Out of chaos, improvement

Six weeks ago the sports world was full of optimism. Major sports were in playoffs (MLB), in training (NBA, NHL), in early-season (Premier League, NFL) or in the case of USMNT, beginning a new World Cup cycle. Since that time, lots of teams have seen their master plans implode, their best players get hurt and their critical hires fail to thrive in all sorts of unanticipated ways. What had been orderly is now chaos but that’s how it goes; the path to improvement sometimes goes through chaos.

How do we know about the chaos? Sports journalism tells us so. The Denver Nuggets, the New York Jets, Liverpool Football Club, and now, the USMNT, have all underperformed, and it opens the door for writers to explain how and why those underperformances occurred. The descent into chaos has consistent themes: bad luck, injuries, coaches failing, players not trying. The real story is usually simpler. A team that planned to get better gets worse because the plan was too complex or had too many moving pieces or lacked a stable platform to build on, and ultimately that plan was neither realistic or sustainable. It is like trying to accelerate from 0 straight to 100 m.p.h. without making any kind of gradual progress.

The Sacramento Kings have done a nice job at getting good. The team has a relatively simple plan that relies heavily on a 3-player core–Darren Collison, DeMarcus Cousins and Rudy Gay. The approach contrast what the Nuggets have done, according to ESPN, trying to create an advantage in games with the fifth, sixth and seventh best players on the team.

Startup companies often rely on Lean Startup methodology to avoid the overplanning and to sustain continuous improvement. It is a practice that relies on prototyping to a minimum set of specifications (usually referred to as the “minimum viable product”) and iterating on the prototype in a way that allows the business plan to evolve as the employees and the prototypes improve.

Some things don’t ever get simple, and it looks like player development for U.S. Soccer fits that category. The game is complex and the US talent pool draws from a national population of 300 million. Plus, theĀ professional MLS teams and the USMNT have an operating plan in place where player development interests and incentives fail to align perfectly, like on the question of whether it’s better for talented young Americans to play in Europe or to stay in the U.S. The path to improvement through chaos seems inevitable in this case.

And in this case where simplification is not feasible, U.S. Soccer probably should embrace the chaos, look for lots of minimum viable products that target a range of pain points. The challenge is considerable but as long as the focus remains on improvement, for players and for processes, it should be possible to avoid the overplanning and ongoing failure that could make the chaos difficult to get past.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.