Anindya Dutta in The Print
The Olympics come around once every four years. Theoretically. During a pandemic, the wait could be five years, and when there is war, well, it could be twelve, or may just have to be skipped. And at the end of those four, five or even twelve years, it all comes down to that hour, that fraction of a minute, or the split second that it takes a propelled bullet to find its 0.5mm-wide mark, at least ten metres away.
Every minute of every Olympian’s life is spent preparing to peak at that exact moment when the opportunity presents itself. And if you do all that perfectly on a perfect day, and your forty-nine other near-perfect opponents don’t, then you win a gold medal. It is that difficult.
Until 2008 in Beijing, India, a country of a billion people, had not won a single gold medal in an individual Olympic event. Then Abhinav Bindra came along. Rohit Brijnath, who co-wrote Bindra’s autobiography A Shot at History, in the book’s preface writes about the time he spent with the shooter:
“I was taken aback by how far he will go to get better, this extremity not merely of pain but of perseverance that he was willing to travel to. Small things. The meticulous way he examines his pellets, the dissatisfaction even with a perfect score, the altering of the soles of his shoes by 1 millimeter, the willingness to try commando training. Anything, everything, that could help him win.”
There is a good reason for this approach. As Bindra explains: “William Tell with his crossbow had to hit the apple, I have to hit the seed inside the core of that apple. All the time, every shot, that’s my job.” He then goes on to explain exactly why the Olympics is so important to him and to every other athlete in the world who aspires to immortality in their sport:
“The pressure of the Olympics is that right then, at that precise two-hour period every four years, I have to be perfect. Or just more perfect than everyone else in the world. This is what the Olympics’ appeal is, for it is the ultimate proof of readiness. There is no higher achievement in my sport, no finer examination of sporting worth, no more excruciating confirmation of skill produced under the suffocation of tension.”
Abhinav Bindra’s road to Beijing had been a long one. At Athens, four years before, the glitter of the disc had seduced, only to deceive. Bindra was third in qualifying, a medal in his sights. Then he was seventh out of eight shooters in the final, dealing with shattered dreams.
Bindra had felt then that in terms of process, he had done everything right. But balancing sound logic and bitter disappointment is a difficult thing. At the age of 20, coming out of the Olympic shooting range, he had contemplated retirement.
Saurabh Chowdhary and Manu Bhaker, India’s talented 19-year old shooters at Tokyo went through the very same experience. They came in with the weight of expectations and a string of tournament victories behind them, followed the process, and yet melted from the heat of the Olympic altar. A deep dive, once they are back home, into what Bindra did in the four years after his own Waterloo at Athens, that turned shattered dreams into a golden disc, might well be worth their while. It could even change the story their own biographers will someday write.
Between 2004 and 2008, Bindra chased perfection. He tried everything to get that half percent improvement that would give him a 600/600 at the Olympic finals. He broke every part of his process into tiny parts and looked at how to make those parts more efficient. He even had laser surgery done to remove his love handles because he felt the love handle had a trampoline effect when his left elbow rested on his left hip. He lost his love handles but it didn’t give him a 600 every time he picked up a rifle. But he did do a few things that made the difference.
Bindra always used a German rifle, made by the Walther company (the fact that they also famously supplied Ian Fleming’s James Bond always appealed to the young marksman’s dry sense of humour). The German gun used German bullets. To his surprise, Bindra found that a particular brand of Chinese bullets were even more accurate when used in the same gun. Unsurprisingly, they happened to be the bullets the world beating Chinese shooters were using. Bindra had to have them.
There was, however, a problem with acquiring the bullets. The Chinese government wouldn’t allow the manufacturer to sell the bullets to foreigners before the Beijing Olympics were over. So Bindra had a friend in Hong Kong order 10,000 rounds for him. Those were the bullets that he brought with him to the shooting range at Beijing.
Television viewers at the recent Tokyo games would have noticed the heart rates of shooters being displayed on their screens, as they took their shots at the target. The Indian marksman had realised this even as he had first prepared for the biggest stage at Athens. But he had not internalised it until his post-Athens analysis of what he could do better.
Perfection in shooting, Bindra now knew, would come from controlling his heart rate through breathing. If he could do this, he would shoot 10’s not 9’s. So, he practised this. Day after day, month after month, he strove to bring himself to what he describes as “a more parasympathetic state, a more placid frame of mind”.
His respiratory rate prior to the Olympics was 14 to 15 cycles per minute, but by the time he got to Beijing it was down to four-five. It made him stable, allowed him to hold his breath, stay calm, and depress the trigger. He won. It has also been India’s only individual gold to date.
There wasn’t one single isolated element that Bindra did better. It was a sum total of little things that added up to be bigger than the parts. He had followed Kaizen, the Japanese method of continuous improvement. Zen philosophy doesn’t believe in perfectness. It does believe however in striving for it as the only way to be better. Abhinav Bindra is living proof of the fact that it works.
Will it make the boat go faster?
In 2018, Sir Steve Redgrave, winner of five gold medals across five Olympics, was approached by both the British and Chinese rowing authorities to work as high performance director with their respective teams. Their offer was understandable, given Redgrave’s preeminence and respect in the sport. His acceptance of the Chinese one was perhaps less obvious.
Redgrave’s remark a year later — “The Olympic Games in Tokyo are, of course, an important step in our strategy and China wants to win a gold Olympic medal there,” —was treated by the British establishment as wishful thinking. When China struck Gold at the Women’s Quadruple Sculls event in Tokyo last week, and Great Britain failed to get on the podium, the world sat up and took notice.
China didn’t just win, but the team of Chen Yunxia, Zhang Ling, Lyu Yang and Cui Xiaotong made a world record time of 6:05.13 at the Sea Forest Waterway, more than five seconds ahead of France in second position. It is not unusual that when rowing teams win gold at an Olympic event, their time would be about 10 per cent faster than the previous winners four years before. It is simply stunning to have this margin between the gold and silver medalists in the same race.
A pleased Redgrave had his trademark smile on as he told the press: “[This is] just a stepping stone to Paris.” With those words, the world had just been put on notice that he and the Chinese team are just setting out on their journey to greatness.
Before we look at what the Chinese Quadruple Sculls team did differently, we need to go back a number of years to when British rowing did something unusual in the early 1990’s. They recruited Jürgen Gröbler, a man who had moved from the former East Germany. Behind the Iron Curtain through the 1970s and 80s, Gröbler had trained some of the most successful rowers in the world and created winning teams.
Redgrave’s winning time in the coxed four in 1984 wouldn’t have qualified him for the final of the coxed fours in Seoul in 1988, Gröbler told the British. “His gold-medal winning time in Seoul in the coxless pair wouldn’t have even won him a medal in Barcelona in 1992, and so on and on.” At every four-year turn of the Olympic wheel, the bar was set higher. “You have to find more every time,” Gröbler said. He insisted that in order to win Olympic gold, every crew must increase the intensity of their training by 10 per cent compared to the previous Olympics.
Gröbler first brought in the concept of using data to improve the ‘measurables’. He insisted that it was now possible to summarise your every move against the question: ‘Will it make the boat go faster?’ Once you were convinced it would, those are the changes that rowers needed to make.
Gröbler worked with a whole host of successful British rowers in his time, but perhaps the most famous were the coxless four that won the gold medal at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. Steve Redgrave was a part of that team. When Gröbler asked him to do weight training, Redgrave baulked: “If I wanted to lift weights, I would have chosen to be a weightlifter.”
Slowly, Gröbler convinced him with evidence that Redgrave’s increased power from lifting weights would help make the boat go faster. Eventually, the British legend accepted the argument, and it propelled Redgrave to his fifth gold medal, sporting immortality and a knighthood.
Redgrave may not have had the benefit of Gröbler’s insights when he raced in the first part of his Olympics career, but he did not get his previous four gold medals without developing constantly evolving strategies over the years that had made the boat go faster.
At Tokyo, the sum total of that experience evolved into a strategy for his Chinese wards that was simple in conception, stunning in execution: “When they came together four months ago, they always showed good pace and good middle pace. What they were lacking was to change the pace in the closing stages, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last two months after the qualifying event,” Redgrave said after the race.
Sure enough, it made the boat go faster.
The one percent formula
Until 2002, British cycling had won one Olympic gold medal in 76-years. In 2008, they won 7 of the 10 golds up for grabs in track cycling and repeated the feat four years later in London. Sir David Brailsford, who took over in 2002 and is largely credited with this turnaround, became head of Britain’s first professional cycling team. His boys won the next three of the four Tour de France races that they entered.
So how did the bike go faster?
The approach, it turned out, wasn’t so different from the ‘marginal gains’ Gröbler had adopted for the rowing team more than a decade before. Brailsford decided that everything a cyclist did during the race could be broken down into little parts, and a cyclist needed to do every little part 1 per cent quicker. The sum total of these little efforts would make the bike go fast enough to climb the podium. In essence, like Abhinav Bindra, he was following Kaizen, or continuous improvement.
But this was only one of the three pillars in Brailsford’s quest for a podium finish.
The second was human performance. It was not about cycling but what went before the cyclist got on the bike — the diet, the method of training, the mental conditioning.
And finally, there were the strategies that drove the faster bike and more efficient human to ultimate victory.
An example was cyclists asking themselves what was the power needed off the line to get the start required to achieve a winning time? Once this was answered, they looked at how capable the best cyclists on the team were at generating that power. They identified the gaps between where they were and where they needed to be. If it was a bridgeable gap, they put a plan in place, and if it wasn’t, they replaced the cyclist with one who had the ability to get that start.
The British bikes went faster than that of any other nation— a total of 20 times over the next three Olympics.
Go so fast that your opponents forget you exist
If the Chinese rowers made headlines with their win at Tokyo last week, it was nothing compared to the worldwide sensation that a Ph.D. in Mathematics caused in the sport of road race cycling. She won an Olympic Gold apparently without the knowledge of her competitors.
Austrian mathematician Anna Kiesenhofer came into the race unknown and unheralded. She didn’t have a coach or support team. What she had was a strategy, and the lessons of Kaizen. She is neither Chinese nor British, but to get to gold she used the very methods they adopted. And then put a twist on it.
The road race at the Olympics is unlike any other cycling event in the world. There are no race radios, no formal teams to work with to formulate and execute a team strategy. You are on your own, often for tens of kilometres through varied terrain. This is why cyclists have pelotons. Peloton refers to the main group of cyclists who ride closely to each other. The idea is to save energy by staying close to a well-developed group and minimise chances of the drag to 5–10 per cent and make the bike go faster.
There is of course the obvious problem – the best and most experienced riders can keep their opponents in sight and make their move to race away to glory at a time that gives them the most advantage.
A few strong riders will always attempt to break away from the main peloton, trying to build such a commanding lead early in the race that the peloton cannot catch up before the finish. The riders who are in the lead, having broken away from the peloton are referred to as Tête de la Course (French for ‘Head of the Race’).
The mathematician and thinker in Kiesenhofer knew these obvious strategies, and as an outsider to the regulars, she knew she was unlikely to succeed using the same methods. She therefore had to think differently.
The road race in Tokyo is over 147 km from Musashinonomori Park to the Fuji International Speedway and involves a climb of 2,692 meters in the blistering heat of the peak Japanese summer.
The early breakaway was by a five-woman group formed by Kiesenhofer, South Africa’s Carla Oberholzer, Namibia’s Vera Looser, Poland’s Anna Plichta, and Israel’s Omer Shapira. With 50km to go, Dutch racer Demi Vollering attacked up the road, forcing the peloton in front to speed up through the pain of the uphill climb. Another Dutch rider Van Vleuten followed Vollering’s lead and attacked immediately after the gap closed. She then went ahead of the peloton and extended her lead to over a minute.
With 40km to go, what no one realised was that Kiesenhofer was not in the peloton anymore. She was actually ahead of Van Vleuten, riding solo and steadily increasing her lead. This was when her unconventional move kicked in.
One of the strategies that Tour de France cyclists in the French Alps adopt time and again, is speeding ahead of the peloton between 10 to 20km at a time to gain decisive leads. The researcher in Kiesenhofer knew, however, that there have been exceptions, notably France’s Albert Bourlon who made a 253km breakaway in 1947. So it was possible to take longer leads.
But there was a crucial element to consider. The Tour de France is a 3,414km long race. So what the topical individual or groups do at a time is for less than 0.3 per cent of the distance. Even Bourlon achieved it for about 7 per cent of the total distance.
The strategy the Austrian mathematician adopted was bold, imaginative, and utterly unconventional in its execution. With 40km to go, she knew she was ahead of Van Vleuten and out of sight among the mountain bends. So she speeded up. She knew 27 per cent of the race was yet to be run, but if she went far enough ahead and then increased her speed on the downhill stretch to the Fuji International Speedway, she would be too far away to be caught by the time the rest of the field made the move.
The strategy succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. The peloton that pursued Van Vleuten had simply forgotten that Kiesenhofer was ahead of them.
As the Dutch winner of the UCI Women’s World Tour in 2018 and the Women’s Road World Cup in 2011 triumphantly crossed the finish line in 3:54.00 arms up in the air and broke into tears, she saw Kiesenhofer standing in front holding the Austrian flag. The mirage of gold had turned into the reality of silver. She would say later: “Yes, I thought I had won. I’m gutted about this, of course. At first I felt really stupid, but then the others (her teammates) also did not know who had won.”
Let’s think about this – not even Kiesenhofer’s teammates knew that she had finished a minute and fifteen seconds ahead of Van Vluten.
The Austrian with a Master’s degree in Mathematics from University of Cambridge, and a PhD in applied mathematics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona, had outwitted and physically overwhelmed the greatest road racers of her time. And they hadn’t even realised it.
As human beings strive for the Olympic ideals of faster, stronger, higher, their quest for that crucial edge will continue unabated – the bullet that finishes 0.5mm closer, the oar that comes down just a bit straighter, the bike that goes one per cent faster.
Bindra. Redgrave. Gröbler. Kiesenhofer. These are not geniuses, just human beings in the quest for perfection. They have not reinvented the wheel in their sport, merely made it go faster. Through determination, hard work, self-belief, and an ability to visualise the unimagined, they have lowered the horizons of possibility. In doing that, they have converted their dreams into gold. We can too.
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance. Show all posts
Monday 9 August 2021
Friday 15 May 2020
Goodhart’s law comes back to haunt the UK’s Covid strategy
Chris Giles in The Financial Times
Every so often, public policy provides a reason to discover or remember the value of Goodhart’s law. The UK’s response to coronavirus is a powerful and tragic example.
Named after Charles Goodhart, a financial guru, former chief economist of the Bank of England and a sheep farmer, the maxim is about the dangers of setting targets. When a useful measure becomes a target, the law states, it often ceases to be a good measure.
Mr Goodhart developed the law after observing how Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s targeted the supply of money to control inflation but then found the monetary aggregates lost their previously strong relationship with inflation. Inflation ran out of control even when the government held a tight grip on the money supply.
What was true in 1980s UK economic policy is regularly experienced in the private sector. Far too often companies hit their top-down targets without improving underlying performance.
In the current crisis, target-setting is altogether more important. Early in March, Italy’s government strove to protect the nation’s health by locking down the Lombardy region. Initially, this led to a mini exodus that probably increased the spread of the disease to other parts of the country.
But it is in the UK where Goodhart’s law was most obviously overlooked. Throughout the crisis, “protect the NHS” has been the government’s core target. Along with “stay at home” it was the slogan repeated daily to “save lives”.
At first sight, nothing seemed amiss. Ensuring hospitals would not be overwhelmed seems so obviously necessary. Who would have wanted to see them starved of funds in a public health crisis? And their staff needed to be given all necessary equipment to battle the pandemic. With many weeks of experience, however, the slogan and associated numerical targets for making hospital beds available have been nothing short of a disaster. The evidence is overwhelming that instead of saving lives, they have cost them.
While the government focused on hospitals, care homes were given much less priority. Over the past five years between mid-March and the end of April, an average of 17,700 people have died in England and Wales’s care homes. This year, the total is just above 37,600. There is a debate over whether coronavirus was recklessly seeded into care homes when patients were moved there from hospitals. But there can be no doubt that relegating care homes to second division status contributed to the 19,900 excess deaths in the care sector.
Far more people than normal have also been dying at home and most of the excess deaths have not been classified as related to Covid-19 on death certificates. We do not yet know precisely why, but at the height of the crisis local doctors were asking their elderly patients to think hard about whether they really wanted to go to hospital or use the emergency services. A fit and sharp relative of mine received two of these calls.
The exact causal links will take time to establish. But 29,874 people have died at home since mid-March in England and Wales, 10,800 more than normal.
No one should think the government’s ambitions deliberately cost lives. But it was a deadly example of Goodhart’s law. The moment “protect the NHS” became the mantra, people dying elsewhere or without being tested didn’t count.
By comparison, the much criticised target of performing 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of April was better conceived. Although the health department fiddled definitions to hit the goal for one day, earning a rebuke from the statistical regulator, the effort has left the UK better positioned for its ultimate objective of testing, tracking and isolating those with the virus.
Goodhart’s law always pops up in unexpected places. The failure in this crisis to think through the incentives created by the “protect the NHS” slogan will haunt Britain for many years.
Every so often, public policy provides a reason to discover or remember the value of Goodhart’s law. The UK’s response to coronavirus is a powerful and tragic example.
Named after Charles Goodhart, a financial guru, former chief economist of the Bank of England and a sheep farmer, the maxim is about the dangers of setting targets. When a useful measure becomes a target, the law states, it often ceases to be a good measure.
Mr Goodhart developed the law after observing how Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s targeted the supply of money to control inflation but then found the monetary aggregates lost their previously strong relationship with inflation. Inflation ran out of control even when the government held a tight grip on the money supply.
What was true in 1980s UK economic policy is regularly experienced in the private sector. Far too often companies hit their top-down targets without improving underlying performance.
In the current crisis, target-setting is altogether more important. Early in March, Italy’s government strove to protect the nation’s health by locking down the Lombardy region. Initially, this led to a mini exodus that probably increased the spread of the disease to other parts of the country.
But it is in the UK where Goodhart’s law was most obviously overlooked. Throughout the crisis, “protect the NHS” has been the government’s core target. Along with “stay at home” it was the slogan repeated daily to “save lives”.
At first sight, nothing seemed amiss. Ensuring hospitals would not be overwhelmed seems so obviously necessary. Who would have wanted to see them starved of funds in a public health crisis? And their staff needed to be given all necessary equipment to battle the pandemic. With many weeks of experience, however, the slogan and associated numerical targets for making hospital beds available have been nothing short of a disaster. The evidence is overwhelming that instead of saving lives, they have cost them.
While the government focused on hospitals, care homes were given much less priority. Over the past five years between mid-March and the end of April, an average of 17,700 people have died in England and Wales’s care homes. This year, the total is just above 37,600. There is a debate over whether coronavirus was recklessly seeded into care homes when patients were moved there from hospitals. But there can be no doubt that relegating care homes to second division status contributed to the 19,900 excess deaths in the care sector.
Far more people than normal have also been dying at home and most of the excess deaths have not been classified as related to Covid-19 on death certificates. We do not yet know precisely why, but at the height of the crisis local doctors were asking their elderly patients to think hard about whether they really wanted to go to hospital or use the emergency services. A fit and sharp relative of mine received two of these calls.
The exact causal links will take time to establish. But 29,874 people have died at home since mid-March in England and Wales, 10,800 more than normal.
No one should think the government’s ambitions deliberately cost lives. But it was a deadly example of Goodhart’s law. The moment “protect the NHS” became the mantra, people dying elsewhere or without being tested didn’t count.
By comparison, the much criticised target of performing 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of April was better conceived. Although the health department fiddled definitions to hit the goal for one day, earning a rebuke from the statistical regulator, the effort has left the UK better positioned for its ultimate objective of testing, tracking and isolating those with the virus.
Goodhart’s law always pops up in unexpected places. The failure in this crisis to think through the incentives created by the “protect the NHS” slogan will haunt Britain for many years.
Tuesday 8 January 2019
Thursday 21 April 2016
'If you don't have the right culture, it's hard to be a high-performance team'
Former South Africa rugby captain Francois Pienaar talks about his role on Cricket South Africa's review panel. INTERVIEW BY FIRDOSE MOONDA in Cricinfo
"I have been really privileged to get involved in high-performance teams that have won" © Getty Images
Despite consistently boasting some of the best players in the world, South Africa remain the only top-eight team that has never reached a World Cup final or World T20 final. After a year in which both the men's and women's teams crashed out of a major tournament in the first round, while the Under-19 team failed to defend their title, Cricket South Africa are determined to discover why and have appointed a four-person panel to investigate.
The highest-profile person on that panel is Francois Pienaar, the Springbok (rugby) World Cup-winning captain in 1995. He and coach Kitch Christie hold an enviable 100% winning record, while Pienaar also enjoyed great success at domestic level. It is hoped some of his knowledge will rub off on the cricketers.
Pienaar spoke at the launch of the Cape Town Marathon, for which he is an ambassador, about his involvement with Cricket South Africa's review panel, what it means to be a high-performance team, and how to create a winning culture.
Why did you agree to be involved in the CSA review?
Passion. I love this country and I have been involved in cricket - I've played cricket at school, I played Nuffield Cricket, I was involved in the IPL marketing when it came here in 2009. As a panel, we all know things about high-performance and closing out games. I have been involved in a number of initiatives where we've put structures in place and they have borne fruit. This is just a privilege, to be honest.
How will you and your fellow panelists approach the review?
What we will try and learn is what the trends over the last ten years are. We will look at trends, selection, stats and come up with recommendations.
What do you, specifically, hope to bring to the review?
A different thinking from not being in the sport, coming from outside the sport. I have been really privileged to get involved in high-performance teams that have won.
Can you talk about some of the teams you were involved with and how they achieved what you call high-performance status? In 1993, the Lions won 100% of their games.
In 1994, we won 90%. As captain and coach of the Springbok rugby team, Kitch Christie and myself, we never lost. There was a certain culture of that side and a way of doing things. Our management team fulfilled high-performing roles in getting us to get a shot at the title. Even then, there are no guarantees. When you get to the final, it's a 50-50 call and it's the smart guys who work out the margins. It's all about the margins.
Then I went over to England and rugby was really amateur. I was a player-coach at Saracens, I needed to put those processes in place and, luckily, took the team to win their first ever cup. Those sort of things I am really proud of.
A brand to admire: the All Blacks have won the last two World Cups © Getty Images
Have you seen anything similar to that in cricket?
Then I went over to England and rugby was really amateur. I was a player-coach at Saracens, I needed to put those processes in place and, luckily, took the team to win their first ever cup. Those sort of things I am really proud of.
A brand to admire: the All Blacks have won the last two World Cups © Getty Images
Have you seen anything similar to that in cricket?
I had a magnificent session with the Aussies before the Ashes in the early 2000s. They asked me to do a session on margins and big games and how to close out games. I was sort of embarrassed. The best cricket team in the world by a long shot was asking me, but I found it so interesting. My payment there was that I got an insight into how they run their team. Steve Waugh as a captain and a leader - wow! I got so much from that.
What makes a high-performance team?
What makes a high-performance team?
Culture trumps strategy for breakfast. If you don't have the right culture in any organisation, it's very hard to be a high-performance team. The brand must be stronger than anything else. CEOs and coaches and captains come and go but you have to understand the culture and the core of why teams are high-performance teams, and you can't tinker with that. As soon as you start tinkering with that, then you stand the risk of not remaining a high-performance team.
Look at the All Blacks brand [New Zealand rugby], and how they nurture and love and embrace that brand. One of the nicest things for me was at the last World Cup when Graham Henry, who coached them when they won the World Cup in 2011, was coaching Argentina and New Zealand were playing against Argentina in the opening match at Wembley. I was there. My question would be what would happen in South Africa if a team of ours - cricket, rugby, soccer - if the coach who had won the World Cup in the previous outing is now coaching the opposition in the opening match. Would we invite him to lunch with the team the day before the game? I think not. They did that. The All Blacks invited Henry because he loves the guys, he is part of that brand, part of that passion, so why should they not invite him? They knew, if we are not smarter than him, if we don't train hard, then we don't deserve to win. It's about the culture.
Then afterwards, Sonny Bill Williams gave away his medal. Was it him or part of the culture? I would think it's part of the culture. Same with Richie McCaw. Why did he not retire in the World Cup? Because if he did, it would have been about him and not about the team, and he knew it needed to be about the team. That's my take.
How do you create a winning culture?
Look at the All Blacks brand [New Zealand rugby], and how they nurture and love and embrace that brand. One of the nicest things for me was at the last World Cup when Graham Henry, who coached them when they won the World Cup in 2011, was coaching Argentina and New Zealand were playing against Argentina in the opening match at Wembley. I was there. My question would be what would happen in South Africa if a team of ours - cricket, rugby, soccer - if the coach who had won the World Cup in the previous outing is now coaching the opposition in the opening match. Would we invite him to lunch with the team the day before the game? I think not. They did that. The All Blacks invited Henry because he loves the guys, he is part of that brand, part of that passion, so why should they not invite him? They knew, if we are not smarter than him, if we don't train hard, then we don't deserve to win. It's about the culture.
Then afterwards, Sonny Bill Williams gave away his medal. Was it him or part of the culture? I would think it's part of the culture. Same with Richie McCaw. Why did he not retire in the World Cup? Because if he did, it would have been about him and not about the team, and he knew it needed to be about the team. That's my take.
How do you create a winning culture?
Let's go back to rugby. Every World Cup that has been won since 1987, the core of that winning national team came from the club side that dominated. So that side knew how to win. Like in 1995, the core of our team was from the Lions. If you infuse that culture with incredible players, they will enhance the way you do things.
"We will look at trends, selection, stats and come up with recommendations" © IDI/Getty Images
Are there other elements that go into creating a winning team?
Form is very important and so are combinations - they have to work very well - and then there is leadership. How do the leaders close a game down, how do they make decisions, and how do you work with other leaders in the team to do that?
Rugby is a fairly simple game: it's about how easy you release pressure, your exit strategy, and how you stay unpredictable on attack. For that to happen, there are certain elements that need to fall into place. But the overarching thing is, do you have the right culture, have the right guys in form, have the right combinations and the leaders? Can they execute? And by leaders it's not only the captain, it's the coaches, the management staff. If you can do that right, you will be competitive a lot of the time, and if you can bottle that so that when the next guy comes, you pass the baton - you can't change that. Bottle it, understand it, love it. You'll be on the right track.
Is one of South Africa's problems that they have not found a way of gaining or transferring that knowledge?
The transfer of knowledge is something I am quite interested in discussing. Do we do that, and what are the reasons for us not doing it? In rugby, we've never had that culture. We don't have ex-coaches, for example, involved. We have got universities, schools - how can we bottle that, how can we work together? The transfer of knowledge and the sharing of ideas, we need to rekindle that.
Will transformation form part of the review?
Everything is open for discussion and it should be. If you want to do a proper job, you should have the opportunity to ask questions about all elements that enhance high-performance.
Thursday 4 February 2016
Teachers increasingly boosting predicted A-level grades to help pupils win top university places
Richard Garner in The Independent
Increasing numbers of teachers are boosting their pupils’ predicted A-level grades to help them secure offers of places at Britain’s top universities – which in turn are accepting more students who miss their targets, largely to increase their income.
Figures from Ucas, the university admissions body, show that 63 per cent of all candidates are now predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A level – up 9 percentage points from four years ago.
Yet the data shows that only a fifth of those predicted to score ABB actually achieve those grades – a 40 per cent drop from just six years ago.
READ MORE
Students increasingly admitted to university without three A-levels
The ploy by teachers has been successful because growing numbers of universities are offering “discounts” on their conditional offers to prospective students when A-level results are released.
This is because the Government decision to lift the cap on the number of places universities can offer has increased competition among the institutions when it comes to signing up students.
However, many teachers still reckon they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they are noticed and are given a provisional offer by universities. More than half of pupils accepted on predicted A-level results – 52 per cent – missed their conditional offer grades by one grade or two, another substantial rise on four years ago. Senior academics say controversy over the issue could reignite calls to move to a system whereby pupils apply for their university places after they receive their A-level results.
Many teachers believe they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they receive offers by universities (iStock)
The new figures and the trend they highlight were disclosed by Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas, at a conference at Wellington College on the future of higher education.
University admissions in numbers
63% of all candidates predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A-levels
One in five actually achieve those grades
495,940 university applicants in England
52% of candidates accepted on predicted grades miss them by one grade or two
44% of students being admitted with three B grade passes or lower, compared with 20 per cent in 2011
Ms Curnock Cook said that, in discussions with teachers, she had asked: “Surely you wouldn’t be over-predicting your students’ grades last summer?” She told the conference: “I have teachers coming back to me saying: ‘Actually, yes we would.’
“The offers are being discounted at confirmation time,” said Ms Curnock Cook, referring to A-level results day. “It’s been [caused by] the lifting of the number controls that has increased competition [amongst universities].”
“You have to hope you can unlock some latent talent [in those taken in with lower grades],” said one university source. “If you don’t take them in, they could be snapped up by a rival and their reputation increases.”
As well as lower-ranking institutions, high-tariff universities – those most selective in their intake – are also lowering their entry requirements, with 44 per cent of students being admitted with three B-grade passes or lower, compared with just 20 per cent in 2011.
Professor Michael Arthur, provost of University College London, said his university had dropped a grade in 9 per cent of admissions.
Many universities have seen huge rises in the numbers of students they are enrolling. Professor Arthur said the number of students at his university had soared from 24,000 six years ago to 37,500. Part of the increase was down to mergers with other bodies such as the Institute of Education – but at least half was due to a rise in student numbers.
The UCAS clearing house call centre in Cheltenham (Getty Images)
Another teacher said that performance-related pay, which means teachers’ salary increases depend on the results of their pupils – was leading them to predict higher grades.
“Performance-related pay and performance-related management play a part,” they said. “It is why you have to be a little bit aspirational.”
However, it was acknowledged this could be a double-edged sword – as failure to achieve the grades could result in teachers being penalised for failing to meet their targets.
Ms Curnock Cook also predicted that the number of students taking the A-level route to university would continue to drop over the next four years,
Last week Ucas showed that the number of students taking the vocational route through Btecs had almost doubled from 14 per cent in 2008 to 26 per cent last year. Predicted outcomes showed the number taking the traditional A-level route was likely to decline by 25,000 by 2020 – while the number with vocational qualifications would go up by 15,000.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We trust teachers to act in the best interests of their students by giving fair predicted A level grades that accurately reflect their ability.
"Distorting grades would be unfair on the pupils involved and could result in universities having to artificially inflate their entrance requirements, rendering it pointless in the long run."
Increasing numbers of teachers are boosting their pupils’ predicted A-level grades to help them secure offers of places at Britain’s top universities – which in turn are accepting more students who miss their targets, largely to increase their income.
Figures from Ucas, the university admissions body, show that 63 per cent of all candidates are now predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A level – up 9 percentage points from four years ago.
Yet the data shows that only a fifth of those predicted to score ABB actually achieve those grades – a 40 per cent drop from just six years ago.
READ MORE
Students increasingly admitted to university without three A-levels
The ploy by teachers has been successful because growing numbers of universities are offering “discounts” on their conditional offers to prospective students when A-level results are released.
This is because the Government decision to lift the cap on the number of places universities can offer has increased competition among the institutions when it comes to signing up students.
However, many teachers still reckon they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they are noticed and are given a provisional offer by universities. More than half of pupils accepted on predicted A-level results – 52 per cent – missed their conditional offer grades by one grade or two, another substantial rise on four years ago. Senior academics say controversy over the issue could reignite calls to move to a system whereby pupils apply for their university places after they receive their A-level results.
Many teachers believe they need to bump up their students’ potential A-level grades to ensure they receive offers by universities (iStock)
The change was called for by a government inquiry headed by former Vice-Chancellor Steven Schwartz a decade ago but disappeared from the table when universities and schools could not agree to the changes necessary to the education calendar to implement it.
The new figures and the trend they highlight were disclosed by Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of Ucas, at a conference at Wellington College on the future of higher education.
University admissions in numbers
63% of all candidates predicted to get at least an A and two B grades at A-levels
One in five actually achieve those grades
495,940 university applicants in England
52% of candidates accepted on predicted grades miss them by one grade or two
44% of students being admitted with three B grade passes or lower, compared with 20 per cent in 2011
Ms Curnock Cook said that, in discussions with teachers, she had asked: “Surely you wouldn’t be over-predicting your students’ grades last summer?” She told the conference: “I have teachers coming back to me saying: ‘Actually, yes we would.’
“The offers are being discounted at confirmation time,” said Ms Curnock Cook, referring to A-level results day. “It’s been [caused by] the lifting of the number controls that has increased competition [amongst universities].”
“You have to hope you can unlock some latent talent [in those taken in with lower grades],” said one university source. “If you don’t take them in, they could be snapped up by a rival and their reputation increases.”
As well as lower-ranking institutions, high-tariff universities – those most selective in their intake – are also lowering their entry requirements, with 44 per cent of students being admitted with three B-grade passes or lower, compared with just 20 per cent in 2011.
Professor Michael Arthur, provost of University College London, said his university had dropped a grade in 9 per cent of admissions.
Many universities have seen huge rises in the numbers of students they are enrolling. Professor Arthur said the number of students at his university had soared from 24,000 six years ago to 37,500. Part of the increase was down to mergers with other bodies such as the Institute of Education – but at least half was due to a rise in student numbers.
However, the number of university applicants from England decreased on the previous year by 0.2 percentage points to 495,940, the new figures show. The number of 18-year-olds applying also fell by 2.2 per cent.
Overall the number of university applicants for this autumn has held steady – with 593,720 applicants (up 0.2 percentage points on last year) by the time of the January deadline. But the increase was down to a significant rise in applications from the EU – up 6 percentage points to 45,220.
The figures show that more disadvantaged pupils applied than ever before – up 5 percentage points in England, 2 in Scotland and 8 in Wales.
Ms Curnock Cook urged students to be “bold” in their Ucas applications and take advantage of the fact that leading universities were lowering their admissions criteria. Speakers at the conference said parental pressure was partly to blame for teachers upping predictions for their pupils.
Overall the number of university applicants for this autumn has held steady – with 593,720 applicants (up 0.2 percentage points on last year) by the time of the January deadline. But the increase was down to a significant rise in applications from the EU – up 6 percentage points to 45,220.
The figures show that more disadvantaged pupils applied than ever before – up 5 percentage points in England, 2 in Scotland and 8 in Wales.
Ms Curnock Cook urged students to be “bold” in their Ucas applications and take advantage of the fact that leading universities were lowering their admissions criteria. Speakers at the conference said parental pressure was partly to blame for teachers upping predictions for their pupils.
The UCAS clearing house call centre in Cheltenham (Getty Images)
Another teacher said that performance-related pay, which means teachers’ salary increases depend on the results of their pupils – was leading them to predict higher grades.
“Performance-related pay and performance-related management play a part,” they said. “It is why you have to be a little bit aspirational.”
However, it was acknowledged this could be a double-edged sword – as failure to achieve the grades could result in teachers being penalised for failing to meet their targets.
Ms Curnock Cook also predicted that the number of students taking the A-level route to university would continue to drop over the next four years,
Last week Ucas showed that the number of students taking the vocational route through Btecs had almost doubled from 14 per cent in 2008 to 26 per cent last year. Predicted outcomes showed the number taking the traditional A-level route was likely to decline by 25,000 by 2020 – while the number with vocational qualifications would go up by 15,000.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: "We trust teachers to act in the best interests of their students by giving fair predicted A level grades that accurately reflect their ability.
"Distorting grades would be unfair on the pupils involved and could result in universities having to artificially inflate their entrance requirements, rendering it pointless in the long run."
Saturday 3 October 2015
How to blame less and learn more
Mathew Syed in The Guardian
Accountability. We hear a lot about it. It’s a buzzword. Politicians should be accountable for their actions; social workers for the children they are supervising; nurses for their patients. But there’s a catastrophic problem with our concept of accountability.
Consider the case of Peter Connelly, better known as Baby P, a child who died at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s brother in 2007. The perpetrators were sentenced to prison. But the media focused its outrage on a different group: mainly his social worker, Maria Ward, and Sharon Shoesmith, director of children’s services. The local council offices were surrounded by a crowd holding placards. In interviews, protesters and politicians demanded their sacking. “They must be held accountable,” it was said.
Many were convinced that the social work profession would improve its performance in the aftermath of the furore. This is what people think accountability looks like: a muscular response to failure. It is about forcing people to sit up and take responsibility. As one pundit put it: “It will focus minds.”
But what really happened? Did child services improve? In fact, social workers started leaving the profession en masse. The numbers entering the profession also plummeted. In one area, the council had to spend £1.5m on agency social work teams because it didn’t have enough permanent staff to handle a jump in referrals.
Those who stayed in the profession found themselves with bigger caseloads and less time to look after the interests of each child. They also started to intervene more aggressively, terrified that a child under their supervision would be harmed. The number of children removed from their families soared. £100m was needed to cope with new child protection orders.
Crucially, defensiveness started to infiltrate every aspect of social work. Social workers became cautious about what they documented. The bureaucratic paper trails got longer, but the words were no longer about conveying information, they were about back-covering. Precious information was concealed out of sheer terror of the consequences.
Almost every commentator estimates that the harm done to children following the attempt to “increase accountability” was high indeed. Performance collapsed. The number of children killed at the hands of their parents increased by more than 25% in the year following the outcry and remained higher for every one of the next three years.
Let us take a step back. One of the most well-established human biases is called the fundamental attribution error. It is about how the sense-making part of the brain blames individuals, rather than systemic factors, when things go wrong. When volunteers are shown a film of a driver cutting across lanes, for example, they infer that he is selfish and out of control. And this inference may indeed turn out to be true. But the situation is not always as cut-and-dried.
After all, the driver may have the sun in his eyes or be swerving to avoid a car. To most observers looking from the outside in, these factors do not register. It is not because they don’t think such possibilities are irrelevant, it is that often they don’t even consider them. The brain just sees the simplest narrative: “He’s a homicidal fool!”
Even in an absurdly simple event like this, then, it pays to pause to look beneath the surface, to challenge the most reductionist narrative. This is what aviation, as an industry, does. When mistakes are made, investigations are conducted. A classic example comes from the 1940s where there was a series of seemingly inexplicable accidents involving B-17 bombers. Pilots were pressing the wrong switches. Instead of pressing the switch to lift the flaps, they were pressing the switch to lift the landing gear.
Should they have been penalised? Or censured? The industry commissioned an investigator to probe deeper. He found that the two switches were identical and side by side. Under the pressure of a difficult landing, pilots were pressing the wrong switch. It was an error trap, an indication that human error often emerges from deeper systemic factors. The industry responded not by sacking the pilots but by attaching a rubber wheel to the landing-gear switch and a small flap shape to the flaps control. The buttons now had an intuitive meaning, easily identified under pressure. Accidents of this kind disappeared overnight.
This is sometimes called forward accountability: the responsibility to learn lessons so that future people are not harmed by avoidable mistakes.
But isn’t this soft? Won’t people get sloppy if they are not penalised for mistakes? The truth is quite the reverse. If, after proper investigation, it turns out that a person was genuinely negligent, then punishment is not only justifiable, but imperative. Professionals themselves demand this. In aviation, pilots are the most vocal in calling for punishments for colleagues who get drunk or demonstrate gross carelessness. And yet justifiable blame does not undermine openness. Management has the time to find out what really happened, giving professionals the confidence that they can speak up without being penalised for honest mistakes.
In 2001, the University of Michigan Health System introduced open reporting, guaranteeing that clinicians would not be pre-emptively blamed. As previously suppressed information began to flow, the system adapted. Reports of drug administration problems led to changes in labelling. Surgical errors led to redesigns of equipment. Malpractice claims dropped from 262 to 83. The number of claims against the University of Illinois Medical Centre fell by half in two years following a similar change. This is the power of forward accountability.
High-performance institutions, such as Google, aviation and pioneering hospitals, have grasped a precious truth. Failure is inevitable in a complex world. The key is to harness these lessons as part of a dynamic process of change. Kneejerk blame may look decisive, but it destroys the flow of information. World-class organisations interrogate errors, learn from them, and only blame after they have found out what happened.
And when Lord Laming reported on Baby P in 2009? Was blame of social workers justified? There were allegations that the report’s findings were prejudged. Even the investigators seemed terrified about what might happen to them if they didn’t appease the appetite for a scapegoat. It was final confirmation of how grotesquely distorted our concept of accountability has become.
Accountability. We hear a lot about it. It’s a buzzword. Politicians should be accountable for their actions; social workers for the children they are supervising; nurses for their patients. But there’s a catastrophic problem with our concept of accountability.
Consider the case of Peter Connelly, better known as Baby P, a child who died at the hands of his mother, her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s brother in 2007. The perpetrators were sentenced to prison. But the media focused its outrage on a different group: mainly his social worker, Maria Ward, and Sharon Shoesmith, director of children’s services. The local council offices were surrounded by a crowd holding placards. In interviews, protesters and politicians demanded their sacking. “They must be held accountable,” it was said.
Many were convinced that the social work profession would improve its performance in the aftermath of the furore. This is what people think accountability looks like: a muscular response to failure. It is about forcing people to sit up and take responsibility. As one pundit put it: “It will focus minds.”
But what really happened? Did child services improve? In fact, social workers started leaving the profession en masse. The numbers entering the profession also plummeted. In one area, the council had to spend £1.5m on agency social work teams because it didn’t have enough permanent staff to handle a jump in referrals.
Those who stayed in the profession found themselves with bigger caseloads and less time to look after the interests of each child. They also started to intervene more aggressively, terrified that a child under their supervision would be harmed. The number of children removed from their families soared. £100m was needed to cope with new child protection orders.
Crucially, defensiveness started to infiltrate every aspect of social work. Social workers became cautious about what they documented. The bureaucratic paper trails got longer, but the words were no longer about conveying information, they were about back-covering. Precious information was concealed out of sheer terror of the consequences.
Almost every commentator estimates that the harm done to children following the attempt to “increase accountability” was high indeed. Performance collapsed. The number of children killed at the hands of their parents increased by more than 25% in the year following the outcry and remained higher for every one of the next three years.
Let us take a step back. One of the most well-established human biases is called the fundamental attribution error. It is about how the sense-making part of the brain blames individuals, rather than systemic factors, when things go wrong. When volunteers are shown a film of a driver cutting across lanes, for example, they infer that he is selfish and out of control. And this inference may indeed turn out to be true. But the situation is not always as cut-and-dried.
After all, the driver may have the sun in his eyes or be swerving to avoid a car. To most observers looking from the outside in, these factors do not register. It is not because they don’t think such possibilities are irrelevant, it is that often they don’t even consider them. The brain just sees the simplest narrative: “He’s a homicidal fool!”
Even in an absurdly simple event like this, then, it pays to pause to look beneath the surface, to challenge the most reductionist narrative. This is what aviation, as an industry, does. When mistakes are made, investigations are conducted. A classic example comes from the 1940s where there was a series of seemingly inexplicable accidents involving B-17 bombers. Pilots were pressing the wrong switches. Instead of pressing the switch to lift the flaps, they were pressing the switch to lift the landing gear.
Should they have been penalised? Or censured? The industry commissioned an investigator to probe deeper. He found that the two switches were identical and side by side. Under the pressure of a difficult landing, pilots were pressing the wrong switch. It was an error trap, an indication that human error often emerges from deeper systemic factors. The industry responded not by sacking the pilots but by attaching a rubber wheel to the landing-gear switch and a small flap shape to the flaps control. The buttons now had an intuitive meaning, easily identified under pressure. Accidents of this kind disappeared overnight.
This is sometimes called forward accountability: the responsibility to learn lessons so that future people are not harmed by avoidable mistakes.
But isn’t this soft? Won’t people get sloppy if they are not penalised for mistakes? The truth is quite the reverse. If, after proper investigation, it turns out that a person was genuinely negligent, then punishment is not only justifiable, but imperative. Professionals themselves demand this. In aviation, pilots are the most vocal in calling for punishments for colleagues who get drunk or demonstrate gross carelessness. And yet justifiable blame does not undermine openness. Management has the time to find out what really happened, giving professionals the confidence that they can speak up without being penalised for honest mistakes.
In 2001, the University of Michigan Health System introduced open reporting, guaranteeing that clinicians would not be pre-emptively blamed. As previously suppressed information began to flow, the system adapted. Reports of drug administration problems led to changes in labelling. Surgical errors led to redesigns of equipment. Malpractice claims dropped from 262 to 83. The number of claims against the University of Illinois Medical Centre fell by half in two years following a similar change. This is the power of forward accountability.
High-performance institutions, such as Google, aviation and pioneering hospitals, have grasped a precious truth. Failure is inevitable in a complex world. The key is to harness these lessons as part of a dynamic process of change. Kneejerk blame may look decisive, but it destroys the flow of information. World-class organisations interrogate errors, learn from them, and only blame after they have found out what happened.
And when Lord Laming reported on Baby P in 2009? Was blame of social workers justified? There were allegations that the report’s findings were prejudged. Even the investigators seemed terrified about what might happen to them if they didn’t appease the appetite for a scapegoat. It was final confirmation of how grotesquely distorted our concept of accountability has become.
Tuesday 28 July 2015
Abolishing Annual Performance Appraisal
Lillian Cunningham in The Independent
As of September, one of the largest companies in the world will do all of its employees and managers an enormous favor: It will get rid of the annual performance review.
Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme told The Washington Post that the professional services firm, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in cities around the globe, has been quietly preparing for this “massive revolution” in its internal operations.
“Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process—it’s huge,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”
The firm will disband rankings and the once-a-year evaluation process starting in fiscal year 2016, which for Accenture begins this September. It will implement a more fluid system, in which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis following assignments.
Accenture is joining a small but prominent list of major corporations that have had enough with the forced rankings, the time-consuming paperwork and the frustration engendered among managers and employees alike. Six percent of Fortune 500 companies have gotten rid of rankings, according to management research firm CEB.
These companies say their own research, as well as outside studies, ultimately convinced them that all the time, money and effort spent didn't ultimately accomplish their main goal — to drive better performance among employees.
In March, the consulting and accounting giant Deloitte announced that it was piloting a new program in which, like at Accenture, rankings would disappear and the evaluation process would unfold incrementally throughout the year. Deloitte is also experimenting with using only four simple questions in its reviews, two of which simply require yes or no answers.
Microsoft did away with its rankings nearly two years ago, attracting particular attention since it had long evangelized about the merits of its system that judged employees against each other. Adobe, Gap and Medtronic have also transformed their performance-review process.
“All this terminology of rankings—forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever—we’re done with that,” Nanterme said of Accenture's decision. “We’re going to evaluate you in your role, not vis à vis someone else who might work in Washington, who might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you.”
Though many major companies still haven’t taken the leap, most are aware that their current systems are flawed. CEB found that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with the way their companies conduct performance reviews, and nearly 90 percent of HR leaders say the process doesn’t even yield accurate information.
“Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting,” said Brian Kropp, the HR practice leader for CEB. “Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organization going forward.”
Brain research has shown that even employees who get positive reviews experience negative effects from the process. It often triggers disengagement, and constricts our openness to creativity and growth.
CEB also found that the average manager spends more than 200 hours a year on activities related to performance reviews—things like sitting in training sessions, filling out forms and delivering evaluations to employees. When you add up those hours, plus the cost of the performance-management technology itself, CEB estimates that a company of about 10,000 employees spends roughly $35 million a year to conduct reviews.
“The process is too heavy, too costly for the outcome,” Nanterme said. “And the outcome is not great.”
Interestingly, though, the decision to roll out an updated approach usually has little to do with reining in those numbers. Kropp said companies aren’t likely to save much time or money by transitioning away from their old ratings systems to a new evaluation process. Where they stand to benefit is, instead, the return on those investments. “The smartest companies are asking, how do we get the best value out of the time and money we are spending?” Kropp said.
That’s the question Accenture posed to itself. And its answer was that performance management had to change from trying to measure the value of employees’ contribution after the fact. It needed instead to regularly support and position workers to perform better in the future.
“The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating,” Nanterme said. “It’s all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.”
As of September, one of the largest companies in the world will do all of its employees and managers an enormous favor: It will get rid of the annual performance review.
Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme told The Washington Post that the professional services firm, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in cities around the globe, has been quietly preparing for this “massive revolution” in its internal operations.
“Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process—it’s huge,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”
The firm will disband rankings and the once-a-year evaluation process starting in fiscal year 2016, which for Accenture begins this September. It will implement a more fluid system, in which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis following assignments.
Accenture is joining a small but prominent list of major corporations that have had enough with the forced rankings, the time-consuming paperwork and the frustration engendered among managers and employees alike. Six percent of Fortune 500 companies have gotten rid of rankings, according to management research firm CEB.
These companies say their own research, as well as outside studies, ultimately convinced them that all the time, money and effort spent didn't ultimately accomplish their main goal — to drive better performance among employees.
In March, the consulting and accounting giant Deloitte announced that it was piloting a new program in which, like at Accenture, rankings would disappear and the evaluation process would unfold incrementally throughout the year. Deloitte is also experimenting with using only four simple questions in its reviews, two of which simply require yes or no answers.
Microsoft did away with its rankings nearly two years ago, attracting particular attention since it had long evangelized about the merits of its system that judged employees against each other. Adobe, Gap and Medtronic have also transformed their performance-review process.
“All this terminology of rankings—forcing rankings along some distribution curve or whatever—we’re done with that,” Nanterme said of Accenture's decision. “We’re going to evaluate you in your role, not vis à vis someone else who might work in Washington, who might work in Bangalore. It’s irrelevant. It should be about you.”
Though many major companies still haven’t taken the leap, most are aware that their current systems are flawed. CEB found that 95 percent of managers are dissatisfied with the way their companies conduct performance reviews, and nearly 90 percent of HR leaders say the process doesn’t even yield accurate information.
“Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting,” said Brian Kropp, the HR practice leader for CEB. “Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organization going forward.”
Brain research has shown that even employees who get positive reviews experience negative effects from the process. It often triggers disengagement, and constricts our openness to creativity and growth.
CEB also found that the average manager spends more than 200 hours a year on activities related to performance reviews—things like sitting in training sessions, filling out forms and delivering evaluations to employees. When you add up those hours, plus the cost of the performance-management technology itself, CEB estimates that a company of about 10,000 employees spends roughly $35 million a year to conduct reviews.
“The process is too heavy, too costly for the outcome,” Nanterme said. “And the outcome is not great.”
Interestingly, though, the decision to roll out an updated approach usually has little to do with reining in those numbers. Kropp said companies aren’t likely to save much time or money by transitioning away from their old ratings systems to a new evaluation process. Where they stand to benefit is, instead, the return on those investments. “The smartest companies are asking, how do we get the best value out of the time and money we are spending?” Kropp said.
That’s the question Accenture posed to itself. And its answer was that performance management had to change from trying to measure the value of employees’ contribution after the fact. It needed instead to regularly support and position workers to perform better in the future.
“The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating,” Nanterme said. “It’s all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.”
Wednesday 11 March 2015
The secret to performing at your peak? Deciding which of the voices in your head is talking sense
Ed Smith in The New Statesman
As a batsman in the middle of an innings, alone with my thoughts at the batting crease, a silent but urgent conversation would play out inside my head. There were two voices. The first belonged to the player, the actor on the stage, the participant. The second voice was that of a coach, mentor or critic. This observer might advise “me” to be bolder, to assert myself, to be less cautious. Another time, the voice would say the opposite: “You’re losing too much control – rein things in, be more wary.”
Both voices, of course, belonged to me. But they seemed entirely distinct, quite removed from one another, one belonging to the realm of action and the second to the sphere of reflection. One person played the shots; another called the shots.
On good days, this division of labour was co-operative. When the balance between instinct and removed self-criticism felt right, the two voices got along well. At other times the critical voice was too strong and overbearing. He needed to be sent packing, his notebook chucked away.
So there were two dimensions to this conversation that required careful attention. The first was the efficacy and wisdom of the critical advice: was the critic sending the right technical or tactical messages? After all, coaches have bad days, too. The second question was whether this was the right time to be taking advice at all. Because there are moments when you are far better off trusting your own competitiveness and instinct.
A few times in my career the internal voices turned into spoken words, and the opposition fielder at short-leg would look at me in astonishment as I said something like, “Shut up! Just play! Watch the ball! That’s all you need to do!” From my perspective, it was just a small domestic disagreement in my head, nothing more. But to the outside world it looked very eccentric – or plain mad.
So I was delighted to learn the other week that I keep good company. In a sparkling interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show, Mark Rylance described how the actor on the stage, just like the batsman at the crease, has a conversation going on inside his own head:
“When you play in front of people – it may be the same for sports players, too – you have a kind of coach in your head who is monitoring whether (in my case) the passes and the different things I’m doing with the ball – if the ball is the story – whether they are real and natural and believable. You have a little voice saying, ‘Wait, wait, now; quickly, quickly, now.’ Or: ‘Too much, too much.’ And sometimes it’s too strong and you have to banish it from the stage.”
That was my experience of sport, perfectly captured by an actor.
I sometimes feel that all modes of performance – music, drama, sport – are merely variations on a theme, different expressions of the same underlying experience. The play may look different, but the stage on which the actors stand is universal.
Ten years ago, I made a series for Radio 3 called Peak Performance, in which I interviewed young classical musicians and explored the parallels between playing sport and playing music. “Acting, music, cricket – the final vocational choice was partly just chance,” the guitarist Craig Ogden told me. “If I hadn’t become a musician, I’m sure I would have done something else that put me on a stage in front of an audience.”
On The South Bank Show (24 February, Sky Arts 1), viewers watched Rylance watch himself playing Henry V. As the Rylance of today pulled on his glasses, the Rylance of the late 1990s began his version of Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech before Agincourt. Here the critic and the performer were not sharing the stage at the same moment. Instead, they were separated by years of experience and perspective. It was like watching an artist in his studio poring over his early works.
Before I’d had the chance guiltily to suppress my first reaction (“He wasn’t quite as good back then”), Rylance himself said just that. “I hadn’t yet learned to use my voice properly”: that was his assessment of his younger self. The ease and depth of his voice today, which helped make his portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall so compelling, hadn’t developed fully.
So, what changed? Mastery of technique, the refinement of his craft, is surely only part of the story. There is also the question of Rylance the man: his intellectual curiosity and search for experience, his reluctance to play it safe or to repeat himself, his openness and risk-taking, his preference for the more difficult path. Because of Rylance’s temperament and his sensibility, both of his voices – the spoken voice and the coaching voice – are far more evolved than they were 15 years ago. The actor and the critic, the player and the coach, have grown up in tandem and, with age, the conversation has become more co-operative.
Here, alas, the arts generally leave sports behind. For although some lucky sportsmen may be permitted a second act, none (except in golf) gets to enjoy middle age. It’s all over by then.
So I finished watching Rylance’s South Bank Show interview pondering two parallel questions, about careers in which talent and temperament aren’t ideally matched. Which sportsmen would have been better suited, temperamentally, to a longer and more reflective race rather than the fast-forward time of professional sport? Conversely, which actors were fated to have a long-drawn-out career when a shorter one would have suited them far better?
Because although you can shape the words you tell yourself, and can even quell the voice in your head, you can’t do much about the stage you’re standing on.
Monday 22 December 2014
Cricket - It's not the plan, stupid: it's the performance.
Ed Smith in Cricinfo
Merely calling for the heads of Cook and Moores isn't going to solve England's ODI problems © Getty Images
That the England hierarchy wasn't sure, even last week, who should captain them at the World Cup is seen as a terrible lack of planning. You know the kind of critique: problems have been obvious for a long time, need for long-term thinking, absence of a strategic plan, last-minute wobbles…
The consensus, sadly, is wrong and misleading. Planning has very little to do with it. It usually doesn't. The problem isn't bad planning but bad performances. No plan, however good in principle, can survive consistent failure. The fans and the media, understandably, demand change. Indeed, it is not good plans that lead to good performances but good performances that make plans look good. So we have the causality back to front: we talk about the consequences believing them to be the cause. After all, bad teams have plans, too. As Mike Tyson said in a moment of wisdom, "Everyone's got a plan, and then they get punched on the mouth."
Both sides - management and media - are complicit in what is essentially a kind of fraud: the myth of the plan. My television set is always at risk of having heavy objects thrown at it when coaches emerge after a defeat with the message: "Our plans were good, but we just didn't execute them well." (I don't think much more of the alternative: "We need to tweak our plans a little bit.") Always, this is said with the conviction that part a) "the plan" and part b) "the execution" were of roughly equal value and significance. In fact, as every aspiring but failed billionaire knows all too well, plans are really quite easy to formulate - it's getting the job done that's so damned difficult. My plan as a batsman was to get a fine hundred every time. Good plan. Not sure there's a better one. It was the execution that kept proving tricky.
In truth, taking refuge in woolly talk about plans is a polite way of avoiding the subject: the players didn't play very well. Perhaps it's even worse than that and they aren't that good, full stop. This is obviously not press-conference territory. So, artful ways have been cultivated to avoid the subject. An implicit deal has been struck, perhaps without anyone realising it. The media agrees to give credence to the power of planning. But in return, when the wheels fall off, it reserves the right to lambast the management's bad planning. Clichés always develop for a reason: they suit everyone. So it is with planning. For the media (and the fans served by the media), insights into "planning" hint at the inside track, a glimpse at the secret whiteboard in the dressing room. To the management, it sounds strategic and proactive, as though they aren't just sitting on chairs fiddling with rosary beads and cursing under their breath.
| Occasionally a team with fewer resources and less raw talent can win. Far more often, however, the better team wins. Acknowledging that central fact is the essential foundation of any good strategy | |||
But how useful is planning as an explanation of events? When I was growing up in the 1980s, economic gurus constantly pointed at the apparently superior Japanese model. They argued that Japan was likely to pull ahead of America because its firms pioneered gradual consensus-building and long-term planning. But between 1990 and 2013 the American economy grew by 73% in real terms, whereas Japan's expanded by 24%. In the new economy, light-footed tinkering, the ability to "pivot" (a Silicon Valley phrase that means changing direction quickly and decisively) has often proved far more effective than long-distance planning.
I write all this as someone with a lifelong interest in strategy. By nature I am considered rational rather than spur-of-the-moment and devil-may-care. It is precisely because I care about planning - and recognise its occasional but serious contribution - that I also know the limits of its remit. Planning can certainly make a difference. From Odysseus' Trojan Horse to Jose Mourinho's Champions League title with Porto, we know that occasionally, very occasionally, a team with fewer resources and less raw talent can win. Far more often, however, the better team wins, regardless of what's written on the whiteboard. Acknowledging that central fact is the essential foundation of any good strategy.
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Yet there is widespread reluctance to admit common sense. I see this first-hand when I sometimes play in amateur cricket. A bowler will be bowling all over the place - full tosses on leg stump, long hops wide of off stump. Clearly, he doesn't know where the ball is going. And then the captain calls him over for a long conversation about field placement, or, even more insanely, starts barking instructions like, "Come on! Like we talked about in the dressing room!" If the barrel of your gun is randomly crooked, the precision of your aim is totally irrelevant. You aren't going to hit the target. So first fix the gun, then we'll worry about the fine-tuning target practice.
As a professional player, I saw one spinner get a mild version of the yips. The coach's insight into the situation? "We need to work with him on how to construct an over." I'll say. He's got six balls to bowl (if we're lucky) and he doesn't know where any of them are going. Construct an over? Sounded awfully hi-tech to me, as though we were in masterful control of events, tweaking at the margins like chess grand masters. The truth was simpler: he was struggling to land the ball. "Constructing an over" was not a plan available to us.
England's bad ODI form is not about Alastair Cook. It is not about Peter Moores. It is not about being too loyal to the captain or too attached to outdated plans. The real problem is the England team. It isn't that good. Hasn't been for a long time. Especially in ODIs. Especially abroad. This is a difficult conversation, tending towards the nihilistic. So we talk about planning and tactics and captaincy instead.
How can the really salient facts be changed and improved? The whole cricketing culture in England needs to take white-ball cricket more seriously. We need better pitches for List A games at home that encourage attacking batsmanship and make greater demands of bowlers. We need to encourage innovation and risk at every level, not ask players to learn new tricks on the grandest stage.
That, I concede, is the outline of my own plan. But as I said at the beginning, plans are easy. It's getting them done that's so difficult.
Sunday 9 November 2014
Pro athletes cannot be bullied into better performances
Valuable notes from a book that explains the intricacies of coaching and captaincy without once mentioning either
Ed Smith in Cricinfo
November 9, 2014
Coaches must remember that practice isn't an end in itself © Getty Images
I've just read a brilliant book about captaincy and coaching. It might be the best book ever written on leadership in sport. The author not only studied many of the greats at first hand, he also did the job himself. There is a surprise, however, and I'm not going to spoil it. So guess, by all means, but I'm not giving away his name until the end.
I've gone through the notes in my book, collecting his advice into several themes.
Mystery
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."
"The better a captain is, the less you know why. You certainly can't get the qualities from a textbook, and they can't be faked by copying a great captain. But there is also a practical side: however much talent you're born with, there's a lot to learn. All the best captains and coaches work hard at their craft, developing their own individual ways. They all do it differently, so there can't be only one "right" way. To put all young leaders through a training course only means that a mass of mediocrity will be let loose on the world."
Instinct
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."
Intuition rather than rationality often drives inspired decisions. "Some captains and coaches are totally instinctive and can't describe what they do. [After one game] I was so impressed that I complimented the captain on a detail. 'Oh! Did I do that?' he replied."
See the big picture
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."
Being preoccupied with details can't be allowed to obscure what really matters. "Skilful captains and coaches can transform the way a team plays in a very short time, even though some of them wouldn't be able to tell you much about tactics or technique. Before modern video and analytics, there was far less emphasis on precision and more on capturing the overall mood of a team. Captains were listening for bigger and more important things. We've lost something in demanding total accuracy."
Show, don't tell
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."
One great captain "could tell me what he wanted with his eyes," the author writes. "It's important to look at players as if you expect the best, not as if you fear the worst. Many inexperienced coaches seem to be "looking for trouble", a real turnoff for a team. When I look at players during a match, I'm trying to involve and communicate what I'm feeling rather than police them."
Authenticity
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."
Waving your arms around and acting for the cameras doesn't fool anyone. The author advises captains to have the integrity to stay focused on the game situation rather than get side-tracked about the impression he's making. If the captain is "naturally flamboyant, then it's a natural expression of his feeling". But when his self-conscious gestures are just acted out, "and don't have a real relationship with the game… then it's just a circus."
Practice is not the real thing
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."
"The most important thing about a practice session is that it's not an end in itself. Everything a coach does must aim at a good performance on match day. Take a chance and leave some things fluid. Don't cross every "t" and dot every "i". This may feel risky, but it keeps a team on its toes and gives the match day an "edge". Don't practise a team to death; I've never had much sympathy for coaches who "program" a team at practice and then just "run the programme" during the match. There is more to it than that."
Seek authority not power
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."
"Captaincy and coaching are like riding a horse, not driving a car. A car will go off a cliff if you "tell" it to; a horse won't. A team has a life of its own, based largely on the players sensing what each other will do."
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Some coaches have an "unfair" knack
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."
"An assistant coach told a story about how he couldn't get the team to work together at practice sessions, despite giving crystal clear instructions. Some time later he attended a practice led by the brilliant head coach, who began with the same practice drill. The head coach gave his characteristically vague and wobbly advice, and the whole team played together perfectly. It's an unjust world."
Allow room for mavericks
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."
However good you are, some players won't listen - and nor should they. "One of the greatest players in history said he never looked at captains in the field as he couldn't understand what any of them were doing."
****
It's a very good list. But here is a confession. The book, though real, is not about cricket. The words captaincy and coaching are not mentioned at all, not once. The book's real subject is classical music, the title is Inside Conducting and its author is conductor Christopher Seaman. In quoting from the book, each time the term "conductor" appeared, I changed it for the word "captain"/"coach".
First, I want to demonstrate that cricket is not a ghetto, a special case that cannot learn from other disciplines. The art of performance is largely universal. As I found out when I made a series for the BBC comparing the life of a cricketer with that of a classical musician, the differences are dwarfed by the similarities.
Secondly, given the evolved state of professional sport, we need to rethink the outdated assumption that the way to inspire better performances is to threaten, bully, intimidate and scream at players. It's not wrong because it is undignified (though there is that too), it's wrong because it doesn't work. As I've argued before here, instead of seeing sportsmen as a rabble of unmotivated shysters in search of a sergeant-major to whip them into shape, professional athletes have more in common with surgeons and musicians.
Above all, captaincy and coaching are collaborative. No one, no matter how brilliant, can lead without followers. So I'll leave my favourite anecdote from the book in its original form, "untranslated" into cricket-speak:
"A famous conductor was conducting a major work without the score. At one point in the concert his memory failed him, and he gave an enormous downbeat in a silent bar. Nobody played, of course, and he froze in horror. A voice at the back of the violas whispered, 'Aha! He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"
Wednesday 6 August 2014
Sick of this market-driven world? You should be
The self-serving con of neoliberalism is that it has eroded the human values the market was supposed to emancipate
To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.
I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.
We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.
Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.
The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.
Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.
If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.
All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.
The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.
The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.
The same forces afflict those who can’t find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.
These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.
Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.
The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it.
So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
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