Kayoko Takagi tells a story about a crab that threatened a persimmon tree in order to hasten its growth. The story isn’t real as the belief is: verbal intimidation of plants is a Japanese ritual that still persists during planting periods. Can you imagine attributing the growth of a flower to the yelling you’ve been giving it day after day?
This is what I encountered in my professional context: coaches who proudly proclaimed that their players improved thanks to the endless anatomical instructions they repeated daily; coordinators who assumed that the athlete’s development was due to polishing them piece by piece as if they were a car. I was surrounded by zoologists who didn’t understand how little we could learn about polar bears by studying one that has never lived in the Arctic but in the Mediterranean zoo of Barcelona; by animal tamers who believed they could prepare a newborn lion for life in the wild in a pit where the closest thing to the savannah was a concrete wall painted with tropical shapes by a maintenance worker during his internship.
This inconsistency between what players are —and what properties they have— and how they are treated by those who are —supposedly— meant to help them grow is what I addressed in the seminar Training Methodologies for Debate: A Complex Systems Approach, organized by Venezia FC and the research group Complex Systems in Sport.
If you feel like watching it, you can now access the conference I was fortunate enough to give in front of so many minds I admire. Don’t expect a politically correct talk… because you’ll only find sincere words about how to stop teaching birds how to fly, about how to ensure that the people we impact learn thanks to —not in spite of— us.
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