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.

 

 

Volleyball Coaching Life-What Happened at BYU

Reports detailing the racist incidence that occurred during the volleyball match between Duke University and Brigham Young University has been all over a frenzied social media. There have been factual statements, and there have been fanciful third person recounting.

The facts are out there, mixed in with too much conjecture, supposition, extrapolation, and biased interpretations. We will get to the true sequence of events somewhere down the line; I hope, stripped of the coloring from individuals with agendas.

Here is what I think I know.

·       Rachel Richardson is the 19-year-old black female athlete that was undeservedly subjected to a racist tirade from a person who is not a student at BYU yet who sat in the student section of the BYU gym.

·       This person spewed the N word towards Ms. Richardson every time she came back to to serve.

·       Ms. Richardson notified her coach.

·       The event staff placed a police officer in front of the student section, but the person was not removed immediately because no one would nor could identify the person who spewed the racist words.

·       I don't know what the Duke bench saw or heard or when she heard it.

·       At the end of the match, the offending person tried to approach and address the Duke bench. That was when Ms. Richardson identified the voice, the event staff threw this person out of the arena and announced that he was banned.

·       The BYU athletic director addressed the BYU crowd the following day prior to the scheduled matches. The footage can be seen on Twitter.

·       Several Tweets went back and forth amongst many people, I don’t know the timeline so I will just let people go track it down on their own.

·       The next match that involved Duke, (playing against Rider) was moved from the arena and the match was played quietly, away from the spotlight with restricted admissions because Duke volleyball had asked for the accommodation.

In the aftermath incidence, there were massive amounts of discussions, debates, and heated arguments in the college volleyball bulletin boards and Facebook pages. I have also privately exchange texts with people who coach volleyball. The general consensus from the coaches is first, something like this should never have happened; second, there were  massive failures in how the situation was handled. What is not a consensus is how the failures could have been avoided and what would be the right thing to do.

This is what I wish to explore.

To reiterate, I am not privy to any more information than anyone else. I don’t know anyone on either coaching staff or people who are directly associated with either Duke or BYU athletics. I am not prescient in plumbing the depths of the minds of anyone involved. I am, however, a college volleyball fan and a volleyball coach, one that is very far removed from the rarified airs of the division 1 college volleyball programs. A very interested observer trying to align what happened with what I believe to be the right and moral principles which should have guided the decision making. All suppositions and mine and mine alone.

At the most basic, there is the athlete: Rachel Richardson. A 19-year-old starter on the Duke volleyball team.

My instincts as a coach tells me that my first and foremost responsibility is to protect all my players from unnecessary and dangerous circumstances. This incidence falls into that category. Some argued that a coach cannot and should not protect players from everything, that this was a potential learning experience.

I call BS.

No one should ever have to deal with this level of ignorance and hatred Period. This is not being able to gut out sprints, this is navigating the unveiled hatred being directed at a woman who is just coming of age. That argument is spurious. Stating this belief reveals the underlying prejudices in the speaker’s mindset: they are assuming this kind of hatred is and should be the norm, that as a person of color, Ms. Richardson represents those that need to “get used to” this kind of confrontation because this is and will always be the norm in our society. I vehemently dispute that, even though this may be more a part of our reality than I desire, but I will never accept it as the norm. This mindset usually originates with those who are accustomed to being in the dominant position,  of being in the majority all of their conscious life because they have never had to suffer through the shame of being told that their feeling do not matter and that they are not the norm.

As a coach, I have always believed  a coach’s responsibilities to all their players goes beyond the teacher-student relationship. Club and high school coaches are tasked by the athlete’s family with  teaching and molding her in all respects or life: physical, mental, intellectual, and emotional. College coaches have the added responsibility of guiding their players through the formative years of life, years of learning to make critical decisions, of maturing into a sentient being as a well developing into a responsible adult. These athletes are learning to integrate all the overloaded sensory experience  an athlete is exposed to while placed in the pressure cooker that is intercollegiate athletics.

The added responsibility on the college coach is onerous and intimidating. It takes a special leader, teacher, coach, mentor, and many times surrogate parent to accept that mantle. I never coached in college, but I respect the college coaches I know as people who are not only willing to accept the responsibility but are eager to step into the position with passion. The position is never taken up with dread; it is taken with a sense of nobility and reverence for the job that they are about to embrace with every one of their athletes. In this case, I had assumed that the guardian for these athletes would act with the urgency that the situation demanded.

I have spoken to a few coaches from different levels of collegiate volleyball; to a one, they knew what their first reaction would be: pull the team off the court until the situation is stabilized and their athletes, their charges, and their future colleagues are protected. They also, in deference to their pragmatic impulses, admit that they don’t know if they have the courage to follow through on that action, because intercollegiate athletics is complicated, involving an inordinate amount of moving parts. They admitted that they didn’t know if they can retain their purity of purpose while negotiating the quagmire of the many levels of decision making that are imposed on them. But to a one, they say, they hoped that they would and could.

Moving to the broader subject of the institution, the university. We know that intercollegiate athletics is big business and optics are of utmost importance to the institutions, which is what we cynically assume to be of the highest priority for the university. But the athletes are ostensibly why there are intercollegiate athletics, the institutions field athletic to take up the responsibility of educating the younger generation, to guide them, and the teach them how to deal with real life. It is a mission that is similar to the mission for the coach, except the institution’s mission is both more broad and more in depth in scope. The institution has promised to  shoulder the responsibility of protecting and caring for all their athletes.

Speaking in human terms, the universities think of the athletes that they have representing their universities as a part of the family, a term that is often overused by the representatives of the institutions while the athletes are being recruited to those institutions. The institution often speaks of those athletes, as the living and breathing embodiment of the core spirit of the institution. Yet  with great benefit comes great responsibility, not the least of which is the responsibility to protect them, and more importantly to demonstrate the character and integrity the institutions seek to embody by example.

The third and last layer is the broader volleyball community. This includes all the players, coaches, fans, and media that love this sport. We have a responsibility to uphold the integrity of the sport and to do so with our minds focused on the welfare of everyone who are involved.

We, as the greater volleyball community benefit from being able to watch skilled and talented athletes compete and perform for our enjoyment, to indulge us in our addiction and love of the sport. In return, we are implicitly requested to protect them from overt acts which will absolutely impact their mental and physical health. It is the least we can do for those who are young and talented enough to give shape to what we understand to be the epitome of our beloved sport. Yet in this case, no one within that small community thought clearly enough to volunteer the facts of who, what, and how. The volleyball community sat silent as the person who is doing her part to indulge us in our love of volleyball is made to feel insulted, unloved, and unsafe.

Looking back on the three layers of responsibilities, all three layers failed in protecting Ms. Richardson. All three layers decided instead to practice group think, to act as the ostrich, to rationalize the inaction by diminishing the suffering of a fellow human being, to abdicate our responsibilities to an athlete, a member of our institutional family, and a beloved part of our volleyball community.

This story will no doubt play itself out in the media, and then disappear into the ether as so much of the other once urgent events had disappeared. We humans have short attention span, it is quite convenient that way, to better assuage what minimal guilt we may feel in our hearts over the suffering that Ms. Richardson has had to endure.

Yet, can we, as coaches, institutions, and community afford to let the event disappear quietly?  A tragedy is for naught if it fails to teach necessary lessons. Failures are wasted if no one acts to urgently prevent it from repeating itself in the future.

Will we learn the lessons? Most importantly, will we commit ourselves to actions that creates change from those lessons? Will the individuals, the institutions, and the community pay attention long enough to actively prevent the next time? In that regard, I would say that I am neutral in the optimism department, but I can still be hopeful because we are talking about volleyball people. My people. My sport. My community.

Doing the right thing isn’t the easy thing, it is the only thing.