Creating change is hard. Harder still when we can’t see it.
Radiologists are trained to look.
When asked to review a set of slides for cancerous nodules, 83% of the radiologists sampled missed a picture of a gorilla, 48X times larger than the average cancerous nodule, superimposed on their last slide.
You are not looking for hairy gorillas when you are trained to look for cancerous nodules,
Send your kid to a football camp and the coaches are trained to develop technical football skills. Coaches who are trained to see technical skills, look for technical issues to fix. Making it hard to see the physical and psychological mix that helps kids develop in full.
It is tempting to simplify the challenge and fix it. Teach coaches another skill, add another responsibility, and produce another process. You only have to look at job recruitment posts to see how that plays outs.
But, that would be missing the point. Change is not easy exactly because it is owned by the majority but driven by the minority. In this example, only 17% of the radiologists saw something different.
Before coaches learn to take on specialist skills. Perhaps, it is time to first teach coaches to be open, curious, and experimental in their approach. After all, isn’t that what we ask of the recipients of coaching.
Are you willing to change?