Every now and then a new concept spreads like wildfire and is soon adopted at scale by organisations and professionals within a given domain. This is a scenario that seems to be especially prevalent within professional sport and the performance sciences in general. Initially early adopters are drawn in by an appealing message and a story that they find compelling. As the idea gathers steam, the growing uptake seems as much motivated by anxiety and the sense that ‘everybody else seems to be into this, so perhaps I should be too’. In due course the concept becomes firmly established and its legitimacy is widely accepted. For those caught up by this wave (or mown down by it) this all seems to occur with dizzying speed. All of this speaks to the captivating effects of ideas and the power of narratives. It also begs the question how might we avoid being taken captive and resist being swept up by the tide. Even once the wave has subsided, these events leave in their wake a detritus of zombie ideas that we as leaders, coaches and practitioners must navigate thereafter.
From this familiar story there are a few different threads that are worth exploring. Firstly, we have the incentives that prompt both rogue individuals and those within institutions to spawn and propagate ideas that are flawed or even entirely bogus. Next we have the cognitive biases that motivate the behaviour of early adopters - namely speaking to a pre-existing bias or appealing to something they desire to be true. Finally, we have the group psychology behind the herd mentality that drives mass uptake once the idea has reached a critical level of momentum.
Whilst each of these aspects are interesting, it is perhaps more useful on an individual level to shed some light and gain a level of insight that will enable us to spot trends at an early stage. In addition to developing an early warning system it will also serve us well to cultivate our intuition so that we are able to call bullsh!t.
DEFERRING TO THE AUTHORITIES…
Whilst this is not something that we give too much thought to, there are some common assumptions on the nature and distribution of knowledge. Representatives of prominent institutions and seats of higher learning have traditionally been considered to be the authorities in various fields. More recently thought leadership has become a little more distributed. Within our professional realm we have a tendency to put prominent figures on a pedestal and ascribe a great deal of importance in what they have to say. In the present moment we also need to consider the hordes of virtual experts roaming social media vying for authority status in the field.
In any case, there is an expectation that we should defer to the authorities. It might be argued that we could spare ourselves a lot of time and cognitive load by letting those who purportedly know better do the thinking for us. Such a mindset would prompt us to take ideas and concepts at face value when they come from somebody who has been conferred ‘expert’ or ‘thought-leader’ status. Whilst it might be expedient, this does however place us at considerable risk of being misled and misdirected.
“There is no monopoly on common sense”
An inconvenient truth is that any closer scrutiny of the track record of noted experts and esteemed institutions soon reveals that they are as prone to error as any of us. Sadly the burden of proof is often lower for established voices and their status somewhat insulates them from critiques, with the result that ideas proposed by these sources tend to get more traction regardless of their merits.
In such favourable conditions, ideas from high status sources are accordingly able to win widespread favour without being exposed to a great deal of scrutiny. Residing in a position of authority also enables these individuals to hold onto a wrong position for longer. One thing that can be said about authorities is that they are more adept at dismissing and discrediting conflicting evidence with rationalisations of a higher level of sophistication.
Those declared to be an authority may also not trouble themselves unduly with empirical evidence. The central tenet of empiricism is that ideas are tested against what we observe in reality. The separation between academia and the applied world sadly tends to confer protection from exposure to reality, such that the fitness of the idea (in evolutionary terms) is not rigorously tested. Prominent figures in the virtual world are likewise rarely pressed to provide the proof that what they claim actually replicates under real world conditions.
This is all compounded when models or theories are presented in such a way that makes them difficult (or even impossible) to falsify. If the idea is sufficiently vague that it fails to make a specific prediction that can be tested empirically then it will endure indefinitely. This spawns a zombie idea that cannot be killed by conventional scientific method. When we reach the stage that a concept starts to appear in lectures and is reproduced in textbooks (or coaching manuals) it is effectively all over. False facts effectively become canonised as accepted wisdom and attain the status of scientific truth (despite this being a contradiction in terms).
GAMING THE SYSTEM…
Given the incentives, it is somewhat natural that individuals and institutions leverage this privileged status and use their influence to propagate ideas that reinforce their status or otherwise serve their own agenda. Sometimes this is done unwittingly but there are certainly cases where it is done with a level of premeditation. If we can become familiar with certain tells, it is possible that we might equip ourselves with an ability to spot such instances in real time and avoid being taken in.
“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow to define or destroy you”
For those who seek to carve out a niche or otherwise introduce a particular concept that serves to advance an agenda, it all begins with inception. To create a hook, it is crucial to craft a compelling story. A veneer of plausibility is also necessary. So we begin with a reasonable assertion that accords with experience or speaks to a preconception that is shared by many. After enticing the audience to take the first step out onto the ledge, a story can be spun that sets out from this shared area of agreement and ends up in a place that is far less supported.
As well as a compelling story, you also need a good delivery mechanism. It pays to come up with a catchy name that has an allusion to scienciness - perhaps misappropriating a term or abstract concept from another field (like dynamical systems theory). On that note, conjuring up some mystique is useful to draw people in and this also helps with misdirection - in other words, it sounds impressive to the audience even though they are not entirely clear on what it is (‘hip lock’, for instance). Finally, it should be declared as ‘truth’. After all, if you want to attract followers the idea must be presented with complete conviction.
It is often only the few who pause to scrutinise the claims and interrogate the reasoning behind them. Typically the idea has gained sufficient momentum and a garnered big enough following by this stage that those who raise troubling questions are either ignored or dismissed as heretics. At this point, there are few good options. The most straightforward response for the naysayer who has no wish to join the cult is to quietly get on with their work, ignoring the collective mania and delusion that is gripping their peers. However, in exceptional cases an individual will dig their heels in, activate their inner honey badger and begin the long and arduous task of publicly exposing the illogic behind what has been presented.
BRANDOLINI’S LAW…
“The amount of energy to refute bullsh!t is an order of magnitude larger than (it takes) to produce it”
Alberto Brandolini is credited with pointing out the asymmetry in the time and effort required to discredit bad ideas compared to the work it took to create and propagate them in the first instance. The authors of the book Calling Bullsh!t further observed that not only do garbage ideas take far less energy and intelligence to produce than to dismantle, nonsense also seemingly spreads more readily than sense.
Those rare and heroic figures who take it upon themselves to invest the time and effort to debunk flawed but popularised ideas thus face a herculean task. It also takes a great deal of tenacity to see this largely thankless task through to completion.
Worse still, an ugly fact of life is that by the time the underpinning rationale has been publicly discredited and the idea itself thoroughly debunked, these ideas are often so firmly entrenched into practice that the inconvenient truth is largely ignored and many simply choose to proceed as they have been.
NEGOTIATING THE HYPE AND DODGING ZOMBIES…
Given the preponderance of bad and even discredited ideas that remain in circulation it is clearly unsafe to assume we can simply take what we are told at face value. We should also be reticent to place too much faith in a particular authority, regardless of their status or platform. Irrespective of how accepted an idea might be or how respected the source, we should nevertheless see for ourselves.
In reality, for the most part what we are dealing with is not pure bullsh!t. In many ways this would make our task more straightforward. Rather there is typically a kernel of truth mixed in with the manure. Sadly this means we need to get our hands dirty to extract what is useful and then discard the rest.
An excess of credulity is clearly a problem (and one that is common in the field), but we also need to avoid viewing everything and everybody with excessive suspicion. Clearly we will miss a lot of valid information if we are too quick to dismiss or disregard new ideas. We need to entertain the idea in the first instance if we are to extract any value. Equally there is some due diligence required to avoid being misdirected.
“Even doubt requires knowledge”
When we are presented with an idea we should take the time to interrogate the logic and reasoning behind it. The deeper our knowledge and understanding, the better able we are to apply our critical thinking faculties. In general, we should temper our confidence in any concept that we are not capable of deriving from first principles.
Without the depth of knowledge that would lend the necessary confidence it would appear safest to resist the pressure to be an early adopter. More generally, the fact that our competitors or peers might have adopted a new way of doing things is not in itself a reason to do the same. In either case, rather than accepting the claims being made, we should do some in-house verification to test the idea against what we observe empirically and establish its real-world efficacy for ourselves.
The courage to be pioneering and a willingness to try things of course remains important for those who seek to evolve their practice and gain competitive advantage. But when we encounter a new method that seems intriguing we should nevertheless take the time to explore it thoroughly before adopting anything new and untested into our practice. Practically this means playing with any new toy or novel method in a controlled setting (generally using ourselves as the guinea pig) before unleashing it on an unsuspecting performer when it matters.
Cover photo credit: Photo by Nathan Wright on Unsplash
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