There is a great book called Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke. Now you are probably wondering who is Annie Duke? Well, she is a world class poker player who made 4 million dollars in her Poker career before she retired in 2012. She was on her way to a graduate degree in Psychology when she discovered she was better at poker.
The game of Texas Hold Em poker, many decisions get made in a very short time and not all the information is available to you. There is an imperfect relationship between the results and the decision quality. You can make what you think is a good decision and lose the hand but it is what comes after that has the greatest impact. It is how we handle it knowing full well we made a good decision and lost.
According to Duke in a hand of poker double digit decisions are made depending on where you sit at the table. A hand of poker can take up to three to five minutes with 6-8 people around the table. It got me to thinking about other sports like hockey or golf. During a single shift of 40 seconds a player can be making in excess of 15 decisions depending on the score, where the play is occurring, is it a special teams situation, or the style of the team you are playing . If an NHL player gets 24 shifts in a game at 15 decisions per shift, that is 360 decisions during the course of a game.
When it comes to Coaching shouldn’t players be taught how to make decisions? In hockey they call it read and react. Read what? React how? Players who have a good hockey IQ are good decision makers, but how do they become good decision makers? I have been very fortunate to work for some very good Coaches and some were very good players. I recall one incident from 30 years ago where an Assistant Coach kept asking myself and the Head Coach why a player continued to play the way he did. Thirty years ago I did not know. My best guess at that time would be that the player had a low hockey IQ or his skill level did not match his own expectation level. We tried to work with player, but to know avail. He just felt that he was doing the right thing and his line mates were not good enough for him and our Coaching was bad. Fast forward 30 years if that same situation arose and knowledge that Coaches have today the first question we would have asked ourselves is what do we not know about this player ? We know that an athlete can execute certain elements of a tactic but what we do not know is the why? Perhaps somewhere is a players past he was afraid to say ” I do not know” or ” I am not sure”. By doing so he would have been viewed as a failure by his Coach and have his ass stapled to the bench. Good Coaches, and I mean really good Coaches view that statement not as failure, but as the first step in teaching. As the great Coach Bob Johnson said” a Coach is just a teacher with a whistle”.
What makes a decision great is not the outcome, many people will get tied to that. Great decisions are the result of good process and the process must represent the state of knowledge the individual or the athlete has. It is the role of the Coach to deliver that knowledge. The evolving state of knowledge in the process is a variation of ” I don’t know”. Every time a Coach works with an athlete the Coach is lessening the gap between the “I don’t know or I am not sure”.
Until next time.
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Between The Ears 