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What Squash can teach us about learning environments

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Could the sport of Squash also teach us some useful organizational lessons? While the analogies between learning Squash and developing professional skills aren’t exact, both involve similar processes. Competitive sports mean game players become serious about having fun. The same spirit of having serious fun is sometimes absent from compartmentalized workplaces, where work seems to finance the weekend and holidays. Have you ever noticed how individuals from these environments will tend to put more passion in their leisure than their work, and that is a tragedy for the workplace? The challenge for leaders in these organizations is to discover how to introduce serious fun in everyday tasks, and some of the analogies we can draw from sports can be concretely applied in workplaces.

Sports vary in the number of players that can participate in a game, their quality of interactions, the environments where they are played, and their level of forgiveness for mistakes. Racket sports like Squash and Tennis are played between two or more players within a defined boundary and are relatively fast-paced. The two games, however, have some stark differences.

The environments where Squash and Tennis are played are quite different, and consequently, beginners to these two sports have a tendency to develop their skills differently. The approach to these two sports by beginners can provide us with some valuable analogies for developing good learning environments. Tennis is an unforgiving sport for beginners, where the range of strokes required for gameplay requires repeatable precision. It does not take long for a beginner who starts by whacking at the ball with great force, without mastering some level of precision, to face some embarrassing moments. Balls whacked without any control quickly sail out of the court, or land in the middle of an adjacent game. After having received a few stares and gone through some awkward moments, this beginner quickly realizes that some formal lessons are necessary if they want to grow beyond providing comedy value.

Squash, in contrast, is a more forgiving sport, at least on the surface. A ball smashed with great force but little precision will bounce off the wall and come right back to the players. Beginners playing each other can rely on their physical fitness and reaction times to have a game of sorts. Squash is played within four walls, of which at least three are not transparent, and games usually face little or no scrutiny from better players. Even if it does, the symbolism of a closed room denotes personal space (at least in western cultures), and it is an earnest teacher that will cross that boundary to give pointers to beginners without being asked for advice. As a consequence, beginners that only play with other beginners will develop self-taught techniques and tricks that work best to defeat novices. Under these circumstances, their skills will be honed towards applying force and developing fast reaction times. A common observation of Squash novices unexposed to better players is that "Squash is about speed, force, and good instincts". Given that there is usually a fair measure of aggression and bravado in their games (novices tend to hurt each other), there is also a common perception that it is dangerous. In contrast, experienced players will usually point out that it is more about consistency, control, timing, and placement. Professionals in the sport can repeat the same stroke repeatedly with a very small margin of error. In contrast, novices playing other novices will tend to develop skills geared towards beating other, but not developing skills for accuracy and precision. Continuing on this trend over extended periods of time will lead to the total sum of their skills reaching a steady plateau. This plateau isn’t at a level that realizes their full potential, but at a level where the sum of their bad habits constrains any further growth.

If too much time is spent playing steady partners that are also beginners, the plateau stabilizes to become their skills ceiling. The first encounter with a skilled player brings a lot of surprises and a massive margin of defeat. Under these circumstances, beginners with a positive attitude towards learning will try to unlearn their bad habits in order to relearn the structured and consistent skills squash requires. Their games will become worse before they become better, but it will be an accepted compromise. It is common for beginners to discover that the most fundamental things, like their manner of gripping the racket, is incorrect. Players to whom immediate winning matters than gameplay will tend to persist with their known bag of tricks, and will see little or no improvement in their games. These bag of tricks will have some surprise value, but little else. The fictitious example of Alex and Joe, who decided to learn squash by playing each other after work and the occasional weekend, illustrates some of these points.

Alex and Joe’s excellent squash adventure

Alex and Joe work together in a software company, and they decided to give Squash a go. They are both quite athletic, and Squash seemed like a good sport to improve their fitness. Alex and Joe decided to play their first game on an early Saturday morning. They arrived to find almost all the courts empty. Fortunately, they had read up on the rules before, and they knew the basics of the scoring model. During their initial short practice rounds, they discovered that the harder they hit the ball the less likely it was for the opponent to hit an effective return. Alex had played some tennis before, and he started their first game with a full-swing overhead tennis serve. Joe was caught completely by surprise, and lost the point. In the next point, Joe was prepared for a fast serve, but he could only react with a weak return, which Alex promptly smashed to the back of the court. Using his new-found killer serve, and playing in the front section of the court to smash the weak returns, Alex won the first game easily. Joe learned some good defensive tactics from the 1st game, and was able to return shots better in the 2nd game. He lost by a smaller margin in the next game, and went on to win the last game. They were completely exhausted at the finish of the last game. They both agreed Squash was an excellent way to keep fit, and they started playing more regularly. Joe quickly learned Alex’s killer serve, and Alex also learned some of Joe’s defensive moves. Their games became evenly balanced out, and the games usually could go in the favour of either player. After a year or so, Alex had a skiing accident, and Joe had to find a new Squash partner. He learned there was a Squash ladder available at a club near his house, where players were divided into groups of 5 based on their skills level. The members of this group would play each other, and the 2 players that fared the best would be promoted to a higher group, and the 2 worst players would be demoted to a lower group. Joe thought that he was probably a mid-level player, given that he had been playing a very fast-paced and aggressive game for the past year, and that most of the players didn’t seem to be as young and fit as him. His first game in the ladder was a shock. He didn’t score a single point in 3 games. His opponent seemed to be everywhere at the same time, and his return shots always seemed to be placed just out of Joe’s reach. His killer-serve was returned easily, and none of his tricks worked. The rest of his games in the group also ended in stark defeats. A few of his opponents were kind enough to give him pointers, and Joe decided he had been playing the game all wrong. He started to get weekly lessons from a Squash coach, and his gameplay immediately deteriorated as he had to unlearn his old tactics, and relearn different ways of handling the same situations. Around this time, Alex’s leg was completely healed from the Skiing mishap, and they started to meet again after work to play. Alex found that he could easily beat Joe, who didn’t seem to apply any of the regular styles. Joe pointed out to Alex what he had learned from his time at the Squash ladders and the coach, but Alex decided that the techniques he had learned before worked for him. Over time, Joe became a better player, and the games became unmatched. Alex moved on to find a regular partner at his own level, and Joe saw steady improvement to rise to the mid-level group in the Squash ladder.

Closed and forgiving environments breed bad habits

Closed environments are those where the efforts of individuals within it are subject to little or no peer interactions. Forgiving environments are those where poor results are either not recognized or ignored. When these two characteristics occur together, they tend to breed bad habits. For example, making an issue go away quickly only to have it occur time and time again is the result of applying bad habits. As an example, let’s consider the role of technology in businesses today. Can a business that is not in the business of technology be in business without technology? The fundamental core upon which a business is built, or the things that make it different from other businesses (differentiators) is something most people in that business should understand. If technology is not a differentiator in an organization, then there will a few specialists and experts who manage the technology required for business operations. When troubles occur with the systems managed by these individuals, there is a tendency to overlook it because so much depends upon them. Situations within the four walls of the organization are increasingly touted as being "unique" and "extremely complex", rendering any benchmarks with comparable organizations as invalid. Processes are structured around a principle of least work for the specialists rather than what is best for the business. Most of the systems cannot be changed, or are very expensive to change, as the specialists keep touting how complicated and fragile the systems have become. Outdated technology, such as 9-year-old browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 6), are still used because some applications will only work on them. These are anecdotal evidence of a technology department operating in a closed and forgiving environment. In all of these cases, "doing just enough" to keep the lights on is accepted as sufficient, and a complacent business environment is a dying one in these competitive times. Similarly, the American automotive industry operated without almost any competition after the Second World War, resulting in a closed and forgiving environment. By the late 1970s, the Japanese automotive industry had recovered, and started producing more efficient and reliable cars. Today, of the top 10 models of cars sold in America, 6 are Japanese cars.

Luckily, forgiving environments allow the correction of mistakes before they turn to habits

Despite the tendency for bad habits to develop in forgiving environments, they nevertheless afford the opportunity for corrective action, provided that it is taken before the mould of bad habits harden. If stakeholders within an organization are satisfied by those who "do just enough", then there exists a capacity to surprise them with something better. Shot selection in Squash is about understanding the different options available for a situation, and then selecting the optimal stroke given the circumstances. In many circumstances, it is better to take the more inconvenient shot if it serves to develop our long game. Similarly, the first step towards building better solutions is to delve into the options, and make selections based on the situation, circumstances, and strategic objectives. If the option that solves the problem in the shortest time or with the least resources is always selected by default, then this doesn’t usually result in balanced solutions. Making a shot selection that improves our game but loses us the point is better than winning the point at the cost of stagnating improvement.

"Learning by Coaching and Doing" is better than "Learning by doing".

The things that sometimes appear to be deceptively simple often aren’t. Squash seems to be a simple sport, because when we hit the ball, it comes right back. Project Management seems to be a simple job as it seems to be all about getting a bunch of people to work on a common project. Writing a requirement for a new system seems simple because it is probably a list of our needs and wishes, along with how badly we want them. Designing a user interface seems simple because all we need is a bunch of data forms for all the data we need, and to top that off, there are plenty of examples we can copy by doing some searching on the web. There is a reason why each of these of these tasks has a considerable body of support literature and training material. In many cases, both the person performing a task and the manager of that person can develop a false perception of that task’s simplicity. When such as task is not fulfilled successfully, the failure is projected on the person performing the task or the person’s manager, rather than developing a better understanding of the skills required to fulfill the task. The example of Jenny’s new job illustrates such a situation.

Jenny’s new job in the sales department
Jenny just started her new job in ABC Corp in their sales department. On her first day, no one seemed to be aware that there was a new employee expected on that day. She awkwardly waited around for 30 minutes while her new colleagues asked around about the new employee. Finally, her new manager Mark, who had interviewed her 2 months before, showed up saying that he was really sorry that he hadn’t told everyone about the new hires because he was really busy. He then gave her a 20 minute introduction to her tasks, and told her that he would need her to be a self-learner. He gave her a list of 50 prospects, and asked her to start calling them and making sales appointments. Though she was completely bewildered, Jenny didn’t want to give the impression she wasn’t up for challenges, although the challenge didn’t seem entirely fair as she wasn’t familiar with what she was selling, what the expectations were, or how others sold the product effectively. She hesitantly went to her new desk, and tried to read up about the product on the company’s internet page. She then went to a few colleagues near her desk to get some pointers, but they were also busy making sales calls. One of them hurriedly printed out 3 documents for her. She ate her lunch alone, and by the late afternoon, she seemed to understand the products of the company. Around 3 pm, Mark dropped by her desk to ask how many people she had already called, and she had to tell him that she hadn’t call any because she was busy learning about the product. Mark was a bit surprised, and asked her to get on with calling people. Over the next few days, Jenny called most of the people on the list. She could generate some initial interest, but once the person on the other side of the phone had some specific questions about the product, Jenny would insist on a face-to-face appointment with a specialist. After a week on the job, Mark called her in for a meeting. He told her that he wasn’t very happy with her performance, and he was going to terminate her contract. Jenny was very upset, and she told Mark that she hadn’t been provided with any support. Mark told her that everybody else seemed to do just fine without any support, and if she needed support, then this organization wasn’t the right one for her.

The rather harsh example of Jenny’s experience illustrates how a person could have done much better by learning through both coaching and doing. On her first day, Mark could have allocated 2 hours of another sales agent to initiate things for Jenny. Even better, he could have had a starter pack that explained how everything worked, including the product details. Finally, he could have placed her in close proximity with his best sales agent, asking them to help Jenny whenever she needed it. In his failure to do anything of these things, Mark undervalued and lost a potential team member, wasted the organization’s resources by hiring and firing someone within a space of weeks, and failed to utilize his own time and the team’s time in the most effective manner. Instead of understanding the potential of a new team-mate, Mark projected his own failures as a leader on Jenny. The best opportunity for Jenny to have learned about her new job would have been on the first day. As she wasn’t provided with any formal training, her personal experience, circumstances, and daily challenges would have shaped her learning path. The things that would have worked for her would become personal best practices, and their consistent application would make them her habits. Her ability to dispense with these habits, when confronted with better practices, would largely depend upon how long those habits had been practiced. As in the example of Alex and Joe learning Squash, both of them saw a sharp spurt in their initial skills development before reaching a steady plateau capped with a ceiling. The ceiling will get harder to penetrate with time as the sum of the bad habits that seem like skills become deeply ingrained.

For example, children can learn multiple languages more rapidly than others, largely because the linguistic methods are more fluid at a younger age. As the linguistic methods are formalized, perhaps based on structures or metaphors depending upon your favorite linguistic theorist, new methods become harder to learn, especially if they have to supplant existing ones.

The advantage of learning without coaching or formal methods is that it gives an individual the freedom to discover new methods that are in tune with their own abilities. A coach would still have to learn about the personal strengths of an individual, while most mature individuals are already aware of them. This gives the self-learner a faster growth spurt compared to an individual who receives formal coaching from their first day, but it also compounds their bad habits.

 

Create transparent walls in your organization

A key ingredient for an individual to consciously realize that improvements are required in their work is by watching skilled practitioners at work. Leaders in organizations must work to create an environment of metaphorical "transparent walls". Transparent walls are created when work done by an individual is observable to anyone. Experts can watch novices at work and give them advice when required, and conversely, novices must be able to watch experts at work and go up to them for advice. Transparent walls can be built within an organization, and can be extended to the organization’s partners. In some cases, a transparent wall can be built between 2 non-competing organizations that want to learn from each other. Smaller organizations, such as startups and web agencies can build transparent walls between their solution partners, creating an extended learning organization.

I don’t know, but I’ll learn

There’s a lot that most of us don’t know. Knowledge that we acquire for effective gameplay is practical and applied knowledge, rather than knowledge for the knowledge’s sake. The first time Joe encountered a skilled player, he felt that the other player was all over the place all the time. Initially he had no idea how the other player was doing that, but he probably understood that some sort of squash voodoo wasn’t involved. He did some learning through observation, and found that his opponent consistently moved to the "T", an area roughly in the center of the court. Also, his opponent was constantly watching him move, while Joe kept fixedly staring straight ahead at the wall, waiting to react off anything that came off the front wall. In his subsequent lessons, Joe learned about the footwork necessary for effective forehand and backhand shots. In gameplay situations, people are more adept to learning as the quality of better opponents are immediately obvious, and learning new things bring immediate benefits. The same isn’t often true of working environments, where the lack of skills or knowledge to fulfill a role effectively isn’t immediately obvious. It only becomes glaringly obvious when someone fulfilling the same role is doing it with much better results. Transparent walls help in making skills gaps glaringly obvious, and then the rest depends on the person having the attitude of "I don’t know, but I’ll learn".

Developing skills requires keeping the game alive

A key requirement to develop gameplay skills is to keep the ball in play. Strokeplay that results in ending the game quickly, such as an aggressive serve, followed by a weak return, and ending in a hard smash, will not help improve the quality of the game. Similarly, in learning environments, performing only short and repetitive tasks repeatedly will develop a good worker with a narrow range of skills, but it will not create a skilled craftsman. Workers who try to finish a task quickly rather than effectively will create results of poor quality. Learning environments, therefore, should help people take the time they need the first time they perform a task. A culture needs to exist where there is no shame attached in someone being able to admit that they don’t have the knowledge to perform a task. The short tasks should then be extended to cover other related tasks, creating a continuous string of inter-related tasks. A common organizational paradigm in software development environments used to be separating teams by competence. One bunch of people wrote the GUIs, another wrote the services, another managed the models, and the DBAs looked after the database schema. Each group had some knowledge on a narrow set of tasks and problems, and members of one group rarely moved into another group. "A team for each tier" is a common organizational anti-pattern even today in larger organizations, and leads to poor results and skills development. A good software developer, given the need to translate a functional requirement to a working system, will understand how to build a user interface, services, object models, database models, and integration structures to fulfill that requirement. This end-to-end knowledge is analogous to the range of strokeplay a skilled squash player develops in order to keep the game in play, and it is obtained through practicing the positive pattern of "everyone touches all tiers". By keeping the game alive, the long game emerges, which broadens the skills of a player.

A superficial and simplified model of the game soon gets replaced by a complex and evolving one

On the surface of things, Squash seems to have a deceptively simple rule. All shots must come off the front wall. On that token, it would make sense for players to keep complete focus on the front wall. The reality isn’t that simple. The practical nuances of this rule is that players can use any of the other 3 walls to place their shots, provided that the shot eventually comes off the front wall. If a player just watches the front wall, then shots will seem to be unpredictable and erratic, lending to the myth that Squash is a game that is built on instinct. Skilled players know how to "slow down time", giving them more time to select the optimal shot, and not to make instinctive returns. Experienced players watch the other player as they hit the ball, understand the trajectory of the ball, and make a movement towards the best position to take the next shot. Understanding the trajectory of the ball, with experience, becomes a reaction. A professional player doesn’t think, "Ah, my opponent has hit the ball towards the middle of the left side-wall of the court, so then ball will bounce off that wall, hit the front wall in the lower mid-section, and it will finally come in to land on the lower right-hand corner in the front of court. The learned reaction would be watch the ball being hit towards the left side-wall, then to make a controlled movement towards the front-left of the court while evaluating the optimal shot selection, while watching the ball come off the left side-wall and head towards the front wall, completing the footwork necessary to make a balanced shot as the ball heads towards the right-hand corner in the front of the court, making the shot and then recovering immediately to return to position of control, and keeping an eye of the opponent as they move towards making their shot. This constant process of observation, movements, strokeplays, and shots is a recursive process, and a beautiful game emerges when all the elements combine to create a long rally where the full range of the game is explored. Similarly, when we first encounter a new domain or subject where we have to work, things can appear deceptively simple. For example, surely logistics is the business of picking up stuff from one place, and dropping it off in another? Yet it takes around 10 years of experience in order to become a seasoned Logistics professional, where the nuances of pick-up bookings, pick-ups, routing, transport optimization, consolidations, cross-docking, storage, allocations, picking, loading, delivery bookings, and making deliveries come together to form a complete game. Efficiently run logistics companies are few and far between, and the best logistics companies treat their truck drivers and warehouse workers as their biggest assets.

To master a sport means becoming a lifelong learner. Your game never becomes perfect, it just gets better or worse.

There are very few athletes that will claim that their game is perfect. Several examples exist of spectacular defeats following the claim of being invincible. To truly learn a sport requires that we always remain students, and never assume we’ve "arrived". One of the easiest ways to measure the knowledge culture in an organization is to try to spot the type of books there are on people’s desks, if any. For instance in a software development environment, I would expect to see a few books on programming, design, or architecture books lying around on people’s desks. Even better, it is a pleasant surprise to spot books on mathematics, biology, city planning, or better writing on a software developer’s desk, a sign that the team is actively thinking laterally. Cross-pollination across disciplines is innovation fuel, and the best knowledge workers are constantly seeking to learn laterally. Great athletes, similarly, learn by observing and participating in other sports. Some, like the great basketball player Michael Jordan, have enough courage to attempt a professional career in a different sport like baseball. Our knowledge of a discipline is never complete even though it might occasionally feel like it in our working environments. At best, the knowledge might be sufficient to complete our tasks within the narrow confines of the expectations others have from us.

The feeling of returning to a sport after a long lapse is not dissimilar to the feeling we have return to work after a long holiday. In Squash, these long lapses from the game are very telling. The ball doesn’t feel right on the racket. Movements in the court do not feel smooth. Players get in each other’s way frequently. Shots appear crude and lack the elegance apparent in controlled strokes. The entire game feels scrappy, and victories, should they happen, will seem hollow. The gap between what our games once used to be, and what they are, become painfully apparent. Only by playing frequently and re-discovering the dedication with which we once learned the game can we hope to return to form.

 

Don’t encourage heroes or heroics

Reading the ball early makes all the difference between reacting to a shot or being prepared in advance to take a shot. Beginners to the game often rely on their instinct and fast-reaction times rather than being prepared. Reactively hurtling or lunging to get to a ball and being able to pull off a successful return stroke might feel great, but gives very little time for recovery. An advanced player would find no trouble returning a shot taken in hurried heroics while the other player is still recovering.

In market-driven companies, "time-to-market" often becomes a measurement that displaces other metrics, and individuals who can get things done quickly are perceived as being the most effective. In these environments, retrospective analysis is perceived as a luxury, and individuals have a tendency to hop between putting out one fire after another. In these environments, the best firefighters tend to assume a "hero" status, individuals who bring the organization from the fiery pit of despair ("nothing works") in a blaze of glory. Weak leaders and heroes have a symbiotic relationship. Weak leaders build a career on being able to manage crises, and rely upon heroes to solve them. Heroes gain importance by being able to solve the crises, and bask in the favours that it wins them from their leadership.

Firefighting to solve simple tasks, or those tasks where the relationship between cause and effect is obvious, fosters false heroes. A few years ago, I remember encountering a manager who promised bonuses to his testing team based on the number of defects found by a tester. As a result, we would usually see a sudden spike in the number of defects around bonus-time, with individual defects being reported several times or being structured as multiple defects. For instance, in a webshop project, we had products organized into different categories where each category had roughly 10 products. The addition of any product within a specific category to a shopping cart produced an error. Instead of a single defect report which explained how the addition of any product from that category produced an error, we received 10 defect reports, one for each product in that category. The total number of defects would also show up in management reports, and resulted in a perception that the entire system was flaky as the number of defects were in their hundreds. The testers were perceived as the saviours of the project as their diligence had managed to uncover a huge pile of unknown defects, and the development team were increasing perceived as sloppy. At the end of the project, we found some serious defects that had gone unnoticed. The focus on creating superficial defect reports had distracted a lot of testers from delving into more serious defects.

In strokeplay, the best shots come about as a result of being able to read the ball early, pre-positioning before the ball has arrived, and delving deep to analyze the options for an optimal shot. The results define the line between a learning player and stagnant one.

Force experts to play with beginners

Left to themselves, most game players would want to engage with others at their own level. Playing a beginner in squash isn’t usually much fun, especially with those beginners that aren’t aware of some unwritten codes of squash, such as never willfully harming another player (this is very hard for football players to understand). It is usually tiresome to play someone intent on practicing golf swings in a confined space, or someone who dives headfirst in trying to get a passing shot (it’s a hardwood floor). Nevertheless, having experts play with beginners is the only way a beginner will improve and understand the nature of expertise. The seemingly effortless grace that underlines the movements of a professional athlete is something that can only be emulated with practice. One of my early squash coaches believed that a Squash player can only be classified as an expert if they have logged at least 10,000 hours of playing players better than themselves.

Learning is a better goal than winning

Winning is a short-term measurement of success, but being able to win at the present isn’t a guarantee of being able to win in the future. An initial failure where a person is given the chance to learn so that they can succeed more consistently in the future is a good learning environment. In contrast, environments that measure meaningless metrics like "number of issues solved per hour", "average duration spent resolving an issue", or "number of source code lines written per day" encourage problem resolution and volume production but not learning. For instance, it’s easy to spot the call center where employees are being measured by "number of calls taken per hour" and "average duration per call". If a call center agent spends too long resolving a call, and thus lowering their performance metrics, they can simply pick up and disconnect the next few calls (pick up the receiver, and put it right back down) to improve their performance metrics. The next time you are on hold, and get disconnected the moment your call is finally picked up by an agent, it is probably because the agent is being measured by a meaningless metric. A learning organization is measured by the degree of success with which challenges, issues, and tasks are completed. To return to the example of the call center, a call center agent within a learning organization would be measured by how successfully they were able to complete the issue the customer had, and not by how long it took to resolve the customer’s issues. Failing to successfully resolve a customer’s issue may result in the customer calling again, or becoming so frustrated that they terminate their relationship with the company.

In conclusion

The world of work is changing at an ever faster pace, increasing the demands on our own skills. Applying analogies from sports like Squash can help make skills development a continuous and integral process in work practices, rather than treating it as an occasional means to catch up with the latest and greatest thinking. Tooling and information access for developing skills are increasingly getting better, although skills development depends more on attitude than anything else. The comfort created by constant stability can lead to skills stagnation. The presence of metaphorical walls shielding us away from competitive forces makes this stagnation worse. Climbing over the fences of our comfort zones and comforting ourselves with the unknown can lead feelings of vulnerability or even defeat. At the same time, these vulnerable moments are those that give us the chances to develop and extend our skills. Sports like Squash can provide us with a structure for developing our skills, sharpening our attitude until we become lifelong learners, never achieving an imaginary level of perfection, but getting constantly better. New situations in our work may surprise us, but with the right attitude, they won’t leave us feeling helpless. And when we are able to find a temporary balance between the external and internal forces that shape us, it is then we are at our best.

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