500 Words a Week - Better practice, not best practice

The wonderful thing about S&C is that we are constantly striving for best practice. The risk of this is that once we believe we have found it and declare our work best practice, it becomes frozen and stagnate. We preach about its virtues but rarely take the time to challenge our work and see where the vices lie. Best practice implies that we have reached an endpoint, we get wrapped up in the mind-set of “it’s the best, so no need for it to get better”.

Adam Grant discusses that what gets in the way of exploring better practices is when a performance culture only holds people accountable for outcomes and results.

“Exclusively praising and rewarding results is dangerous because it breeds overconfidence in poor strategies, incentivizing people to keep doing things the way they’ve always done them. It isn’t until a high-stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to re-examine their practices” - Adam Grant.

This reminds me of a concept James Smith talks about in his book Governing Dynamics of Coaching: is our athlete succeeding because of us/ our practice or are they succeeding in spite of us. This is a concept I believe every S&C coach should be conscious of, especially when working with high level athletes who probably would reach where they are or where they are going without our input.

Grant recommends to still look at the decision outcome, but also evaluate the decision process to lead to better practice. Was the decision process shallow with little thought put in or deep and evaluated thoroughly?

Taken from “Think Again” by Adam Grant

We must understand that the only time we truly fail in making decisions is when we have a negative outcome combined with a shallow decision process, when we don’t put much thought into what we do. Even if the outcome is negative, but our decision process was deep and well thought out, you can consider this a step forward to better practice as we can learn from the negative outcome. We must equally be aware of when our outcome was positive but our thought process was a shallow one, as a certain amount of luck could have been present in leading to the positive outcome. Again, repeating above, thinking about did our athlete succeed because of or in spite of our intervention.

While I state that we should be conscious of the “because of/ in spite of” concept, thinking about it too much can lead to us doubting our usefulness. One way I like to combat against this is through continuously monitoring our athlete’s physical performance abilities through embedded testing. As the saying goes “if you’re not assessing, you’re guessing”. If we are tracking important variables weekly such as certain speed and jump metrics, and see an upward trend combined with a deep decision process about what we are doing with our athletes, I believe that we can lean to the side of our athlete getting better “because of”.

I would highly recommend Adam Grant’s book “Think Again”, from which many of the above concepts were taken.