culture in soccer

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Another boat, another broken oar

A critical look at how culture shapes American youth soccer

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How we think frames and anchors what we doAny one that has been around American youth soccer for the past 40 years shouldn’t fail to grasp that some things haven’t changed. The problems of the 1970’s; bad parent coaches, pay to play, 70% dropout rate and idiot parents are still here. Nothing much has changed on the solution side either. Technological fad’s, 12 step programs and Best Practice-technical curriculums come and go. Repeating the past and expecting change is not a prescription for success but a description of insanity.

How can this be? Many smart, well meaning people have worked hard, for a long time for change, yet outside of the gloss and hype have achieved very little. The 10% improvement. This is not just nostalgic reflection. What’s going on today is just an update of past solutions while the problems have become even more complex. Doing the wrong things better only takes you farther from the right things.

This presentation look’s at American youth soccer through the lens of culture. We’re past the stage of blind optimism and wishful thinking. They don’t work. For real change it’s time to get serious and employ a critical examination that takes our culture into account. Only then can the search for progress have any chance of success.

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Cycles and loops

The OODA loop

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Culture is the fog we live in

We take nothing else more for granted

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The beautiful trinities

Some of the best ideas come in three’s

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Diagnosis

Condition or a disease

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Logic, constraining and enabling

Deep culture

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Choosing or deciding

Building snowmobiles

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Concept formation in real time

From seeds to trees

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Scale rapidly and continually

This Not this

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What is best?

Winning

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Adversarial decision-making

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

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General Systems Theory

How everything actually works

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Boundaries

Dividing the micro and macro

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Signal theory

Working together

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The power and problem with cybernetics

When does being in a groove become stuck in a rut

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Black swans

Fooled by randomness

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Paradigms

Normal and revolutionary

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Time waits for no one

Avoiding paralysis by analysis

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Of Clocks and Clouds

The rhetoric’s of logic

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The Ambiguity of Play

The rhetoric's of play

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Rhetoric’s power of persuasion

Sophistry

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The homunculus and conceptual spirals

Serial and parallel processing

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The myth of optimization

You cannot do it all

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Attention

Paying & capturing

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The selves and the Big Other

What drives who we are

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People

The source and target of friction

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Ideas

Mythos becomes logos

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Technology

Human and Non-human

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Problems

Every solution has a problem,not every problem has a solution

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Politics

The Matthew Effect

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Command and control

The vile masters of mankind

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How bureaucracies work

We take on characteristics of our environment and vice versa

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The Soccer, Industrial, Administrative, Complex

It’s a business

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The Educational, Industrial, Legislative, Complex

The guardians of culture

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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

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Summary

“Culture is not made up but something that evolves which is human.”

“Everything man is and does is modified by learning and is therefore malleable. But once learned, these behavior patterns, these habitual responses, these ways of interacting gradually sink below the surface of the mind and, like the admiral of a submerged submarine fleet, control from the depths.”

Edward T. Hall

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Slide notes – talking points3. Boyd’s OODA loop: cycles &

loops, culture4. Edward T. Hall: oblique, counter-

culture, ism’s5. Robert Pirsig: culture bearing,

trinities, quality 6. Marianne Paget: new normal,

diagnose7. Allegory of the cave: ideals,

experts, STEM, objectification8. John Boyd: Destruction &

Creation, implicit-explicit9. Venkatesh Rao: double Freitag,

Tempo, reification10. Yin Yang, Goldratt: scaling, time

scales, strategy-tactics, Theory of Constraints

11. Arnold: product v. process12. Sun Tzu, Ali: active opponent,

USMC13. Ludwig von Bertalanffy: systems14. Luhmann: boundaries, flowing

edge, two levels higher, hard-soft15. Bernstein & Shannon:

harmonizing, feed forward-feedback, noise, sensitivity-discrimination

16. Norbert Weiner, Heinz vonFoerster: second order cybernetics, spiral

17. Nassim Taleb: chance18. Thomas Kuhn: paradigms19. Gigerenzer & James Allen: interval

logic, heuristics, stopping point, time scales

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Slide notes20. Karl Popper: Clocks & Clouds21. Brian Sutton-Smith: frames and

anchors of play22. Sophistry: rhetoric's as persuasion23. Stan Franklin: serial & parallel

processing, ideas & concepts24. Gary Klein: optimization, leverage

points, heuristics, switch task25. Vickers & Khaneman: attention26. Goffman & Lacan: the selves &

Big Other27. Clausewitz: friction, beautiful

trinity

28. Ideas: mythos becomes logos, reification

29. Technology: human, non-human30. Rittel & Webber: problems31. Machiavelli: politics, real v.

theoretical-dualism32. Adam Smith: C2, leadership33. George Ritzer: McDonaldization,

bureaucrat, ideologue34. Eisenhower: SIAC, capitalism,

new, mistrust35. Lewis Powell: EILC, obedience,

passive consumers, low bar, mistrust