“Complex” isn’t the same thing as “complicated” – and the difference matters.
Q. What’s the difference between sending a rocket to the moon and the development of a young child?
A. Sending a rocket to the moon is a complicated task, while the development of a child is a complex one.
The differences?
A complicated problem or task has a recipe. The recipe (also known as ‘best practice’), ensures that success is repeatable time and time again. As long as the parts of the system are assembled together in the correct way, there is a high predictability of outcome.
A complex problem is difficult to characterise. Complex systems show emergent behaviour over time, their nonlinear nature means predictability is very difficult, relatively small changes can lead to massive shccsc and complex systems tend to self-organise, meaning there is no central point of control.
Football is a complex game, humans are complex, therefore talent development is complex!
To steal a quote from Mark Upton from My Fastest Mile:
“Turning our attention to sport and the environments being created, we are seeing this engineering approach permeating the “elite” world of adult high performance as well as (more worryingly) talent development, youth and child participation. Rather than the descriptors associated with the thoughts from John Kiely, (“safe to fail”, “mentoring”, “ownership”, “trust”, “exploration”, “solving problems”), it is becoming more common to observe environments and behaviour reflective of “measurement”, “control”, “fear”, “accountability”, “production lines”, “asset management”, “reporting”, and “benchmarking”. As a result, we believe the learning, growth and potential of people in sport is being stifled. Drawing from complexity principles, we believe individuals, teams, clubs and sporting organisations can take a different path and emerge far better for it.”
In future posts, I will discuss some possible implications for talent development and the need for coaches and development organisations to let go of our ‘illusion of control’ and ‘embrace the ambiguity.’
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