Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of ...

As the saying goes ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. But it truly is quite remarkable how readily we will override our capacity for critical thinking in the face of a story we want to hear. As we will see, if the message on offer appeals enough to a particular desire or bias, it appears we will happily overlook whatever shortcomings in methodology and inconvenient flaws in logic are apparent. In this way, we can be active participants in ‘group think’.

We might then question our roles in upholding the conventions that abound in performance sport. Upon closer inspection, there is rarely logic in convention. It is beguilingly easy to fall prey to participating in such group delusion. On some level, we could argue that we willingly enter into this to prop up a particular tenet of our belief system in relation to theory and practice.

Crimes Against Critical Thinking in the Face of a Good Story
Informed Coach, Informed Sport Parent, Informed Leader
Paul Gamble
Uniting Participation and Performance

There is a strange insistence that participation and performance are entirely distinct and never the twain shall meet. But is there really no common ground to be found here? I will argue that participation and performance are NOT in fact mutually exclusive - especially in the case of youth sport. There is in fact plenty of overlap. So why should we keep them apart? Is it possible that bringing participation and performance back under the same roof might provide benefits in both directions?

Uniting Participation and Performance
Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner, Informed Coach
Paul Gamble
The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport

A provocative title, so allow me to specify at the outset what exactly I am highlighting and the limits of the argument. Firstly and most importantly, let me make it clear that I am excluding from the discussion the necessary and vitally important domain of child-protection and the protection of vulnerable adults under law. What I am specifically referring to is the concept creep that has seen the safeguarding approach extended to sportsmen and women at senior level, who are otherwise (in the eyes of the law) deemed responsible adults capable of providing informed consent, making decisions and advocating on their own behalf. I am also excluding clear cases of misconduct that unamibiguously violate professional ethics and the boundaries of the athlete-coach relationship - for instance, sexually inappropriate behaviour or physical abuse. What I am also highlighting is the mission creep of those charged with investigating such claims and the present danger of over-reach. Why I feel these trends need to be challenged is that the safeguarding system if left unchecked threatens to penalise coaches simply for carrying out their proper duties.

The Tyranny of Safeguarding in Sport
Paul Gamble
Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme

EDITOR’S NOTE:

To celebrate the imminent release of the new title ‘Sports Parenting: Negotiating the Challenges of the Youth Sports Journey to Help Kids Thrive’ we are sharing this special post. The excerpt featured is from the chapter ‘Choosing the Right Programme’.

Environment is everything when it comes to developing talent. Parents are naturally highly motivated to find the programme that provides most optimal conditions to allow their child’s talents to flourish. Seeing past the sales pitch and making the right choice is however not a straightforward proposition. Being successful on this endeavour begins with understanding the key features that make for the most conducive setting to enable young performers to realise their athletic potential. In this chapter we aim to provide parents with some criteria to guide the search.

Special Post: Choosing the Right Programme
Informed Coach, Informed Leader, Informed Practitioner
Paul Gamble
Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

The inclination to question is not common - looking back, most of us would admit that we uncritically accepted what we were taught. There is a general assumption that authority figures know what they are doing, so it may not necessarily occur to us that the consensus view that is espoused might be flawed or even untrue. Yet it is always worth allowing for the possibility that the prevailing view may not necessarily have a sound basis or at least might be missing something important. It might serve us well to consciously foster in ourselves and others a readiness to challenge preconceived ideas and the received wisdom, simply in the interests of our own enlightenment. More broadly, it merits highlighting that willingness to question and to offer competing ideas are necessary ingredients for progress. Clearly this has some important implications for leaders and organisations, as well as for the professions and fields of study that we are part of.

Ingredients for Progress: Heretics and Dissent

Conformity

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Tackling Innovation in Elite Sport

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Tackling Innovation in Elite Sport

An outsider’s view of elite and professional sport tends to assume that these environment are constantly engaged in ‘pushing the envelope’ in the relentless pursuit of better. The situation in reality tends to be quite different. Conventions and the pressure to conform to what others are doing have a powerful pull. Paradoxically the resistance to exploration and barriers to innovation are often more pronounced the highest level. Especially within professional sport those involved are acutely aware that their position is highly prized and job security at a premium. These conditions are naturally not conducive to taking risks or moving beyond the tried and tested. All of this helps to explain the abundant examples demonstrating that opportunities remain to gain significant competitive advantages and even some easy wins

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Diversity and Inclusion in Elite Sport

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Diversity and Inclusion in Elite Sport

Elite sport is not immune to shifts in cultural norms and conventions in wider society. The number of diversity and inclusion roles have increased 60% in the UK over the past five years, and this has started to be mirrored in sporting organisations. The governance and national sport systems for Olympic sports are government funded, so it perhaps unsurprising that these organisations might be prompted to adopt policy that is becoming the norm in other sectors. That said, professional sports have also begun to follow this trend, notably in the US. In this post we consider what diversity and inclusion means in the context of sport at elite level.

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Triangulating a Position

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Triangulating a Position

As the value of cognitive diversity becomes more recognised, what is striking is how slow we have been to realise the need to revise our habitual ways of consuming information and interacting with those who hold contrary views. Whilst pioneers who think different are celebrated in modern western culture, in reality we are far less amenable to entertaining disagreement and diverging ideas. In the professional and academic realm we are quick to follow an authority and align with a school of thought. The hordes are likewise quick to leap into the breach to defend the doctrine against perceived challenge or dissenting views. If anything debates in all circles are increasingly polarised, as the assembled masses flock to either one side or the other. We might appreciate cognitive diversity on a conceptual level, but on a practical level we are clearly not there yet. So what steps can we take to enjoy the benefits of cognitive diversity and open our minds to the possibilities as we form our opinions?

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Special Post: 'The Illogic of Being Data Driven'

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Special Post: 'The Illogic of Being Data Driven'

In the digital era there is a great onus on being ‘data driven’ across all domains. The drive to be objective and to quantify input and output is eminently understandable. The well-worn phrase that gets thrown around is ‘how can you manage something if you don’t measure it?’. We do however need to be very careful about what metrics we use as a proxy for the thing we are attempting to evaluate. There is inevitably a separation between the measure we can objectively quantify and the complex entity that it represents. We need to be very confident about the specificity and sensitivity of the particular measure in relation to what we are seeking to evaluate, to avoid false positives (detecting something that isn’t there) and false negatives (failing to detect something that is there). On a more fundamental level, complex phenomena defy simple measurement.

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Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

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Tempering Athletes: Future Proofing Versus Acquired Fragility

Tempering is a process used to impart strength and toughness, and essentially serves to bring out the intrinsic properties of the material under stress. Athletes forged in the crucible of severely testing conditions may be similarly rendered highly resilient to future challenges and stressors. Those who successfully come through such trial by fire paradoxically often prove stronger from the experience. The notion that stressors can not only make systems more resilient, but in fact stronger and better as a consequence, speaks to the concept of antifragility, a phenomenon observed in nature and highlighted by Nassim Taleb who famously coined the term. In this post, we will bring this antifragility lens, and a general reticence to accept that sports injuries ‘just happen’, to reframe how we think about preparing athletes to ‘future proof’ them to risks and scenarios that we cannot fully anticipate. In place of safeguarding measures and interventions that seek to protect, we will make the argument for tempering athletes to harness and develop their intrinsic reserves and coping abilities. Adopting this perspective and general strategy for managing injury risk, we will outline some tactics to help guide practitioners in their approach.

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Fostering Diversity of Thinking

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Fostering Diversity of Thinking

Divergence of opinion has traditionally been viewed in less than positive terms: when x and y don’t see eye to eye on a particular subject, this is generally seen as problematic. By extension, we hear of the virtues of assembling a group of ‘like-minded’ individuals. Organisations typically promote compromise and conformity as virtues to foster harmony and unity within the group. Contrary to this, the wisdom of crowds illustrates the benefits of aggregating judgements from a broad and disparate group of individuals. To further strengthen the case for diversity of thought and experience, ‘cognitive diversity’ is in fact found to be the major factor that differentiates successful teams and organisations. In this Informed Blog, we explore the paradoxical ways diversity and divergence are conceptualised, and see what lessons we can take on a group and an individual level in the context of sport.