Too much performance and not enough learning?

When the athletic director called me, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Could I really coach the varsity girls’ basketball team at the local high school? I stopped playing basketball myself at 15, and these girls would be older than that, and probably better than I was.

I decided to go in for the interview just for the experience. Then I got the offer. I took the leap and decided that I would figure it out on the way. I did. After several years of not winning a single game, we won three that first year.

Back then, I was supporting the development of athletes and today, I mostly support the development of better leaders.

Yet, in a sense, it’s not that much different.

Back then, we spent most of our time at practice, doing drills and various exercises to increase the individual skills and group dynamics needed to perform better when it mattered most — during the game.

During the pre-season, we were in the gym practicing 6 days a week, for 2 hours each session. Once the season started, we still practiced 3-4 days a week. This time is what Briceño calls the “Learning Zone.” Each practice was ~80% deliberate skill development, with a scrimmage at the end (sometimes with the boys team.)

Once the games started, we had official games once or twice a week. This is when we put everything we learned together for the “Performance Zone.”

If you know anything about athletics, you know that most of their time is spent in this learning zone, with small amounts of time in the performance zone.

What Briceño observes is that the ratio of learning to performance is inverted in the corporate structure. Every day has become a performance of some sort, and if not a direct performance, we’re scrimmaging, rather than engaging in deliberate learning.

The other day I was leading a session and I started with this question : What part of you doesn’t want to be here right now?

The responses were all similar — the part of me that has a mountain of emails to go through, the part of me that has a ton of work to get to, etc.

In corporate context, we are stuck in this performance zone, irregularly breaking out of it for some learning. Even when we are in this learning zone, some of us have our minds still on the performance.

In my days as a coach, most of our learning was spent outside the realm of performance — in our practice sessions. But that doesn’t mean that we weren’t learning during the game itself too. Yes, the game was the game, but other elements changed every game — the location, the spectators, the opposing team, the health of my own team, etc. In that regard, each game became an experiment, and an opportunity to learn.

Briceño is a big advocate for spending more time in the learning zone because it’s the only way we truly get better. He believes that practice doesn’t always make progress, (See Day 1 Musings.) so we have to be very deliberate about how we’re learning.

Not only do we need to take time away from our work, but we can also imbed learning into our performance, not separate from it. He invites us to run small experiments, that we can learn from, that allow us to make better choices in the future.

We can run experiments around how and when we check our email.
We can run experiments with how we structure our meetings.
We can run experiments on how our we design our day.

Everything and anything can be turned into a learning experiment. As Adam Grant writes in his book, Think Again, we can all benefit from thinking more like a scientist.

What’s something you can experiment with in the next couple of days?

Originally posted on Substack with comments.

Read Deeper Not Faster