Do you feel lucky?
In his review of Arsene Wenger’s recent autobiography, Nick Hornby recalls a game which Arsenal lost in December 1997. The manner of the defeat was so pathetic that many predicted Wenger would be out of a job by Christmas. However, Arsenal hardly lost another game in that season and won the league and FA Cup double. Wenger went on to become Arsenal’s longest serving and most successful manager and is commonly recognised as being one of the top managers of the premier league era. Is he lucky to have survived when other clubs would have sacked him, or was his success pre-ordained due to his skills and personality, merely needing time for the results to reflect this?
Sport is a fickle business. The unrelenting progression of results, abundance of performance data and plethora of pundits with air space and column inches to fill mean that we are never short of opinions. Its interesting, with this blizzard of information, how consensus views are formed and proliferate. Managers often become known as being the masters of the ‘half-time team talk’ for example. A team scores shortly after half time and this is attributed to the quality of the managers’ input to the players during the half time break. This is despite the reality that goals can be scored at any time and many managers say very little at half time. Ed Smith, in his excellent book, ‘Luck’, concludes that the half time team talk is something for the coach to do with his voice to give the illusion of control while he has a captive audience.
There are examples from sports other than football. If a cricket team wins a match through playing aggressively and taking chances they are bold and fearless. If the same tactics result in the team being bowled out cheaply and losing the game they are reckless and the captain’s days are numbered. An athlete who has dedicated their lives to untold hours of training and sacrifice and wins a gold medal is a hero while their training partner who came 4th was naive in their preparation or didn’t ‘believe’ enough.
At first glance this may seem to have very little to do with education but I would argue that there are interesting parallels. School leaders are faced with an, often bewildering, variety of data and there is no shortage of audiences to whom that data must be interpreted and explained. Like sports coaches, leadership teams are running incredibly complex organisations and any number of significant factors may contribute to the overall performance of the school. What the public want in sport and education is people with a compelling and simple explanation for complex results - whether they are right or not is often secondary.
One of the best quotes from Ed Smith’s book comes from economist John Kay. ‘We tend to infer design where there was only adaptation and improvisation, and to attribute successful … outcomes to the realisation of some deliberate plan’. We humans like stories. We find comfort in the extended playing out of cause and effect. But what if life is just too complex to know who caused what and why things turned out the way they did? Perhaps we would all be better off if leaders were prepared to admit more often that they just don’t know, (although perhaps not when talking to an Ofsted inspector).
It might feel upsetting to admit to oneself that we don’t know exactly why things are the way they are. At least we have the advantage over football coaches that school data isn’t produced every Saturday and sometimes midweek as well; we have time to reflect, debate and reach conclusions. In his book ‘Fooled by Randomness’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we take a lead from the ancient Greeks. Their heroes were celebrated for their values and character despite the odd mishap during an epic trial. Maybe we too should value leaders in light of their character and the rightness of their motives rather than solely on the results of their actions . It should relieve pressure if mistakes become judged by the quality of a decision in relation to the information available at the time rather than purely on the outcomes of that decision. Sport might be a results game, but education should not be. Lets spend more time thinking about developing character and less time obsessing over data.
