Volleyball Coaching Life-Assessing Decision Making and the Buddy System

An exploration of how coaches assess their wins and losses and perhaps a way to be more honest with ourselves.

I recently saw two separate blog posts from two friends: one from John Forman https://coachingvb.com/we-should-have-won-actually-no/ and one from Alexis Lebedew http://www.coachescorner.net.au/2024/02/winning-games-coulda-shoulda-woulda.html . Their posts address the same topic from different points of view. Which of course got me thinking about the topic.

John’s blog is about being honest with yourself. While we have regrets about losing a match, we always think our team should have won, rationalizing the loss by attributing the loss to  something other than ourselves; exhibiting our very human tendency to justify the losses by “resulting”. Resulting is a term coined by Annie Duke in her book Thinking in Bets. (Duke, 2018). Duke was a professional poker player turned researcher in cognitive-behavioral decision science and decision education. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Duke) Resulting happens when we subconsciously and erroneously assess the validity and quality of our decision making by anchoring our assessment on the results of the decision making. In short, resulting is: deciding that we made great decisions when the results are in our favor, but reciting a litany of excuses: luck, uncertainties, and everything else, when the result is against us. I had written about resulting previously. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2018/12/volleyball-coaching-life-resulting.html)

At its most basic, resulting is dishonest, but as we are being dishonest to ourselves, we don’t usually realize or acknowledge that dishonesty. First, we are deliberately fooling ourselves; second, we are misattributing the bad decisions to unverifiable ghosts; and finally, we are stopping ourselves from finding out why the results did not go in our favor, there by creating the delusion that good results mean good decisions and bad results are not due to any of our decisions. This is not conducive to getting better.

Alexis’ blog is about the couldas, shouldas, and wouldas.

In Alexis’ own words:

1. Coulda - these are games where you theoretically could win but really not likely to because the other team is just better. You COULD win these but probably won't. You move on quickly from these if you lose.

2. Shoulda - these are games where you really SHOULD win. Your team is clearly better than the other. But sometimes you don't win these. These games hurt your heart if you lose.

3. Woulda - these are games you WOULD win next time if you don't this time. They are 50/50 games. Two pretty even teams. You definitely can win this if you play a solid game but they might win too. These games frustrate you if you lose.

So, at the end of a tournament you divide up the games.

1. Coulda - if you win one 'coulda' game this is a real positive. If you don't it is neutral.

2. Shoulda - if you win all your 'shoulda' games this is a neutral. If you lose one this is a negative.

3. Woulda - if you win more than half of these games it is a positive. If you win half it is neutral.

This distinction between coulda, shoulda, and woulda is based on expectations, on comparisons of the teams playing based on prior experience and educated extrapolation of what the coaches know. It is deeply rooted in the personal probabilities of the coaches; these probabilities are accurate only as far as the ability of the coach’s experiences and knowledge can accurately predict a result. Unfortunately, there is a large amount of uncertainty which complicates the coach’s personal probability.  Even more unfortunate is that the validity of the coaches’ personal probability is greatly affected by the personal fallacies and biases of the decision maker, the coach. A pertinent question is: how much overlap is there between the areas of coulda and shoulda, or shoulda and woulda, and how does that affect the personal probabilities?

This is not to say that these distinctions are not important, they are. Indeed, they are important tools in our cognitive toolbox that need to be used to ascertain the objective meaning of our results, but there is an awfully large cloud of uncertainty associated with these tools.

The two blogs started me thinking about ways to reduce the amount of uncertainties associated with these categories we use to determine and evaluate wins and losses. I started to think about how to get more meaning to these heuristics that we employ to assess our team’s performance. There seems to be enough cognitive dissonance inherent within our minds to impact how we assess the value of the wins and losses, which obscures any useful conclusions that we can use to improve our team performance.

Annie Duke talks about having benefitted from the Buddy System as she was starting out in professional poker. She lays out some ground rules for this buddy system in her book. (Duke, 2018)

Here is my interpretation of Annie Duke’s  Buddy System in an outline format, any inaccuracy propagated is mine only.

·       Create a group.

·       Each member is accountable to each other.

·       Need to be accurate above all else. Accuracy over confirmation.

·       Always encouraging.

·       There needs to be a diversity of perspectives.

·       Diversity in opinions reduces uncertainty.

·       Each member must be open to the diversity of ideas.

·       Each member must be courageous enough to challenge biased thinking.

·       There must be a de-bias function within the group: a dissent channel and Red Teams specifically to de-bias.

·       No bad luck stories are allowed.

·       Being a Stoic: Member must not care about things that they have no control over.

Identifying confirmatory thought is hard, the person whose decisions are being reviewed must behave as below:

·       Be the first to give profuse credits.

·       Be the first to admit mistakes.

·       Be the best at finding mistakes in good outcomes.

It is no surprise that Duke uses her own milieu of professional poker as the basis for evaluating decision making since the poker playing environment forces the players to make high gain and high loss decisions under high pressure and short time constraints. She makes the valid point that having to bet is the best way to have skin in the game, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb espouses, because nothing can guarantee personal honesty more than having to put personal gains and losses on the line; putting down a bet is the best way to have accountability about the decision. This is the reason that expert opinion in the form of a bet is better than just expert opinion alone. But Duke is not the only psychology researcher/expert who feels this way. Maria Konnikova, whose poker playing arc is the reverse of Duke — she started as a researcher investigating the most difficult decision-making environment and then coming to the same conclusion as Duke about professional poker as the ideal environment to evaluate decision making. Konnikova then took the plunge into the poker playing world to research the topic, i.e. she put her skin on the game. She also wrote about decision-making in the poker playing environment in her book The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (Konnikova, 2020) Konnikova also had a buddy system in place to assess her decision making, her buddy system is Eric Seidel, a renowned poker player. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Seidel)

The purpose of these buddy systems is to filter out the cognitive biases that are inherent in human behavior from affecting our own assessment of our coaching and decision-making. A very large part of that cognitive dissonance is resulting. Although the buddy system that Duke outlined for poker playing is very attractive, playing poker is different from coaching volleyball, although there are enough similarities to warrant an examination of the concept.

Here are the main differences that I can think of:

·       Poker involves decision making and execution in a single action, i.e. it is an individual game. Volleyball coaching involves coaching decision-making being translated through the decision-making and execution of players.

·       This means that the assessment for volleyball coaches is divided into two different activities: assessing the decision-making and execution of the players and the decision-making of the coaches.

·       Poker decision-making is completely devoid of emotions to people outside of the poker player since it is an individual game. Volleyball coaching decisions are always complicated by personal relationships between players and coaches when it comes to assessing the decision-making and execution of the players. This speaks to the dual role of the coach in most instances: as a mentor/teacher and as the person held responsible for wins and losses.

Here are some similarities or trade-offs that neutralize the differences.

·       Both poker and volleyball coaching involve significant randomness that can not be adequately calculated as probabilities.

o   In poker, uncertainties enter into consideration as how the cards distribute around the table and how each of the other players play their hands.

o   In volleyball, uncertainties enter into consideration as: the bounce of the ball, how and what decisions the opposing team coaches make, and how the opposing players make decisions and execute. There are also the decisions made by the officials in volleyball which adds another layer of uncertainty.

·       While both poker decision probabilities and volleyball coaching decisions probabilities need to be considered as Bayesian — each decision is conditional upon the previous decision — they both have long-term and short-term impacts which affects future decisions.

In general, the comparison between poker and volleyball coaching decision-making can be taken to be somewhat equivalent, even though the poker decision-making is more random but contains fewer intermediate steps that involve decision-making by others. I assume that to be an even trade off.

My thought now goes to how to implement a similar buddy system for volleyball coaching. First, assessing the decision-making and execution of the players is de rigueur for all coaches and staff. This kind of  assessment comes naturally and automatically for all coaches and is practiced after every match. This does not mean that the assessment is completely free of bias as the personal relationships may bias the assessment, i.e. the mentor/teacher role will affect the assessment. Will the coaches hold themselves to be completely objective? Does the knowledge of each individual bias the coaches’ assessments of the players? Given the sensitivities of all parties involved, can a completely candid assessment be possible? Or probable? My thought is in the affirmative, as this kind of conversation has been happening for eternity, some with more candor than others, but it is possible. But is it probable in individual instances? That is what is uncertain. In corporate America, there has been the recent practice of 360 evaluations of an individual’s performance. Some corporations employ this technique at the highest level of the corporation, with the CEO and senior management at the center of the 360 circles. I am not privy to the results, but I have not heard more about this technique being employed for a few years. Curiously, Karch used it with the entire roster of the USA gold medal winning team in Tokyo, not just those who were on the final travel roster, but everyone on the training roster.

In terms of the assessment of just the coaching decisions, I have not heard of any coaches formally creating a buddy system to evaluate their decisions from match to match. The logistics of doing this can be easy or difficult. It is easy to just have the coaching staff go through the post mortem as long as the coaches are completely honest with each other and being adults while ignoring the hierarchy within the staff in order to maintain the integrity of the process. The difficult option is to get a group of like-minded coaches who don’t work together as a staff to spend time and attention evaluating each other’s decision making. It takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort.

The most difficult part of differentiating good and bad decisions in sports is to avoid resulting. There have been many heated discussions amongst sports fans which usually end with either: it didn’t work, or it worked. The purpose of the buddy system is to decide whether a decision is good or bad while  basing the assessment on the context, situation, the lineup, and the performance tendencies of the players who are playing, but never including the result.

I personally think this is an invaluable exercise. I used to have informal late night post practice rap sessions with other coaches in my club, discussing specific situations and dissecting my own decisions. It may be quite unpleasant for my ego, but quite enlightening. I am not sure how a formal buddy system would work in that context or at a higher level, but I think it would be both interesting and informative.

Circling back to John and Alexis’ blog posts, this kind of buddy system could serve as a check on the topics that they wrote about, in my usual long and verbose trip around the globe.

References

Duke, A. (2018). Thinking in Bets. New York: Penguin.

Konnikova, M. (2020). The Biggest Bluff: How I learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. London: 4th Estate.