OODA in Sports Coaching: Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) Insights

Rob Gray, PhD on  Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) in Sports Coaching

Dive deep into Col. John Boyd’s OODA Loop through the Constraints Led Approach (CLA) with Rob Gray (Arizona State University, Perception-Action Podcast). Discover how ecological dynamics, feedback, and adaptive training create flow states and elite performance in sports — and beyond

Guest Rob Gray, a professor at Arizona State University and host of the Perception Action Podcast, shares his expertise on ecological dynamics, skill acquisition, and building adaptable athletes. Drawing from baseball, basketball, and beyond, Rob discusses how constraints enhance human performance, feedback mechanisms foster learning through failure, and cultural differences shape coaching strategies—bridging OODA's perception-action loop with real-world training.

Rob, author of "How We Learn to Move" and "The Ecological Coach," teases how CLA transforms rigid drills into dynamic, game-like environments for peak performance. 

Guest: Rob Gray, PhD
→ Podcast: https://perceptionaction.com/
→ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-gray-8232b417/

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March 25, 2025

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Books And Props
• 3:44 Ecological Dynamics Vs Linear Models
• 6:46 Education Of Attention, Intention, Calibration
• 10:46 Keep Perception And Action Coupled
• 14:41 Drills Without Information Fail
• 19:26 Constraints-Led Approach Explained
• 24:06 Meeting Tradition Where It Is
• 28:26 Intention, Tweaks, And Representative Design
• 32:56 Coach As Gardener, Not General
• 36:16 Messy Practice, Productive Failure
• 40:26 Adaptive Strategy And Culture Change
• 43:56 Selling The Front Office On Outcomes
• 48:06 Assessing Practice: Decisions And Adaptation
• 51:56 Failure That Teaches, Not Breaks
• 55:16 Affordances And Team Coordination
• 58:06 Where The Movement Is Growing
• 1:01:06 Paths Into Modern Player Development
• 1:04:26 Applying CLA Beyond Sports
• 1:07:56 Baseball Cultures: US, Japan, And Transfer

Transcript

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 0:56

Uh, Professor Rob Gray. He's at Arizona State University. Welcome to the show, Rob. How are you doing? Good. Thanks for having me. Hopefully that wasn't too fast and furious. I just wanted to share some ideas with you on where we are and our line of thought. I do have a couple of things with me. I have uh your books, uh, two of your books. Okay. I have uh ecological coach, developing attuned and adaptable coaching skills. And I also have uh how we learn to move. And I highly recommend these books. And before I flip it over to you, I also have two props that I want to share. And maybe this will number one, Cones. Yeah. And then number two. No. Yeah. And I think this one, there's some history. Yeah. Yeah. This is balance bike that we got in Germany when we lived there, and that's how my kids learn how to ride bikes. So with that being said, um, where do you want to go with this today, uh, Rob?

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:48

Well, I think just kind of how you can apply some of the ideas of ecological dynamics. Your introduction to the OODA loop, I like the direction you're moving it. The, you know, the the big contention we have in ecological dynamics is that those are discrete linear processes. You decide, then act. You perceive, decide, act, whereas they're really more linked. Like you act to perceive sometimes. You explore your environment to pick up information, not just so I think that's and settling is situating it in the environment, recognizing that skill is a is a relationship between your perception, how you pick up information and how you move. I brought up Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 2:26

So I brought up that when I went through PCT with Warren, I'm like, wait a minute, this is kind of confusing. This is not how I understand like active inference and predictive processing. But when you look at it from the the sketch that I showed, it's just saying action by or um is it action drives behaviors or our perception? Is that right? So you're right. It's it's a continuous one.

Rob Gray, PhD: 2:44

So it's a yeah, and they can go the other direction too, yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 2:47

Yeah.

Rob Gray, PhD: 2:48

Yeah.

unknown: 2:49

Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 2:49

So and then with what I saw in the paper uh that you had out there with uh Dr. Hippolyto and Warren and others, and and and Carl Friston, by the way, is to me, everybody's looking at this from their own perspective. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong. It's you're all right, correct? I mean, hopefully I said that correctly.

Rob Gray, PhD: 3:05

Well, we we disagree. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, in ecological, we would doubt the the argument really is what goes on between the perception and action, right? How much the brain is processing and predicting and adding to the information that's coming in, right? In the ecological psychology, Gibson's fundamental idea is you don't need to add anything at all. No prediction, right? No actually, no inferences, no hypotheses, right? You just pick up the right information and you link your movement to it and you're done.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 3:33

So how do you do that? How do you train for that then? That's that's what we're getting at is how do you bypass that? Um, and that again within the OOD loop, you don't have to go through those spaces, the predictive and planning side and simulation. Yeah. You can go right up to that skill side.

Rob Gray, PhD: 3:48

Yeah. So there in the ecological, there's kind of three processes you go through when you become skillful. One we call education of attention, which is learning to pick up better information. My main sport I work in in bait is baseball. So when you're a new hitter, you learn I can start my swing when the ball's this distance from me. That's not very effective information because what if I throw it faster, right? Or even like crossing a street uh safely. So you learn to pick up better information. You can pick up the information that tells you when it's gonna arrive. Uh that's called education of attention, education of intention, you learn to match your actions to your goals better and your abilities. And then calibration, you learn to like when you get in a uh example I always give is you when you rent a car, right? When you rent a car, you might get a spongier break. So you have to learn how to calibrate your foot movements appropriately for the dynamics of that break. So you're using the same information but from the stop sign and the environment, but you have to calibrate the two, link them to. And we lose calibration very easily. But uh yeah, so those are the kind of three posters. So you want to give practice environments with kind of encourage people to learn to pick up their information through lots of lots of variability in environments, letting them explore, let them do let information that's relative to their abilities, right? Um, like the example I always give in when I stand, I'm five foot nine, right? When I stand in a b basketball court, I don't perceive the ability to, I don't have the ability to dunk basketball, right? So that I have to learn to perceive kind of space and in with relative to what I can do. So so that that so most of it, like a lot of it is keeping the inform always training with the information there that you're gonna have in right in the real situation. That's my end of my podcast. I always say keep them coupled, which I mean always have your actions driven by the information that you're gonna face in this scenario.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 5:41

Right. So keep the system open, right? Keep keep the system open.

Rob Gray, PhD: 5:44

Yeah, yeah, for sure. This is like when you do typically what we do is we train skill by pulling things out of the environment. You know, in you know, training someone to have firearms training, right? We pull it out of the environment, shoot you on a range. There's no information about whether you should be shooting that target, and information about whether a person has a gun where they are, right? It's just a tar a target with nothing, no information there. So we pull that skill out, and then that's what a uh that's what a balanced bike also tries to address, right? We don't we pull in typical way to teach you to um ride a bike is we separate propelling the bike forward from balancing the bike. Training wheels do, right? They they take the problem of of balancing the bike away from the child. So they have to relearn that later, put it all together. So it takes longer. Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 6:35

So there's a lot of coaches that that listen to this and coaches that I've talked to in the last couple of weeks that will say that they're already doing a lot of things that you say uh we should be doing or they should be doing in the ecological approach and constraints flight approach. So they have small side games. You know, I watch my girls and they do the weave in basketball, they'll dribble around cones. Um and if I go back to what I did in aviation and what uh Moose did in the Marine Corps, uh going back to firing a weapon, it's you have to create the conditions that you're going to experience, right, in order to actually learn how to adapt in the future. And one of the fundamental questions I have with the basketball coaches now is, and and I think this is true with a lot of parents, is when do we see that transition from the awesome spin moves and Eurosteps and all that into a basketball game? And I realized after I asked that, I'd say months after I asked it, I'm like, I know the answer to that. You have to train like that, you have to create the affordances or the context, the constraints um that are required to uh for for the individual to explore what they can and cannot do, right? So but for um the you know, the w wider coaching audience, when they hear this, they're like, what are you guys talking about? So how do you kind of show what the current state is um and and talk about that and what the evolution should look like when it comes to um an ecological approach?

Rob Gray, PhD: 8:00

Yeah, so the like the weave in basketball is a good example. The the weave is something we don't like, right? The weave is you're moving down the floor, you're passing, you're doing actions, passing, dribbling, cutting with no information there. Like, why are you passing it to that player? You pass to that player because the defensive player is here, where you cut through gaps where there's no defense there, you're just playing on air, right? It's the same way, you know, I do a lot of recent work in mar mixed martial arts, like punching, doing techniques when there's no opponent, right? Why are you like a technique is action is driven by something you pick up from an opponent from the defense of basketball? We want that there as much as possible. It doesn't matter what we mean we have to play the full game every time. We can like and the same thing with training in military and other things, right? It doesn't mean we need to, we can't possibly create the full scenario in your situation, right? There's no way it's too dangerous. There's no we can't create the pressure, the chaos, right? But we can kind of take a piece of it and right and keep have the key ingredients still there. But we don't do that by going uh uh really isolating the skill. We find that you know you're gonna get really poor transfer into that situation.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 9:11

Uh so there's a phrase I think it was in your book, uh, or it said, um, the game is not the best teacher, right? Yeah. Is it you is that you? So, and that's what we want is we want to create the conditions and practice and training. So, and my my argument is we want to be in a flow state in performance. And just let me build on this some more. I got to fly air shows, right? So I spent a lot of time in front of millions of people flying the F-14 demonstration. And on demonstration days, those are the best performances because I got hate to say it, but we got feedback from everybody. We we're in the environment, there's people watching, things like that. Your performance goes up and everything kind of slows down in the cockpit, right? Everything just happens. It just kind of flows from you. The same thing is true in a game. That's what we want to pursue in sports, is flow, right? And if you watch the movie F1, that whole movie is about chasing flow, right? That's pretty cool. So, but in order to do that, uh, you have to create those conditions. And again, this goes back to the fundamentals of what do you call it, task environment and individual, right? Maybe we could talk a little bit about that. Constraints. The constraints, right? So we need to start with the external environment to help create the conditions so people can learn. So can you walk us through constraints and the three constraints that you guys talk about the most?

Rob Gray, PhD: 10:24

Sure. And I think you're on a key point, right? One of the key points of this is the main stimulus for how we're gonna get you to learn is the practice environment we create. For what we set up for you to practice, not what we say, not just what we say. We're not gonna overly technically instruct you, we're gonna create these environments. Constraint. Constraint is something in an environment that essentially a reason I call it a constraint is it takes away some uh a solution you could use, right? So uh, you know, when you have a 10-foot rim in basketball, it takes away, I can't dunk to score. If I lowered it to six feet, then that solution comes back in. Um but so and there's three types. There's uh individual constraints are constraints you bring. So it's your height, your weight, your flexibility, how you handle pressure, all these kind of individual things, uh, your level of fatigue. Those things, what those things are gonna take away some of the solutions you can use, depending on your your own capabilities. And that's part of the reason we don't want to just instruct the ideal perfect technique for doing a skill. We want to let you find one that works for you. By prescribing everyone the same way to shoot a basketball that are different heights, different arm lengths, different is is not gonna work. So that's an individual task, is something specific to the sport. So the rules, the number of players, the equipment. So in basketball, we could give you a heavy ball to shoot. That's one of my favorite tools. Pitching in baseball, we use different weight bats. That's a really popular thing now. Different length bats to practice with. So they're very specific to the sport. Environmental are kind of general things that would apply to anything you're doing, which are like gravity, light level, friction, weather, those kind of things. So the biggest one that a coach has control over is the task constraints, right? They can manipulate the rules, the size of the area playing and number of players, equipment. Environment, you got to kind of take advantage of opportunities. We can play a thing around with things like light level and things you can design. There are some technology starting to design things like that. But yeah, those are the three ideas. Well, the idea is that from the kind of interaction of these different constraints, you're gonna, you're gonna a movement solution, a way to perform your goal is going to emerge the word we use is emerge. It's gonna come out of out of all that, right? You're gonna find. So in this approach, really, we're trying what we're trying to build is adaptable problem solvers, right? So we want you to be find a solution for any set of constraints we give you, right? Instead of you teaching one technique which will work, not work in all conditions, we want you to be able to like the famous quote from Bernstein is you know, being skillful is not about repeating a solution, it's repeating the process of finding a solution, right? So you we want to teach you to find, be able to find a way, or if we go back to firearms, fire accurately in any condition, when you're running, when you're lying down, when you're on one knee, when you're you're you know you're tired. So can you find a technique that's gonna work in that those different situations? That's kind of the fundamental idea.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 13:29

So there's a lot of language associated with this. And and you know, we're we're you know, we know emergence, path dependency, all the the language of complex adaptive systems, self-organization, you get into affordances and attractors. And by this time, everybody's eyes are rolling back in their head, right? Yeah, yeah. Right. But that's the whole point about learning, is you have to push yourself, you have to reorient around what was known 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and learn what's going on today. And this seems to be one of the biggest challenges that Moose and I have when we go in and work with elite performers, elite leaders, CEOs, and so forth. They're like, that's not what they're doing, right? That that other organization isn't doing this. So I've got to ask, um, what's it like on your end trying to get the front office, a coach that knows, you know, this is the way I was taught 20 years ago, 30 years ago? How do you get them to see this differently?

Rob Gray, PhD: 14:18

Yeah, that that that's a great point. I think, you know, I kind of I think you can overwhelm people with language and and it could be so using it all the every term perfectly correctly all the time is made. I do think there's a value in using things consistently. Like the word constraint, so the coaches I work with, we always try to use that because then you understand why why am I adding this? Why do why would I what is it gonna do when I give a person a longer bat? Well, I'm gonna add more players on the basketball court. So for example, I coach my son's basketball team this year, and we do like when instead of doing the standard layup lines where you just run in by yourself and do a black, I have one line of shooters and one line of chasers, right? And so they're coming, they're gonna try to defend. So that's a constraint I add. But yeah, so I think there is like there is some consistent of that in doing that. Um the terminology you just kind of got to build on the idea slowly, I think. I always uh the question I like to use, I like to meet when I work with coach, meet them where they are, right? If they're a really traditionalist, I start with can't how can we make that a little more variable, a little more game-like, right? For example, in my sport, the cones you showed earlier, baseball the equivalent of cones are batting tees, right? You're hitting a ball sitting still off a getting ready to hit a pitch coming at you 100 miles an hour. How do I don't know how you could think those would that's gonna help, but a lot of people still so if a coach is really wants to use those, I try to think can we change the height of the T, move it around, do it. So I try to kind of move, pull them in this direction and introduce some of the concepts along the way.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 16:47

That's great. I'm gonna bring Moose in here because uh Moose is the big brain when it comes to connecting the John Boyd's uh destruction and creation, the strategic game, mission command. What's going on in your head there, Moose?

Mark McGrath: 17:00

A lot. I was just at lunch with someone, and we were talking about how do you teach this to the like he's like, I get it, but how do we teach this to my team? You know, how would we teach this to the rest of the people? And that was exactly my answer was you have to meet them where they're at, and everybody's gonna have a different way of receiving this. Inherently, everybody, I believe that everybody's capable of doing these things inherently, or they may already be doing these things, they just don't understand them. And where Boyd would come in is that if you understand these things explicitly, then your results would be they would become geometric, that you'd be able to improve at a rate where your competitors would never be able to even calculate what's happening to them as they as they unravel and uh and head into uh and head into defeat. That's kind of my that's that's kind of my initial big big picture thing because ultimately when I I'd read an article not long ago on my on my contra frame my my substack my other substack contra frame about the tyranny of the coaching tree. And the tyranny of the coaching tree is kind of what Ponch was alluding to, that you have all of these coaches that, you know, this is the way we did it, this is the Bill Walsh way of approaching this, this is how Mike Holmgrim taught me, and I'm just gonna stick to it. And in light of new information, nothing ever, nothing ever changes. In fact, I just restacked an article on The World about Mike Tomlin. I'm I'm from Pittsburgh, I'm a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, season ticket holder. And I get to renew this article every single year because Mike Tomlin does not change, and it just keeps progressively getting worse and nothing's changing. And you keep pointing it out, and and no one's gonna no one's gonna understand it until the whole entire thing just explodes. Then they'll then they'll make a change. Yeah, they're extreme.

Rob Gray, PhD: 18:44

What if they had three coaches and their history stealers?

Mark McGrath: 18:47

Yeah, and you know, generally it's not it's not bad if those consistent coaches are constantly revising and updating their their approach and they're changing with the the nature of the game. Um, you know, the Steelers, you know, just using the last couple, you know, the last whatever, 15 years that he's been there, 17 years he's been there, is they're always like this defense first. Well, they have the worst defense in the entire league right now. You know, they haven't adapted or adjusted to the game. He doesn't have one person in his coaching tree. No one, he hasn't, he hasn't uh produced a single a single uh uh file, you know, or you know, uh coach. Coordinator coordinator or anything. It's yeah, that's that's that's that's a bad that's bad orientation and and it's defeatable. And when you're it seems that that their cultural orientation is we need 500 or better. He's never had a losing season. But in that process, they've been they've had their asses kicked in playoff games. They they get into novel situations and they don't know what to do because they double triple down on what they think always always worked in the past, and they're not they're not adapting or changing with the game. So it's the opposite of destruction creation. They're not doing anything to improve their capacity for free and independent action. And that's how all of a sudden they're four and three with with no with no hope. Um, I I don't think.

Rob Gray, PhD: 20:11

Yeah. Yeah, the um the uh we have a another a new somewhere up there, a new football book that we just I wrote with a couple of guys applying these ideas to football practice. But but yeah, no, I think there's uh there one of the reasons like you know I find really rewarding about this, like that you may show that article in the New York Times, the constraints. I think that it's kind of catching fire. Is I there's a lot of coach, it's not the I the methods aren't new. Small sided games, people are doing that forever, right? It's the kind of putting the theoretical wrapping on it. I get so many coaches, they're like, I've been doing that for years. Now I you kind of explained why it works. And they get ideas for making little tweaks. And they teach they could teach other people how to do how they came out with the tweaks, let's talk about those because I the coaches are right.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 20:56

I did a uh episode with a coach, local basketball coach, and I'm like, what he's doing is pretty good, really good. But with a little tweak, and let just start let me start with one intention. Why are we doing this, right? So um, you know, I one of my daughters a little bit on the spectrum, so we have to spend time and go, why? Here's a why, right? This is why we're doing this. And and um that closed lip communication, right? Here's what we're trying to accomplish with this thing. Um, when you put that in front of them, um, you know, why are we doing a shimmy in basketball? Well, she didn't know for years that it was trying to get inside the mind time space or inside the oodle loop of somebody else to get them to do something, right? To create a mismatch or create surprise, right? And that's what we're getting at is uh through these little tweaks, and I think that's one of them, along with what you call it representative learning design. Is that another one? Yeah. So can you walk us through some of these uh tweaks? Because people are doing this, but what are what are the little ones that you can give to coaches right now?

Rob Gray, PhD: 21:51

Yeah, the so the kind of the so I wouldn't what I tell coaches, don't spend forever designing a drill or practice activity. Get the basic, then try it, right? You never know. Um, a lot of these things people will find shortcuts, and you know, you could put a rule you have to pass five times before you shoot in basketball to make your players move with the ball. Like who's your yeah, they'll just stand at the top and go one, two, three, four, five, and then they'll go play, right? They'll shortcut your rule all the time. So you kind of put it out there and you gotta adapt, right? So think about you know, what can I change, what can I add. But the intention one, I really that's a really critical. Oftentimes we don't, you know, I'm a big believer in like the you know, Anders Erickson's idea, deliberate practice, right? If you want to get better, you gotta work on something specific that you're not good at now, right? And so I had the same thing with with my kids, uh my kids when they first started playing basketball, they were they never knew which side to send stand on to set a pick on a uh because they didn't understand what the purpose of it was. No one ever explained it to them. Yeah, they would just go stand there by the fire, but they would always stand on the wrong side. It wouldn't work, it was pretty funny. But but yeah, they need to understand what their intention, what their how they know when they've done a good rep, right? I think is it's clear. So but yeah, the tweaks, you know, is you know, changing, adding a different rule, you know, adding another player, adding, you know, there's so it can add change the constraints. Um, we could make it all easier sometimes, right? So in my example I gave earlier, the layup lines, if I have a kid that's constantly missing the layup when someone's chasing them, what I'll do is I'll make the defending line further back, right? So they have to run farther to get to the and so they have more time to get the shot off. So I'm still there's still someone chasing them, but now they have more time to get. So I I just make everything a little bit easier without pulling that out of the out of the right. So so that kind of thing, I think you kind of get a feel for how to how to do those things.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 23:48

And the uh coach's role. Uh so there's something we we talk about, we talk about mission command, um, we talk about leadership because there's a nice connection to that with John Boyd's work. We often talk about leading like a gardener. Can you talk a little bit about the coach's role and how and how all this comes together?

Rob Gray, PhD: 24:03

Yeah, I think that's a a challenge for a lot of people. Uh it's a fundamental shift from being the general, being the instructor, right? I know how to do it. You come to me and I'll tell you. That's kind of like a Mike Tomlin approach. I know how to play defense, I'm gonna tell you to a more of a guide, right? I'm gonna help guide you and you you find a way to do it and help, you know, support you in you learn you learning how to do it yourself, right? It it's more of a so it's more of a hand less, it's still like there's still a major role for the coach, right? A lot of people misinterpret the constraints that approach is just let them play and don't say anything, don't do anything. But you're still guiding them. If a player like is, you know, doing something that you know won't work as an instructor, right? Then then it's okay to step in and try to give them something to change that. You can still have your expertise there. But yeah, you're more guiding and and pointing out things and creating practice, design designing practice than telling people explicitly, here's how you do it.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 25:09

So you you brought up an individual constraint. And I think a lot of coaches that I've met in the past, again, I'm I'm a parent to a 16 and 14-year-old, two girls uh that play basketball and other sports. And what I've seen is, hey, this coach is gonna come in here and he's gonna do this framework, he's gonna do this thing. Uh and our working with organizations, they do the same thing. Hey, we're gonna do this thing, we're gonna do this framework, we're gonna follow that. The the I hate to say the correct way, but a relative effective, more effective way to do things is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of who you have, right? And start there. And then you develop a team around those constraints, right? Rather than coming in with and throwing something on and doing it that way. And why do coaches one, do coaches still do that? Do they still come in and say, I'm gonna throw in this whatever, this this approach?

Rob Gray, PhD: 25:55

There's still a um, there's still, I think, uh draw to be in control, like in control uh in control to teach them my offense, right? No matter if we have a good point guard on the team, I'm gonna play this offense. Because it's worked for me in the past. I know how to do it. So be in control, I think there's a real pull for that. There's also what I found like in coaching, the kind of pressures you get from parents and the things like the the this CLA approach compared to standing in perfect lines and dribbling, it looks messy, right? Kids are making bad passes, they're throwing the ball. Um, you know, there lots of things are happening. It's kind of chaotic.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 26:33

All you have to do is go to a real basketball game with your kids. You see that that happened, right?

Rob Gray, PhD: 26:37

That happens in the game. Yeah. So we're preparing, but yeah, but uh so parents like I've had people, and you're not saying as much, you're not giving as much technical instruction. So it looks like it's not as what people expect to be learning, like what a practice is supposed to look like. Nice neat lines, nice people making every shot, right? It's more chaotic, it's more, you know, and I'm a big believer. I emphasize, right? We need fail, you need failure to learn, right? Failure motivates you to learn, right? We want you to fail. We don't want you to fail in the game. That's performing, right? But we want learning, it kind of motivates you to try something different, to get better. So, so we're gonna, it's gonna look a little less pretty than than a lot of practices. So, so that's kind of a challenge. And it's pull, and it's so easy kind of to pull back to the way that you were taught, and your coach taught you and they car coach, right? That path dependency is start is a very strong pull. And it's a real shift, I think, too, in how like you think of everything in life is taught this way, right? You go to pottery class or you learn how to go to a cooking class, you go, person tells you the correct way to do it, and then you leave, right? That's the way we that's the best way to live. And then you practice repeating it over and over until you get it right. So it's a it's a really big shift, I think.

unknown: 27:55

Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 27:56

So parents, uh, I will say right now, people are pushing back, and I'm telling my girls, don't push this on any coach. This isn't something you just say, dad says we need to do it this way, dad coaches great organizations. No, no, no, no. That's not what we're saying here. We're saying there is a better way, and we invite you to come explore it with us. And if you don't want to, you're going to get your butt kicked, right? Yeah. That's that's that's what's going to happen. And and uh just some more insights. We learned, I don't, I may or may not know this for fact, but we learned about NBA teams that were doing this over the last couple of years, and they didn't want anybody to know about it, right? I'm not gonna reveal many names at the moment, and I don't think this is one of them, by the way, the one I'm wearing on my sh my t-shirt. I don't I don't think so. But but there are some players from Europe that are dominating here in the NBA, right? Because potentially they have constraints that we don't have over here. Let me let me just walk you through a typical parent in my neighborhood. Uh there's there's money that we can throw towards a coach that we're gonna spend, you know, two hours a week on to teach them technical skills, right? Is that the right approach? Are they using CLA? Uh, are they using the traditional methods? Um, that that's up for debate, right? But that's what's going on here. Over in Europe, you may be playing on a on a sidewalk or whatever. You don't have the nice facilities, you don't have the the the you know, the relaxed atmosphere. You're playing outside, you're playing with uh, I don't know, but they have different constraints over there. And in a con in the conversation I had in the last couple of weeks, it was that pretty soon the NBA, the top 10 players are not going to be American, right? Because our AAU system doesn't follow this approach. It's a business to get you to pay for parking on the weekends, right? It's a business to get you to go watch your kids and learn, spend fifty to a hundred dollars to go watch your kids pass the ball to the other team. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I think there's a yeah. Uh where where I'm going with this is just that um that difference between you know uh having the ability to go down to a coach that may or may not know what they're doing. We can all do that because we're keeping up with the Joneses, right? My neighbors are doing it, my friends are doing it, I have to do it too. Um we want to flip that script and go, hey, this is probably the most effective way to train anybody in business too, by the way, if you're gonna learn team teamwork skills, um, is to use a constraints-led approach, an ecological approach, something that's based off of complex adaptive systems thinking. But people don't want to take the time to invest. So uh going back to the NBA and teams that are doing that, um, it looks like it's picking up some steam in the last month. Uh, can you talk a little bit about that?

Rob Gray, PhD: 30:24

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, I think teams are the general, they're moving away from less plays, right? Less scripted plays and more towards kind of principles, right? We want to create an imbalance, right? That and and so I think there's definitely a movement towards that and how we, you know, how we train guys. I think that that is growing for sure. There's getting um, I think people are seeing benefits. And the positionless basketball, right? So there that's the one big thing with Europe. Yeah, the huge, well, Oemby is like shooting threes from he's seven foot four or whatever he is, he's shooting threes ten foot behind the line. And he's he's all over the court, playing in every position pretty much. So I think that's kind of getting losing some of the structure and allowing things to adapt and flow. You mentioned flow, I think. Yeah. Allowing things to flow a bit better instead of everyone thinking, where should I be? Where am I on the court? Just teach them to pick up opportunities, right? Oh, there's an opening there. There's no one under the hoop, I'll cut there. Have players, teammates recognize that. Yeah. So I think that I think it's definitely a movement there. There's kind of different sports have different degrees of that. Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 31:33

I wrote about that, I just put the link in the chat, but the title was How a Division III Basketball Team Cracked the Code on Adaptive Strategy, and it was St. Joseph's basketball team up in Maine. How they were doing basically what you were saying. They were doing positionless basketball. They you know, they didn't have any set plays and there was no pick and roll. And they were, you know, inherently doing pretty very good John Boyd type thinking and applying it to basketball. And of course, my argument would always be that if they understood it, if they actually understood went deeper on understanding like why all that was happening and why it was working so well, they'd get even better at it and become even more unstoppable. You know, most people, I think when you look at their differentials from where they were to where they got to, you know, the other teams constantly were were unraveling. They didn't know, they didn't know how to respond to these, you know, basically improvisation within the constraints, what I what I talk about in the article.

Rob Gray, PhD: 32:27

Yeah, yeah. No, that for sure. I think that that's uh definitely we're seeing that happen. And you know, I think um the uh you know teams adopting more of that, allowing for more of that, I think is it's going for sure.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 32:41

What about the front office? How do you get them to buy off on this? Um I mean, because going back to Moose's point about adaptive strategy, adaptive strategy to us is exactly the same thing you're trying to do at the teamwork or team level for team development, right? Create the conditions, look to the external environment, understand the context. That's how we've developed strategy. So how do you get the front office to buy into this? And I'm sure you have to do that from time to time.

Rob Gray, PhD: 33:05

For sure. And I'll say first, you know, I've started working with police training and military. I think if ever there's a scenario where this fits, it's you guys, right? How could you possibly predict what scenarios you're going to be in? You're performing in a completely unpredictable, chaotic environment. You could possibly can't train someone. If this happens, this is four million variables, right? If this is here, this the shooter's here and there and there, you need a million options. So so yeah, so I think the the the hard part, some of the challenges with like a front office is it's harder to demonstrate like simple linear improvements, right? It kind of quantifying and showing improvements, showing easy numbers. Oh, the person did a a sprint test and they were 10 seconds faster or whatever. Um, even though that sprinting doesn't really, it's not skill, right? You're just running in a straight line. Um so those things are a little challenging. So it's yeah, it's just convincing them. Um and sometimes it's like I've had where can we just do a small part of the training this way and kind of gradually convince them and show, show by the the um the the outcomes. But yeah, so I think uh fundamentally, like I think uh you were mentioning the I think it's about coaching the outcomes, not coaching the technique, right? So you want like that's what I really like on a team play, on a basketball team. You want to we want to be aggressive on defense, we want to get we want to organize when we get, we want to create imbalances, we want to create numbers, right? Those are outcomes, not we don't want to shoot with our high, like focusing on the technique of the shoot. We don't want to pass here and do this when this happens, right? So yeah, I think that's important. But yeah, I think I've been lucky. The teams I've been working with already have people in place are kind of a believers and intrigued by these ideas. I know some other people have had struggles gone back and forth, but yeah, I think demonstrating and how coming out I've I've had some ways where I've shown, you know, the there's a tool I use called representative practice assessment tool.

Speaker 4: 35:13

Yeah.

Rob Gray, PhD: 35:14

And basically showing the relationship between that and and I think on a surface level, a lot of this makes sense, right? We when you show people 90% of the practice you do is not like the game at all. They kind of like, no wonder why we have trouble making decisions and and things like that. So how often like you get often like in basketball, like we don't have good decision makers on our team. Well, how much time in practice do act people actually make a decision? Or do they always do what you told them before, right? So those kind of things, kind of pointing out those and showing us you start with an L. Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 35:48

Is it like a rubric or something? Like does it show good behaviors and bad behaviors, or what what is it like?

Rob Gray, PhD: 35:51

It says in this tool, is is a there's a bunch of questions, right? Is um and it's a scale. The number and its stuff don't matter to me so much. It just gets you to think about, right? Uh are there decisions involved? Are people do people have to adapt their movements? Do people have to change their detentions based on the unfolding situation? And you kind of get sudden, and so I I think it just gets people to think about how they can make little tweaks to make it the practice more representative.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 36:20

Yeah, you know, in teamwork training, we work on the non-technical skills. There is a way to do that. So you get into something known as guided self-correction. So you and I've learned this from uh folks from JetBlue and then folks that were working up at Boeing and healthcare organizations and emergency rooms up in Seattle, where they identified that, hey, we got this from commercial aviation and fighter aviation. It's basically you describe a positive behavior or a negative behavior. And we we did that in teaming, and I'm just wondering that's it's probably the same thing. It's uh, you know, what is good look like, right? And it's hard to describe sometimes, but once you do that, you get into guided self-correction for coaches, and it might be something that uh could be worth exploring. And I'm trying to remember the technical name of these, and I can't believe it's not the tip of my head. Or anyway, but yeah, that's that that works, right? Once people know where they are, you know. Yeah, for sure. And generally, if you were to do that with a a high school basketball coach, um, for example, they're gonna be, I'll say, far far left on the spectrum when it comes to are you doing things that you that make no sense, right?

Rob Gray, PhD: 37:22

Yeah, yeah. They're gonna do probably coach the way they were coached.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 37:26

Or or there's no coupling.

Mark McGrath: 37:27

There's also risk aversion too, right? They don't want to take the risk and be and be different. You know, they don't want to uh something could be phenomenal. I mean, it seems like it seems like anytime there's been a novelty innovation in a sport, any sport where it literally changed the game, that came at such considerable risk that somebody finally had the stones to do it. And for sure. Everybody was saying, you know, ruining the game, you're destroying their game, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, it it it changed it forever. Like, I think back to, you know, Gladwell's got that book, David and Goliath, and he talks about those the basketball team in Silicon Valley. Yeah, they just pressed the whole time. I just read that, yeah. Yeah, and it makes total sense. Like, why wouldn't you do that? But then, but then like they gave in to like the the sort of the herd saying, you know, this is destroying the game, you know, you're not playing basketball the right way. This is not how we used to do it. And then that when they when they violated their their innovation, when they violated their novelty, they lost.

Rob Gray, PhD: 38:26

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oftentimes you get that a rule, like in the league we just played in, you couldn't press to the last two minutes of the half.

Mark McGrath: 38:35

But when Walter Camp invented the forward pass, you know, it was heresy, right? Or like, you know, run and shoot or West Coast offense. These things were heretical until they became so successful you couldn't argue with the results anymore.

Rob Gray, PhD: 38:49

Yeah. For sure. Lots of that's what yeah, the kind of the old school people complaining, you know. So yeah.

Mark McGrath: 38:56

That was the article of the that's the article, the tyranny of the coaching tree. It's like the you know, the coaching tree, it's like, you know, they're not gonna violate off the orthodoxy, but the ones that do take the risks are the ones that those are the ones that ultimately get rewarded. Yeah, there's bad risks too. Like not not every, like we were saying, John Boyd terms, like not every not every snowmobile works, you know. Uh yeah.

Rob Gray, PhD: 39:16

But for sure. Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of it is, you know, one of the things we uh we focus so much on what we're trying to develop coaches, like you're talking about coaching tree. Like so many coaches focus on what to coach instead of how to do it, right? Like what you you need to coach this defense, that, but how do you do it? How do you when and how do you give feedback? How do you use instruction? How do you design practice, right? So so I I think getting the experience, the really good guys that have the long, deep, tall trees, they develop how to coach. They educate their people that work with them and they're well to that end.

Mark McGrath: 39:51

Anytime I've ever worked with a sports coach, they're always waiting for me to tell them what offensive drills to run or what do I need, what and and and when it never comes, they can't believe it because all I'm trying to do is get them to adjust their cognition, their cognitive software, and then what they need to do differently, it just becomes self-evident.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 40:10

I want to go back into some of the theory here. And when I read about Bernstein's degrees of freedom, and you brought up Bernstein earlier, uh, there's folks that come out of the military and say, we got to execute flawlessly. And I'm like, well, after you read Bernstein's uh work, you're like, that's impossible, right? The outcomes are important, but how you execute varies because of complexity, right? So can you walk us through and our listeners through what that is? What did Bernstein discover?

Rob Gray, PhD: 40:33

Yeah, so Bern Bernstein's fundamental I'll go along. Bernstein was a Russian physiologist early. And I really like his story because he was not only a scientist, but he was assigned to apply it. He got assigned a job in the of working with blacksmiths and trying to make them more productive. And he, this typical assumption was, right, you want to consistently hit your piece on the metal when you hit with the hammer. And the way that you do that is by doing the same hammer swing every time. So you you repeat an outcome by repeating the movement perfectly, right? Just like you said, you repeat that technique over and over. That's where you become skillful. Bernstein, luckily for everybody, didn't buy that and he measured it and he showed, no, he came up with this phrase, repetition without repetition. So you repeat an outcome. I repeat getting in a ball in the basket, but not by repeating the same shooting technique every time. My favorite example of that, Steph Curry is the king of that, right? He never takes the same shot twice. He never, he never takes the exact same jump shot. Um, but he consistently gets the ball on the hoop. He repeats the outcome without repeating the movement. So Bernstein identified that's kind of his phone. And then he he kind of, for understanding how we achieve that, he came up with this idea that this is a degrees of freedom problem. So a degree of freedom is think of a degree of freedom as like your your joints and your muscles, and you have all these options for moving, right? So when I when I, you know, I example I use serving a volleyball, I could serve a volleyball just by swinging my arm and keeping my elbow locked and my wrist locked. I could hit the ball underhand over the net, or I could bend my shoulder rotate around my shoulder, my elbow, and my wrist. Each of those is what Bernstein called a degrees of freedom, right? And he said he what he identified was the hard part is not is which how what do I do with all? We have too many options, really, when you first start out learning a skill. You have too many different ways you can perform an action. Um so we need to take some of those away. That's how we sold, and you know, human beings are terrible with options.

Speaker 1: 42:38

Yeah.

Rob Gray, PhD: 42:39

Um when we, you know, my favorite example is a microwave, right? A microwave has 42 different buttons. Most people use two popcorn and start, right? Because people don't want a million options, right? So there's too many different ways to throw a ball, hit a ball, or whatever. So there's too many different, you think about all the what I need to, if I need to tell my wrist, shoulder, and elbow what to do when I'm serving a volleyball, that's a lot for kind of my so that he that he we argued that's the fundamental thing you have to solve. It's also like a real strength, right? I so I I I can serve in multiple different ways. If I get tired, my elbow gets sore. So I've got what we would call redundancy. There's another term. Redundancy means there's just multiple different ways to achieve their goal. So that was his, he identified this problem and he thought of different ways. And one of the typical ways when you're first learning a skill is we what do what is called freezing degrees of freedom. So we essentially take one of those options away, right? So it's very common for someone to first learn to serve a volleyball, right? They lock their elbow. They don't rotate around. So now they don't need to figure out what to do with it, they just don't move it, right? The problem is when you do that, the your solution doesn't have it's not going to be great. You're not gonna be able to hit very hard ball. So um, but you probably can get proficient and play. So, but then you kind of over time you learn to unfreeze those things. So, yeah, that was his. So he is uh, you know, understanding motor control, understanding the role of variability and and adapting to different conditions and constraints. He didn't use the word constraints, but uh he was talking about that at the time.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 44:15

Okay, no, thanks for that. Yeah. Something else I want to pick your brain on, and I'll give you some examples. So, coaches' feedback. Uh, so we talk about debriefing and effective debriefing, but there's a different approach when you're in a training environment. And let me give you an example. So in fighter aviation, as an instructor, the way we would lead a debrief is we were trying to build, believe it or not, their, you know, what are they attuned to when they're flying? What altitude were you at? Where was the sun? Uh what side were you on? What was your heading? What was your airspeed? And we're trying to build that into their, I guess the way they look at the, you know, how they look at their cockpit and what they're looking at. So the next time they go out there, they can know what to pay attention to, right? I need to know this, I need to know that, I need to know these things. So what we're trying to do in that accelerated approach to performance in fighter aviation in that training environment is we're asking questions, right? We're not, we're not demanding them, tell us what this was. We're like, you know, usually you'll go, what side were you on? And they'll go, I was on the right, and you're like, no, you're on the left. You know? Just the basic things, right? Yeah. So walk me through the coach's role in feedback in in CLA and an ecological approach.

Rob Gray, PhD: 45:23

Yeah, the what you described is a great example of what we kind of promote. And that's a perfect example of the term I mentioned, educating attention. So you're by the you're giving kind of leading questions by where what they need to focus on, right? You need to focus on the by asking them where was, you're encouraging them to focus on that next time because you know that's important what for information for the task as a coach. So that's perfect, perfect example, coach using their knowledge to guide. Questioning is is a great tool. I like to um get people to kind of answer the questions by doing it, like getting them to actually show you instead of just saying, if if at all possible. Yeah, and also it gets the athlete engaged. Um, one of the things we were hoping to get out of this is getting athlete more involved instead of just being a passive recipient of a coach ordering them what to do and pushing them around. We want them to be involved in their own learning. What's that look like? What's that what's that look like? I mean, um So how do how does that happen? Yeah, yeah so get letting them so there's a few different things. Letting them feel like having uh some choice in how sometimes I'll I'll end practice like okay, what what constraint should we do now? I'll ask them, I'll get their advice, and maybe it's something silly, but giving them how they're they they feel like they're involved, they're not just following orders. Feeling like they're part of uh part of a team, really. They want instead of having isolated drills where you're doing one-on-one, people really like the relatedness, feeling part of the dream, part of a team. Yeah, so that's that's it. But the other thing with feedback, we want to give, try to not to talk so much while someone's doing something. Do it after, right? We will there's what we call terminal feedback is much more effective than saying, unless, right, there's certain constraints, you know. I was just at a policing conference, we were talking about firearms, right? There's certain constraints that are non-negotiable, like basic firearm safety, right? Those things you want to stop. It's okay to stop immediately, right? If someone's has their finger on the trigger when they're running into a room, okay, stop. Those are non-negotiable. They're very strong, those are constraints we're giving on them, but we really want to emphasize when they're when they're buying, because they're pretty serious. Same with you know, a martial arts class or something, if you punch someone when you're not supposed to, things like that. So yeah, so but the for the most part, we want to let kind of them do their thing and then give them the feedback after. Um and I and like I said, questioning is a big one. I think that was a great example you gave.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 47:58

So one of the examples I was talking to a basketball coach the other day is in inbounding a ball, and you know, it's always getting intercepted. And I think it was in your book where you or one of your books where you talk about that where you allow the athletes to fail, right? I mean, they're gonna throw the ball to the other team and then let them come up with a solution. Somebody on maybe is that stuff and I think the Marines did that quite a bit. Uh what do they call it? Uh, internal bias for action, or uh I forgot there's a technical term for it, but they it's a way to buy into it, right? So you talk a little bit more about that.

Rob Gray, PhD: 48:28

Yeah, for sure. I I like I said earlier, I think failure is like great. Like, so yeah, letting you you can't get the ball in, then you learn to bounce pass or reach around someone, right? Instead of doing something because a coach told me to, right? Getting the person to do a bounce pass because it ends up getting that to getting I'm successful, just so much more powerful. Then they understand. I always say, let them understand the why themselves, right? Why you're doing it. Why do I want to do a bounce pass here? Because it's harder for them to block, right? Things like that. So yeah, I think that's a that's a good example. It's a really good or powerful way to learn. Didn't uh as long as you don't have too much failure, right? Too much failure is gonna demotivate them, feel confident. So you you kind of have to balance it, right? Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 49:16

What's that book uh about Vince Lombardi, like when when pride still mattered, didn't he, you know, he had gone to Jesuit schools, which were free thinking and open inquiry. And I and I'm biased, I'm a product of two Jesuit schools. But they they give you the constraints, but you're free to operate within them however you see fit, so long as you you know get the mission done, right? And and when he was teaching football, he says, even if the play calls to go to the two-hole and the four hole's open, the two-hole's not, go in the four hole. Like take make the decision to have the freedom and the autonomy within the constraints to to to make the decision to do something different. Don't just do it because the play, the play says so. The other thing I I about staying on Lombardi really quick though was that John Madden would tell the story that when he was a young coach, he went up, Lombardi would do this like coach's symposium or whatever, and he says there was eight hours on just the sweep. Like eight hours, eight hours, just the sweep. But Madden, but Mad Madden said the more that we got into it over and over and over, all of a sudden, all these different opportunities started to emerge. You started to see things differently, even though it was allegedly just a repetitive thing of just the the sweep, but it it was it was like the orientation is kind of like like you know, you don't you don't think of these things anymore, and and possibilities emerge when you get so attuned to something.

Rob Gray, PhD: 50:49

Yeah, and that yeah, there's some there's been some reanalysis of John Wooden's coaching too, and he seemed to have a lot of that in there too. Yeah, the that's where here's another term, affordance, right? What we want is our athletes to pick up affordance. We want to pick up to opportunities in the moment. So if the play calls for this, but you're right, the four holes wide open, go there, take that opportunity, right? And don't just pre-plan a movement and do it. We want and teamwork comes when two more one or more two or more teammates perceive that ordinance at the same time. So they both perceive a wide receiver perceive that they're blitzing, and he goes, he cut changes the pattern and goes along. The quarterback perceives at the same time, and boom, there's a touchdown, right? So perceive allowing things happen in the moment instead of having by picking up the information instead of having everything pre-planned and scripted.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 51:44

So we train for adaptability, right? That's what you're saying.

Rob Gray, PhD: 51:47

Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 51:48

Okay. Not not to follow a plan. And that's yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:52

Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 51:53

So the way we talk about planning, it's plans are something to deviate from. It's not a rigid approach, but most people look at it as that's what I have to follow. Or like, no, no, it's just a starting point. Yes. So this is fact. There's so much overlap between what you're doing, and again, I I I really believed um years ago that the elite coaching um community was doing this. But it sounds to me like it's just starting to, it's in pockets. It's a weak signal right now, right?

Rob Gray, PhD: 52:19

It is, yeah. Yeah, I would agree. There are some coaches that have been doing this very, very well, some sports more than others. But yeah, it it's still very traditional in a lot of ways.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 52:30

What would be a good path to do? I mean, looking at Alex, uh, I'm gonna get his name. Samara, am I saying his name? Yeah. This path is is very unique, right? To coaching. Yes. What is the talking to my girls that you know, they're like, what are they gonna do in the future? And I'm saying, hey, AI is gonna be a big part of human performance. So is coaching. So just walk me through what a good path would be to get to do what Alex is doing with the or will be doing with the Portland Fire.

Rob Gray, PhD: 52:57

Yeah, so I think, you know, Alex is because he was a coach, basketball coach first, and then he kind of I think he had an aha moment, like with I was doing some of this already, and then he came across this field that perfectly aligns with what he he felt work, and then he kind of kind of went from there and got his player development with the Cleveland Clavineers. And then so yeah, I don't I think uh just getting getting involved, like start uh thinking about practice designs, get involved in uh in in communicating. I think get out what what I tell people in my sport, get your stuff out there, right? Start a blog or a podcast, talk about how you're implementing these stuff, what you learned. Um, don't be afraid if not stuff works, talk about how you iterate on practice, right? How you so I think getting in and a lot of teams I know kind of they're they're looking at those kind of things, um, looking for the next person and take any experience you opportunity you can to learn from other coaches, even if it's not in your sport, your main area. I think there's so much you can learn from and even trying coaching other sports. So yeah, I think obviously just doing it, right? But doing it, having a mentor, having a group, one of the things I have a group that works with my podcast where we have a bunch of coaches and we just talk through problems and challenges people face doing this. Everyone's in a different sport and stuff, but it's very, very so get a coaching group to discuss some of the things you're doing and trying and get ideas from other people. I think that's really a great way to do it.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 54:29

Let me ask you this if a large corporation came to you and said, hey, how do we apply CLA to develop uh team skills or technical skills and in whatever it may be? What would your response be?

Rob Gray, PhD: 54:42

So, like if I there were if I were applying this to how to run a business, for example, or something like that.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 54:47

To improve performance, uh human performance in an organization.

Rob Gray, PhD: 54:51

Yeah, I think uh, you know, allow giving, identifying the, you know, I I think about I get people do I have a few exercises they do one constraints matrix, where I get people to think about what are the constraints in our activity or whatever we're working on? Time, space. And we work through them. And I think what might adding one of these do? Well, how might it change people's behavior? So get people thinking through those things. Yeah, so get just get people thinking along the lines and and trying stuff and and and seeing writing, observing their experience, I think is the how I would do it. And depending on the sport, I kind of well, I I work in a lot of different sports in the in now a beyond sport, some some of the things, but kind of doing I'd start with an analysis of what I think is involved in the typical way we train. And usually if I'm trying to sell myself, I talk about you know, kind of the how I would the kind of low transfer we get from the type of training to the actual environment. We see yeah. Well, yeah, I think that I think that's kind of I would say it, you know. I think it does apply. You know, I'm using a lot now is you once you see this, you can't unsee it, right? It applies to life, right? Everything in your life, you're like, oh my god, so I I could think I think it would work for anything.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 56:06

Um we've been talking about musicians and uh Yeah, Rob, I we'd have to agree with you because we come at this from a the lens of the Oodaloop, observe oriented side act, which is not just those four things. It's it's much, much more, you know, cybernetics to physics to philosophy to warfare, right? That it just represents the tip of a massive iceberg, if we want to call it that. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it's very frustrating for us to, you know, because we we're Moose and I and our organization, we have to deal with people that go, well, that's not the way I was taught. That's not what Mackenzie teach is teaching us. That's not what they're doing over there. And you're like, they're wrong. Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't work, it doesn't always work in our favor that way, right?

Rob Gray, PhD: 56:45

Yeah. That's one thing that I like about this field that's complex, adapts, right? It's not a special theory we develop for fighter pilots or humans. It applies to everything. See how sand dunes form, right? How your heart works. It's a dynamo, it's it's just it's a theory of everything. It's not an easy theory, right? It would also kind of recognize. I th I like it, I think it's a bit more honest. It's recognizing this is just messy and chaotic, and we just have to deal with that. We're except we're dealing with the whole looking at the whole picture instead of trying trying to make things controllable and understandable by reducing reductionistic.

Mark McGrath: 57:22

The generalist will survive over the specialist. Yeah, yeah. Interdisciplinary when we look at a lot of these thinkers like Boyd and McLuhan and even Vince Lombardi. I mean, Vince Lombardi was a classic example of a of a guy who was interdisciplined, like you know, very interdisciplinary training. I think that the generalist survives, not the specialist.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 57:47

Well, here's what I'm gonna do, Rob. Those people that are closest to me that that I want to influence, but I'm not gonna do it me. I'm gonna ask them to look at your podcast and look at your work. So can you tell our audience where they can find more of what you're doing, what you're doing next, who you're working with, and and all that? Just so they because I don't want them coming to me because they're they're they're friends and family. They're gonna go, Mr. Rivera's want wants this, or you know, Callan Carmen's dad wants this, we're gonna do it. No, no, no. I'm just pointing to them and saying, you should probably look at this because this is what we do with organizations that win. It's the same thing. So share with our audience what they where they can find your work.

Rob Gray, PhD: 58:21

So uh I have a website, perceptionaction.com. That's my main website. That kind of everything you mentioned. I have a podcast where I get really down the nitty-gritty of all the the details of this, applying this to skill acquisition. Um, and then I have a few books I've written and kind of the consulting uh opportunity with some do some workshops every once in a while if I'm doing a couple of police uh workshops in the in the new year. Um yeah, so you can find everything in there, perception action doc.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 58:51

All right. And then uh I've come across several coaches over the last few years. Uh I'm gonna throw their names at uh at you on here, and you you you can go ahead and decline to uh respond to it. But uh one of the ones I've been following is Joe Boylan over he used to be with Memphis Grizzlies. Um and he writes, I mean he's constantly throwing things out there. Yeah, but but I'm like, are all coaches like this? Because if they are, man, that's that's where everybody needs to be learning. So I believe he has a new company called uh I don't know what it's uh let me look it up, uh Cognition Coach. What a great name.

Rob Gray, PhD: 59:21

Um do you know Joe at all? Yeah, I do. I met a great guy. Yeah, he he's an example. I don't know, I don't think he would mind me saying this, but where the upper organized upper level management, he didn't have the quite the support in Memphis, I think, as I understand how things went. Men with the play certain players and things, so it didn't it was working well, but he didn't quite have it. But yeah, I think it's I think it's it's fun for me. I'm really I love helping people develop and help you know educate stuff. So it's very exciting to me. There are quite a few coaches that are really interested in in you know, upping their understanding of things, and that's really exciting. But it's there are that that's he's an extreme example, right? He's always posting reviews of papers he's reading and stuff. So yeah. But yeah, he's a he's he's doing interesting things with decision making and all kind of ecological approach and stuff. So yeah, it's cool.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:17

What about in baseball? I mean, any any can you share with us any coaches or organizations that are really into this?

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:00:25

Yeah, so the I've worked with two now. I used to work with the Red Sox, now I work with the Cubs. So, you know, people like Jason Ochart, who was with the Red Sox, he's he's uh a hitting coach. He he's affiliated with Drive Line. Drive Line's a private baseball training facility that has multiple locations. They really buy into a lot of this stuff. Some of the you know, the people I work with, the Cubs now, you know, Craig Counsel's our manager, he's got a lot of the you know uh these ideas in the way he coaches. I like that. So come to New York. We need you, we need it here in New York. The Yankees? Yeah. You had a guy, um, yeah, the there's a few guys that used I used to know there, but yeah, so it is expanding, and it's interesting to see uh because part of this is recreating the culture and the environment.

Mark McGrath: 1:01:13

I got a question, kind of a curveball here. So I was stationed in Japan for almost two years, and I fell in love with Japanese baseball. I think I think it's played completely differently than it is here in the United States. Right? I mean, the the crowds, the environment, it's absolutely insanity, like on the scale of European soccer. And I've noticed that the technical differences between a player that came up in the JBL versus the MLB, and then when they come over here, they either make it or they don't. But some of the ones that have been really successful, like Otani. And a Deonomo and Adeki Matsui and others. Have you ever looked into that? Like what's the what's what are the cultural differences between what goes on in baseball in Japan versus what goes on here in the United States by them?

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:02:00

Yeah, I think there's cultural differences in terms of the workload and things like that. One of the specific things I can point to is in Japan, in Korea as well, they actually they have they hire pitchers that didn't make it to the level to throw batting practice. So where whereas in North America we use more machines, right? You do batting practice with machines. We would never have a we do some lot of batting against a pitcher in practice, but you can't do too much because you wear it, you're gonna wear out the pitcher. So they have more realistic some ways more realistic training environments. But I think um, yeah, I think that's there's there's some differences like that, how much they push the kind of uh the their uh no not following strict models, things like that. But yeah, I do I agree with you. It's a fun, it's a fun environment. Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:02:52

What are their gaps? Like what what do Americans do better than they than they don't, do you think? Like by again, generally speaking.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:03:00

I don't know. I think it's it's position, you know, it's specific specific. Uh I think, you know, developing uh in the the having the develop the system minor league to major league systems better in America. But I don't know if there's any specific things I could point to that are different. I think there's you know, just we've had some extreme cases, like with the Ortho Tani, who's uh unbelievable, but I think so I don't know if they're they're kind of supposed to be.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:26

The last and probably the most natural question is just the cultural difference between Eastern culture versus Western, specifically Japanese, which is one of more respect and humility. There's there's less it's it seems like in in JBL there's less sort of highlight reel show boating, like there's less there's a lot less of the sort of fun and games that go on that take away from the actual sport.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:03:52

Yeah, for sure. And there's more, yeah, there's some kind of you know, the respecting your elders, not questioning, is it is it it's a little bit actually goes against the theory. We'd expect those to make people less skillful in the ecological dynamics.

Mark McGrath: 1:04:06

So so I it's not the best example for for for um So Pedro Martinez throwing Don Zimmer to the deck, that wouldn't happen in Japan, probably.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:04:15

Probably not, no. Or a player saying, Why are you making me do all these weird drills? You know, yeah. It probably wouldn't happen, yeah. But yeah, no, no, it's interesting. There are some, I don't know if anyone's done a baseball one. There's an interesting one in soccer, like you know, soccer, the like Brazil, their kind of culture and stuff, they reward flair and you doing all kinds of showy moves, and that's with how their players play, the million deceptive step over moves, and you know, like so it it there's definitely a culture. Culture is kind of one of the environmental constraints we talk about, right? I think as a coach, too, you create like, do you want to be a defensive team or you want to be an offensive team, right? You have to kind of create a culture around what you think's important. It can't go too strong, right? Maybe in some of your years, how hard are those to how hard are those to overcome?

Mark McGrath: 1:05:08

Because I think when people think, say Pittsburgh Steelers, they think Blitzberg, and I think Jack Lambert and Greg Lloyd and James Harrison and they think of these Paul Amalo, they think of these fearsome Hall of Fame defensive players that would put guys into the hospital or in their careers, but that kind of regression thinking doesn't address the present of the way that the game is changing and evolving.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:05:32

Yeah. No, I think you get you get very stuck in your ways, and you're right, you're not adapting to the new players. I was lucky enough to do a little bit of stuff with the Spurs, right? When they drafted Wemby. And I met Greg Popovich. He actually he came up and shook my head after I did a present presentation. He's like, hi, I'm Greg Popovich. I'm like, I know who you are. But he was like, we were talking about Wemby. He's like, I'm not sure what I'm how we're gonna coach him yet, because I have to see. Like I have to see what he has. I'm not gonna coach him like Tim Duncan. He's a completely different guy, right? So I was really impressed by that. I think if you get too structured into a culture, then you can't, you gotta and and then kind of copying a culture, like that. You like copying, oh, we want to play like Tampa Bay or whatever. And when you don't have the same people, the same environment, that's that can that's a bad one. But yeah, even copying culture from team to team, I think, can be bad. He would be an interesting guy. You've got to adjust to what you have, what you have on your team.

Mark McGrath: 1:06:28

Greg Popovich would be an interesting guy to speak with because he's an Air Force Academy graduate and he was an intelligence officer in the Air Force, and it's it'd be interesting to see how much of his uh you know wiring as a as a former officer and as a cadet, you know, how did that have an effect on? Because you know, John Boyd was an Air Force officer. Yeah. I wonder um what effect that had. He was a real Yeah. Same thing with like Shoshevsky.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:06:54

Like Shoshevsky went to West Point, and he was a culture of how they play defense and emphasis with Duke.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:05

Bum Phillips of the Houston Oilers was a marine raider that fought in World War II. Yeah. Gunfighter.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:07:12

I'm sure it had an effect. It's got a lot of skills.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:15

Tom Landry was a bomber pilot in the Eighth Air Force. A lot of these military guys, who knows? Maybe there's more than we realize. Yeah.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:24

Well, hey, Rob, we really appreciate your time today, and thanks for coming on the show. This has been fun. I definitely want to do this again with you know down the road because I think we're gonna see this evolve quite a bit. At least that's our hope. Where sports goes should be where organizations go. So thanks for what you're doing. I'm looking forward to the Spurs playing the uh nuggets this year. It's uh just something I want to see. You got a couple of uh interesting characters on both teams. Yeah. Again, thanks for your time. Any any questions to us? Any anything you may have for us?

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:07:52

No, that was great. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I'd love to do this again. And yeah, I agree with you. High performance is high performance, whether it's sports, military, police. I think the same principles can apply.

Brian 'Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:04

All right. Thanks again. We'll keep you on here for just uh one minute.

Rob Gray, PhD: 1:08:07

Yeah, thanks for that. Okay.