Part of Gareth Southgate’s success might be his willingness to show to football outsiders to assist prepare his England team. one among these advisers, former Olympian Matthew Syed, argues there is a lot the remainder of the planet can study this approach.
If there’s one universal truth about human psychology, it’s that we love being surrounded by people that think a bit like us. the traditional Greeks called it “homophily” which suggests “love of the same”. it had been Plato who warned “birds of a feather flock together”.
In some ways, this is often the story of the britain football set-up for the last three decades, the squad travel by a real “footballing man” advised by other “footballing men”. the thought is that if you get knowledgeable football chaps during a room, you’ll maximise the quantity of data – and thereby find how to win matches.
This is why when Sir Clive Woodward – a world-class rugby coach – was appointed as an assistant coach at Southampton FC a couple of years’ ago, there was uproar. “But he’s a rugby person”, football insiders said in horror.
“If Harry Redknapp – the coach of Southampton at the time – needs advice, what’s wrong with, say, Tony Pulis or David Pleat (both English based football coaches)? they’re experts on football!”
The curious thing about these arguments is that they’re , on the surface, persuasive. it’s true that Pulis knows more about football than Woodward. But does one see the problem? Redknapp already knows what Pulis knows. They were each socialised into the assumptions of English football: how of fixing tactically, diet, recovery, you name it. They are, if you wish , intellectual “clones”.
The real Gareth Southgate, by people who know him best
If you set Redknapp, Pulis and Pleat during a room – all good footballing men – you’d have high individual knowledge, but you’d even have collective uniformity. you’d have an echo chamber. they might reflect each other’s assumptions back to every other. it might be comfortable, chummy and consensual. it might even be monolithic and non-creative.
This tendency may be a problem that extends beyond English football. When the CIA was founded in 1947, it hired brilliant analysts, but they also happened to seem similar – white, middle-class, Anglo Saxon, Protestant males.
The recruiters, doubtless subconsciously, were influenced by homophily. because the academics Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn put it: “The first consistent attribute of the CIA’s identity from 1947 to 2001 is homogeneity in terms of race, sex, ethnicity and sophistication background.”
Crowd of businessmen
image captionRecruiting people that think an equivalent way inhibits creativity
The same is true of the many of the large tech firms like Google which, a decade approximately ago, wondered why innovation had dried up, despite hiring numerous brilliant software engineers.
They then realised that they were hiring people from similar universities who had learned under similar professors and had absorbed an identical range of concepts, heuristics and models. They were “clones” of every other. only they started looking beyond their usual horizons, reaching bent different universities and social networks, did things change.
Gareth Southgate, the britain head coach, has followed a special approach, opening himself up to new ideas from the outset.
One source of those ideas is that the FA Technical planning board , an eclectic group that has been advising on performance in regular meetings since 2016.
Southgate’s 25-year go after redemption
Members (all unpaid volunteers) include Sir Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach, Colonel Lucy Giles, commander of the Sandhurst academy , the Olympic rower Kath Grainger, Manoj Badale, a tech entrepreneur, the rugby coach Stuart Lancaster and David Sheepshanks, mastermind behind the St George’s Park national football centre.
At first, football insiders were horrified by this group, with negative articles appearing within the British press. We aren’t “footballing men”. But this is often why the group is capable of offering fresh insights on preparation, diet, data, mental fortitude and more. this is often sometimes called “divergent” thinking to contrast it with the “convergence” of echo chambers.
“I like taking note of people that know things that i do not ,” Southgate told me. “That’s how you learn.”
Lucy Giles
image captionColonel Lucy Giles is among those giving Southgate performance advice
Southgate has also assembled a various group of coaches in Graeme Jones, Chris Powell and Martyn Margetson – individuals who have deep but very different experiences of the sport . And, even as importantly, he’s keen to concentrate to them: the instant England score, the celebration is curtailed in order that Southgate can gain the input of Steve Holland, his assistant.
These diverse coaches aren’t rebels within the sense of seeking to disrupt the team. Rather, they’re rebels within the sense of injecting fresh thinking which helps everyone perform better.
The tragedy is that folks in echo chambers often don’t even realise they’re trapped. this is often some extent made by the novelist David Foster Wallace, who tells a story that starts during a aquarium . “There are these two young swimming along and that they happen to satisfy an older fish, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ and therefore the two young swim on for a touch , then one among them looks at the opposite and goes, ‘What the hell is water?'”
Wallace’s point is that once we are surrounded by people that think an equivalent way, we will overlook the apparent . Classic examples include Blockbuster, which missed the opportunities of the web despite dominating the movie rental business, and Kodak, which was so fixated on print photography that it never took the opportunities afforded by digital.
Southgate and coaches
image captionHis coaching staff was hand-picked for his or her diverse skills and backgrounds
The CIA missed a whole series of threats thanks to its clone-like recruits. a couple of more rebels could have changed everything. It wasn’t until after the 9-11 attack that the CIA began to broaden its intake.
Of course, diversity should not be pursued frivolously. If Brailsford, Giles, Badale, Grainger et al were advising not on football performance but the way to design the massive Hadron Collider, they might be ineffectual. Introducing outsiders for the sake of it rarely works. The key’s to bring people together whose perspectives are both relevant to the matter , and which also are different from one another . This maximises both “depth” and “range” of data – resulting in “collective intelligence”.
The England eleven haven’t won the Euros, and there is an extended thanks to go. But the facility of diversity is beyond dispute, central to the strategies of the many of the foremost cutting-edge institutions.
Echo chambers could also be comfortable but they’re inherently self-limiting. within the post-pandemic age, with the planet changing faster than ever, it’s diversity that unlocks the key to success.