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Moving Forward

December 28, 2012

Coaches will often convey to their teams a variation of this theme:  “If we’re not moving forward, we’re falling behind.”  And with such immediate feedback – the next contest – coaches can measure their team’s progress quite easily. Progress is harder to measure for the organizations that serve and support coaches and athletes.

If we are doing our jobs well, we will have both an “inside game” and an “outside game.”  We will create our own opportunities to improve our services and we will be alert to opportunities to improve ourselves when they are handed to us or forced upon us from outside sources.  Both types of change can be positive.

  • Change from inside has the benefit of institutional knowledge.  This change can be informed, measured and careful to avoid unintended consequences that hurt more than help customers.
  • Change from outside can be less rational but also less restrained by history and culture.  It can be more disruptive in a positive sense, perhaps more innovative in origin and more expansive in impact.

It’s my sense that, as the calendar turns from 2012 to 2013, the MHSAA is at the merging of two lanes of traffic – an inside lane of change combining with an outside lane change – which will modify some services and move them forward at unprecedented speeds during the new year and the next.

  • This has been obvious as we have partnered with ArbiterSports to prepare the ArbiterGame scheduling software for our member schools.  Hard work internally that’s about to show results to schools and their publics.
  • This may become obvious as we expand our schedule of inexpensive camps for inexperienced officials.  This could be an antecedent to additional training requirements for MHSAA tournament officials.  The public expects better, and we can do better.
  • This may also become obvious as we expand offerings and then add requirements for coaching education focused on maximizing good health and minimizing risk.  There is a gathering parade of experts and evidence advocating for much more training for many more coaches; and we must find our way to the head of that column.

Panama Points

January 25, 2012

Author David Kord Murray opines in Borrowing Brilliance that almost all good ideas are borrowed, and the farther afield one roams from the topic at hand the more useful the idea may be (and the more brilliant it may appear to be).

So it didn’t surprise me to discover useful ideas for modern day leadership and management in a book written in the 1970s about a period many years before that – David McCullough’s history of the building of the Panama Canal titled The Path Between the Seas.

I learned first that the primary task of this huge project was not what it appears to be. It was not primarily an engineering feat, but medical. Not removing dirt, but disease. Not conquering the largest obstacles, but the smallest insects. It was only after the diseases were understood and controlled that the construction could advance and the project could be completed.

Second, I learned that once the construction was begun, there was a bigger challenge than digging the pathway clear. It was removing the unwanted dirt and debris to other places. It wasn’t the front end of the project alone that mattered, but the back end as well: where to put the hundreds of millions of tons of rock and dirt on or around this narrow isthmus of land.

For every project there is need to assess what the underlying issues are that might get in the way of accomplishing the more apparent tasks before us.

And for every project there is need to fully assess consequences. We don’t want merely to move the dirt around, creating new problems as we do so.

I will be considering these thoughts as I soon see with my own eyes the Panama Canal, constructed over four decades and completed almost 100 years ago. And gratefully, I will be fully immunized for diseases largely conquered during the completion of this engineering marvel.