If you work supporting athletes in the world of high-performance sports, there is a good chance that you are operating in an environment that’s VUCA!
No, I’m not cursing at you in some other language.
I’m sharing a concept that originated in the military and has been adopted in the business world. Your decision making and problem-solving can improve if you can understand and accept this concept.
What Does VUCA Stand For?
VUCA is an acronym used to describe environments that are:
Volatile: refers to the increasing change of pace.
Uncertain: references the unpredictability of the future.
Complex: is about the interconnected relationships and impacts between people and performance factors.
Ambiguous: refers to the “unknown, unknowns.”
It’s easy to understand how in the “fog of war,” a battle environment would be VUCA. Things are changing fast, you don’t have all the intel, there are a lot of factors and moving parts, and you can’t be entirely sure what’s going on.
Business leaders have also realized their survival is decided in a VUCA world. Technological changes are occurring at a faster and faster pace. Things are more uncertainties, and the world is more interconnected and complex.
These are problems that aren’t easily solved by doing what worked well in the past. Best practices might not apply. Often there really don’t seem to be any right answers.
Whether it’s the US Army War College, IBM, or Google, they all have come to recognize the environment they are operating is VUCA. To succeed, they all are striving to create adaptable organizations and leaders.
High-Performance Sports Is A VUCA Environment
If we step back and take a broader view, I would argue that much of the sports environment is VUCA. In fact, I think this often applies to the collegiate and junior/youth levels as well (in some cases, the junior level may be the worst!)
In sports, the situation in a single match or even a complete season can change fast. During any game, we have all seen things change at an astonishing rate, both for good and for bad. A season can change quickly with injuries in your squad or another. An unexpected upset in the league and the season picture can start changing fast. That’s volatility.
Many things in sports are also unpredictable. While Las Vegas bookies are pretty good at setting odds, predicting specific outcomes is pretty hard. The same holds for predicting a player’s success. As a whole of sport, organizations are terrible at predicting future success in young players. There is a lot of uncertainty.
Just look to the NFL. The teams spend tens of millions every year, have years of actual sports performance, do thorough testing (performance, medical, psychological) and interviews. Yet they waste untold millions on the wrong players and hurt their teams year after year. It’s so ineffective it seems like a crapshoot sometimes.
I think it’s easiest for us to recognize the challenge of complexity. Actually, predicting injuries is really hard. Predicting exact changes in a player’s physical abilities from the training process is hard, but knowing the precise transfer and impact on their sports performance is way harder.
Why? Human movement, in general, and sports performance, in particular, are complex.
The hardest one to get our heads around may be ambiguity, and this concept is essential. There are some things we don’t know, and we are aware of that. These are known unknowns.
However, there are some things that we don’t know, and we aren’t even aware we don’t know them. These are the unknown, unknowns. We can’t look for answers, because we aren’t yet aware there is a question.
VUCA Olympic Preparation
So, if sports in general are VUCA, I definitely think that the integrated support team’s environment is even more so. This means performance coaches and sports medicine specialists are operating in a VUCA environment.
As an extreme example, I think back to directing a staff with strength coaches and physical therapists getting a women’s wrestling team ready for the 2016 Olympic Games.
With it being a combat sport, you already start off in a challenging environment.
Now I have loved working in combat sports. From my days in the MMA world to elite wrestling, these have been amazing experiences that made me a better coach. They also taught me a lot about working in a VUCA environment.
Combat Sports Complexity
Performance is complex in grappling sports. Lots of interacting components that are very dynamic in their application.
These sports are a challenge because there are so many physiological abilities you have to develop. Various strength & power qualities applied in a multitude of movement patterns. Moving in upright stances and on the ground. There are high-level demands on a mix of energy systems. Significant needs for mobility and stability exist as well. And let’s not even start to consider the psychology of fighting.
That’s built-in complexity.
Add in the dynamics of changing weight classes from worlds to Olympic competitions, and the impact of a bracket system and the complexity increases to make predicting possible performance outcomes much harder.
Just within the performance of a single human, there is complexity in their own systems and relationship to the training process. Add in competitors, environments, and training partners, and the complexity grows.
Volatility & Uncertainty Magnified
When you leave the US and operate in some other cultures and bureaucracies, it’s jaw-dropping. This particular national team had administrators several levels up who added to the uncertainty.
Once I watched an administrator walk-in at the end of practice, athletes drenched in sweat, exhausted and mentally fatigued. After a few words with the head coach, suddenly, they had an entire additional practice right then. And they were showing off for a person that impacted their chances to go to the Olympics.
It impacted their livelihood.
In this particular team, without question, the practice schedule, intensity, and length would vary without notice or pattern. Influence of politicians and administrators added changes. With sports coaches generally judging the workouts based on the work done and the amount of strain and sweat, the volatility was magnified.
That’s a whole new level of uncertainty we usually don’t see in sports in the west.
However, if you’ve been in this field for even only a few years, you’ve seen that uncertainty in action. You, or a fellow professional, you know, have experienced a coach going off script and changing the entire practice. The intensity, the volume, the focus, or the mood. All of these change the physiological and psychological strain.
The training plan you had for the day just went out the window, and in some cases, often the week.
This may be the most common frustration among many performance coaches and sports medicine professionals in a team setting.
Sports Injuries Increase Volatility & Uncertainty
Because of the nature of wrestling, the athletes were regularly injured. Significant injuries or small tweaks can be a regular occurrence. The therapist faced a very volatile and uncertain situation, along with the performance coach.
This is also part of the environment of any sport. There are setbacks and obstacles along the road to success. They create uncertainty because future training needs are changed, as are practice and competition schedules.
Injuries themselves are multi-factorial in both the risks and the rehab after. They involve not only physical structures but the entire physiology, motor control, and psyche of the athlete. In a word, injuries and rehab are complex.
Culture and Language Ambiguity
Preparing this wrestling team for the Olympics, we also had team members from strength & conditioning and physical therapy. There are often things in either one of those professions that they may not have as much knowledge as the other. Some of those things are known-unknowns, but others aren’t. They’re ambiguous.
We also had staff from 2 different western countries, working in a third Asian country. Through language, translation nuances are often lost. The translation is not just about the words but the meaning being communicated.
Different cultures encode different amounts and types of information in their verbal communication. S that we take for granted in our own culture.
You also have cultural norms and shared understanding. Everything from common sayings, to styles of communication.
I can guarantee because of just language and culture gaps, there were a lot of additional unknown, unknowns. Added ambiguity.
Managing In A VUCA World
In trying to deal with a VUCA environment, we can look to strategies applied in military and business settings.
In 1909, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, which promoted a reductionist approach to managing businesses. Traditional management practices and many theories military leadership have been built on a foundation of trying to control the environment.
But in a VUCA environment, you don’t know all the variables. They are changing, and what they mean isn’t always clear. In spite of this, you still have to act.
Therefore, the first key is recognition. If you think you are living in a logical, linear world, none of this matters. If you believe high-performance sport is like that, you’re either in a very unique situation, or more likely, just naively waiting to get run over by VUCA outcomes.
If recognizing it ourselves is the first step, then embracing it is the next step.
If you are a performance coach or sports medicine specialist, you may be lucky to have an impact on the athlete for a few hours a day. Often not even that.
Stop planning and pretending that you have a degree of control that you don’t. Yes, we need to identify variables and work to manage them. But in parallel, you need to build a system and methodology that allows for the uncontrollables.
Agile Periodization & Programming
I have witnessed many performance professionals frustrated when their highly planned, detailed training program is messed up. When things are VUCA, there will be a wrench thrown in. It’s not if, but when and how badly?
Instead of being frustrated that the head coach changed practice intensity again or that because of the weather, the week’s practice and training schedule changed, plan on it.
Don’t become frustrated or surprised that you have an 82 game season and that the GM and player both want a different workout because the readiness metrics are all red today. Expect it.
This means a change from traditional periodization. Especially on a micro-level. Step back from planning the goals of a macro-cycle, and then laying out specific workouts on specific days. You know that probably isn’t going to happen.
How about planning the goals for the macro-cycle and laying out several types of workouts that will help achieve the macro-cycle goals? Layout a plan that prioritizes specific workouts. Determine how many of them you want to accomplish in that macrocycle.
Then use your knowledge and skill to get them achieved in the best manner possible. Which days are best based on the plan, on what you know, and what could change?
Microdosing In VUCA Player Load Management
The factors that impact a player’s readiness and adaptation to training are complex. They are also uncertain as you can’t always predict when today’s practice or tomorrow game might be much harder or easier than expected. You might not be able to foresee personal issues, a delayed flight, or other parts of real life.
Since your players’ fatigue is such an important consideration in high-performance sports, we have to account for the uncertainty and complexity around it.
Big loads can have a big impact. And once applied to the player, they can’t just be taken away. In a VUCA sports world, this can leave them unready or at risk when things change.
However, you still know that you need to apply intelligent loads to maintain readiness and reduce injury risk. So how do you do that in a VUCA situation? Microdosing
In business, a vital aspect of the agile approach is built around small but meaningful iteration. Big changes take too long and might be wrong. The environment might change while you spend 2 years developing your new product. So that risk is minimized by getting an initial product to market, learning, and slowly improving. That’s iteration.
Microdosing frequent, smaller training sessions has some of the same benefits for similar reasons. I always remember when I first heard Vern Gambetta say, “One training session won’t make an athlete, but one session can break an athlete.”
Using smaller training bouts can still deliver a lot of benefits, but the impact of VUCA episodes will be smaller. You have minimized risk.
Diverse Thinking
The combination of complexity and ambiguity mean that if you have a narrow view of things, you will increase your risk of failure in a VUCA world.
If you have a reductionist view, and only focus on a small part of a complex system, you are often going to be frustrated or baffled by outcomes.
You can’t see the forest for the trees.
Having others with diverse points of view within that same complex system lets you pool your perspective. You get different aspects of different trees and help build a better view of the forest.
Additionally, even the best professionals have unknowns in their domain. So smart professionals minimize these unknowns by building teams and networks of others in their own profession. You might be a great strength coach, but I’m willing to bet there are others in this field that can go deeper in some specific area. That’s just the truth.
The more substantial challenge is unknown, unknowns. Finding help for something you are aware you don’t know is possible, but where do you start when you don’t even know what you’re missing?
Diversity is a big key here. Diversity of professions is a useful place to start. Modern integrated support teams have strength coaches, physiotherapists, speed coaches, nutritionists, sports scientists, data analysts, psychologists, and more.
This diversity of professional domain knowledge helps eliminate individual biases and unknowns. Take that a step further and look outside sports for clues on the unknowns. Business, military, art, and social sciences can add new perspectives to shed light on the ambiguity that exists.
Critical Thinking & Questioning
Being comfortable in confronting a VUCA world requires that you can step back and question things. You have to move beyond “best practices” as they once were, and conventional wisdom.
It’s not that you have to throw those things out or abandon effective practices. Instead, you just need to add the willingness and skills to continually question and reexamine them.
It sounds foolish to suggest thinking slow in a fast-paced, VUCA world, but that’s precisely one of the skills you need. Author and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman talk about this in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
In it, he highlights how many of our cognitive biases arise from thinking fast. This type one thinking relies on our intuition and experience. It’s beneficial to navigating the myriad of decisions we all encounter. When the experience it is built on is both broad and deep, it’s even more effective
But that same speed puts us at risk of some cognitive biases. We think we understand things we don’t and use limited data to fill in a complete picture. We might make conclusions based on just a small amount of data. Thinking fast tends to factor into confirmation bias and drive over-confidence.
Type 2 thinking, or thinking slow, is more conscious and deliberate. In a VUCA environment, we need this “slow” thinking because it protects us. Relying only on intuition and past experience could be setting us up for failure when they collide with change, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Thinking slow, asking deep questions, and probing the problem give us some protection from those thinking fast errors. It brings balance to our problem-solving in VUCA situations.
Performance In A VUCA World
As a professional that supports athletes in a high-performance sports environment, you are in a VUCA world. In fact, many in business, military, technology, and sociology would argue that we are all living in a VUCA world.
Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity combine to create hard to solve problems and pose risks to success. Only by acknowledging this reality, and employing new problem-solving strategies can we succeed.
