Antifragile Volleyball-Antifragility

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Joan Didion

Human decision-making during uncertain times have been shown to be unreliable at best and the results tend to work to the detriment of the decision maker. This proclivity for making dodgy decisions in the uncertain times have been well studied in the recent years. (Dukes, 2018) (Kahneman, 2013) (Konnikova, 2020) 

Our minds default to what author David Epstein (Epstein, 2019) calls procedural thinking, which describes our tendency to use the solutions that are the most familiar to us as the default. Daniel Kahneman calls the procedural thinking the System 1 response, which bypasses the conscious mind. Epstein also describes conceptual thinking as the kind of thinking, as contrasted with procedural thinking, this is where the decision maker fully engages their consciousness in evaluating a solution, or System 2 reaction in Kahneman’s language.

It is not that procedural thinking-based solutions are never applicable to all situations because there are times where the speed of decision is more important than the effectiveness and accuracy of the solution, and conceptual thinking process would be too slow in reacting to a dire situation.

I think of the decision-making environment as generally a system, which has a technical meaning from engineering and sciences. Epstein calls them environments; he describes them as being either kind or wicked. Simple system can be thought of as being the kind environments and complex systems can be thought of as being the wicked environments.

For the sake of explanation, an environment (system) is broadly characterized by two different categories or variables. The first is the internal variables or state variables in system-ese. Internal (state) variables can be observable from the outside, but not necessarily measurable. In the volleyball context, the set score can be thought of as an internal (state) variable; as can each athlete’s level of play, physical exertion, and mental state. The game flow of a team, the players’ responses to the opponent’s actions, the atmospheric conditions of the playing gym and court can be broadly described as an internal (state) variable. In short, internal (state) variable is everything that characterizes all the actions in the game which comes from actually playing volleyball and affects the result of the game.

The second category or variables are the control variables. These are what we do as players and coaches to affect the results. They are the levers that we can pull in our effort to change the outcome, or more accurately change the internal (state) variables which changes the result. In the case of the player, the control variables can be how they perform their skills, whether individually or in conjunction with their teammates; the choices they make; and the decisions they make while setting, hitting, serving, blocking, and playing defense. In short, everything that the athlete can directly control which contributes to their team’s scoring, or to keep the other team from scoring.

For the coaches, the control variables are more subtle and indirect. On the tactical front: the choices of the lineup, the rotation choice to take advantage of matchups, the choice and timing of substitutions, the tactical adjustments on offense and defense during play, and their emphasis on the strategy and tactics used for that set, ad infinitum.  On the communication front they include: the coach’s choices of what to communicate; their communication styles; and what to emphasize before, during, and after each set. On the psychological front: their choice of how to address the team before, during, and after each set or match.

Kind environments (simple systems) can generally be characterized by two features: linearity and non-interaction of the internal (state) variables. Linearity refers to the system characteristic that the predicted result  is known when using a proportional tweak to the known control variable and the predicted result is also proportional. This is based on prior knowledge of the kind environment (simple system).

Because many complex systems behave linearly if the perturbations to the internal or control variable are small, the known small perturbation results can mislead the decision makers to think that their assumption of a kind environment (simple system)  is correct, and the familiar procedural thinking will serve their purposes. Human decision makers like this mode because it  allows us to be comfortable with using the known solutions.  The non-interaction of internal (state) variable is implied by the term “linear”.

The wicked environment (complex systems) is the opposite of simple systems: any lever that we push, the control variables that we can access, will not usually result in what we expect. A big reason is that  the system is opaque; either because we do not have a good model of the complex system, nor can we accurately predict the complex system response. It is all a black box. The second condition of the complex system comes into play because all the internal (state) variables and the control variables are intricately coupled. Sometimes the coupling is direct and measurable: a missed serve means a point; sometimes it is indirectly coupled: a tough serve makes the passer pass a slightly off pass which moves the setter to a slightly less optimal setting position, making her less likely to set the middle, which causes the opposing blockers to focus on blocking the left side hitter, giving the left side hitter a greater challenge to score. One can use the Butterfly effect to describe the indirectly coupled effect inherent in the complex system.

Butterfly effect:

 A phenomenon in which a small perturbation in the initial condition of a system results in large changes in later conditions. Such phenomena are common in complex dynamical systems and are studied in chaos theory. (Butterfly effect, 2022)

Complex systems can react dynamically, with high volatility to unexpected perturbations.

The complexity of a wicked environment (complex system) also means that its uncertainty, unpredictability, and nonlinearity will also react unpredictably to a solution that is based on the kind system (simple system).

Humans generally rely on our knowledge of simple systems as reference for any decisions we need to make in any unfamiliar or unknown scenario, we like having a stake in the ground. We  pivot around our own trusted knowledge of the simple system behavior, nibble around it to feel safe even as we are making decisions in a wicked environment (complex system), because are optimistic creatures, we usually assume that we are in a kind environment (simple system) even when we suspect that we are not.  We do this because we do not want to overthink, to deal with the unknown, the uncertain, and the random. This is not an indictment of our decision-making ability; it is just the way our rational mind works.

The word Antifragile comes from the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb as he describes in the book of the same title. (Taleb N. N., 2012). Taleb entered our consciousness with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Taleb N. N., 2007), which called attention to the unexpected and unpredictable events which upends what we believe about our reality,  not because they are so out of the ordinary but because we are predisposed in our thought process to ignore the potential of the black swan. Antifragile is a part of the Incerto series, along with the Black Swan, of four books from Taleb which investigates complex systems and how we humans make decisions in an uncertain and unknown world. He focuses specifically on  those who make  decisions without knowing the inner workings of the system and cannot predict the trajectory of the system response as they make decisions based on the assumption that we permanently live in kind environments (simple systems) or that all the environments are close enough to being kind that we can make linear approximations and be able to get away with making that assumption.

The definitions of fragile, robust, and antifragile below are definitions that I cobbled together from Taleb’s work and my own understanding of the concepts.

Definitions

Fragile: Something fragile does not like volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and stressors. Fragile systems crumbles under high magnitude shock (perturbations). Fragile systems prefer the deterministic, the known, and the familiar. Fragile systems prefer to operate in a rut and will suffer because of extrapolating solutions based on simple system assumptions.

Robust: Something robust is neutral to volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and  stressors. Robust systems can successfully survive and resist the high magnitude shock (perturbation); although they will only maintain the status quo at best, they will not get better or gain from the situation.

Antifragile: Something antifragile thrives on volatility, randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, and  stressors. Antifragile systems will not only survive but will benefit from the high magnitude perturbation. In this case, the gains and benefits from the perturbation will be nonlinear, i.e., the benefits stemming from the perturbation increases exponentially.

A volleyball match is a wicked environment, a highly nonlinear and complex system. Indeed, because most sports are highly causal: one action affecting the succeeding action which affects the action after that, ad infinitum, we must model sports actions with Markov chains. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-markov-chains.html

It is this complexity that drew my attention towards examine the volleyball match as a theoretical application of Taleb’s ideas. Specifically, how does a coach avoid building a coaching framework which forces the team to always play a fragile game? How does a coach prepare a team to play in an antifragile way?

I delved into Taleb’s tome while also thinking about hypothetical situations within the volleyball context to try to imagine ways of applying Taleb’s thinking. The examples in Taleb’s book are mostly about the financial markets and the decision making thereof, he did not write about sports and how to apply his antifragile methods specifically to sports, playing sports, and coaching sports. I wanted to translate his ideas about what creates antifragility in decision making, in training ourselves to be antifragile, and how to create antifragile players.

One specific example that I thought of right away and read from Mike Hebert’s book (Hebert, 1995) is his discussion about practicing in system plays. He said he realized that his own statistics showed that he was spending vast amount of time working on situations that happen infrequently because of the strength of his opponents. Indeed, the practice time is better spent on out of system improvisational play. This is not an earth-shattering revelation, yet we find many teams spend an inordinate amount of time passing easily bopped free balls to practice in system plays. The fact that teams are practicing in system plays is not what makes the situation fragile; what makes the practice fragile is that it reinforces the belief that the game is played in a kind environment, that in system plays will prepare the players for the wicked environment, when the opponents are NOT sending easy free balls over. We are turning our players fragile by not preparing them for what they will most likely experience.

This should be fun. And painful. And challenging.

Stay tuned.

Works Cited

Butterfly effect. (2022). Retrieved from American Heritage Dictionary: https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=butterfly+effect

Dukes, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets. New York: Penguin.

Epstein, D. (2019). Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York : Riverhead Books.

Hebert, M. R. (1995). Insights & Strategies for Winning Volleyball. Champaign IL: Leisure Press.

Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking Fast and Slow. NYC: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Konnikova, M. (2020). The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attnetion, Master Myself, and Win. London: 4th Estate.

Taleb, N. N. (2007). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. NYC: Random House.

Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder . NYC: Random House.