I asked Jordi Fernández for an unpopular opinion about training. He replied with a personal goal: to reach a professional team and not coach “tactics” —as understood by the “monkeys”. This post comes from the discussions we have had with since that day.
However, some of the excerpts used in this post have been inspired by the book —or rather, work of art— Coaching Meditations by Andreu Enrich.
Leonardo Da Vinci proclaimed —and practiced by example— that artists should not paint objects and figures in their paintings using lines to define their contours.
Leonardo’s curiosity about the study of nature led him to discover that nothing in nature has precise visible lines, boundaries, or borders. Those who paint lines occupy space in the painting that these lines neither deserve nor have earned because, in reality, they have no physical presence —neither matter nor substance. We see them, but they do not exist materially.
The contour lines of bodies are an imaginary idea that emerges from the combination of lights and shadows. Therefore, Leonardo Da Vinci argued that the artist should represent the shape and volume of bodies or objects by relying on the latter. There is no physical boundary separating different shades, only a continuous gradation that is infinitely divisible. The contour lines in a painting emerge when the artist skillfully employs lights and shadows.
If you draw contour lines, you are falling into the trap of (mis)representing a reality that surpasses us because its complexity. They exist —like ideas or sensations— but not physically, only imaginatively. Just like Santa Claus, tactics, or technique. Contour lines are a consequence of the interaction between two colors that we see but do not occupy any space. Like the mixture of olive oil and water: we can observe how the oil stays on top and the water at the bottom. We perceive a separation between the two liquids —a straight separation that no one has placed there... but that emerges due to the difference in properties between the two liquids. There is a line that exists but has no physical presence, no matter, no substance.
The same happens with tactics and technique: we should not deny their existence. We must re-think their emergence. Just as Leonardo did with contour lines, we must understand how and when tactics and technique appear.
Tactics and technique are the contour lines for those of us who do not paint canvases but rather whiteboards imprinted with a sports field. They are things we see, but they do not work the way we think. To create a great painting, one should not draw contour lines by tracing them on paper. To achieve great “tactics”, one should not think that they need to draw arrows, instructions, mechanisms, or plays on the whiteboard.
The difficulty of finding a glimmer of light within the black box of causes and consequences works against us. It deceives us —making us believe we are smarter than we are— giving us correlations without ever providing us with a clue about the causalities of what goes in and comes out. It often makes us look at the finger when the wise man points at the sky. We focus on the superficial: we observe the contour lines, the passes we make in the game, and we train, by imitating repeatedly, to perfect them. But the cause that governs the complex network of passes —or any other skill— is not the memorization or imitation of patterns; it is not the act of tracing contour lines.
The collective movement that we observe and can describe from the sidelines is a consequence of many other things... rarely it is caused by the arrows drawed on the whiteboard. We have corrupted tactics so much that we believed it consisted of playing PlayStation with a joystick, and we dedicated ourselves to being drawers of lines, describers of movements after the fact, and determiners of a closed —and unrealistic— game model. But reality has no arrows, no contour lines.
Because tactics are not something one seeks, but rather what one finds: it is what emerges from the efficient co-adaptation of the team to the challenges that the game constantly presents. It is when the team is adapted to the game that the team’s behavior —the arrows on the whiteboard— emerges. If instead of taking the team as a reference, we focus on the player, we can talk about technique: the adaptation, from an individual or motor perspective, to the constant competitive challenges. The team does not lose, the player does not fail, because of their inability to follow the whiteboard or orders to a T. They lose because they cannot adapt successfully to the challenges of the match, of the opponent.
Every match that the team and its members navigate is an uncertain, unknown journey. It is not a disordered game that we must remedy by organizing it with our mechanisms made through video analysis. The innate uncertainty of each match is not disorder. It is an order that we do not understand. Another matter is that it may not have the organization that we —as people, probably Westerners in love with empty forms— would like.
In the streets of Vietnam, there is just as much order as on the Katy Freeway in Houston. The latter, in fact, with so many lanes and so much over-intervention from incompetents who could not find their own backside with both hands, became chaotic, disorganized, inefficient, dysfunctional. The only order or organization missing from Asian streets is the kind that we Westerners prefer.
This is a match: an order —easier or harder to understand— that those who have an aversion to uncertainty hate, but that must be navigated eficiently to win. The secret does not lie in looking at a GPS that has never experienced any perturbation. The gateway to success in the game is not opened by a whiteboard anchored in a past that does not match an unknown future. The match is governed by an indecipherable order that demands constant collective problem-solving. A team —players and coaches alike— must play, awake, attentive, until events reveal themselves. This is far more crucial than following the pattern drawn by those who belong to the tyranny of whiteboards and force you to follow.
“When many coaches say that the game has become disorganized, has broken, as if they cannot do anything anymore… that is the moment when most of the information flows.”
—Juan Manuel Lillo
The skill of adaptation —individual or collective— makes the behavior —of the team or the player— emerge… not the other way around. It’s not the drawing in the whiteboard that makes the behaviors emerge and prepares the team and each player to adapt to the competition. The drawing in the whiteboard is the result we can perceive of a team that interacts efficiently with its environment. It is the behavior that emerges from the interaction within teammates and opponents as the contourn lines “appear” when two colors interact.
Leonardo did not waste time painting the contour lines of the Mona Lisa. The most beautiful contour lines in history emerged —without the need to be individually traced— when the artist mastered the interaction of the lights and shadows in the painting.
There is a coach who understood it very well —and long time ago— that does not work on tactics by drawing arrows on the whiteboard and ordering specific behaviors, one by one, from the sideline. He intervenes in the purpose of the system, the team, of which he is a part. The purpose is the common, shared objective that emerges from the interaction of the system’s components. A purpose that will transform into intention: the goal-directed behavior of the team that emerges through interaction with each specific environment.
When the purpose is common, to overcome each challenge, the components of the team diversify according to what is most suitable based on their personal constraints. In challenging, disadvantageous, or unexpected situations that threaten the team’s purpose, players interact to find functional solutions —and if the environment is unfamiliar and requires it, innovative ones. Faced with high pressure or a team that has parked the bus in the penalty area, a team aligned with a purpose self-organizes and adapts to the situation to overcome it. The interactions between components —not just between players, but also with the coaching staff, substitutes…— are continuous, dynamic, and reciprocal in every competitive scenario. These interactions are governed, however, by the shared purpose, the goal that guides the team.
To paint a great canvas, the mediocre painter traces contour lines. Leonardo masters the lights and shadows. As coaches, if we want to stop being mediocre, should we then abandon the whiteboards and simply align the purpose? No. Well, yes and no. Having everyone row in the same direction, with each sailor clear on where we are going, is an important step. Imagine if each one put their efforts in a different direction... However, alignment does not guarantee success. Sharing a purpose does not imply that the response to each uncertain challenge of the journey will be functional.
Tactics are the fluid substrate resulting from the efficient co-adaptation of the team to the challenges constantly posed by the game. Once the team is guided by the light of the same lighthouse, the next step is to develop the skills to adapt efficiently to the different environments the uncertain journey will present. We must become a team efficient in solving problems, not in memorizing solutions. It is more important to adapt to what one encounters than to be obsessed with what one seeks. Do not obsess over the arrows on the whiteboard that —in many cases— do not account for what will actually happen on the field.
The best tactics in the world —just like the best painting— will not emerge from closed arrows drawn on the whiteboard. It is not created by looking at the map, predicting the peculiarities of the journey, memorizing them, and executing them as if assembling a car. “Here we will make a pass into space, here this, there that, and we will score a goal.” Nonsense. Fraud. The best tactics in the world will be witnessed in the mastery of shadow and light, of the team’s perception and action in fulfilling a purpose. When the crew adjusts the course towards the lighthouse they are heading to in the face of large waves that they encounter but had not predicted. When they overcome the storm that splintered and surprised them. When they efficiently fend off the various attacks —with different strategies— of the pirates who wanted to assault them and drive them away from their destination. When they adapt functionally during periods of fragility when a sailor is injured, needs rest, or leaves. Similarly, the best technique in the world does not develop thanks to suggestions from slow-motion biomechanical analysis —with more gadgets than common sense— that conclude the elbow should be positioned at 35º instead of 36º. The perfection of individual movement is witnessed when the crew member dexterously overcomes each challenge of the journey. When the player has explored a multitude of different landscapes that have given him adaptability to competitive uncertainty.
How, then, do we train the best tactics in the world? How do we develop the team’s ability to select the crucial information in environments we cannot foresee? How do we make the team capable of adapting to scenarios that cannot be deciphered in advance?
By making the preparation resemble the uncertain journey. Not the other way around: trying to make the journey resemble the certain preparation. Setting, as our goal, the efficient adaptability of the team —with a shared purpose— to the uncertain and constant challenges of the game. Leaving behind the certainty and comfort of the whiteboard and marker. As far as I know, there is no school that teaches how to predict the future. I am not sure it makes much sense to try to capture it on a whiteboard, then.
If preparation is based on memorizing and repeating solutions to certain problems, how will the team behave when the need is different? The best tactics in the world are worked on, forged, in challenging environments. Situations that present a challenge —known or unknown— to the team that must be solved. If the preparation only offers known challenges, the team will not adapt to unforeseen ones—those that have not been worked on— during the match. Well, if the team adapts, it will be in spite of the coach, not because of him.
The journey, the match, the competition, is uncertain. How do we prepare for the uncertainty of the game? By making the challenges in training uncertain. By offering environments that are as challenging as they are diverse and unknown. It is here that the team works on tactics: in the face of what it does not know will come, what it will encounter. The best tactics in the world will emerge when the team has the capacity to generate efficiency and functionality in response to the challenging competitive uncertainty. If the environments are neither challenging nor unknown, we are indirectly telling the team that there is no need for improvement. As new obstacles disappear, the exploration of efficient team solutions ceases. Improvement stops.
The process of meeting a challenge in the game involves coordinated, constant, and reciprocal work among components —players, coaches…— aimed at achieving a goal. The components act and evolve together as a single unit. This collective work among components —without a dictator— to fulfill the system’s purpose is called synergy. By presenting challenging and unknown environments, we foster the creation of new synergies. If a new synergy is advantageous, it stabilizes in the behavior of the system. The team only retains those that provide more efficiency than it already has available. Interactions are far more important than the precision and detail of arrows on a whiteboard. As Don Antonio de Villarroel Peláez said centuries ago: “The bonds that hold men together are much more important than the quality of their marksmanship.” Because the invisible, quality relationships among components are what drive tactical and technical emergence… not the other way around.
The more solutions the team has to fulfill its purpose, the better. The team will shift between synergies, stable solutions, depending on what each environment requires. The components, faced with each challenge, will self-organize in the most efficient way possible to overcome each competitive difficulty while satisfying their purpose. This is a bit like what György Sárosi did: the player of the Hungarian national team who was simultaneously named in Europe best defender by La Gazzetta dello Sport, best midfielder by Kicker, and best forward by L’Auto.
Because the team is not a machine that must be programmed from a whiteboard. It is a complex system with the capacity to adapt to life’s challenges —an ability that has been perfected over thousands of years. This is how the liquid consequence that many call “tactics” emerges, which they attempt to capture, often unsuccessfully. In this way, just as the contour lines appear, tactics emerge: like a beautiful reward that was not sought.
It is then, when you understand the process, that you can take a marker, walk up to the whiteboard —which I have cursed so much— and draw a play; that, in a certain situation, you can make a “technical” suggestion —like “place your leg this way”— to the player. When you understand what it can offer, what the potential is of what you draw or say.
The ink on the whiteboard is nothing more than a prayer of a fleeting, specific functionality in a limited game context. There is a solution that requires the alignment of the stars to succeed. And provoking this alignment is no easy task. The frequency of alignment is too low to depend solely on that moment.
It is at that instant when you understand that, of course, a coach can use the whiteboard! When we realize that it is not the governor of something as complex as the behavior of the system, the team, and all its components. When we see the ink we draw on it as a help, an empowering option —not a confining one— with a potential that must be utilized in situations —more or less frequent— that require it.
The most important thing is that you understand the process, not how you label it —“tactics”, “technique”, or “collective/individual adaptations”. That you pursue a team with purpose, intention, attuned to the relevant information in the competitive environment to guide its behavior. It is then that the efficient behaviors of each component emerge, which the “monkeys” like to think occur thanks to the arrows they previously drew on the whiteboard, believing themselves to be the great designers of the sports universe.
“Therefore, O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines.”
—Leonardo Da Vinci
Therefore, O coach, do not organize your tactics with arrows and orders. Do not think that technique is like a synchronized swimming routine.
Therefore, O coach, focus on the invisible magic that brings forth tactics and technique; do not obsess over imitating material observable consequences that results from the beautiful process of co-adaptation.
Martí Cañellas | Fosbury Flop
