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Daryl Caver's avatar

As one of your American friends :), I found your thoughts to be profound. I know in American Football, it's a copycat league. If you see one team doing something a certain way and they win the Super Bowl, other's follow that same approach, without understand the context of the way the team did what they did. They also may not have the right people in place to execute the same approach. I see that in business where it works at one of these big tech companies so we should be able to follow the same logic by hiring some of their people to implement it without taking into account the people/culture you already have in place, need to change. As you said doing a lot of change at once has unintended consequences.

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Rodrigo Sperb's avatar

Hey comrade, nice 'hearing' from you over here! I love the way you put it, unfortunately is recurrent problem around human systems, I am afraid. So indeed, it happens in sports just like it happens in business.

The thing with too many changes at once and unintended consequences is that it may lead to chaos when you don't need it (and yes, there are situations where that might be useful, and you might even 'nudge' a system in that direction). And the fundamental flaw I have observed and even experimented is not to reckon that effective change often requires time. Be patient to things to settle. Still actively engage and intervene, but in a much smaller and surgical fashion, knowing that is a 'craft' that were ultimately talking about, not anything mechanical and deterministic.

Circling back to sports, it is not by chance that some of the most memorable teams come of some kind of underlying sort of era... Be it with a constant head coach, or sometimes not even that, but by some solid foundation beyond that (like a set of professionals which are kept for the long run, even if head coaches come and go with some regularity).

More I think about these things, more I realize and value patience combined with relentless engagement to change but only incrementally things. Must confess I myself I need to work more on my patience side...

Great interaction! Thanks again for engaging.

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