Thursday, August 26, 2004
Expectation management
I'm off shortly to head south to compete in the national championships - a sailing regatta. With a crew of 8, one of the key things to do is to set expectations as to how we will do, and then attempt to perform to those expectations. It may be that we should win - or that we we should be in the top 10, or not last, or whatever, but part of successfully progressing in sport is to be able to appraise your abilities and work towards improving them, so that even a 19th place may be a perfectly reasonable result given the current context.
Changing these expectations is cognitively difficult - we were going into this with a core crew and a plan for top 5, with at least 2 top 3 results. But crew injury and illness and hassles has meant some major changes, and now we're much more likely to be middle or bottom 2/3, and this is hard for all to adjust to.
All this ramble is relevant - the same is true for learning and using systems - we need to know what we expect to get out of them, how much we should expect to know, and so on - and the systems should support us in developing these models. How to assist them do this is hard, however. Or maybe I'm preoccupied with going sailing - I'm not sure. There's certainly a lot that can be gaiend from reading coaching manuals in terms of pedagogical theories and supporting people developing their skills.
I'm off shortly to head south to compete in the national championships - a sailing regatta. With a crew of 8, one of the key things to do is to set expectations as to how we will do, and then attempt to perform to those expectations. It may be that we should win - or that we we should be in the top 10, or not last, or whatever, but part of successfully progressing in sport is to be able to appraise your abilities and work towards improving them, so that even a 19th place may be a perfectly reasonable result given the current context.
Changing these expectations is cognitively difficult - we were going into this with a core crew and a plan for top 5, with at least 2 top 3 results. But crew injury and illness and hassles has meant some major changes, and now we're much more likely to be middle or bottom 2/3, and this is hard for all to adjust to.
All this ramble is relevant - the same is true for learning and using systems - we need to know what we expect to get out of them, how much we should expect to know, and so on - and the systems should support us in developing these models. How to assist them do this is hard, however. Or maybe I'm preoccupied with going sailing - I'm not sure. There's certainly a lot that can be gaiend from reading coaching manuals in terms of pedagogical theories and supporting people developing their skills.
Comments:
Post a Comment
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS