alarming to see that kind of almost sort of traditional, what I would perceive to be a fairly archaic pep talk with a CEO at the front of the room and a group of players who seem completely disengaged from the conversation. And I found that quite strange because it seemed to me that there was almost a lack of ideas around answers. And for me, it speaks to what you're saying and that we perceive that if we stand in the room and say, we're going to get our mates back, we're going to get the trenches and the whole world's against us, that's going to create this culture, when in fact you've still got ultimate control at the front of the room. So this is what we have to do, these are the expectations.
And it's a sort of, it's a bank example, without some naming the club involved and so on. But I found it to be a really interesting example of what control and culture and what we perceive these things to be. But for me, it missed the mark in title. It almost resonates with the idea that we just revert back to an old tried and trusted narrative when we're in times of trouble.
So whether that's consciously or more, more of just the kind of subconscious thing, we kind of drift back to those safe ways of working. I mean, for me, speaking to that example and the point you made mark around compliance and control, one of the points I try and get across in the paper is that we have this, we have a dominant scientific lens that we've used to try and almost understand everything because we've had so much success in zooming in and reducing things and breaking them down. And we've had success in it. Kind of led to the Industrial Revolution, which is something that is, you know, a massive landmark moment for us.
It's almost like that's led to a real dominance in a way of doing science and understanding the world. And so much of that is about, well, can we predict and control the thing that we're looking at and the thing that we're trying to understand here. And as we talk about that leads to we might need to isolate certain things, we might need to bring it into a large open control of a certain, for certain very abilities. And I do believe that that's led to this style of thinking even around culture now, as you both of you alluded to, it's about compliance and control, because I think we're applying that same lens to human beings and to groups.
Even though it's from what we know now today, it's wildly inaccurate. I still think there is the tendency to do that and it can be that often when times are hard, we start to go, oh no, we need to now look at culture. This is an important thing, because we have the sense that the culture is bad, or the feeling is bad in the group. And again, I think that tendency is then to go back to these tried and trusted methods.
I mean, it's something that's been talked about for a while. And I think it was from Shell through Colu talked about an epistemological hegemonic, which is just a dominant way of understanding the world and collecting a certain type of data. So zooming in and quantifying things has been and continues to be that we live in a world of analytics now. And I think it's interesting to consider how much that has led to a dehumanizing influence, because we just want to quantify each other.
And now with the internet, we have even better ways, even more ways to quantify people's attention, the time they spend doing things. So more and more, we reduce each other to numbers, inherently dehumanizing. And then we start to talk about culture, because we're losing the relationships between people. So for me, it circles around and therefore questioning that scientific lens, which has become kind of a dominant worldview, becomes important to recognize.
But understanding how we change the day-to-day interactions in like, you know, in real world micro settings is more relevant in terms of how we actually stimulate some change. Mark, maybe you want to talk to that. Well, I think just to live from really grounded experience, I suppose, just on that idea of shifting from kind of, yeah, analytics to culture, I think in often culture, we're just really using is like a code word almost for more the human element. So we get so caught up in process and the numbers and data and they're just trying to use them essentially to control.
And we forget about human relationships, trust, learning, all these types of terms. And so what we're really doing is when we go too far, of course, down that really process our entire very analytical approach, especially in a team sport type domain, where it is a large group of people that takes us, yeah, it takes us off track. And I think it's some point, we realize that and then we say, oh, we need to fix culture. But what we're really saying is we need to attend to people.
We need to realize these humans there and all those human elements and interactions that go on. So in a way, that's also nothing new, is it? But again, I'd argue that the culture and Western culture at the moment is heavily what you described, Jimmy, and Gavin, even more so. So that extremely analytical and the paradox at the moment is whilst we're in your post-example, whilst more and more of the theory and the thinking and actually experience coaches kind of tacit or experiential knowledge is towards understanding complexity and interaction, technology and people selling technology are driving us down more and more reductionist paths.
So we've got this really interesting tension at the moment about how that's all unfolding. And I'd say that's the culture of the moment, that's kind of the water and West Women's Institute made it forward from previous times. Yeah, so it's interesting. But it also plays out on the pitch in football with the user game models.
And the people understand that term in different ways. But it essentially is somewhat because the other dynamic or another dynamic here is top down, which is generally what comes with this lens and this way of working aiming for control and compliance. It means there is something that is controlling and it's usually something that's top down in a hierarchy. And there's really interesting discussion around game models in football and whether they are they're basically top down constraints like global constraints.
And they can facilitate because they can facilitate things or they can inhibit things, it's not necessarily good or bad. But talking to some guys in Barcelona, I'm serious recently, they're going through a process of really questioning the use of their game model, less style of play. So this thing that the rest of the world looks at and goes, oh Barcelona, they're so good because they all have this defined way of playing this game model that everyone adheres to. And then now questioning whether this is just too controlling.
So given that we understand athletes as being athletes and people, again, as complex adaptive systems, as nonlinear and in learning being in the interactions and the varied interactions of people, they're questioning the how, at least how they bring about the game model or the style of play. The style of play, they don't want to get rid of that. So their identity and the way they do things on the pitch with a short passing and the idea to dominate the ball and win it back quickly and all that stuff has become really popular now. Yeah, they want to keep that, but they recognize there's different ways of doing that.
So there can be more of a top down approach, which is the game model, but there could also be a bottom up approach whereby the local interactions between players, what emerges from those local interactions is the same pattern of play. But it's based on, like, it's based on local interactions, not global concepts. So maybe an example of this is a conversation I was having with a coach last night. He was asking about a session that we were looking at, and he was talking about the defensive triangle, so how it's really useful for in certain moments players to be in a defensive triangle.
So he asked me, you know, is this a concept that you work with? Or is it like, do you believe in it? Or do you know this concept type then? And I was saying, well, yeah, I understand what you're saying, but we would not talk to the players about a triangle.
We wouldn't necessarily say, you know, can you find a triangle on the pitch? Or, you know, we would say, because that's a global concept that's going to basically shape the local interactions. We would talk about something that we think shines a light on the more relevant information, which is, can you close the gap between each other? So the ball can't go through you, and at the same time, can you get as close to the ball as possible so you can win it?
Now, with those talking about those kind of more local concepts or local interactions, we would see, if they do that, well, we would see, like, a defensive triangle emerge at times, but we would also see other patterns emerge at other times. So we don't lock them into this global idea, but we work at a more local level whereby those ideas might emerge, those patterns might emerge, but there is room and space for other patterns to emerge as well. This is principle based, isn't it, Jimmy? I mean, what we're saying here is there's a principle of, you know, so you take the five-yard theory of the pressing to get it all back quickly.
As an example, the principle is this is what we'd like to see. These are the behaviors, how they actually are executed, could be varied in every interaction. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Because I'm trying to tie this back to, I'm a technical director, Julian's and I'm a coach, Julian's and us, you know, you're saying, okay, we don't want to just put this theme, or this is how we defend these are the answers, but here's an idea, and how the players execute that is up to them in terms of their collaborating finding solution, right?
Kind of, and I want Mark to jump in on this one because he's much better at explaining this stuff, but what I'm essentially getting at is that there are principles that are kind of global concepts. You can call those principles, but there are also like principles or concepts that are more direct players' attention to local interactions. So with the principle, are we directing the players' attention towards a global structure? Or are we directing them to local information?
Mark, can you jump in? Yeah, I was going to explain pretty well, from my understanding, I think you probably haven't mentioned maybe too much around self-organization. So I think what you're talking about there are principles to help place essentially self-organize. So one of the common, if we do seemingly take attention or go off on a different field, but it is quite a common example of patterns of bird flocking.
And I think the answers to discover that there's kind of three rules, or you might say principles that birds use to self-organize essentially. And people can go look up, I won't tell you what they are, I'm not going to go and look up. What those are, but they basically, from those simple principles of rules, you see these quite intricate in elaborate patterns emerge at that global level. And so that's, I think, what, at least if you guys talk about what occurs to me, what's interesting, I think is especially through a young player's developmental journey, the balance of local and global, if you want to talk about more local self-organization and interaction through to Norway, you started giving that a kind of top-down game model, what's where the balance and should that shift a bit throughout that developmental journey?
Exactly. And then the point circling back to the title of the paper, the argument I'm making is that developing creativity requires more of an emphasis on the local interactions that can lead to self-organization, and which then creates a space for innovation in those moments as well, because I'm not cognitively thinking about trying to create a global structure, I'm attending to the information and the changing environment in and around me. So I'm playing in a more intuitive way, which can lead to the same kind of similar global patterns, and the advantage there, because people might go, it's just going to lead to the same thing, and it can look very similar, but the advantage when you go from local interactions, and that's where your focus is, because it's a space for creativity, then people can play as well break that pattern when the opportunity is there, rather than just continually playing the pattern because that's what they've been told from a top-down. So the ability to break the pattern becomes the really crucial part of this.
I think it gives you that, I guess, ideal world, or if it all panned out world, gives you flexibility, yet flexibility, as you're saying, with the flexibility being actually at the right times to break the pattern, whether that's in a more deliberative, pre-planned kind of way, or whether it is super spontaneous, what we might call more creative in the moment, actions and collective action, but it steers you away from rigidity, which is when, yeah, we just need to play this defensive triangle, and we never change that pattern, it becomes rigid, actually it becomes fragile and breaks, because the opposition just works out, basically how to play through or around it, like the case may be. And you're failing the player, aren't you, because you are not equipping the player with, I guess, adaptability within their toolbox, for when they dive into a different environment, because that rigid approach may be very effective, and again, to tie this back to a practical question, we had a question on this recently from another PDP member who said, we recently played a team, who were playing a lot of passing triangles that passed the ball beautifully, they dominated all that big estate now, their kids were better players than us, and I think the word better can be challenged, maybe they were just more football mature at the time, maybe they had a bit more experience, maybe they were just coached in such a rigid way that it looked better to the adult lens, but on the day, this result went against them, and the question was, should I be coaching my players around these fixed patterns, and he's trying to get success? Now, my argument was not, because these were under 8, and this was the key part of the question, now that may evolve with their under 23, and you're out in a performance environment, but with under 8, my reply to that was essentially, you've got to equip these players based on potentially attributes or based on skills they need to learn, expose them to various things, and give them a chance to go and dribble and fight, and go and dribble and fight, and maybe one day we will work on switching play and passing patterns, but we're not going to tell them how that's going to be done, we're going to say, we'd like to encourage you to do something, or we'd like to give you the idea or something, how you're going to execute that's different, I think it can be, it can come back to that control piece for me, you know, trying to relate things to be on the grass, I think we believe we can control a lot more than we actually can as coaches as adults in these environments. I think the other thing about it earlier today, Dave, almost said the exact topic about any more positive light as coaches, not just hoping, not saying negative here, but it is that, especially transitioning from playing to coaching as well, it's suddenly, well, geez, how can I, I want to have a positive influence, but I'm not on the pitch anymore, what can I do?
And I think because I'm particularly with youth players, actually we overlook how much we actually can do with really well-designed practices based on principles, so we actually can have a massive influence by practices on and then, you know, traditional pedagogical tools around feedback and instruction questions. But we tend to become, because we're so fixed on the idea of talent, I think we skip over the influence we can have there and go straight to, well, you're out to really have influences through structures and set plays and plans. So I think there's positive intent there, but again, it's just a whole, again, it's complex, there's a range of things going on that might lead us down the path. And it comes back to, I'm sorry, I'll go back to this again, but the prominent scientific lens has led to a body of knowledge that understands certain things and has ignored or can't understand others.
So we can't be able to understand creativity very well or understand learning very well. And therefore, we haven't developed practices that really are useful for those things. So it's not surprising that we revert to top down more controlling ways of working, because that's the same lens that we've applied or the same practice that we've applied across the board. It's the dominant way of viewing how the world works.
So getting beyond that is part of this problem as well. Talking to the guys and Barcelona again at La Macio, they were talking about coaches success and Kojigo, which I know we've all talked about a lot before. Dave, you've got a great piece on the website about this, but they were saying one of the things is coaches define their success by having their team display the game model. So in this context, whilst known as way of playing, and then alongside that winning games as well.
But the focus is very much for the coach, like their team, their isolated group of players within this bigger coach, this bigger player development structure, which is the academy from the young ages to the older. And they find that really problematic as well, because the coach just wants to get his team playing this way of playing this game model. So players are number eight or six or a full back, and they're always in those positions. And they're taught exactly what to do in those positions from an early age, because they want to show as a coach, hey, I can get a team to play in this way.
And that's the goal. And the thinking behind that is, well, if I can get a team to play in this way and that define success here, then I'm going to move up through the ranks. So again, the way we view things has led to certain success criteria that then only reinforces this way of working. Whereas what they're trying to talk about now, and I'm kind of used to sometimes talking with the same guys at FC Barcelona, is then way more interested in how do we encourage local interactions that will lead to the same path of play at the same start of play, and having players experience different positions, but then still this pattern, this style, this way of being heavily in that.
So that they want to flip things and start working that way, because they will recognize the benefits in it and the potential for players to be more adaptive and more creative. I mean, it was just yesterday, a colleague of mine who had also spoke to certain people in and around that part of the world, saying that so many of the players coming through the boss academy, a lot of them end up in Division II, Spain, and things like that in that league, and are struggling to play with other players in other clubs, because they become so rigidly attuned to the playing, the game model of FC Barcelona. Yeah. Yeah, I think that if you've got a club of that caliber questioning things and reevaluating things, which are obviously, you know, being embedded for a long time, again, there's a content on the website around Jimmy's PhD, and as we've presented about the culture of Barcelona and the influence on the start of the play, I think that's really interesting.
I think I still want to take the conversation towards, I guess, some of these other ideas are any logical dynamics in the form of life. I mean, Jimmy, this comes up in the paper, we sort of touched, we sort of got around this a little bit in some of the things we talked about, but perhaps we'll go to Mark first and send to this idea of a former life and also touching on values and how they sort of emerge within environments. Did you want to sort of kick us off on that, Mark? Yeah, it's a big one.
It's probably more, maybe, frame a bit of a well-stored, I guess, in recent observations I would make for Jimmy, because it will actually be a form of life that he's very familiar with, which is puts out. And yeah, just some observations recently, and had later, there's a local Y and CACenter that started running for self-sest training sessions and competitions, and I've been, I've come in and out there over the last few months. From my understanding, for example, I was off in position as a great developmental tool, if you're looking at it from a football perspective, it's great developmental tool, great for creativity and ball control and all those sorts of things, if I understand it correctly. It has been really interesting watching it, I guess, how that interacts with what you might call the form of life in Australian sport.
So, I mean, one of the first sessions I saw, so I was probably, I don't know how it keeps probably 9 or 10, I reckon this session, and I reckon for 15 or 20 minutes of what I assume was probably an hour long session, that I was doing shuttle runs and agility work. And then in some of the competition, again, it strikes me back to what's up, which is kind of talked about, is it, so probably there was a group of early teams that went exactly what their age were, the kind of early teams, and they just seem again very, very coachally, and there was some interesting set plays being run from a corner, which were really interesting to watch, because they worked for a couple, and then the other team had figured them out, but just exactly we just spoke about, they didn't adapt and touch the point where for a quite advanced players for that age, we're making ridiculously dumb passes straight to the opposition from a corner, because I would just say, script. So, it struck me again, it was quite coach-led, so I'm interested, I guess Jimmy and your take on that, if you've got almost one culture or what we portray as a foot-seal culture, but it's kind of embedded maybe in a broader form of life in sport in Australia or coaching culture. How do you see that?
It's a really interesting example, and I think it shines a lot on the problem here of one of the problems, where if I pick up a certain practice that has developed in a certain cultural context, and we lift it out of that cultural context, and we go and we put it down in another cultural context, and we imagine that it's going to lead to the same kind of, we're going to see the same things happening. So, foot-seal emerging in South America and Brazil and Uruguay originally, and then Brazil and the Latin American countries, has been infused with the playfulness, the cunning, the trickery, the street smarts of that context, of those cultures. So, you know, they play games like, they play one-on-one games where the goal is just to not make each other a lot. So, you know, that then infuses the way they play foot-seal, and have Samba and idea of the idea of Xinga, and where, so those movement cultures infuse the way they play foot-seal, and then that infuses the way that they play football.
But when we just pick up the nuts and bolts of foot-seal, like it's this size pitch, it's these rules, and then we put it down in another context, in a context whereby, you know, a coach lead is dominant, being organized, is valued, training sessions looking hard and difficult, and big and strong, yeah, big and strong, exactly. Then we can't be surprised when it looks very, very different, and has very, very different learning outcomes. Sorry, I heard my heart comes, there's a slip at the time for me, very different learnings. Not predefined anyway, certainly not.
All right, so right, so, I mean, it shows you've been on the grass a bit lately, mate. I'm playing nice. It's a good conversation playing away, mate, with the learning action. Yeah, we won't tell everybody you were doing a whiteboard of a phase of play before we started.
But I'd love to chime in on that as well, mate, because I think we've had conversations around the narratives in Australian sport. Both of us came back from the UK, where we saw some real progression, and the UK coach, he's seen, you know, I sort of moved back to Australia for being away for five years and was quite shocked for some of the things I've seen. The corner example is something I've seen with players I've worked with, where we would set players and say, within that adapt, obviously if player X goes here, then adapt, because we need you to. So we would encourage that what we would do is encourage the set up to be really accurate, but then adapt to what's in front of you, because it's not going to work, it's not going to work.
And so we gave the tools and still it would really break down. But the second point for me was, I love Jimmy, the idea of literally lifting foots out from Uruguay, because they were popping it there and Adelaide and just going, oh, we're going to do it our way and it's going to produce players. In contrast to that, I've worked in environments where we have used foots out, and I've taken teams to tournaments with these sort of skill acquisition age groups where foots out is a key partner. We're not as dumb well, we're transplanted in this case into a UK environment where there's a history of street foot, which has perhaps disappeared in recent years, there are different changes in society and so on.
When done well, it can have those outcomes. When you create mixed age groups, when you create freedom to play, when you play the game, the way it's meant to be played. When you step back as coaches and don't make it coach centric with the shuttle runs that marks alluding, it can work well and therefore be a part of a program within your club or within your environment. When you start getting foots out, we're stepping off as coaches and we're going to say the 13s and 16s, 13s and 16s all play together, and you've got a 16 leading 13, and you've got those social interactions and all those benefits, which whilst it's not, excuse me, authentic, in the sense that it's not street foots out in Rio, or it's not street football in Birmingham, it is still the closest we can get for kids in 2019 to an experience of mixed age groups in play and experimentation and us stepping out the way.
And I think I'm not saying don't coach, I'm not saying that we have to disappear completely, but I am saying we have to create more authentic experiences using these kind of ideas. 100%. But what you're also doing there is respecting the cultural context that it's come from, in recognising that that was free play, and therefore there wasn't a coach involved in that, so does that side of things. But and also the beauty with footsell is that it has a different name from football, and therefore players, personally, I didn't carry my football, my emotional football baggage with me into footsell, until I got to a high level and then the same thing, the same baggage with hers, because you're in a similar pressure environment.
But I think, again, coming back to the core of the paper and the emphasis on culture or the emphasis on transdisciplinarity is really, for me, understanding the context that you're in, and then designing the practice accordingly. So for me, culture, it's not necessarily, it's about recognising that there's already cultural values there, there's already ways of being that are established, there's already a form of life where practices and certain social interactions are the dominant ones. So we want to understand that as well as we possibly can, and if we do that, then we can design environments that bring to life certain things that might be missing in our form of life. I think your examples are really good one in terms of the use of footsell as you described it, because generally we're recognising that in football, it's too coke-centric, it's over-organised and there's too much pressure.
So then how do we introduce something that has a history and a legacy from other countries that don't have those things? And then how do we organise it, like, if you manipulate the constraints around it, to really amplify those things and make it different and dampen the emphasis of control, of over-organised, of pressure to become a professional football player. So for me, anything can be good, but you've got to understand why the dynamics at play or the cultural and social dynamics at play, when you put a programme of practice in place. And the same thing is true of the Rondos, which is an example I use a lot, because it's so simple.
The same thing that's plucked out of context, it's plucked out of, often the Catalan or the Spanish context whereby it has values infused in it that mean there is an intention to play in a certain way. When you pick that up and pop it down in Australia or even in Sweden, those intentions aren't there because the cultural context is different and the values are different. So it won't be played the same way. So then we need to understand what that means, and then we can use certain constraints, rules, point systems to shape an intention that is going to lead to the type of play that is representative of the moment in the game that we want to reproduce or the interactions we want to expose the players to so they can then develop those skills.
I think I'm not sure if you may have even mentioned on the Masterclass day, but I know Paul McInnes has been on and I remember speaking to him two or three years ago before I left the UK about what he's doing Manchester United. I think the stories he told me probably get as close to what he's saying about almost how credit, I think it's almost like a motivational climate. So he's going to help it man you with the youth teams, I'd like to have a cage environment. And the stories of Rashford playing against Paul Burr and the age difference and all those things.
But he said as coaches he and the other coaches that worked there, they were very aware of the type of almost climate they were trying to create. So sometimes it'd be very playful. So very less kind of string-based, really encouraging play, creativity, express yourself. Those things at other times he said they'd want to have a real hard edge.
At the time it's almost one of them going and might start just kicking a couple of guys and just making it that beautiful. Yeah, exactly a good word though spicy. Another time they might want to be just really competitive. So big focus almost an ego or inside is like climate of folks who are going to win this in a story and competitive and it matters.
So they manipulate really through social constraints, meet things, social constraints or social interactions, how they be over climate but done with a very specific purpose. And that's an E, that's high class high quality coaching. Yeah, it's a great example. It's a wonderful conversation we've got with Paul where he does talk about that cage example.
I know he's presented through the FA where he is now on those stories. I think the thing here for coaches like some practical ideas is that what we're saying is that Jimmy's not saying go to a rondone suite. It's just going to be different and sweet. The implication is different because the players upbringing their culture, their social culture constraints will be different to the kids on the street Barcelona who have been playing in London or wherever they are.
So I think we're saying understand and you can't expect and the Australian example is good. You can't expect that they're going to play the same way as a different culture. But I think there's also some other considerations there when it comes to those social dynamics and when you're developing within your club or within your team, when you're looking at your planet, can you find a place for the ideas that you suggested? Can you find a place where Wednesday nights going to be torn tonight and it's going to be competitive and it's going to be fierce.
It's going to be about what I'm telling. Now that doesn't mean coaches screaming and shouting controlling. But it might mean tonight there's going to be something on the line. Tonight we want to see this group of players push beyond maybe it's younger versus older.
So can you ramp up and ramp down the challenge throughout the year to give that diversity of experience as opposed to rigid coach development curriculums which might say we turn up and I've supported coaches for a while now who might say well I deliver a position game and then I deliver a patent to play and then I deliver a game. And that's my session structure. Now my question for them is how can you challenge yourself in changing that because if you do that every time for me that's going to be quite a linear and rigid way for the players to try and they're going to turn up expect to know what's going to happen and then going back to the creativity piece. I mean you can try and then for me that's probably going to kill the creativity within the environment because there's almost an expectation we're just going to go through emotions tonight.
So I think it's about that diversity for me. Yeah I think going back to what Mark mentioned before in relation to that I think that's a really nice practical example. But I was thinking like you posed the question of how do we plan for that. That strategic level planning is always slightly more of a it's going to lead to like global like concepts and principles and ideas that are going to shape local interactions.
And I don't think I'm not saying there's not a place for that at all. I think there is a place for that because I think my understanding in many ways culture is that is that more global kind of constraint that influences local interactions. But in a sense it's something that has emerged from local interactions over time. So we have to recognize this circle are these things are constantly influencing each other.
And then the interesting thing with culture there being that it can often just sit below the surface of what we recognize is it's underlying assumptions often rather than like things that we openly talk about. And this leads me to then Mark's work with Al and John up around like can we have the bigger conversation around what really are the values guiding the way we do things. And I think this is for me important because if we're talking about global principles and global constraints then values seem to be the I mean they seem to be things that emerge across cultures in different contexts around the world. So they seem to be these ideas that resonate and emerge as human beings kind of coexist and kind of work together.
And there seems to be a somewhat universal like spectrum of these values as well which is pretty interesting. But as the guiding constraints for like complex adaptive systems they seem to be the like the best fit, the most fit for purpose. And like there's a story I probably mentioned this to both of you previously but I think it brings it to life quite nicely. The idea is that you can be driving your car and you're driving your car and you come to a or you hit a wall and the car stops.
So physical law and you're not going to get around that the car will stop because you hit the wall. The next example so physical laws constrain what we can do. The next example is you're driving along and you come to a red light. It's a social rule if you like.
So you stop your car because you're a red light. It's a constant. Yeah exactly. Exactly.
And it's agreed upon and it constrains your behavior or guides your behavior. But then you're driving along and a kid steps out into the road and you stop your car and you do everything you can to stop your car to not hit the kid. And that's not physical law that's governing your behavior and it's not social rule. It's a value in human life.
But that value not only has an influence when you drive your car. It has an influence throughout your life and everything that you do in all other contexts. It's going to shape your behavior because you value human life and you don't want to kill anyone or hurt anyone in most cases. Whereas the red light is only specific to that section of the road and it's only specific to when you're driving your car.
And in the culture that we have with the scientific lens we've been using with the emphasis on predicting and controlling and compliance we seem to have thrown out red lights everywhere to try and like shape people's behavior. So you have policies and procedures for everything. So every imaginable circumstance and this just I mean it's not it's not fit for purpose when working with complex adaptive systems i.e. people and groups of people.
What is fit for purpose or what is closer and more appropriate is the work with values that then transcend different contexts. And then there's a flexibility in understanding how you embody this value in this context. So I suppose I'll kind of leave this over to Mark because these are the conversations he's having with big sports organizations is kind of recalling what it is that we value in sport and then making sure that that value is a guiding principle through everything that happens and what we do. So then you have this global idea, this global principle that runs through and influences organizational structures, how people work together and collaborate with team, staff, administrators and then down to coaches and players.
Would that be a fair explanation? Happy? Yeah we'll see where it goes. I'll take it on and see where we end up.
My thought listening to that Jim is the red light construct is still based around the same value as stopping putting the brakes on not running because it's designed to avoid accidents and stop people dying if you like. So it's bad in life. So I think it's a really interesting thing. And again if we put a more hopeful and positive light or stance on things is actually people generally have good intent or they're good values if there is such a thing here at the universal level and if you talk human rights, they're actually all right to the child as is topical at the moment, tickling Sweden is so we all say we actually value this preserving life.
But I guess how society at a very broad level then goes about acting and respecting that value can differ. And this is where it becomes very different. So the red light symbolizing a very centralized control approach versus I guess the common comparisons to a traffic light intersection would be around about where the constraints aren't as tight as again still some principles or you might want to call them rules that we abide by. But what we're trusting in much more is one people paying attention because you do have to attend to it.
And that's one of the key things we talk to everyone about is that you're constantly attending to the environment what's going on around here. And so it's a tension and second is to use their judgment. So yeah actually I can get around this round about paying attention. I don't want anyone to die.
I don't want to crash any micro professional judgment or using my perceptual skills. I can go. Whereas the red light takes away all of that. You basically don't really don't intend other than work abroad or you'll be able to use phone but that's legal.
Other might say yeah is it red is agreeing okay that makes the decision for me. So I don't have to attend. And what people are arguing is long term so if we talk about moving in a microscope without macroscope here and say the long term implications of a society that goes down that path may lose the ability to actually make those judgment calls or perceive those affordances. And so it becomes self-reinforcing.
We're basically with dumbing ourselves down and that's a lot that talk about AI and those sorts of things and machine learning and robots are overtaking things. People say the only way that can happen is if we meet them halfway. But there's a bit of a trend at the moment that some forces that are trying to nudge us in that direction. So that's our word you know I guess our work is here where it's on or off the pitch.
You know you're tending to the things that really matter what really matter around you. What are your values or some common principles that can guide and you've got to constantly pay attention and make good sound professional judgments and you'll need to learn to do that over time. And the value is not changing is it but the context or the interpretation may differ between various people. I mean that's kind of what we're getting in is that if we're using that value-strum approach then we are sort of accepting that it may be a different way but it should ideally underpin the way we move forward or the way we collaborate or the way we develop in this case play this perhaps if we're talking about coaching ourselves.
Is that kind of where we're getting at? Yeah I think the other thing that came that really just came up for me in that explanation up is around whether it's engaging or disengaging. And I think sitting at the red light is inherently disengaging following the policy is inherently disengaging. Someone else has done the thinking for you.
Someone else is attuned to the landscape or any for you if you like. And again it's like a top down as opposed to like being in the moment and being engaged with what's going on. And one of the interesting things there as well which is kind of a delicious irony of it is skillful drivers around and about will be much more efficient in terms of throughput of traffic than again the traffic light system but yet we love often associated words efficiency with the traffic light system as in with control and process and efficiencies. And structure yet actually highly skilled self-organisation coordination guide advice and principles or rules can be not only more effective but efficient as well if you are if you need to concern yourself with that.
Well this is the education over control thing isn't it. I know Jimmy and I have spoken before and I think we almost died down to engine of the war on drugs you know and these kind of these kind of broader social issues but there's this this mini-op that's a redundant fight because the amount of resource and time energy goes into it we know those will say will legalise things or whatever and look that's up for that's a big debate and a big discussion but it is that sort of principle of well we'll just control and stop everyone here but it's the way and you know so we're not really winning the battle it's just an analogy that kind of popped into my head there. Absolutely. I think the yeah and the point yeah the point around also dumbing ourselves down is a very relevant one and that's not sure we I'm not sure that we need the advent of AI to appreciate that that's an issue right now and again the emphasis there and something I'd point made in the paper as well as around this reproductive education so the idea that we're just going to reproduce what we already know so we're just going to get this this next generation just to know what what we already know rather than viewing it which again is viewing it as as top-down as filling an empty vessel rather than as an opportunity to co-create and reimagine and push boundaries.
So that could critical thinking there isn't there and says or at least encouraging critical thinking within that system you know I mean we've talked and I know Mark you've written about the idea of linear education systems and the influence of the industrial revolution which Jimmy touched on earlier but and I'm not overly criticizing the education system for what it is now or teachers who are out there working hard but I think we need to get away from discouraging critical thought and make sure that we are encouraging that and whether that's a football environment or a classroom doesn't matter how can we encourage young people who are developing to think critically to make decisions to adapt to develop skill in the case of approaches as best we can and create those environments where there is you know we are challenging them to think we are challenging them to adapt constantly. And there's an interesting point there around thinking critically and Mark's example of the roundabout which is more being attuned to what's going on because then we're looking at slightly different understandings of learning and of acting in the world. One was more around if we can be engaged and attuned and present with our environment and what's going on from a perception action point of view versus correctly thinking which can just be sitting in a bit of a daydream whereby you're thinking your own head and reflecting on things or having a conversation that does that and it's interesting to consider which of those two experiences we prioritize more at the moment and which of those we see more as learning and for me the critical thinking in our own head piece is something that dominates a little bit more than being engaged with the environment and attuned to the environment and acting in more of a maybe it's like even acting in more of a flow state. You think Jimmy, do you talk in your paper as I can ask you in terms of the education system do you talk much to that or have any narrative around that?
Yeah there's some small pieces around that just basically around this idea of reproductive education and just we're just reproducing what's gone before us and the need to kind of get alongside the learner and co-create. I mean the beauty is there's lots of principles in those ideas that are similar principles that are talked about in transdisciplinarity that are similar principles that are talked about in collaboration for creativity. So it's almost like across these slightly different situations or different contexts in domains the same principles are really a kind of shine in through and I think the paper doesn't explicitly mention that but it's implicit in the red thread running through so really can we collaborate and co-create together and that's often being aware of the baggage we bring with us which can often be cultural and they're making sure that we create a space that's free of unwanted bias and we can move forward together. Really really interesting guys and I guess on that note heading towards the end of the conversation for those who have tuned in and we've started a lot of ideas around and gone down some various tangents here.
Mark I'll start with you if you've got some sort of takeaways or some summaries I guess and considerations for those who are perhaps technical directors and clubs or then leadership roles at various sporting organizations to have they can interpret some of the ideas we've discussed and take some ideas into their environment. I think what Jimmy's work and he's like this paper and some of his other work is maybe alluding to and making providing from frameworks to his that ability to really mention early join up and should like that kind of saying I guess from boob room to board room in a way is actually there's some common principles or ways of looking at this thing that we're trying to do and trying to help particularly I think we talk a lot about young people shine and flourish there's some things off the pitch that we can consider in terms of principles and frameworks and ways of going about it that are actually really similar underpinned by similar ideas on the pitch so that's probably just one thing I'd encourage people in technical directors or kind of heads off type roles to think about in terms of the influence they can have through those roles. And Jimmy from your perspective any kind of key takeaways to sum things up before we wrap the conversation? Yeah well very similar to what to what Mark said there and it's actually something I've been reflecting on recently and I haven't kind of moved rolled here A.I.K.
Now my role is head of development for 13 to 19 so I've been having to think in this way a little bit more and I think the key one around exactly what Mark mentioned is principles like can we collaborate can we co-create and can we can we work with local interactions and this is something that to be fair Ben is 14 and Mark Sullivan have been doing in the club for the last couple of years in the eight to twelve spaces which has been a focus so having local interactions between coaches regularly as a way of educating and developing coaches and then providing an organizational structure that privileges those interactions and that's still working progress so getting better and better at that and then I think what it's a little bit like if I could go back onto the pitch and we talk about the game model versus local interactions I wonder if this can be a little bit like how developing countries have skipped using landlines and putting in that massive infrastructure and they've gone straight to mobile phones which is just like a better way of doing the same thing so for me I wonder working with new coaches coming through and even parent coaches maybe we kind of just move beyond the idea of say game model and we just work with local interactions or at least certainly shift the focus in that way and maybe that's going to lead to a bit of a development jump. Yeah it's a challenging point to finish on Jimmy and a really interesting one now for those who have tuned in obviously on the Play Development Project website you can seek out a lot of content from both Mark and Jimmy search their names on the website and lots of really interesting articles around some of the topics we have covered as well I would strongly encourage people to get over to myfastasmod.com and check out some of the work that Mark and his colleagues over there are doing and really trying to influence and shape organisations and sport and otherwise as well so on that note I want to thank both of you for your time it's been fascinating conversation Mark thank you so much for your time. Thanks very excellent to have you back on and Jimmy has always made a pleasure and a challenge and lots of great ideas to come out congratulations on having your paper published mate and well done thank you for being here tonight. Cheers mate thank you very much for bringing us all together tonight yeah it's been a lot of fun.
Excellent we'll look forward to another Play Development Project Masterclass discussion very soon. Thanks for joining us on the Play Development Project podcast you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at playerdp or find us on Facebook don't forget to head over to playadevelopmentproject.com where you can sign up to our progressive coaching community and gain access to our wide variety of resources to help you in your coaching.