Last week, I had a conversation with the head coach of the number 1 nationally ranked ice hockey team (age-grouped), wherein he said: “Never problem solve. If the players are struggling, it’s because they are not processing well enough.” I interpreted this less as a coaching abdication and more as “never solve what the players and team need to solve.” Struggling implies that the players are trying to reconcile unfamiliar information, competing demands, or different understandings. Equally, they may be overwhelmed, missing a necessary skill, or unable to recognize the relevant cues. More subtly, struggling may not mean not processing, but rather a process in progress, and it’s critical to building collective cognition.
This sets up three interesting questions:
What’s the difference between productive and unproductive struggle?
How do coaches create the conditions for developing greater processing capacity?
How does a coach judge when an intervention helps players keep processing and when it takes the processing away from them?
This is adjacent to an idea explored in a previous article, “Smarter Teams Win More Often,” in which I argued that, given comparable talent, teams with better collective cognition convert talent into results more efficiently. Collective intelligence influences how much of that potential the team can actually express by constraining or enabling the range of varied actions they can coordinate without losing coherence.
The coach’s line expresses a few fundamental principles. In sports where coordination requires significant interaction enabled by high degrees of player agency (soccer, hockey, lacrosse, basketball, football in broken play, etc.), collective processing, at the least cost, is the game. I define processing as the players’ ability to notice, reconcile, and act into novel information in the collective. Processing allows a group of players to string together a series of distributed decisions into coordinated and effective action.
During play, no one (coach included) possesses the whole picture. Each player sees different cues, faces different constraints, and holds information others need. The challenge is therefore more than developing better individual decision makers. It is developing the connections through which those partial perspectives become useful collective action.
In collective sports, there are two broad ways this happens. You push the processing onus into the collective, understanding that decentralized sense and decision-making are experienced and expressed at the coalface. Or you attempt to centralize it through and via the coach. While the latter may be appealing, it assumes that centralized thinking can orchestrate decentralized action. Play-by-play football attempts this. This model asserts that a central intelligence reduces cognitive processing requirements by pre-learning plays. While choreography can reduce some processing demands, it cannot remove the need for collective adjustment while executing plays, or in broken play when novelty prevails.
Collective processing requires common know-how, information, communication, and an understanding of what patterns are playing out. It comes from shared intentions, recognizable cues, mutual expectations, and an understanding of what teammates are trying to accomplish. These are meta-skills that get learned through practice. The challenge is that one player’s sensible adjustment can create a problem for someone else. Collective intelligence involves learning to adjust in ways that others can recognize, anticipate, and work with.
Players learn this by:
Recognizing what teammates are responding to.
Communicating information that changes another player’s options.
Anticipating how their own adjustment will affect others.
Resolving competing interpretations while play continues.
A team becomes smarter by practicing the work of thinking together. If the coach continually performs that work, the players have fewer opportunities to develop it.
A set of potential “struggle” heuristics might be:
Processing in progress: players trying, talking, adjusting, getting closer. Hold back. Ask questions.
Overwhelmed: players going quiet, retreating into individual play, the shape collapsing. Intervene on state, not solutions. Simplify, reset, restore communication.
Missing a skill: teach it.
Can’t see the cue: direct attention; don’t supply the answer. “What’s their D doing when we enter the zone?”
The coach’s role is to design practice around the problem types players meet in games, and then to judge which kind of struggle they’re observing. Their role becomes that of a question asker and frame-of-thinking builder, allowing the players and the team to shape their internal repertoire of perception-action responses.
Circle-In gets teams to perform closer to their potential by making team behavior more visible: who is connected to whom, the quality of their relationships, and what players are thinking and feeling, together with the collective behavioral state this affords, at any point of the season. We make players more intentional, coaches more informed, and the team collectively smarter.
Graphic: Created by Gravisio from Noun Project
