FA county coach developer, Steve Dorey, explains the benefits of predicting possible session problems before getting out on the grass to deliver.
Learning from experience is often a long and arduous process, particularly when you’re starting at the beginning.
Having delivered the FA level 1 course for several years, I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of brilliant people who all have one thing in common: they’re all new to formal coach education. Some have had extensive playing careers, some have been coaching for years, others have never kicked a ball in their life but are determined to give their sons and daughters a great football experience.
The taken for granted assumptions about coaching that come from experience are difficult to surface as they become second nature, instinctive, tacit. Think about the last time you drove your car for instance. Now compare that to the first time you drove a car. Different? Hopefully. But it probably took a few bumps and near misses along the way to get to where you are now.
Coaching is no different. You’ll get a few knocks along the way, but you’ll learn from them and do better next time. But what if we could speed that process up? Could we forecast the bumps ahead of time and avoid them before they’ve even happened?
Identifying problems before they happen
The work of Gary Klein is endlessly fascinating if you’d like to get under the bonnet of how people make decisions in their everyday life.
Klein developed the concept of a ‘pre-mortem’ when discussing approaches to business projects. When putting together project proposals, Klein would encourage his colleagues to view the plans critically, specifically looking for places where the whole thing could fall apart.
Essentially, they were spotting how the project could ‘die’ before it even started living. That way, problems could be identified, and fixed, ahead of project’s delivery. This turned out to be a revelation, with projects becoming tighter, more robust and purposeful as a result. So, what does this have to do with coaching?
Coaches of all levels have ‘stinkers’, the sessions that just haven’t worked. But this happens less with more experience. More experience equals more miles on the clock, more bumps in the road, more bad sessions that have been learned from.
However, if those bad sessions could be turned into good sessions before you’re even out on the pitch – for example at the planning stage of the plan, do, review cycle - does that mean that you could become a better coach, faster? This is a concept I’ve explored with coaches and the feedback has been positive, with sessions becoming tighter, more robust and purposeful as a result.
Find a critical friend
Critical friends are great allies to have in this process. It’s a brave move to ask somebody else to critique your sessions but that feedback can be invaluable. My experience says that critical friends are exactly that, friends. Players on the other hand, can lean a little more to the critical than the friend side.
Coaching is a fluid, dynamic process so not all problems can be foreseen ahead of time. But if you can make a ‘pre-mortem’ part of your regular planning process, you should have less than you might have done otherwise, making the 'do' bit that little bit easier.
If you haven’t done so already, you can read my previous blog posts here:
You can also find relevant content on The Boot Room:
References
Klein, G. A. (2011). Streetlights and shadows: Searching for the keys to adaptive decision making. Boston, MA: MIT Press.