Problem solving-1
Within the NCCP CORE competencies PROBLEM SOLVING is in my book, the most complexe yet the most challenging one.
In our daily lives as coaches we face challenges to help athletes to improve in training and eventually in competition.It’s a never ending quest!
I work with national team athletes to help improve their strength and conditioning and some of them on their Technical and tactical skills. So within my context PROBLEM SOLVING is critical to help them improve all the time and reach their full potential.
After a few weeks of reflecting on the gap analysis class with Dr Van Nutegem and the directed field of studies in sports class with professor Dave Hill, i came to realize that my problem solving methods were inconsistent, most of the time effective but i never understood why, so i could build a model for future reference.
Here is my new personal approach to problem solving:
-Step 1: Ask yourself the following question, WHAT is the problem?
-Step 2: Collect Facts, Images or Data
-Step 3: Ask the question WHY is this happening? – Cause analysis
-Step 4: Solution Planing
-Step 5: Implementation
-Step 6: Evaluation of effectiveness
-Step 7: If step 6 is good than we standardise
-Step 8: Draw conclusions on the process and the lessons we learned
Here is a current problem i’m trying to find solutions on:
Like many contact sports Karate is a quick decision making sport
As a coach i’m always trying to find efficient and fun ways train this
Ability, which involves also AGIlITY:
Agility is a quick total body change of speed and direction movement in reaction to a stimulus at lest that is how i see it now. As before i used to train and test athletes doing the classic T Test, and different latter drills.
But i noticed that those drills didn’t effectively transpose themselves in the real competition context, because they lacked the cognitive aspect.They just change of direction drills with a pattern that was known in advance!
In this video, you will see how i found ways to overcome this problem, but i’m still looking for ways to Test Agility with the decision making aspect.
Through the HPCTL program and also The CSI in Montreal i have been blessed to being exposed to new coaching concepts bring my attention to this ability and to reflect and analyse it so i could improve my coaching effectiveness .
Please share what you do in your sport to train and test these abilities.
Thank you
Gabriel
Here is an exemple of the solutions i found to train these abilities
i ‘m now trying to find a solution to mesure and track them effectively
References:
Shoji Shiba and David Walden Quality process improvement Tools and Technics, revision 6;7/30/2002
PROBLEM SOLVING THEAM-2
31/03/17
In my last blog about the subject i put up the picture below, showing where i stood in this NCCP competency compared to my peers at the beginning of our program and the area i where i was most behind the class average was : “takes responsibility for improvements or problem solving.”
I took it upon myself to improve in this area to become a better coach, during my studies at UBC i came to realize that in my coaching career i was always behind someone who took all the big responsabilities and a person who had all the pressure. I was always the”assistant” , always in a supporting role! I was shy to put up my own ideas upfront for improving the athletes.
Early in my career my assumption was: the head coach makes all the final decisions, that is his role, he should know all the answers, he should delegate tasks and break things down, not delegate responsibilities or keep us (assistants) accountable.
“Leaders venture out none of the individuals in our study sat idly by waiting for faith to smile upon them”
“Those who led others to greatness seek and accept challenges”
When i graduated from the Canadian Sport Institute in Montreal, i started to have a different mindset, and started to evolve as a coach and a leader. The UBC program inspired me to take on more responsibilities to improve athletes, i decided 6 months ago to step outside my comfort zone and open my own dojo to create a competition team. I could not hide behind anybody, this was my project.
Since we became an Olympic sport more and more traditional karate athletes are making the transition to “sport karate”, once i declared that i wanted to start my own competition team, the word got around and i started to have athletes wanting to make the transition come to me. I did not solicitate anyone because that causes problems with other teachers and coaches. Most of them keep a traditional base with their original “dojos” and come to me for sport karate.
I immediately started a problem solving culture and a continuous improvement culture, getting athletes, to think for themselves. In my problem solving quest in training, i started to explore more deliberate practice and I also made them understand that fighting is a constant problem solving game and that led me to add cognitive dimension to my coaching. Instead of telling them what to do all the time, i put them in situations that make them understand The “why” and let them figure out the “how” and i wanted to have them concentrate more in practice. I started to design challenging practices to improve performance.
Despite repetition, most people fail to become experts at what they do. It doesn’t matter how many years they spend they stop getting better. Experience does not equate to expertise.( Atul Gawande 2002)
i had an athlete who had trouble creating openings to score, so i filmed him and reviewed the film with him and asked him why he had trouble scoring. He figured out by himself that he wasn’t creating any deterrences or faints, he was coming in too directly and his intentions were too obvious to his opponent. He had a big smile on his face, and the next practice i told him to choose 3 different attack technics and he had to find tree different ways to score for each attacks. It took a while but he found by himself 9 effective strategies. The next steps was, the testing, so i had him spare in practice without telling his teammate what i was looking for, and he passed the test.
By viewing expert per- formers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving perfor- mance, we are likely to uncover valuable information about the optimal conditions for learning and education. (K. Anders Ericsson 1993)
A few weeks later we had a minor competition, a perfect setting to put him to the test, and he finished 2 nd and scored a lot of points in his matches. I learned a lot as a coach in this experience and improved his offensive repertoire dramatically!
References
K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer (1993) The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
JM. Kouze and BS.Posner (2006) leadership challenge
Farnam Street News letter Susan Cain (2002)What is Deliberate Practice?
Great post Gabe, I believe that incorporating decision making into agility training (and training in general) is essential. A huge determinant of performance is the ability to close the gap between physicality that you can measure and what is actually applied. I liked observing your deliberate training environment that incorporated decision making with agility training. In volleyball, I have found that block and defense focused drills provide opportunities for athletes to make the proper decision and then be fast through their movement. We focus on strength and power training in the weight room, and then seek to apply that in varied training environments where the athletes need to be proactive and make a good decision in order to apply their speed and strength.
Thank you Joel for your feedback, i’m constantly trying to find ways to improve decision making in a training ans than competition context
My focus right now is on Testing and new ways to quantify those abilities with data, if you stubble on anything that can come close to that
i will be more than happy to use it with my athletes
kind regards
Gabriel
Gabriel,
This is fantastic! I appreciate your critical thinking of your problems; that you don’t accept the standard tests or concepts with complacency. Your courage to experiment, even if you don’t know the answers or how to quantify what you are doing for validation is the work of excellence! Discovery and exploration is exactly what is needed to realize things that have never been done. You will be well served with this mindset, because even if any experiments don’t pan out, you will learn invaluable lessons from the process and new discoveries that you did not even intend on solving.
Thank you Robert
It is a big challenge trying to quantify those abilities to make good decisions quickly while moving and changing directions
Lately i have been obsessed by it. i want a tool that will help get some data so can assess the progress of my athletes in training, in a more precise way
If you come across anything let me know
Gabriel, again, I am not sure where the comment went that I made last summer? I like the reflection and how you have defined the problem solving process. What you have described is very similar to the steps in the Making Ethical Decision making process which is quite a good problem solving method. I also like how you have included some video of your training. This is excellent evidence of your coaching context and practice.
Here are a few thoughts on developing agility and decision making. This is based on my background in motor learning and some of the motor learning principles. First, I think it is important to define agility. In most texts the term includes some aspect of decision making or mental processing. Hence most agility tests involve reacting to something or replicating some type of movement pattern. The T-test is an interesting example. If the athlete starts on their own (not on a command) and works through the T pattern from memory, then I would say that the test is more about testing multi-directional speed. However, if the test has the athlete react to a start command, then react to a visual or auditory direction at the top of the T, then I would suggest it is more of an agility test. In the second example, the test involves decision making where as the first example it is running the test based on memory.
In your video examples, I can see you applying drills that are aimed at having the athlete react to some form of stimulus in order to execute a move. In many cases, these are decision training practices, wherein the athlete must react based on the correct selection of one or more actions. The challenge for the coach is to ensure that the decision is made based on cues that are relevant to the sport context. This is similar to specificity of training in S&C, wherein the athlete adapts to the training stimulus and hence the training stimulus should be most applicable to the sport (Eg. the most specific training for Karate is karate). I will make one exception here on the S&C side. That is that certain types of S&C training may/should complement or counterbalance some sport specific movements. If the sport skill requires tremendous training of one movement pattern, some specialists believe that training opposite movements may assist in diminishing imbalances. Eg, if the sport action predominantly uses quadriceps, part of the S&C training may include hamstring exercises. Anyway, it would be good to get your thoughts on this from an S&C perspective.
Back to training decision making. Joan Vickers says that all decisions that an athlete makes are based on a concept she calls “perception action coupling” Essentially this means that the decision that an athlete makes must be based on a relevant stimulus that could be found in the sport specific skill. In your example of the bag drop drill, the athlete may only get good at the particular drill (catching the dropped bag), but this may never transfer to faster reactions in Karate. What is good about the bag drop drill is that it helps the athlete focus attention which may help to develop underlying cognitive skills that are necessary in making a quick decision in karate. Hence the bag drop drill may be a good lead in to other drills that have a more karate specific stimulus. The other aspect of the bag drop is that it helps the athlete to focus their visual attention on one spot which is likely where the athlete need to be focusing during a match. The athlete then reacts to the bag being dropped by shifting visual acuity to the bag in order to catch it. in essence this is what Vickers might call a cognitive trigger. (The Athlete reacts to something in the environment to make a correct decision). Where I would challenge you is whether the athlete needs to actually catch the bag, or if they should make a more relevant sport specific action like punching or kicking the bag. In this situation, if the bag was dropped from a higher height, the athlete could punch the bag then make a relevant or tactical follow up decision (punch or kick). Or if the bag is dropped from a lower height the resulting action may be to kick the bag, with a follow up decision. In this situation you may be able to align that actual sport skill with the “agility” stimulus (bag) which may make the sport specific action more relevant. The next challenge is to see whether the athlete can make similarly quick decisions in a more realistic context like sparing.
In Shaunna’s Kin598 class I do a lecture on decision training later in the year. The basis for this type of training requires 1. Defining the decision to be made in competition. 2. Identifying the cognitive skill to be trained. and 3. Designing a drill to enable the decision to be most effectively trained. In your example in the bag drop drill, it seems that the decision is to react to an stimulus in order to make the most effective attacking option. The cognitive skill being trained in attention and focus. What do you think.
I may talk to Kraig to see if we can replicate this type of training here in Victoria.