The Real OODA Loop in Hockey: How CLA Coaches the Emergent Game | Dan Poliziani

Hockey is an emergent game. The puck changes hands every couple of possessions and nothing holds still long enough to script, so the players who win are the ones who read what is coming. No Way Out host Brian "Ponch" Rivera calls that the real OODA loop, and it is the heart of this conversation with Dan Poliziani, a hockey coach of more than forty years, former Yale player, and son of an Original Six pro.

After losing an eye early in his pro career, Poliziani followed the doctors' account of how his brain would rewire itself into a lifelong study of how people learn, and what he found maps onto John Boyd's OODA loop. He describes coaching as designing environments rather than running drills, shaping the constraints so athletes self-organize. That is the constraints-led approach and ecological dynamics, and it drops right into Boyd's model, where orientation is the center and skill lives in implicit guidance and control, the part built through experience, not instruction.

They cover blocked versus random-variable practice, debriefing as orientation-building, why learning is non-linear with long plateaus of consolidation, balance bikes versus training wheels, late specialization and Epstein's Range, biobanding, mission command, and why a well-oriented mind is the real edge in sport and in an AI-shaped world. The uncomfortable through line: stop coaching athletes like machines to be programmed, and start coaching them like complex adaptive systems that self-organize and win.

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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Transcript

Introduction to Dan Poliziani and episode overview

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

But your name. So hey, I am here with Dan Palizziani. Did I say that correctly? Palizziani is yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Just just like it's belt.

unknown 0:28

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:28

Palizziani. That's awesome. I love the name. So uh I found some articles on LinkedIn about coaching, constraints-led approach, and hockey. And I want to be clear with everybody. I don't know hockey at all. I mean, I'm pretty useless when it comes to hockey.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:42

I do understand high flow activities, things like basketball, soccer, reciprocal teams, and things like that. But I noticed your articles were bringing together ecological dynamics, constraints-led approach, and neuroscience. And there is some tension between the communities now that, hey, perception is direct perception, and there's that's one side of the house that we were directly coupled to the external environment. And the other side is, hey, we're predicting prediction machines. So I believe they can both be true. And I think what you're writing about is uh spot on to what I think uh needs to be resolved. And at the end of the day, when you and you may not be familiar with the observe orient decide act loop, and that's fine. But at the end of the day, it when people look at that, uh they will see that both the ecological dynamics approach, the perception, cognition, action melds well with prediction, action, and uh active inference. So the free energy principle. So, Dan, welcome to No Way Out. And uh I I wouldn't mind if you gave a little bit of

Dan's background in hockey and transition to coaching

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:44

your background to our audience so they know who you are and uh we'll get this thing airborne.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Yeah, yeah. Well, ho hockey is my background. My my uh my father was a professional hockey player back when there were six NHL teams and six American League teams, and and uh we we followed them around when when I was younger. And uh, you know, I obviously played minor hockey in my local community all all my years, and uh I I was actually able to play major junior hockey back when you could play. You the rules have since changed, and you can now play major junior hockey, which is deemed professional, and attend university hockey to get a scholarship to the United States. So I played one year major junior and uh and got injured, and when I was down with the farm team, which consisted of players that were with that were eligible for university hockey, some schools saw me play. So the following year I decided to to go to Yale University and and play hockey. I played there for four years and then turned pro, not having been drafted. And in my first year I lost an eye in a stick incident. I wrote one I wrote one article, one of the articles called Mess regarding how messy life can be. You had mentioned uh David Epstein yesterday in our conversation, and I had read his about the time I had to make uh well, I'll go back. I the injury caused a pivot in my life, and at the age of twenty-three I was no longer playing hockey and got into coaching right away. Uh I left early in my senior year to play in the American League. Uh the Los Angeles Kings farm team was right in the town of New Haven where Yale is. And and so I I I kind of let my studies slip and and uh didn't graduate on time. When the injury happened, the coach contacted me in a hospital bed. I had two operations and three procedures on the eye. It basically left me blind in the left eye. And my coach said, if you

Injury, plasticity, and career pivot

SPEAKER_02 3:44

Tim Taylor said, if you if the doctors are telling you that you're done with playing, then I'd like you to come back and finish your degree and and get into coaching. And that's what I've done. I've I've I that's what I did. I've been coaching well over you know, forty years now. It started at age twenty-three, and that's that's pretty much all I've done my entire life. I've got in I got into education in the private institutions high school loop. Uh and it's it's uh it's there you know at at that level where I really started to experiment with and research into how to become a better coach. So that's basically what's got me here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 4:22

That's fantastic. Yeah, yesterday we we talked about the connection to Yale. I asked you if you were familiar with some of the uh players that I know and some of the folks that that moved out of there. And let me just uh for our our our audience, uh Keith McCullough, who runs Hedgeye, was a captain at Yale uh for several years. And and in fact, it was through his morning macro brief show at 8:30 or 9 o'clock in the morning. He always talks about books and he talks about coaching, and he brought up uh David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box. Uh we'll have David Epstein on this podcast here soon. We're looking forward to that. But but what I like about Coach McCullough's approach is he's taking what he learned from hockey and and complexity theory and all the greatest theories that are out there, trying to apply it to the market. Right. Yeah. And he's doing a great job with that. So so a nice little connection back to Yale. And last year I took my girls up to Connecticut to go to a Yale basketball camp there. And uh

Connection between hockey, complexity, and coaching

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 5:15

they're actually here at a camp at we're here in Pennsylvania at the moment. They're at a camp not too far from here. And I just want to start off with this. We dropped them off the other day, and the coaching group uh leader got up and started talking about how much time the coaches have in D1 basketball coaching and how they all come from the same place. So I'm like, I wouldn't brag about that. I I'm not hitting, I'm not saying anything bad about it. I'm just saying we need to look outside uh, you know, you can't determine the character and nature of a system from within. You got to look outside. And I think that's what you've done is you've looked outside to bring ideas into coaching. So can you can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah. Uh well, as I said, when I I I'd come back to Canada after spending nine years at Yale, and I got into uh junior hockey, tier two junior hockey, which is a level below major junior, which is a level consistent with NCAA and a level below pro hockey. And at that level, you know, I I I I didn't have a teacher certificate, but they you know, in an academic environment, you're always asked to find ways to improve your ability to teach and coach. And uh Mike Sullivan, uh who uh d had made a presentation about uh about development at the high school level, said that you know, as as coaches are teachers and as such, it's our responsibility to to leverage what we know about the brain and about how how people learn, how children learn, and bring that to the to the sport of hockey. And and I can recall coming upon a a paper written by Richard Light back in 2012 on game sense. And what what attracted me to it was was um a piece in there that he he he discussed how how to shape drills. And that's very consistent with ecological dynamics, constraints-led approach, where you where a coach's responsibility isn't to just run drills, it's his responsibility has to shift to changing an environment, changing the environment such that the athlete is learning, is self-organizing based on

Ecological dynamics and the environment in learning

SPEAKER_02 7:20

what the environment is is providing. And and that really that really piqued my interest. I mean, my the loss of an eye early in in my career, uh and the doctor's explanation to me was very much about plasticity, how how how the brain would reorganize, the the the the neural networks in my behind my eye would reorganize and become stronger. And so the lack of depth perception and the and uh the lack of balance and you know all that proprioception type of thing would get better and and and my right eye, my good eye, would get stronger in time. And I kind of took all that information into account and and and tried to push further into hockey development, knowing what I know about plasticity and and what a dangerous thing it can be, what a wonderful thing it can be, but what a dangerous thing it can be in terms of you know drilling in a blocked fashion rather than random variable environments and the information that the athlete is is myelinating. Mike Sullivan spoke about the talent code and is it Eric Anderson's 10,000 hours, and and there's some some good and bad in in that study. Right.

unknown 8:29

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

Uh but I I took to more the the random variable environments and creating atmospheres where the uh where the athlete has to self-organize.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:38

Aaron Ross Powell So is it safe to say that the constraint of having vision out of one eye only forced you to understand more about how the brain works, and that led you to understand a little bit more about the complex systems, I don't think they called it that back then, um, but dynamical systems thinking, yeah, systems thinking, and see that if you apply what we know about the brain or what we think we know about the brain to what to organizations

Brain plasticity and complex systems in sports

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 9:02

such as a a sport team, yeah, you can actually build a better, high-performing organizational elite team. So is that can I say that? Is that true? I I I I believe that to be true.

SPEAKER_02 9:13

I mean, uh yeah talent and skill is really the combination of of a technique and its response to the environment. It blocked training, sort of repetitive, repeating something until it's uh those neural connections are myelinated. Myelin is the white fatty tissue in the brain that that reinforces neural networks. It turns, you know, what is a a dirt what would be a dirt road into a superhighway, just the connections, the automization, automization of of a skill. That's a good thing and a bad thing, because if we we we can't treat the decisions that are made in hockey, a chaotic sport, as going into the brain and retrieving a model and then applying it to those situations because the environment is fluid. It's changing it's changing constantly. I mean, the puck changes hands every two possessions. So I've got it, I pass it to you, you lose it to the opposition. They grab it, they try to make it play, they lose it. So it's a it's a very fragmented game. And I I heard you talking about basketball on one of your one of your interviews about you know, uh two separate loops within one confined loop. And and that that's that's hockey is very much like basketball in that you can't rely on a a singular model, a a technique and apply it to situations. You have to be adaptable. And I think that's what sort of random variable creating environments that are ever changing and and having athletes uh create a library of experiences that that that sit in inside this organ and our head and and allow it to predict or hallucinate, as you you mentioned yesterday as well, about what's about to happen. And the game is so chaotic, you have to rely you cannot think. I mean you cannot afford to think. There just isn't the time to do that in a game like hockey.

Chaos, variability, and decision-making in hockey

SPEAKER_02 11:12

Yeah. And basket and basketball for that matter.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 11:16

I think in all sports, uh anywhere. So what we're trying to get away from is the the the deliberate approach of prediction and active inference, more towards something which John Boyd called implicit guidance to control. We're learning about type zero and type one cognition. You we may call it system one thinking. It's kind of a yeah, yeah. So so this we have to bypass that. And when you look at the CLA approach, uh constraints led approach, though you'll so they'll show perception action. The the part that's missing in that, and the whole thing about CLA is to build skills, right? That that those skills that people can uh use to uh adapt to a changing environment, that goes right between inside the OODA loop, that goes between perception and action. It's called implicit guidance control. And actually John Boyd called it finger spit and give fuel, fingertips fill. How do you build through experience? Uh, and and we're leveraging things from naturalistic, naturalistic decision making, Gary Klein and others that say we have to build that experience up to have that ability to adapt to change and see novelty in the environment. So all we're saying here on this podcast and on this show is within John Boyd's Oodle loop, that implicit guidance to control pathway

Implicit guidance and the OODA loop

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 12:23

is absolutely critical when it comes to building high performance. And that's what you're saying too. And that's what the CLA is saying as well. We need to build those skills up. Yeah. The second thing we say on here is that you know, there's the technical skills and there's the non-technical skills. The non-technical skills being the teaming skills. And that's what we focused on with the flow system. And I'm just sharing that out with our listeners so they understand that these are not different things. We're we're trying to describe how a living system interacts with a changing environment, and CLA looks at one piece of that and says, this is what the coaches need to know. And I don't disagree. We actually 100% agree with it. And there's more to it, too, right? There's there's the the the uh the active inference part, the predictive processing part, the things that actually connect. So I I I love what you're saying because you're you're breaking it down. So coaches, and and I have a reason for doing this. I have two girls that play basketball, and their coaches do not use SEAL. And they're coach, and this is I'm gonna be brutally honest here. You brought it up. Coaching is leadership. In fact, leadership is coaching. That's what we bring up from the science of teamwork. Coaching is leadership, means that leaders and coaches need to read. They need to look outside their domains and they need to find out things and bring them in. Yeah. And if you're not doing that as a coach, you're not a coach, and you're not definitely not a leader.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

No. It's a real challenge, and and there are a number of challenges in hockey specifically, as far as I I wear two hats. I I I wear a mentor's hat in an organization, double-A organization, uh, where I'm I'm instructing, I'm trying to guide or instruct the coaches on how to coach to do exactly what we're talking about here. But the pressure or the comfort in falling back on the ways that we were all coached before. I mean, that's our comfort zone. We're all going to fall back on that if if given the choice. You're right. Coaches don't pick up books, and and and hockey organizations typically are closed systems, and entropy, the loss, the degradation of knowledge is like the Chinese telephone game. You know, I say something to you, you say something to something. It just deteriorates. And so and and then there's a some pressure with regards to the way it looks. I mean, a lot of what we're talking about asks a coach to step back and and and allow learning to occur, allow failure. So we have to create these safe environments where failure, uh, which is information, is recorded constantly, over and over and over again. And and that happens in such a dynamic, as you mentioned, in such a dynamic fashion. I have to make decisions on whether on how I how to possess a puck based on my surroundings. But so do my teammates. They have to look at me and go and ask whether or not I have the time to make a play, if I have the space to make a play. They have to perceive that as well. They have to make decisions on whether to whether I'm complete or incomplete. Complete and incomplete, meaning, you know, do have uh do I have eyes? Am I visually aware of where my teammates are to make a good decision to make a play? Or or or do an up or am I facing the boards and I don't have that capability? Now the opposition is doing that too. You mentioned the two basketball teams. They're they're making decisions on that as well. The more opportunity you have to make better decisions to outnumber an opponent, the more opportunity you have to possess a

Environment, situational awareness, and perception

SPEAKER_02 16:42

puck. The more opportunity you have to possess a puck, the more opportunities you have to score, and so on and so forth. So you you're right, it is it is much deeper, and it does involve much more than what's going on in my brain. It has to do with what's going on in our unit as a team in terms of a cohesive understanding of the environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 17:02

Yeah, you might like this, Dan. The environment, we're talking about that now. In the early 70s, mid-70s, actually, John Boyd had it in his interview, leaving the military, leaving the Air Force, and he actually talked about this. He said, I'm your environment, you're my environment, right? And you just brought that up, right? So how do you create the conditions that the kids, and we're talking about kids here for the moment, they can attune their attention towards the things in the environment that matter, right? That that's hard to do. And in in aviation, we you know, we h we call it situational awareness. It goes back to World War One. Situational awareness. Level one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, understanding what happened, understanding what's happening now, and then projecting what could happen next. And I think in the game of hockey, you really have to project what's happening next because that you said every two seconds the the puck is changing hands. Every two positions.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

So I I have it, I make a play, it's gone. It's a highly fragmented game. Chaotic. It's chaos. So how do you make sense of chaos? You have to train in it. Is there a pattern in chaos? Ultimately, I doubt it, but you you you'll begin to pick up cues. If you if you're immersed, if you train in chaos, you'll begin to pick up cues. Your brain can identify and predict, okay, I've been here before. This is what's likely going to happen. Now, I can't I can't actually think those things. It has to be it has to be instantaneous. And and that's the You have to experience it, right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 18:24

Absolutely. You have to experience it. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah.

unknown 18:26

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 18:27

So so I don't again, I don't know a lot about hockey, uh, how they train and all that. And I've had conversations with Keith about this and and folks around him that just said the same thing. It's it's such a closed system like you brought up. And and when we talk about other high flow sports, even in football, not being as high flow as as basketball, soccer, it's a lot more controlled. So it's yeah, it it's centralized control. There's offense, there's defense. It's not a reciprocal sport. And it's it's okay. It's by the way, baseball is at the other end of it, which is baseball is not really a team sport, it's a group sport, but there are high levels of interactions happening, which means you do that what we're talking about still applies, right? We're not saying don't play baseball. We're just saying different things are happening there, and it's uh more technical, I'd say. Yeah. So uh where I'm going with this is the idea of line training, uh muscle memory, which I brought was brought up, aviation thinking that we need to build muscle memory, right? That's that's you got to do the same thing over and over, you've got to dribble the same way, you got to do the same line thing, you got to do warm-ups the same way. That's all bullshit. That's all gone.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Yeah. Well, there is uh I'm not saying when I said a coach has to step back and allow a drill to teach uh the athlete, I I'm not saying that we're not coaching. In fact, a lot of a lot of the coaching comes in the organization of creating that environment. That's that's the new role that uh ecological dynamics is suggesting for coaches. But there is time for technical improv like technique, the development of technique and the myelination of specific skills like bat bouncing a basketball. If I do that, you know, for for 30 minutes uh of every practice, I'm gonna get I'm gonna automate that skill. But that doesn't transfer well into chaotic environments. And and so you know, when a player comes back out of a drill and into a line, maybe an assistant coach could be there suggesting you know a technique or or uh suggesting what he might, or even ask him, better, better yet, ask him what he saw and what he might do differently so that he actually engages in the solution rather than just being told what to do. And I think that's key. That's that's absolutely key. You know, questioning and engaging and and uh reflecting and and and video analysis after the fact so that he can see you know what's what's going on and maybe what to look for.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 20:50

Let's let's let's talk about that. That's that's debriefing. That is critical too. So this is one thing I think is is missing in CLA is effective debriefing. I just went through Rob Gray's uh new book, by the way, just to look at it. You know, he he he points out some things that are pretty solid. Is that uh on memory?

SPEAKER_02 21:05

Is it new book on memory?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh just came out in the last couple weeks. Yeah. You know, he challenges the the neuroscience perspective. I'm okay with that. We need we need good good challenges, and we can't just always assume the same thing over and over. But what he points out there is he's getting into team science and and teaming and things like that, and he's getting into recounting what happened and some good practices. And we use good practices, by the way, not best practices, because if we had best practices, everybody, you know, the dominant approach to coaching would always would always be here. It would prevail. So we're always looking for good things, yeah, better practices. Anyway, the the idea of debriefing and having the kids and players look at what happened through multiple perspectives,

Debriefing, team science, and learning from experience

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:46

which could include video. Because we want, and what we're trying to do there, in my opinion, is build that sense making up, that that situational awareness, that third-level essay. What happened? Can you recount what happened? Did you see this rotation of the ball? Did you see that? What are they attuned to in the environment? By the way, in fighter aviation, this is exactly what we built up through the world of debriefing, is that attunement uh or you know, where where do we put that attention?

unknown 22:10

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 22:10

What are you looking at when we're flying? What are you seeing? What are you noticing?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 22:14

And we build that up through debriefing, but we can only do that if they have the experience to do it from, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 22:21

So you you can't talk about not having an experience like like, hey, we watched a game we weren't part of. Did you notice it it kind of works, but you got to put them in situ so they can experience it, so we can talk about it from multiple perspectives. And chances are, as a coach, you're not seeing everything anyway, right? Right.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

True. Yeah. Right. You'll find, I mean, I we always watch it's played, and and our our our our gut feeling was that we we didn't play very well. And when you watch it back, it's actually we did, you know, there were some some things that happened that were out of our control that actually led to our believing that, but that's not the case. Anyway, I I spoke we spoke with uh Rob Gray last week. We had a uh a Zoom c call with him, myself and the other uh the head coach at uh at York University. And and I I I told him, you know, we we spoke about the problems of of uh that we are encountering with uh university men, uh, you know. Kid players playing the game age twenty to twenty-five who had had developed in a system that w where they were told what to do all their lives. And they said, How do we how do we overcome how do we overcome those habits where they they want to be told what to do when we're trying to immerse them in an environment where, one, they're still developing and need to develop, but where they have to figure things out on their own and sort of create this library of experiences. And he I I suggested video, you know, videoing our practices such that they can look at what we're doing in practice and then relate it to game situations to the point where we're we're on the bench in a game and go, ah, there's the step-out drill, so that they associate what we're doing in practice with what we're doing in the game. And he he he thought that was a good idea. He he he he he he believed that you know allowing them to see and question them about what what's happening, what might happen, or what we're going what problem we're trying to solve in in certain drills would help with uh sort of their buy-in to the uh to uh to sort of ecological dynamics and and uh you know game sense mentality.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 24:29

Dan, I'm gonna share something with you and then I want you to build on it. Uh so in in corporations, when we use what we call the flow learning lab, where we take them into a simulation, we immerse them into an environment, we co-create value. Generally, the first thing people before we even get to that, people want to know what exactly are we going to do? And my response is like, I don't know yet, because I haven't seen you guys work yet, right? So so it's kind of messy, and and most leaders don't want that. They want to know what's going to happen at 9 30, what's 9 45, 1015? What are we doing this point? I'm like, well, I don't know because I haven't seen you guys work yet, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 25:02

So we start off kind of sloppy, and then about 30, 40 minutes into the immersion, they start to buy in. And when we do uh debriefs after a 10-minute simulation, they make the connection to what they just experienced, to their day-to-day work, and that's where they get to buy it. And that's when this accelerates as they go, wait a minute, we're not doing any of these things you just showed us. And we we we have these biases, these heuristics, these things that we're implementing, these poor meetings, these poor decision-making processes. We don't do debriefing, we don't do any of the things that you're showing us, we need to fix that. That's different than telling them you need to plan, you need to brief, you need to execute, you need to debrief, you need to do it this way. You need to experience it to find out that you're making the connection to your day-to-day work, and then you get to bring that forward, and now you got buy-in.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Absolutely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 25:45

Well, that's what we do.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

Yeah. I uh you know, I'll I'll put on my mentor hat again. Uh coaches are getting anxious around

Coaching, environment design, and safe failure

SPEAKER_02 25:53

this time because they wanna they wanna, you know, start their yearly plans and you know, they want to put just talk about what systems they're gonna use and you know who's gonna occupy special roles and in special situations during the games. And and uh I I I want to caution them that how can you plan something that you didn't you don't know is gonna happen? How can you plan the year out where what I want them to do is you know start with some simple principles or or rules of thumb, so to speak, loose, loose guiding principles where they the players tell them what they need to do in practice, rather than, you know, I want to spend 20% of my practice on defense and 80% on the forwards and maybe a little bit of time with the the goaltenders. Like you said, you really have to, I don't know what your team is going to need. You're gonna have to discover that and let them tell you what you need to do. And then and then the hard part is is uh is designing practices because they don't have you know, we're asking the players to go out and experience this, and yet I feel hypocritical in that I want to give the coaches a library of drills to use. Um and and and they they don't understand that. They don't know they they have to experience that as well. And all of this, all of this, this all of this learning that has to occur takes time, and the real dilemma is the measurement of it. You know, how do you measure the success of the learning that's going on uh in a random variable environment? It's really hard to measure, except to say, you know, ask a player, you know, here's a situation where if you had a scanned to know what your options were early or how much time you had, you know, did you scan this time or didn't you scan? Measure those types of things where they're trying to take in with their senses the information that's available to them. It's it's a real difficult proposition.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:55

Well, I think there's solutions to that, and I wasn't expecting to go there with you on this, but from Gary Klein, he has a situational awareness card that you can stop and use, and we have narrative approaches to capturing what's happening. So there are red teaming techniques, and it's interesting. I just wrote something on that this morning about red teaming being a constraint, and red teaming is just how do we mitigate cognitive biases, enable critical thinking, how do we find the best uh uh look at the best idea regardless of who gave that idea, right? So there are ways to do that uh that that uh we can implement with coaches. And I want to bring up something here. If you brought me into a hockey organization, I have zero hockey knowledge, right? But I have value in coming in there to talk to the coaches and have that conversation to go, uh because they they're the subject matter experts, right? They know how how hockey works and all that, but they don't know necessarily know how this works, right? Right. So what we're trying to do is you coach the coaches, and and it's not necessary that the coaches that are coaching your coaches have a background in the game itself. They because I'll be honest with you, fighter aviation is is the ultimate skills development uh approach, right? Hands down, the best way, if you borrow ideas from that, you're gonna develop the best skills possible. Don't look at the domain and say we can't learn anything there. Look at the process that got us to build the high-performing teams, right? Absolutely. And that's what I'm getting at. So uh I want to talk about parents here here for a moment, right? Because they have a say in this. And I think there's a very important saying that we get or an idea that we get from the Toyota production system, Ono and Shingo, and that is control that's outside and bottom up. It's hard to change a system from within, but if you look at it from the outside, if you put parents in charge of this and saying, we demand that our our kids be trained the same way we want them to be to learn in school, we want that brought into the way they learn on the court or the ice. So let's talk about parents for a moment. If you're watching sloppiness, which CLA probably looks pretty sloppy to coaches or to parents, uh, the butt the baskets aren't going in, these they're they're they're throwing interceptions or passing the ball away. How do we bring the parents on board uh so when they see this, they know that there's learning happening?

Parents, development, and creating learning environments

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Oh boy, I I I I just I I just wrote an article called First Step, and it I I sort of thought, you know, parents don't instruct their children how to walk as infants. They you know they clear a room and and they make sure that there isn't, you know, anything dangerous for them to you know fall and hit their head. They create safe environments for the child to fail. And and yet when we get as soon as you put them in a rink, you you want you want instruction. We're comparing hockey is an expensive sport and it's a huge investment for parents. So you know we have we have we have leagues with levels of single, double, triple that that parents compare their child to. We compare our we equate our success with wins and losses, you know, things like that. And I it's y you're right, it's it's difficult to get them to think differently about development and have the patience and the love to allow their child to fail. Um they want to correct things right away. They want coaches to tell their child where to stand. They want their child to be able to, you know, to carry a puck down the ice and get a shot on net. But that's not that that's not easy. And if if we just treat the development in in sport, specifically hockey, as we treat you know, creating a safe environment for our child to learn how to walk. Every every the constraints are the the texture of the floor, you know, going from carpet to to linoleum or the the the amount of space from one piece of furniture to another. Those are all constraints that the child has to deal with and learn on their own. You know, we want to grab their our hands and twist their bodies so that their their legs pivot into place, but that's not the best way that children learn. That's not the way the best way for a child to learn.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 31:59

We we all want training wheels on everything, and let's talk about that because I you know I grew up riding a bike with training wheels, right? Uh and that's the dominant approach here in the US anyway. We we were fortunate to live in Germany, uh, the girls were little, and we saw these balance bikes out there. We're like, what is that? Right? So if you're not familiar for our listeners, if you're not familiar with the balance bike, it's just what it sounds like. It's a little bike with little tires and no training wheels. No. And the kids use their legs to balance, right? So they push off, there's no pedals on it. And what happens is they they they learn to balance on that. Yeah. So it's a constraint-led approach, but thinking, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Yeah, absolutely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 32:34

And when we brought them, the girls were young and they didn't have a bike uh with pedals until we brought them to the US around three or four, I think when they're when they turned three or four. But then, you know, when they're big enough, they we got them a bikes that had pedals, ever had a training wheel, and you just put them on that and you push them forward and they just ride. Yeah. Right. It's it's amazing. While the other kids are struggling, you know, they're for another two years on riding you know, with training wheels, our our girls are right riding around, right? That is a great example of of what we're talking about here is the dominant approach to riding a bike had training wheels. Yeah.

unknown 33:04

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 33:05

But the balance bike, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

Same concept, you know, learning to walk. There's a there's a period of consolidation where where where all that learning actually, there might be a uh a lapse where they fall back to just crawling around. That period of consolidation is similar to what we experience with our hockey players. You know, we're we're we're noticing that in the drilling, in this dynamic, chaotic environment, random variable self-organization, that that that it's it remains messy and it frustrates. There's a cost to a cognitive cost to the messiness and the chaotic nature of training. But over the summer, uh it's almost like there's a period of consolidation where the you know the brain, as when we sleep, starts to consolidate everything it's it's it's it's experienced during the day, and you know, like waking up in the morning with a solution or in the middle of the night with a a solution to a complex problem. It continues to to work on these problems. And and I, you know, there's there's no way uh I I'm not sure how you teach a child balance, but it at some point it becomes consolidation occurs and and automation occurs. You know, I haven't ridden a bike in ten years, but I I can still get on a bike and and and and and make my way. Uh it's it's it's there's a consolidation period that I think is really important, and a patience that is even more so with the I'm hearing this from you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 34:35

Uh so it's not a linear one percent improvement every single day. It's nonlinear, no. Um, and this is important. Right. So

Consolidation, nonlinearity, and learning phases

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 34:41

there's some concepts I learned many years ago. One's called punctuated equilibrium. Um it's just boom, things happen overnight. It's it's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

Yeah.

unknown 34:48

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 34:49

And that's in nature. You get into phase shifts, uh, that could happen. Uh, you get into attractors where you can be stuck in an attractor, and we we could talk about this in mental health, and then you get a pat as fast shift. So what we're gonna what you're going to see as parents and coaches is that consolidation period where you're not seeing any improvement. Right. Right. Right. And that's probably where most most coaches and parents give up and go, we can't do this.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Well, guess what? Or they add more teaching and more instruction and more Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 35:15

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this is normal. So let me give you an example from my world of coaching corporations. They they love what we show them. They walk out the door, they're excited, uh, and then three months later, uh in that three months that usually passes where they don't ask for coaching, they realize that they need coaching all the way through, right? And and so they see a rapid increase in their ability to do things uh immediately when they leave a workshop or a training program, and it stays flat, and then it all of a sudden it goes back down. So this is the I forget that there's like the normalization of normalization of deviance. There's a many concepts that support that. So again, what we're saying here is it's it's a nonlinear progression that you're going to see. You're going to see moments where nothing's happening.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 35:59

And that's okay. Yeah. That's how the brain actually works too, right?

SPEAKER_02 36:01

Or uh exactly. I mean, it's I mean it's got to wow, making sense of the chaos is is I mean, just just taking s slice after slice after slice of experience and you know, and and and ha you know, learning how to or understanding that it's that that that the the the predicta the the prediction ability of the brain will eventually come up with something close to what's the an what the answer is. And even if it's wrong and likely is wrong because of the fragmented game that it is and the chaotic the chaos that that's going on in a game of hockey, you're getting closer and closer to to to uh to the appropriate reaction to to chaos.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:48

There there's one thing there's there's one thing I read uh in in Rob Gray's book, and I there's a basketball player out of Michigan, I I can't think of his name at the moment, but uh ADHD. So there's a lot of children that are are uh you know now on the spectrum or or being diagnosed as being uh on the spectrum. And it doesn't mean it uh where I'm going with this is CLA actually addresses this because it creates the environment, and and there are many papers on this that you change the environment and you change the behavior. Yeah, you you get what you need out of it. You can't demand your kids to do something. And I want to bring up something else uh for our listeners and you. The idea of mission command has been around for many, many, many years, right? We we mission command is just building uh self-organizing teams through intent, uh giving them the teams the intent, give them the the uh what, but not explaining the how. There's that aspect of it. And then you you talked about this earlier. Leadership is more about creating the conditions, leading like a gardener. And for those of you who've read the book Team of Teams, you're familiar that uh General McChrystal wrote that in his book that we need to lead like gardeners. That's that's what CLA is. We you you you take the things around, the constraints around the garden, and you let it grow, right? So this is not anything new. This is mission command, this is uh leading like a gardener, this is setting the conditions, creating psychological safety, which is not about saying it's a psychologically safe place. It's actually creating the conditions through actions that leaders take, vulner vulnerability, fallibility, telling folks that I did something wrong, which is difficult to do. So what what we're talking about here is nothing new. This is just the way people best we wait best we know, people learn, right?

SPEAKER_02 38:26

Yeah, I've been I mean, uh that's the first thing I when I was asked to come in and mentor a group of coaches, I I came in and said, This is gonna fail. I just want you to know I I turned down this job because this is gonna fail. And and here's why, here are the challenges, and I went through all all of them. And it uh I I I just think changing the perspective of coaches is is such a hard thing to do when they're turning over, when coaches are turning over as often as they are from year to year, when you're getting um coaches with very little hockey background and very little foundation of knowledge in hockey, what to look for? What what to look for when you're looking when you're watching a game, a modified game, you know, drink the zone, move the nets, play a modified game. What are you what are you looking for? Or what are you looking at that you might want to correct? You know, how do you teach support? Or, you know, if if you notice that possession is something that they're struggling with, or getting a shot on net is something they're struggling with, how is it that you're gonna come come up with uh creating an environment to that'll address that? That's not an easy proposition because of their, you know, because most coaches are volunteers. I mean, now in the AAA centers they're all getting paid to coach, but most coaches are are volunteers. And and like you said, they don't pick up books and they aren't introducing new information and new evidence about about learning and and all these things that we're talking about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:01

You're gonna love this. We had uh Sue Enquist join us early on in No Way Out, and she's the uh winning NCAA softball coach, I think.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:08

She was working with our

Coaching in hockey, development, and system change

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:09

our Olympic team. Okay. Well, I met her through a flow program from uh Stephen Cotler, and she she brought up what you just brought up, which is any chuck in the truck can be a coach here in the U.S., right? It it doesn't take much. If you look, and I'm gonna ask you this about hockey in a moment, but if you look at what's happening happening in basketball, Europeans are starting to dominate, and and you know, why? I don't know why, but you you look around, they have to go through the coaches have to get a certification, some type of coach, right? They they have to know something at all levels. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

And in a lot of places they're it's basic. Yeah, I'm sure.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:41

Yeah, but here in the U.S., we I mean, you're what do you need to be an AAU coach? Maybe a background check and a little knowledge of even concussions, they have to learn a little bit about that now.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:52

But but in Europe, they're they're almost mandating in some places that uh things like CLA need to be understood by coaches. Here in the U.S., I can't get an athletic director to buy into this because it's well, it's unique, it's it's the coaches aren't going to do what they want to do. And I'm like, it's your damn job to help shape the conditions.

SPEAKER_02 41:12

In the sport of hockey, it's a little bit different than that, in that you know, Canada used to be, you know, the dominant country in that sport. It was our game. And and the other countries have started to catch up. And I John Lind is doing some interesting stuff in in Sweden. He's the director of education and and development in the Swedish Ice Hockey Association. He's looking into things like bio banding and and into early the the problems with early identification of talent in in Canada. We have a draft uh that's based on birth date. And obviously, someone born ear early January is going to be a year older than a child born in mid-December. And who's who's gonna benefit from that? And who who are the who are the the kids that were identifying as elite or the best of their group are likely going to be the older, the kids that are a year older, because they're mature, they're they're a year more mature. And he's trying to he's trying to introduce an idea of biobanding by by grouping kids by their physical maturity and their physical development rather than a strict age category, which is really interesting. And a lot of the European countries are doing that. They very much have bought into sort of play practice methodology, ecological dynamics, uh, keeping as many kids involved as possible for as long as possible, because it isn't it it isn't the early identified kids that are making it to the highest levels. It's actually the the late bloomers. So we talk about being patient and allowing time for these things to develop. I associate David Epstein's uh range book, I don't know if you've read it, sort of uh why why early specialization is going to be overcome by late bloomers. I associate that with the sampling phase of child development, you know, ages four till twelve, where it's encouraged that they play multiple sports uh because the brain, the cerebellum, the at the very base of the brainstem, is the first thing that to develop. It's the mini brain. And that's the center of athleticism. It's the use it or lose it phase, the sampling phase is the use it or lose it phase, where if you're not jumping, climbing trees and and j jumping over rocks and and playing three or four different sports when you're growing up, the brain begins to prune. There are two major blooms of gray matter and synapses in the brain. One is in early infancy through through that age of twelve, and then another in during adolescence, where the brain is overly populated with neurons and synapses. And we have to we have to diversify our use of in the in the earlier ages to become more athletic, because the more athletic you are, the more transfer there is to the particular sport that you end up choosing. So I'm not sure if that answers any of your No it does.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:13

It's cross-referencing is critical here. So if we don't have that exposure to that, and then let me give you an example. In in academia, you have experts that know their domain vertically, right? They they they know their depth. Yeah. But they don't know across. Right. And and uh when you look at things now, you need generalists to adapt to a changing environment, which is happening all around us, and you're starting to see that. So even this world of AI, and this is important, and this is a connection I want to try to make, is for future for our kids to perform well in the environment that we expect is coming with the world of AI, where they need to be really adaptable. My view is they need to be learning this in sport, just as much as they're learning it in in the classroom. And they're not. And that's why I really want my girls to learn from coaches that understand CLA, not because I want them to play basketball, because I want them to be adaptable to a changing environment. And I want to be really clear on this. It's not about going to D2, D1 school. It's about preparing for an environment that's gonna be full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. That can be accomplished through CLA. And of course, CLA is gonna change the more we learn about it, right? I mean it is it's not a it's not a panacea

Preparing for a volatile future through adaptive skills

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:22

by any means. It's a direction that I think coaches need to go and make it their own.

SPEAKER_02 45:27

Absolutely. Yeah I mean one other thing I wanted to to mention was uh was a a study uh that Dan Siegel did. He he was he was studying mirror neurons. Mirror neurons you know the sort of the the the seed of empathy. You know you look at a a sad person coming into the room and you're not going to joke with them. You're gonna understand so socially in terms of our social education you'll understand that that that they're upset. It's the the this the seat of empathy. Any player playing a sport, I mean visualization is one thing where whereby neurons fire if I'm watching you take a basketball shot and and focusing on that the same neurons are firing as I'm watching you. Not not as accurate as as you would as actually taking the shot but but I I it's important to encourage the players that are that are standing in line waiting to go to watch and identify um the danger of a situation or the the emotional charge of a of a a specific situation in order to in order to be able to adapt when they're in those situations. Understand a sense of urgency, understand uh all the things that go that go into making decisions that are emotionally charged as well as you know tactically important. I I don't know how I don't know how that relates to what you were asking me, but I I I wanted to get that I wanted to No it it does.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 47:00

So so just by observing you can learn a lot. But you have to know what you're paying attention to and that's a coaching thing too is is you know there's discipline involved in from my experience watching the girls practice and watching anybody else's it's it's better to learn from others because you you don't have enough time to make the mistakes, right? So same thing in naval aviation we we called it the gouge we we would learn from others we would have things passed down and we you watch how other people respond to an environment and then you would take that in and you you you learn faster. What ends up happening in most organized sports even AAU basketball is the kids aren't even paying attention. Even when they're part even when they're part of a a 5v0 or on air drill they're not paying attention which is probably the worst thing you should be doing anyway is put them on an on-air drill right which means there's no perception action coupling that no coupling to the environment it's just them running a drill over and over so let's let's build on that. So if you're running a drill and there's seven eight people on the sideline watching people run a drill they're gonna get bored too because there's no coupling going on there. There's nothing happening. So it's like a double whammy you're you're you're you're not learning anything they're not learning anything in the court and you're they're not learning anything on the sideline. A better approach is to to have them observe even a even I do this with the girls when I watch basketball. What did you notice about that pass? I don't know dad. Okay let's let's pay attention to how that how they're doing that because then they start to see things right and this is critical as that's what that looks like. Right? Well there or that's what that situation looks like.

SPEAKER_02 48:27

I mean there's a cost the the brain uses twenty percent of our our energy it's a pattern recognition organ because it it needs to save energy when necessary. And so redundant repetitive drills, the brain just filters, it just turns that out it it the brain wants to recognize novel things, things that are new, things that are dangerous, things that are you know that need to be attended to you know we we drive to work every day and I doubt we can recall anything about the trip in unless, you know, there's a pink elephant on a street or construction forced us to take a different route will we recall anything that happened during that time because things get the brain sh has to shut shut out certain sensory information. And and and that's why randomness and and and chaos is important because there's a lot there's a lot of newness to attend to so that sort of speaks to what you were just talking about. And and I think and this the digital age you know k kids get answers right away anything they want they want they can they can get the answer. And that that's problematic because the same it transfers over to sport you know hey you know is the coach going to come in and talk to us in between periods he said you know no I they he just wants you to sit with this and and figure things out he says tell them to come in and coach us. You know they want answers they want to be told what to do and and I think that that's a product of the way they've they've grown in sport and and possibly in life you know we all want to come to the defense of our child you know let's have that C grade turned into an A. I'll talk to the teacher about it. There's no process in in in learning there's no no involvement in the process of learning and understanding how to get better with with this new day and age. AI is could be a wonderful tool if you know what you're asking it or if you know what you're inputting into it and you know how to you know Geiger out the fallacies. I mean everything gets thrown in there. We got an if you understand what you're talking about and understand what you're asking it. If you intuition favors expertise I think Kahneman said that you know a bat a bat and a ball costs $1.10. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball how much is the ball you know in intuitively we're lazy the brain is lazy we want to say 10 cents well that's the wrong answer. You know interesting to to to understand all the all the the the value of the process that you speak to you're gonna love this i've I've actually used that in corporate training several times along with the stroop test.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 51:09

The stroop test is something we use in fighter aviation yeah I love I love it. Yeah yeah so so yeah right now I did something actually at at at Keith's event at Hedge I live where I explained the uh hollow mask illusion and and how our our brains are prediction machines and all that. So basically when the mask rotates around because faces stick out we always see the face sticking out even when we're looking at the backside of the mask. Okay. So again this is these are not these are not new things. We're just saying that fundamentally when you look at how we operate

Neuroscience, mirror neurons, and empathy in sports

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 51:38

how natural systems work that's what we want to take and we start with your to your point about artificial intelligence and and distractions like the phone and all that, that takes us out of being human momentarily. We need to get back to that and I think that's what sports can provide our kids is that moment to be back in connection with with other real humans. And you can use AI to train them and there are things that we're looking at you know like polygons and things like that to help help them recognize just like we would look like look at a HUD, a head up a heads up display in a in a cockpit to give you that information they need rapidly to learn rapidly, right? So that that's down the road but that's going to happen. I do want to ask you this Dan what about the successes with CLA and hockey what do you see them now with any I I think I I'm I'm not sure if hockey's really big on it um but but can you give us some successes that you're seeing?

SPEAKER_02 52:28

It's a struggle. I mean I know the new owners in at in the Canadian Hockey League which is major junior hockey in Owen Sound are ecological dynamic uh enthusiasts. I know that if you watch any of the rookie camps at the NHL level you see a a variety of of uh confined space games going on and and and it and it encourages you in in that you would hope that at at that level that that if people see that hey the NHL is doing it maybe we should be doing at the at the minor hockey level and the developmental levels. But the NHL can't be a model for what we do in in development with with children. Because they play so many games um and there's very little opportunity to to practice and because CLA and ecological dynamics is is expensive in terms of the amount of time it needs to to to create this library of of experiences the NHL can't be a model for that. So I I'm not I'm not overly encouraged that uh how successful it'll be uh it's been a challenge at the univers e-sports level university in Canada because you're dealing with uh 20 to 25 year olds you know I guess I'm assuming the brain is fully wired at the age of 25 through 28 years of age. There's a lot of habit there that needs to be broken down.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 53:55

I'm and and we've we've you know as we discussed with Rob Gray it's a real challenge to get them to see the value and to invest in the process you know when they're looking at our win-loss record and going boy we better work on the power play you know so building the pipeline of CLA players might be a better approach for the long term and if you look at the NBA uh right now and NW NBA and you might be familiar with Alex Sarama's story going into Portland Fire uh I don't know if you're you're tracking any of that but from Michigan I hopefully I get the coach's name Rusty May left Michigan they used CLA at Michigan they won a national championship I'm not saying it's correlation is causation I'm just saying that that that happened and then with the Mavericks uh Rusty May uh looks like it's bringing in CLA to there based on the coaches he's hiring and bringing down there. Yeah you look at San Antonio uh you look at Wemby you look at uh these players that are kind of cerebral you know they're they're big thinkers into like I'll just call it the a little bit of woo where they're we're you know meditating they're they're they're watching their diet they're looking at a holistic approach. Yeah so these these players are are kind of demanding that the CLA be brought in there. We had early indications at Oklahoma City when they won their their NBA championship that they were using CLA there's the Cavaliers we are seeing the MBA pick up on it and and here's where I want to go with this Dan what's in it for the coaches let's say you're a young you know 30 year old coach at a high school and you start doing CLA and your your objection your your objective is to move on to the U university or move on to Pro Sports. Yeah I what what advantage do you get by coaching this way? That's fantastic. I think we'll we'll wrap it up there but before we do I want to ask you where our listeners can find more about what you're doing, how they can find you. Yep I'm familiar with determined that's fantastic. I I'm so glad that you did write on LinkedIn and like I said I I came across one of your articles on I called you and I just wanted to check

Closing thoughts and where to find more about Dan

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 55:51

in with you to make sure that that that this would be a good fit and then you you jumped right into different types of decision making and I can't remember what the big one oh entropy which you brought up during this. I'm like I'm like we're on the same page. Yeah so uh I I appreciate you coming on and uh I'll give you the last words here. Oh you're welcome. Uh thanks again and and we'll keep you on here for a moment.