Coaches attest to how every team they coach has its own behavioral footprint. Even teams with well-established cultures, a large returning player cohort, act differently season to season. While behavioral dynamics may vary in intensity and nature, they are never absent. Despite coaches proactively establishing clear norms, values, expectations, and season goals, novel behavior emerges. Sometimes positive and generative, but many times negative and dysfunctional. The latter is hard to subvert, understand, and proactively mitigate. Inter-player dynamics always spring some surprises. As one coach stated – dynamics are stranger than fiction!
Behavioral dynamics are a different kind of difficult. They are not the same as playing a highly skilled team or coaching a complicated set play. They are like boxing with an opponent you can't quite see or touch. Dynamics are elusive, always on, and consequential, but offer very few direct intervention options. That's hard.
The cause is partly explained by what teams fundamentally are.
Teams are Complex – they are made of many different and interdependent parts bound in relationship and interaction
Teams are Systems – Multiple parts sharing information and energy to coordinate their inputs into common outputs
Teams are Adaptive – They are open systems that respond to their environments and contexts in order to establish and maintain some kind of internal stability. In the process, they create new patterns of self-organized behavior.
No coach can escape the consequences. Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) exhibit strange characteristics and thus behavior.
The 4 must-understands are:
The behavior of the whole cannot be predicted from understanding the attributes of the parts. The roster tells you very little about how the team will behave.
Macro or team-wide behavior emerges from the connections and interactions between the parts. States like trust, motivation, and confidence are not installed or instructed; they manifest through micro-interactions over time. Additionally, the same roster connected and interacting differently, and you have a different team.
Causation is not linear. Small changes in interaction can have outsized effects and vice versa. Feedback loops can amplify small perturbations, creating unintended ripple effects. Adding one additional player, or a minor disagreement between two players, can have a disproportionately large impact on the team's behavioral state.
Co-evolution of player and group behavior. There is both upward and downward causation. Players' interactions create team-wide dynamics, and team dynamics shape individual player behavior.
The two biggest coaching implications are:
You can control a set play because the causal structure is relatively specifiable, but you cannot specify player connectivity, relationship quality, and interaction content. This means that coaches cannot reliably control the team's behavioral outcomes from the centre, instead having to rely on indirect intervention mechanisms to influence or shepherd the structures from which behavior emerges.
Teams are dispositional in nature. Each team has its own unique behavioral tendencies and patterns inherent to their player attributes, how they are connected, and the nature of the interactions between them. Think of these as tendencies or biases. This produces each team's default behavioral fingerprint or way of being.
That's highly inconvenient. Direct intervention, work on the team, is the wrong paradigm. You have to work with teams.
If you want to better comprehend your team's behavior, look at the connection and relational structure and how players are interacting within it. Who hangs out, what language do they use, what actions do they mimic, what do they emphasize, get upset about, deflect, keep quiet about, celebrate, tend to respond to, etc. This is what drives the collective behavioral show.
Team behavior is difficult to control not because coaches lack sufficient knowledge or effort, but because they are trying to influence an emergent phenomenon whose causes are distributed across a continuously changing interaction system.
In the adjusted words of Donella Meadows: you cannot control teams, but you can dance with them. Said differently, you can't control dynamics directly, but you can condition and constrain them. It's the thing that great coaches are able to develop and orchestrate. Build cultures, conditions, and processes that expand connection densities, foster more robust relationships, and mediate generative interactions. This clarifies expectations, expands mutual player intelligibility and coherence, all while minimizing coordination friction.
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, 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.
