Willingness v capability - do you know the difference?

Sam’s last post about uncoachable athletes really got me thinking, as I know there are times we’re I’ve blamed the players I’ve been coaching, or got really frustrated with them and labeled them uncoachable. Only to realise after some reflection I probably hadn’t set them up to succeed as best I could. I had just been a bit too impatient with them, wanting to get ‘there’ faster. So, this post is an extension on Sam’s, and it’s another way to look at this idea, which in my mind is ultimately about our players learning how to perform.

The best way for me to introduce my take on this idea then is to tell two stories; one’s mine and one’s someone else’s.

My story:

I was coaching the (mighty) East Coast Bays Rugby team a few years back, and we’d been working on a particular attacking pattern of play that week in training. From my perspective, it was looking pretty sharp, and the guys seemed to understand it. We were having a live scrimmage against our reserve side, and the scene was set for us to execute this particular pattern. It was the right part of the field, the right time etc. I could hear us call the pattern and set up ready to have a crack. Much to my frustration watching, what played out was not what I thought I’d see. Guys went to the wrong places, made poor decisions and we completely mucked it up. Looking back, my response when we got a chance to chat with the team wasn’t the best. I was frustrated because I had thought the team were ready to nail it, but once my red mist had settled, in talking with some players, I realised that they weren’t quite ready to execute it. However, as I saw, they were willing to try. A quote from John Wooden kept going through my head driving home from that training:

 “You haven’t taught it until they have learned it” – My definition of learning is can they do it ‘live’ aka ‘in performance’ consistently.

 Someone else’s story:

 Watch this clip from Steve Hansen when you get a chance:

In a nutshell, similar to my story, the All Blacks had been training a move for a certain situation for weeks. The coaches and players were 100% confident they’d learned it. But every time the situation in the game was ripe for that particular move to be done, Dan Carter never called it. This became more and more frustrating for Graham Henry (Coach), and it wasn’t until after the third week of this happening that Hansen (assistant coach) finally shared with Henry why Carter wasn’t calling the move. The reason…. He didn’t believe in it. So basically, the flipside of my story. The players were capable, but not willing. At East Coast Bays, they were willing, but not yet capable.

This is what I mean by Willingness v Capability, and I think the two examples can highlight two different positions within this idea:

The matrix above (while simplifying what is potentially quite complex) is a nice way of framing this concept and getting us to think about the various people we’re leading and where we’d potentially plot them. Hopefully, you’re starting to think about situations you’ve been in where players didn’t seem to be shifting their behaviour or their skills and reflecting against this matrix. Was the reason more down to a lack of capability, or to a lack of willingness?

Have you ever caught yourself saying to yourself something along the lines of ‘they should just know how to do that’ or ‘they should just know what to do there’. When you hear yourself say that or think that, use that as a trigger to get curious. Why do you think they should ‘just know’. For me, you can be confident they should ‘just know’ when you’ve seen the behaviour consistently in previous situations. If that’s the case, you can probably be confident in thinking they should ‘just know’. But, if you haven’t seen the behaviour consistently before, perhaps you need to spend some time digging into whether:

1. They’ve got the capability to do what you think they should be doing:

• Can they execute under pressure?

• Do they understand exactly what’s being asked of them?

• Have they been in that situation before?

• Have they practiced it enough in lower pressure situations to get comfortable?

2. They’ve got the willingness to do what you think they should be doing:

• Do they not fully understand why you’re asking them?

• Do they not fully trust the idea?

There may be several reasons as to why they’re a bit lower on the willingness scale. In the example above with Dan Carter, it was that he didn’t believe the move was going to work. Because of that, he was never going to call it.

Admittedly, this means we potentially need to be more patient with our players, but as we know, learning isn’t linear. Just because we’ve talked about something once or tried something once in training (aka East Coast Bays), doesn’t mean everyone’s learnt it. Added to this, everyone is different and interprets our messages in different ways. Player A may grasp a concept and buy into it after one conversation, while player B might not fully buy in until we’ve had nine conversations, and they’ve failed on more than one occasion trying the opposite way. What I hope this matrix does is stops you from that fit of frustration prematurely. When you are thinking to yourself like I was coaching East Coast Bays ‘they should just know how to do this’, be curious and explore why you think that, and if it’s valid. If it’s not, do you need to spend more time on their capability, or is it actually a willingness issue?

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