I’m drawn to comedians – for their perspective and their inclination to live on the boundary and poke questions at how the world around them is structured.
‘Private Investigations’ is a podcast from the Irish Comedian Tommy Tiernan, where he’s compiled his thoughts and ideas on various subjects. Tommy has been performing stand-up for nearly thirty years. More recently, he’s hosted ‘The Tommy Tiernan Show’, a prime-time chat show in Ireland, where the premise is that all the conversations are ‘in the moment’ and authentic. There’s no prepared questions and he doesn’t know who he’ll be interviewing as a guest, until they walk out on stage. In this, his philosophical perspective shines through, inspired by his belief in honest conversation and love of improvisation.
All comedy has a philosophy that underlies it, along with a point it’s trying to make, and it’s this in Tommy’s comedy that I was drawn to when first seeing his stand up. In his podcast, an episode called ‘The Horseshoe Gospel’ was a personal favourite of mine.
The Horseshoe Gospel discusses the value of ‘Horseshoe-Shaped’ ideas versus those that are complete, or absolute, like a circle. “When things are horseshoe shaped,” says Tommy, “they’re open to the transcendent. When things are fully closed in on themselves, they’re missing something…”
Sport is accelerating in its drive towards predicting outcomes. Performance teams want to be as certain about future results as possible. Naturally, this drive comes from financial pressures. As more money comes into sport, investors want to be confident they’ll get a return. And returns in sport, for the most part, are driven by success on the pitch. Within large sporting organisations, the pressure filters down to the staff at all levels, but especially the performance staff, who will (in many ways rightly so) be encouraged to come up with a reason as to why a particular plan is going to work long in advance of finding out whether it actually will.
When pressured to come up with such certainties, performance plans tend to bias towards what can be measured and communicated simply, sometimes failing to acknowledge many of the aspects of performance that can’t be counted and controlled.
But little of what really matters in performance can be measured. Plans are sometimes put in place for the sake of having a plan in place, not because the plan is useful or useable.
While working within the Premier League, I would sometimes stand watching the warm-up with one of the other staff members. We’d overseen everything the players had done that week; we knew how hard they’d worked in pitch sessions, what they had done in the gym, how recovered they reported to feel via daily questionnaires, how strong and powerful they were relative to previous weeks and who was carrying injury niggles. We knew what they’d been told in tactical meetings and how well coaches felt sessions had gone from a technical/tactical perspective. We understood what the general vibe of the team was and whether there was an air of confidence or concern… But, despite knowing all that, we laughed about how we had no idea what was about to happen in the coming game.
Now that’s partly to do with where the team was at, from a performance perspective, at the time. Competing mid-table – able to defeat some of the bigger teams on our day, but able to lose to some of the lower teams if we didn’t show up. It’s also a reflection on the Premier League and what makes it such a great competition to watch and be a part of. Anyone can beat anyone else, regardless of league position, if one team isn’t switched on. Although the higher performing teams are of course better at finding a way to win more often than not.
But this also reflects the unpredictability of performance in elite team sport. We’d always look for clues as to how we felt the team would perform, but anything we grasped onto would be disproven on another occasion. For example, there were times we felt we’d got the week’s preparation spot on and then the warm-up felt like it had great energy, the changing room before kick-off was buzzing and we were playing a team we knew we could beat… But then the whistle would go and the entire game would be a shambles – the team wouldn’t click and we’d struggle to get out of first gear. There were other times where every aspect of the preparation was the opposite of that: the energy was low, no one seemed to be switched on in the warm-up and we worried the team had maybe done more than we ideally would have liked them to within pitch sessions, in the week leading into the game… But then they’d win, and perform fantastically in the process! Of course, our perceptions may have been wrong and there may have been various aspects of preparation that we’d failed to consider. But despite both of us having worked in performance sport for a long time, we were still consistently amazed at how far off our predictions could sometimes be.
‘What It Takes to Win (WITTW)’ and similar models for deconstructing sport are popular in performance environments. In the UK this approach has been the bedrock of much success, in Olympic sport especially. While I agree wholeheartedly in our responsibilities as performance teams to be as clear as possible on the tactical, technical, physical, and psychological requirements to succeed in the sports we’re working with, I’m sceptical of how the What It Takes to Win style model is sometimes employed on a philosophical level. I’ve experienced this kind of thinking being taken too far and I feel when this happens, it strangles what performance really is – magic! Especially in the complex arenas of team sport. (It can be done well however: check out this great article from Dave Reddin on his work with England Football, for an example.)
The Horseshoe Gospel for me is a great reminder to leave room for the unknown in our performance programmes. Of course, we must work tirelessly in our preparation (that work ethic from both staff and players is the foundation of successful teams) and we should also plan extensively, making sure we have Plan Bs, Cs and Ds when necessary. But there’s a point where we then need to let go. We should be clear where in our programmes we’re leaving space for magic. Because whether we like it or not, this magic will show up, and does show up, time and time again. We’d do well to realise the best we can do is prepare the conditions to allow for magic to happen… It’s not something you can make happen. But it is something we can stifle. I’ve been part of programmes, in various sports, that have tried to control outcomes so much, there ends up being little space for ‘the transcendent’. While hyper-structured teams can perform very well, this approach can also strangle success. I don’t believe such programmes can lead to true mastery for the individuals or the collective organisation.
We’d do well to realise the best we can do is prepare the conditions to allow for magic to happen… It’s not something you can make happen. But it is something we can stifle. (Click Here to Tweet)
I’ll end with another story that has always reminded me of this principle, it’s from the philosopher and thinker, Alan Watts:
There once was a little girl, who wished and wished for a bunny rabbit. She asked her parents every day if they would take her to the pet shop to buy one. They’d walk past the shop sometimes, and she’d stare at the rabbit she wanted through the window – a pure white, fluffy, bouncy, bunny. Eventually, her parents conceded and took her to the pet shop to buy the rabbit she’d wanted for so long. She was so excited. They got to the shop and they handed her the rabbit that she’d looked at through the window for weeks. They even let her sit with her new bunny in the back seat of the car after they left the pet shop. She loved that rabbit so much. She hugged it and hugged it for the entire journey. So much in fact, that she’d squeezed it to death before they arrived home…
✌️Tom