“You gotta challenge all assumptions.”

After a good number of years and through several different formats I’m now going to attempt to frame a story through this blog. The story grew out of hearing the same complaints, observations and solutions over decades about the state of the game. Parents who don’t get it and need education; what’s better, winning or development; coaching curriculums that preach “this is ‘A’ way, not the ‘The’ way” yet create dogmatic thinking; periodic movements to ‘reform the system’ yet offer little more then recreating the staus quo and on and on. The feeling can be summed up with an anecdote. I was at a coaching convention talking with a National staff coach who asked me what I thought of the field and classroom presentations. “They’re fine, but they’re the same as last year, which were the same as the year before and so on back ten years; same topics, same methods same message. That’s not progress that stasis, where’s the growth?” He agreed. Unfortunately, at that moment neither of us had a solution to what appeared to be a real problem.

The story has to be more than merely venting. Solutions, or at the least positive ideas for change have to be offered. Furthermore they should be grounded in science. Opinions, beliefs and disconnected personal stories won’t cut it. With that as a constraint I’ll refer to a wide number of authors, rules, laws and principles for support. The following entries contain very little new information and ideas but may present them in unique relationships. The validity of those relationships is what can be called into question.

Principle among these authors is Col. John Boyd, (a brief-giver actually) and Nikolai Bernstein a Soviet Neurophysiologist. Both came independently and from different perspectives to similar conclusions about growth, learning and survival. Boyd’s paper, Destruction and Creation and his OODA loop theory dovetail nicely with Bernstein’s shifting focus heuristic, a term coined by Rob Bongaardt. Both men saw that either/or debates easily result in dogmatic thinking, which could neither advance an idea nor retreat from an entrenched position. Instead it takes the dynamic interaction between antagonistic positions, along with an underlying goal, to survive and grow.

There will be a host of other voices that come up in these blogs. Some will provide a systems perspective, others a military outlook, some will add an educational, sociological, historical or physiological point of view. Ultimately, the purpose of adding these disparate voices will be an attempt to change the dynamics of the coaching educational dialog. In short, these different perspectives may provide the question that can open a new line of thinking about the game.

To recap; I believe that there’s an element of ‘stuckness’ about the game, how it’s perceived and presented. A little bit of ‘lateral drift,’ an approach used by Robert Pirsig may help to find a point of least resistance to change. That change is necessary should be self evident, that it occurs isn’t. So I’ll submit a few ideas in attempt to move the discussion along undeveloped lines and models in the current coaching scheme, because as Boyd observed, to get unstuck “You gotta challenge all assumptions.”