Folks,

This weekend has been a little bit dull. I can’t lie. I found myself reading reports on projects, initiatives, and task forces in the sports and coaching landscape in Wales, and all of them had one thing in common: none of them worked that well.

It got me thinking: When we are not sure what we are going to get, the temptation is to design for logic and reason when we could be designing for reality.

Of course, few of us want to look silly in the boardroom. A mind-to-world directional fit might sound sensible and appealing – and that’s its problem right there.

What if we leveraged things we know to be true, not the things we wish were true? For example, if we leveraged the fact that telling someone else what to do is far easier than doing it yourself, what could we design? You can read my thoughts on how we approach coaching in clubs, schools, and the Welsh Bacc if we did just that. 

How to make decisions under uncertainty: Go from reality to models, not models to reality. 

I’m going to leave you with this piece of counterintuitive genius from Rory Sutherland.

Here’s to a great week. 

Simon

P.S. If you are a coach and you find yourself searching for drills on social media, this post might save you some time, panic scrolling each time you go to plan a session.