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- The Invisible Hand
As a coach, Marcelo Bielsa is known for his attention to detail — sometimes a little bit too much.
When his coach’s eye is used for ethical means, Bielsa has been shown to be capable of offering a level of deep insight that is unparalleled in its wisdom.
Take this riff on the architecture of Athletic Bilbao’s training facility:
“A gym has to be between the training pitch and the dressing room. Why? So the player can follow this path: dressing room-gym-pitch, then when the session is done: pitch-gym-dressing room.
Javier Zanetti is a player who never got injured. He told me that when he went from the dressing room to the pitch every day, he would go into the gym and do a preventative routine. And when he would return from the pitch he would go into the gym again and do the same preventative routine.
He told me one day he stopped doing it, because they took the gym out from the middle between the dressing room and the pitch.
Javier Zanetti played over 1,000 games of elite football, so it’s safe to say his habits and lifestyle were strong. And yet, over time, his personal habits became overawed by something as simple as the gym location.
When we talk about creating environments, we’re often referring to the behaviour that is created by the psychological environment. In this form, ‘environment’ is unseen and stems from how we treat each other.
However, this can cause the physical environment to be overlooked. But the physical environment can be just as impactful on how people feel, and the behaviours they exhibit.
Bielsa says that Zanetti’s insight caused him to study the movements of the players over time, and make a series of recommendations to the architecture firm who were building Athletic’s new facility.
He adds: “Here’s what I proposed: link the doctor’s office with the pharmacy, to the physiotherapy room, and the doctor’s desk. This is what’s best for the club, not for me, because I will never go to the doctor’s office.”
Bielsa spent a day sketching out a facility based on his observations, bundling together sections of the building based on where the players naturally gravitate.
After presenting it to club stakeholders, he says the plan became to do what was best for the construction company — a quick solution rather than the right solution.
Very few of us will ever get to contribute to a facility design project. Heck, most of us are flat out just trying to keep our jobs a few months after delivering a championship.
However, understanding the implications of your building on behaviour is a worthwhile pursuit for any coach. Architectural inefficiencies or constraints may be unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to use the physical environment to reinforce the behaviour you’re looking for.
Here are some areas in your physical environment that warrant attention:
How do players and staff arrive into the building each day
- Are they welcomed by a human being and made to feel like they belong?Where do ‘collisions’ occur where people informally interact
- Or, is your physical environment reinforcing siloes and siloed thinking?Do you say you have an open door policy, but your door is quite literally closed?
- Asked another way: what doors are creating a barrier to conversations between players and staff, or staff and staff?What performance mindset triggers do you have, and where are they?
- Under Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks would tap a sign above the door that said “I’m in!” as they walked through the door to the practice fieldWhere can people go to switch off?
- Even the most positive, supportive environment can be overstimulating at times, so is there somewhere to go that’s deliberately quiet?Learning environment or pretend classroom?
- I’ve seen teams set up classrooms with school desks and chalkboards, which was fun for a while, but it’s not surprising that once the novelty wears off adults don’t want to feel like they’re at school anymore. A learning environment is one where you learn wherever you are, not just in a mocked-up classroom. (Why not have a mocked-up principals office as well and make naughty players sit outside…?)How do players and staff exit the building each day
- Are they farewelled by a human being and reminded that they belong?
There are dozens of other areas of your physical environment that may or may not be aligned with the behaviours you’re trying to reinforce with your team.
You may not be able to do anything about it, but you should at least know how it’s playing a role in the behaviour you’re seeing.