We Need to Fail More
The sports industry is afraid to fail. That's a major reason why it is falling behind other entertainment industries when it comes to innovation.
In the Sports Industry, we don’t fail enough.
Or when we do, we don’t learn quickly enough, we mostly assign blame, pivot, and somebody loses a job.
Prior to working in the sports industry, I worked as a creative—first in television and film, then in games. Even during my first academic foray, design principles, design strategies, approaches to creative collaboration were always connected to the research and teaching I was lucky to do on media.
This also means I still have friends and contacts in those creative industries, and I learn a lot from them. I was listening to my new favorite podcast—Eggplant - The Secret Lives of Games—which features game designers and developers talking about their craft, and in it, one of the hosts, Zach Gage, introduced me to the concept of an OODA Loop as a really important framework for innovation and decision-making processes.
Developed by retired Air Force General John Boyd, the OODA Loop is all about the role information has on decision-making. A guiding principle of the OODA Loop approach is that we are able to continuously perform better with more information, and that information comes from making a decision, taking action, and analyzing the results. OODA is an acronym for “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” and the looping nature of the process is critical. The decision and action feed the observation and orientation, and vice versa, and on and on. The key to a good OODA loop is speed. Spending too much time on any one step leaves you at a deficit of information, and it’s more valuable to continue the loop than to pause and deliberate. Think of it like time spent deciding is less valuable than the information gathered from a decision, even if it doesn’t immediately work out.
In creative industries, we often refer to this type of thinking as “iterative design.” This is also a guiding approach in software development.
I’ve wondered quite a bit about why in some industries, and not others, approaches to iterative design, and specifically the importance of failure in the shaping of processes are more accepted. One thing I’ve noticed about the sports industry is nobody is talking about failure in a positive light.
The gap may be cultural, as in sports culture versus science/art culture. In the sciences, failure is a fundamental part of the scientific process. Repeatability is a foundational principle of doing science, and in developing axioms and proof. In the arts, a critical part of the creative process is “messing around” or “experimentation” or “play” or “noodling.” Just watch "Get Back and check out The Beatles’ creative process, which seems to be basically “hang out in a sound stage, fuck around on instruments, drink tea and eat food, and see what develops.”
In sports, failure is an oppositional force, the thing we don’t seek but we try to avoid because at the heart of the endeavor is competition. Failure doesn’t help us win, and winning is the goal. There is retrospective analysis—film study, changing tactics—but we try to actively avoid failing in sport because of the consequence.
But sports business is not sports, it’s business about sport. We should not be applying conceptualizations from sports experience to our work in the sports industry. Too often, the metaphors of competition, teamwork, success, excellence, leadership that we derive from sport are applied to sports, and I believe that is a mistake because the processes and importantly the goals are not the same between business and sport. Business is and should be collaborative, not competitive. (And no, I don’t really want to engage in an argument with anyone about Free Market economies, because then this post will become way too long).
And yet, we hear it in our industry all the time, because so many of us come from sports directly. And we bring with us the fear of, the allergic reaction to failure.
So stop it. Set yourself to try and expect failure, and know that failing is valuable. Observe how things change when you shift a variable, orient yourself to that change, and then go decide and act and fail again. Rinse wash repeat.