Beware sports metaphors

Are you making one of these four common category errors?

May 24, 2024

Surprise! It’s still me, Tom Kerwin. It’s just my newsletter has a new name...

I’ve renamed it because I’m consolidating my work under the consultancy I run with my partner Corissa, called Trigger Strategy Group. (We also have a podcast and a YouTube channel if you're in the market for MOAR CONTENT.)

Today I want to talk about the fact that there’s lots of nonsense kicking around about leadership these days (and, well, always). Specifically I’m going to talk about one common category error I often see on the internets, and that’s lifting methods from elite sports coaching directly into corporate knowledge work.

Before I get into that, a little more housekeeping:

A few months back,
John Cutler
and I co-wrote a piece about how capable leaders navigate uncertainty and ambiguity, which then also became a podcast series for Trigger Strategy Group (here’s part 1). We want to turn those ideas into at least an ebook (if not more). The book will give you more examples and stories to illustrate each of the capabilities we talked about, plus workshops, exercises and flash cards that will help you and your team get better at leading in uncertainty and ambiguity.
If enough folks are interested, then we plan to write the book in stages. We’ll offer paid early access to those who want to be the first to get their hands on the material and give us feedback along the way.
Interested? Please let us know here: https://forms.gle/1d6chPNiF619UyYSA

OK back to applying elite sports coaching ideas to corporate teams. What’s useful about this common approach? Where does it fall down? Why is it so alluring?

Let’s start with what’s useful

The four category errors I’m going to get to later are the juicy part, but I wanted to start on a positive note. Bear with me …

Because first, there is clearly some good to using metaphors. In general, looking at one domain through the lens of another can help you see things from a new angle and give you insights. That’s the power of metaphor as a tool for abstraction.

Useful idea #1: let the score take care of itself

Elite sports coaches know that you don’t win by obsessively dreaming about the moment when you hang the medal around your neck. Wanting it is nowhere near enough. Instead, coaches direct effort into many tiny things you can work on every day that can each make that glorious future victory slightly more likely.

If you obsess over improving your performance in every moment, then when it comes to game day, the score will take care of itself.

If you obsess over the objective you’d like to have happen, then you can get trapped in the Just Try Harder fallacy. I love how Experimental History described this fallacy:

I played a lot of Call of Duty in high school, and I used to roll with a gang of bad boys who would battle other gangs online.
We weren’t very good. Whenever we lost the first round, which was almost always, we would regroup in the pregame lobby—basically the online locker room—and decide what we really need to do in the next round is “try harder.” As if the reason we had all just been shot in the head 25 times in a row was that we were not sufficiently dedicated to avoiding getting shot in the head. Armed with the most dimwit plan of all time, we would march into battle once more and lose just as badly. As our virtual corpses piled up, we’d yell at each other, “Guys, stop dying!”
This is the try harder fallacy. I behold my situation and conclude that, somehow, I will improve it in the future by just sort of wishing it to be different, and then I get indignant that nothing happens. Like, “Um, excuse me! I’ve been doing all of this very diligent desiring for things to be different, and yet they remain the same, could someone please look into this?”

In corporate settings, these ideas were echoed in the ideas of the legendary W Edwards Deming. He argued to eliminate slogans (e.g. “values”) and eliminate metrics-based targets for the workforce.

He knew that obsessing over the objective does little to help people achieve it. His take was that about 15% of anyone’s performance is down to the individual, while 85% is to do with the system they’re working within. So when you ask individual employees to try harder to hit objectives, you imply that they should be able to magically overcome the conditions in their environment. You effectively blame them for conditions that are largely beyond their control. “Guys, stop failing!”

Sadly, a lot of corporate strategy does seem to be branded PowerPoints full of lists of bullet points “desiring things to be different.”

(I’ve talked about similar themes in my article about objectives and the adjacent possible, part of my popular OKRs series.)

Like the elite sports coaches, Deming also recommends encouraging employees to worry less about distant targets and focus on improving the system today, in both big and tiny ways. In his world, objectives can be useful when held lightly and not made too specific, because they help you see which conditions you need to change.

When you have a reasonable idea of what you need to change about the system, focus there, and let the score (metric) take care of itself.

Useful idea #2: star players can hurt team performance

Author Adam Grant talks about how football player Cristiano Ronaldo seems to make teams worse. I don’t know much about sportsball but even I’ve heard of Ronaldo. He’s famously really good at making the ball go into the goal, which should mean any team he plays on will win more.

But apparently pointy-headed statisticians have run the numbers and found that every team Ronaldo joined since leaving Real Madrid has experienced a decline in performance. When they employed the superstar, they did worse.

One theory for why this happens is that Ronaldo is selfish. The way that he plays is not about supporting team-mates or making the whole team better. He plays for himself.

I know even less about basketball, but I have heard that a similar study of NBA teams showed that teams with more selfish players, including narcissists, fail to improve over the season.

A similar pattern can happen in companies. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of working with a rockstar employee who’s considered essential but is also a massive arsehole, then you know what I’m talking about. In reality, no amount of individual brilliance can make up for the depressing effect these people cause to team performance, morale, even literal health. So although getting rid of them can hurt in the short term, it’s always better in the long term.

By the way, linking back to useful idea #1, one surefire way to get employees in a corporation to selfishly play for themselves is to set individual performance targets. If you love irony, why not also put up colourful posters all around the office exhorting “we are team players!”.

Where does the elite sports metaphor fall down in business?

In general, everything is more context-specific than we tend to realise. It can be ineffective and even dangerous to lift ideas, structures or methods from one context and apply them blindly in another.

Category error #1: you’re comparing apples and anthills

Elite sportspeople are the top 0.1% of individuals in a single, specific discipline. They are 100% motivated.

People in corporate settings work alongside a much larger group of humans than any sports team could handle. Each individual tends to have a mixture of different levels of experience and capabilities across a diverse range of disciplines. I think we can confidently say that most employees are somewhat less than 100% motivated.

The degree of inconvenience and discomfort each is willing to tolerate is massively different, and that means you need very different methods.

Category error #2: clear vs murky objectives

Elite sportspeople are crystal clear about a single objective that never changes. They can “skate to where the puck is going to be”.

But a group of corporate knowledge workers will be somewhat murky about many competing objectives. Their objectives change frequently and unpredictably. There is no puck, and nobody’s wearing skates.

The way that each group must strategise and plan is very different.

Category error #3: incentives

With elite sportspeople, the best 3 in the world make astronomical amounts of money, while tens of thousands get next to nothing. To have a chance of winning, elite sportspeople have to be world-class exceptional in one discipline. They have to dedicate themselves completely to the sole pursuit of being the best, honing their minds and bodies to reach peak performance. They keep this up for a relatively short career – 2 or 3 decades at most.

With corporate knowledge workers, everyone gets paid a salary and the very best only make a little more. There’s no incentive to become world-class exceptional in one discipline. Dedicating yourself to being the best in a specialist discipline can be frustrating and even risky, as companies depend on doing loads of things adequately and very few things exceptionally. Employees mostly need to maintain good enough performance in a diverse and changing set of skills over a long career: 5 or 6 decades.

The incentives for each group push them towards very different approaches to praxis and careers.

Category error #4: legibility

Elite sportspeople can figure out most of what it will take to beat their competition. They can create a plan for training and a playbook for competition day. They know that the fundamental rules of the game aren’t likely to change – not without warning.

But companies are filled with contradictory and ever-changing narratives about what it will take to beat the competition, most of which are going to be wrong. Whenever companies create a plan, they usually have to change or abandon it, as market conditions — the rules of the “game” — change without warning all the time.

It’s needlessly risky to pretend that the “game” you’re playing is more legible and controllable than it really is.

But why are sportsball analogies so alluring?

In general, humans love metaphors, and especially love making connections between different things. This ability to use metaphor for abstraction and communication is a human superpower. Business settings are particularly rife with metaphors, perhaps because the workings of business tend to be invisible and confusing.

As mentioned above, most people in most companies are pretty damn confused about what it will take to win in a game that has ever-changing rules and objectives. Wouldn’t it be nice if it business could be more legible and fun like sports?

And on the surface, sports have so many similarities to business. After all, there are teams who work together, they compete against other teams for dominance, plus we use lots of mushy words like strategy, goals and game plans. Pay attention in your meetings today – how many sports metaphors crop up?

Or maybe it’s just that lots of people are pretty bored at work but love talking about sports? Team, the team, go team, GO SPORTS!

Copy to remix – not to ape

One big principle for leading in ambiguity and uncertainty: be sensitive to context. Although it’s tempting to follow the path that seems to be working for someone else, it mostly doesn’t work to wholesale copy from another context and apply it to yours. (I’m sure you can think of examples of this in the business world.)

But that doesn’t mean don’t copy anything. After all, everything is a remix. Everything around you, from businesses to products to all of life is made up of copies of copies of copies.

One trick is to use Snowmobiling (see card image from Innovation Tactics below):

Copy an idea, but decompose it into many elements, mutate those elements, and remix them with elements in your context. Many of the possible remixes you can make will be incoherent, but some will inspire novel ideas and practice for you to play with and refine.

Which brings us full circle. Back in our first section, about what’s useful in sports metaphors, notice how I decomposed the unhelpfully broad concept “sports” into smaller elements that sparked connections with other ideas to create fresh perspectives. I shared another example of how this works when I talked about how Sohla & Ham demonstrate innovation.

Now your turn – what other elements of sports trigger fresh ideas for you? Or can you think of any more heinous category errors?

Tom x

P.S. There’ll be more about sensing context and handling ambiguity in the book we mentioned in the intro. Here’s that link again, where you can tell us if you’d be interested in getting early access: https://forms.gle/1d6chPNiF619UyYSA

Thanks

Corissa Nunn

for help writing and editing this.