Tags: Simple Vs Complex; Heuristics; Possibilities and Potential; Knowledge; Flyover Vs Deepdive; Power of Questions; Cages and Walled Gardens; Normal Accident Theory; Affects Vs Effects; The well of knowledge; Performance Problem Classification
PhD solutions to primary school problems, simple solutions buried in complex systems and in asking great questions, opening doors to increased intelligence.
Practitioners, managing high injury burden, complex injury pathology, managing concurrent training loads or prescribing training through ‘tactical periodization’ the demands can be very challenging, fraught with assumptive reasoning, contextual nuances and individual beliefs.
The greater the complexity of a system, the harder it is to establish a solution. Through the lens of ‘second order effects’ the higher the frequency of interrelated mechanisms the harder it is to anticipate the effects of the effects. There is something compelling in both Occam’s Razor (all things considered, the simplest solution is probably the best) and in ‘first principle’ thinking (reduce the complexity by viewing the issue through hard facts/science). In doing so, performance support teams can develop a level of immunity and distance from the sporting context and reassert their role through one of human performance as it relates to the physical world in which we all live. In this approach, it may well be easier to establish performance problems and generate better solutions, it will certainly enable clear questions to emerge, through which, performance support teams can provide answers.
Normal Accident Theory (NAT) provides an interesting perspective on the inter relationship between interactive complexity and tight coupling between systems. Why do practitioners often create complex solutions, training strategies, testing protocols and rehabilitation processes? Through elaborate explanations and unchecked narratives, it could be quite easy for performance teams to lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish, falling victim to jargon filled meetings, questionable approaches and solutions to performance deficits that fail to address the deficit and alarmingly, never get unpicked because of the high levels of interactive complexity, tight coupling and performance team knowledge creep.
To generate a solution to a newly formed question requires practitioners and teams to achieve a new level of thinking. What do we do if the solution provided is in answer to the wrong question? How do we pressure test the performance problem against a more solid base rate? Perhaps, to do this well, the performance team should be interrogating ‘first principles’ – the laws that govern how humans interacts with terra firma and how physiology responds to homeostatic perturbations (stress). Distilling performance problems down to these ‘truths’ – back to first order questions will undoubtedly reduce the complexity because it divorces the human from the sport (rituals, beliefs, context) and binds it to something somewhat more empirical. If Performance Teams could strip down a sport and look under the bonnet of performance, they might find a series of questions that exist in kinetics, kinematics, kinesiology (biomechanics; newtonian physics; anatomy and physiology and bioenergetics) rather than tactical deployment or some ‘method’ of intervention.
Perhaps, establishing the base rates, operating through a ‘first principles’ approach, and in evolving our vocabulary and thinking as a team from this start point, we can create some immunity from the (sometimes) contextual, ritualistic and belief driven world of the sports we support, to something a little less fickle.