Andy Longley Part 2

Coach Profile

Andy is a team performance expert with a background in psychology & applied neuroscience, who will over the coming months share insights ground the art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching. Each article will share a little of the latest applied neuroscience plus give simple tips on how to practically bring it to life in your own coaching.

Hi again team. In my last article we looked at role modelling and how to use this idea to help nurture the behaviours and culture you desire. Today we’re going to look at another part of the coachup model of high-performance teams and coaches, which you can see below.

Together let’s explore the experimentation and how this is truly at the heart of high-performance. Imagine you’re the defending champions and you know that in order to retain your title you need to stay ahead of the chasing pack. Alternatively, you didn’t win the championship, and you know that you need to be better, do things differently and evolve in order to challenge for the title this time. We’ll all be able to relate to these situations and the secret to both is experimentation. If we are not experimenting, we’re not evolving, period.

Our brains primarily only learn from two things, feedback and failure. The feedback can be self-provided feedback and doesn’t always have to come from another person, but the science is clear. If we want to evolve, get better, change and learn, we must fail. This is why experimentation is an essential condition of a high-performing team. A couple of quotes from some half-decent athletes showcase this condition perfectly:

“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life… that’s why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan

“Don’t be afraid of failure. This is the way to succeed.”
– LeBron James

So now that we’ve established the importance of experimenting to stimulate learning via failure, let’s explore what a culture of experimentation would look and feel like. Dealing with failure constructively is a key to your team’s success. A culture of experimenting means that failure is not desired, but it is expected, and the value of experimentation and learning is understood by your athletes and co-coaches. This means your team culture needs to allow for errors. If your team culture doesn’t allow for error, or in fact actively punishes error, the team will not learn from them. Stress will then be increased, and stress in turn reduces our learning. If, however, you nurture a team culture where experimentation, innovation, failure, adaption is celebrated, we create the conditions where learning is optimal and where learning is fast. These conditions will not only enable your team to evolve how they play the sport, but it will also incentivize them to get better as quickly as possible. This is how you stay ahead of the chasing pack or catch the champions!

There are also other benefits to your own and your team’s resilience and wellbeing from experimenting. This quote from the GOAT illustrates this for us:

“I really think a champion is not defined by their wins, but by how they can recover when they fail.”

– Serena Williams

Serena’s insights tell us that when we have a team culture where pushing the limits via experimentation is expected, not only will we evolve our game and capabilities, but we’ll also be exposed to adversity and to learning how to cope with failure and setbacks. This increase to our resilience and coping ability has proven benefits for our wellbeing and mental health.

What’s the science underpinning experimentation?

It all comes down to prediction errors (which I spoke about in Article 10 of this series). In brain terms, learning requires new memories, and there is no memory adaption without prediction error or failure with reflection. When we experience an outcome which we didn’t foresee (a prediction error) our brain’s attention is drawn to it so that we can understand what happened, it then activates our prefrontal cortex (the executive thinking part of our brain responsible for problem solving, creativity and decision making among other roles) and our brain recalibrates itself based on this learning experience. This shows us that experimentation and learning are your main routes to improved performance.

Sports are all too often obsessed with results and retains this short-term focus, often to the detriment of growth and learning. The high-performance cultures and teams who sustain and endure are those which understand that the path to success is focused on growth. That this is the key building block for high-performance and the positive results will be a likely outcome of this growth. Let’s cement this understand by taking some inspiration from the business world where innovation and learning are the main currency of business success. A great example of creating a learning culture through encouraging experimentation from the business world is Google. Google deliberately decided to create a learning culture and ‘incentivize and reward failure’. In his book titled ‘Work Rules!’, Google’s former Head of People Operations Laszlo Bock states “it’s also important to reward failure” to encourage risk-taking. Bock gives the example of Google Wave, an online platform launched in 2010 and closed a year later. “The people took a massive, calculated risk. And failed. So, we rewarded them.” Another example is software giant Intuit. They give a special award for the Best Failure Resulting in Learning and hold “failure and learning parties”. “At Intuit we celebrate failure”, explains co-founder Scott Cook, “because every failure teaches something important that can be the seed for the next great idea.”

Now that we understand the importance of creating a culture of experimentation to achieve high-performance and sustained success, let’s look at some practical steps you can take to create your own high-performance culture.

As a coach:

Think about the behaviours you are demonstrating at all times as the key role model in the team (remembering article 11). Are you role modelling trying new things and pushing the limits where appropriate yourself? Or are you sticking to what’s known and safe? E.g. You tried a new formation in the last match so that you could add another weapon to your performance arsenal. Even if this wasn’t successful, what can you learn from it about what to do next time you try the formation, or at least learn about your current performance limitations?
Deeply reflect on where blame exists in your team environment. Do you and the team allocate blame if something happens to go wrong? As children we are often taught to attribute blame when something goes wrong (normally we blame our siblings if the ball smashes a window) so we can have a deep seated habit of blaming. However, in any team environment if we automatically look for who’s to blame when something goes wrong, this will be a clear signal to everyone to avoid experimenting due to the risk of being publicly or privately blamed. Blame kills evolution.
Review failure through the lens of learning. If something doesn’t go according to plan, or someone tries something and it doesn’t work out, openly debrief this experiment by asking ‘what did/can we learn from this’? If we can create a new habit around doing this, then not only will we encourage experimentation, but we’ll also ensure we extract powerful lessons from it and raise our performance bar as a result.
Call out positive team behaviours when someone fails and learns. When we publicly recognize the desired team behaviours, this increased their likelihood of broader adoption. E.g. Recognising an athlete who tried something brave, and if it wasn’t successful they learned from it and adapted their next performance as a result.

So, there we have a little of the applied neuroscience behind experimentation and high-performance. As a coach, if you want your team to grow, evolve and learn, then creating a team environment where experimentation is not only accepted, but encouraged is a powerful route to choose.

This was the twelfth and final article in this series on the art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching. I hope you gained some impactful insights, challenged your own thinking, and adopted some new habits to take your own coaching to the next level.

If you’d like to have a conversation around the best ways to enhance your own high-performance coaching or team culture, get in touch with Andy via [email protected] coachup offer both confidential One-2-One performance coaching and team coaching services to high-performance coaches and teams.

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