There's No Should in Software!

A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop that was co-led by an olympic champion. I was incredibly excited when she walked in the room. I don’t watch much volleyball regularly, but my wife and I are Olympics junkies, and I remembered her and her team’s run to the gold. In the opening session, this athlete told compelling behind-the-scenes stories about her experiences on Team USA, focusing on the work, preparation, and team building required to eventually stand on the Olympic podium. I could have listened to her all day.

In fact, many elite athletes go on to have lucrative careers as career coaches and motivational speakers once they retire from their chosen sport.  Becoming an elite athlete requires fierce dedication and sacrifice from childhood, but the whole shebang is usually over by the time they reach age 30, and many, many athletes have suffered from being ill-prepared for the next 50 years of their lives. I love that so many of these individuals have found a way to leverage their lifelong sacrifice, dedication, and learning to make a living by helping others.  

Having said that, we on the receiving end of that coaching need to recognize that these lessons aren’t completely transferable to our work lives. Both sports and business have the notions of strategies, tactics, and teams, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. 

We need to stop using sports as a metaphor for business. 

I was an athlete in my youth and am still a big sports fan.  In spite of that – or maybe because of it – it’s clear to me that believing our work teams will be successful if we only emulate sports teams is a fallacy, really.  Here’s why:

• In sports, you face one competitor at a time (maybe a few, as in gymnastics or track and field), and you do so face to face, pitting your best effort and skill against their best effort and skill on a predetermined competition day. In business, you compete against all the competitors all the time, and it’s almost never face-to-face. You rarely get to watch them display their talent and skill. 
• In sports, there is a clear beginning and end of the match / game / meet where you compete with your opponent, and when it’s over in a few hours (or days, for Cricket), there’s a clear result – win, loss, draw. In business, these moments rarely exist (if ever) the start and end times are nebulous, and the results are rarely clear.
• When you’ve beaten a given competitor once in sports, that’s it and you move on to the next.  In business, you need to beat them over and over and over again.  You don’t know who all your opponents are, and they don’t start the game at the same time.  In fact, they aren’t always even playing the same game!
• In sports, you prepare to compete against a specific opponent, you compete against that opponent, and then you recover and start to prepare for the next opponent.  In business, you compete every single day against every opponent, and there’s no cycle of prepare / compete / recover.  It’s prepare / compete (often at the same time). And because you don’t always know who your opponents are, you can’t prepare specifically for them.
• In sports, the only thing you need to be victorious is to perform better than your opponent on competition day, and usually there are 3rd parties (the audience) who care, but don’t have an impact on the outcome. You don’t need to always be better than them – just bring your best work the day you face them, and stop them from doing their best. In business, there are myriad outside forces that can impact your path to victory, and there’s a third party (the customer) who doesn’t give two figs about the competition you’re in, because they need to win the game they’re playing.
• In sports, there are established rules, competitions are overseen – live – by sanctioned officials, and there are penalties for breaking those rules.  In business, there are laws and regulations, but very little live oversight and penalties, and penalizing a rule-breaker must be done by you, and can be very expensive.
• In sports, it’s accepted that many people will try out for the team, be assessed for their ability, and potentially told they aren’t good enough.  And, for those who make the cut, they know that if their performance doesn’t stay at a high level, they could lose their position with no notice.  In business, we interview people for a few hours (see my post on interviewing) and hope they’re good at the job; and if their performance isn’t up to par, there is a long, intensive process to manage them out.
• And, maybe most importantly: sports have seasons and off-seasons; there is no off-season in business. Elite athletes sacrifice family and work/life balance during the season, because they know they can have full family and rest time in the off-season. In business, we see major burn-out, destroyed relationships, and other detritus if we don’t manage our work-life balance all year long.

It’s not that the lessons from sports can’t be applied to business.  It’s just that the parallels aren’t as great as they may seem in the middle of the insular experience of the workshop. We on the receiving end need to put the workshop lessons through a filter of practicality.  

While there are many differences between sports and business, I cannot let this post end without reminding all of us that there is one important similarity.  Not everyone has equal access to the resources and forums to play sports, just as not everyone has equal access to the resources and forums to participate in business. I heard the following phrase a number of years ago, and it resonated deeply with me:

Talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not.

I fully recognize the privilege that my personal heritage and visage offer me. Access, affordability and bias are huge barriers to a level playing field, both within and outside of sports. As a result, we have lost generations of genius in so many areas of our world, and millions of highly qualified people have been unable to realize their potential and dreams. The work must continue, and accelerate, to avoid propagating this tragedy. 

Obviously, there are many lessons we can take from sports and apply to our work lives – providing opportunities for all players, being a supportive and productive teammate, preparing, giving our all. But it’s not all applicable. Business is more complex and ambiguous, and the landscape and rules are constantly changing.  We must remember the key differences and not blindly try to turn our offices into hyper-intense Olympic stadia.