#165: Coach Phil Jackson: Making difficult decisions

Making wise decisions is at the heart of leadership. Coaches are faced with a constant barrage of decisions to be made, from the small ones of little consequence to the foundational decisions that shape our futures. Consider just a small sample of the many decisions we must make: Should I be a coach? Which job should I take? Who can I trust? What system should I run? Which players should I select? What play should we run? How can I solve this conflict? How long should we practice? What should I say to the team? How can we respond? This week we examine how we can become wise decision makers. 

1.     Research on decisiveness. Decisiveness is tied to: 

1. high self-efficacy (self belief), 
2. low neuroticism (anxiety and over-thinking), 
3. emotional regulation (including under stress), 
4. cognitive processing speed (able to think quickly), 
5. intuition (tapping into tacit knowledge).
1. Louis Pasteur: "Inspiration comes only to the prepared mind."
2. Carl Jung: "Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its own history, so too is the psyche.” 
3. Coach Jackson’s long trajectory of sports preparation which informed his mind and intuition, including in the CBA.
4. The value of coaching in the G-League. “A lot of coaches are getting experience.”
5. Selecting players: “Those are some of the harder decisions to make. How does the personality fit? How does the talent fit with the team? Those are things that I learned in the minor leagues before I came into the NBA as a head coach.”
6. “As an assistant coach, there’s not a whole lot of decisions. You may make a decision about the scout team…But those are some of the minor decisions. The decisions that become difficult are things like disciplinary decisions…Those things become difficult because there is always a pecking order on a basketball team. The decision becomes, ‘how are you fair?’”
7. Management decisions that arise for head coaches. “Those are hard decisions.”
8. Non-action: problems that dissipate over time. “That problem will solve itself.”
9. Two broad strategies for decision-making are commonly addressed:
1. analysis (rooted in rationality and rigorous, detailed methods) and 
2. intuition (drawn from tacit knowledge and gut-feeling, the body and senses). There is space for both intuition and analysis.
10. On intuition: “There are some things that just strike you as, ‘I’ve got to react.’”
11. Getting analysis from assistant coaches that informed his in-game decisions: “You could walk into the huddle with that information and disseminate it to the players.”
12. “You can’t change the spots on a leopard.” Some people/players don’t change. 
13. “Even though this player is really talented, is his talent and personality meshing with the team?”
14. Intuition:  It is tied to experience, pattern recognition and deeper understandings. It is tied to our deepest values; it can be better in high stress situations and complex, uncertain ones. It may be less open to change.  
15. Transactional vs transformational behavior: the latter incorporate others into the decision-making. “I can release this into the group because they are trustworthy.”
16. Holistic intuition draws from a diversity of sources. (History, philosophy, theology, science, etc.). Pursuing “deep and narrow” expertise may be of practical use in many areas, but with regard to leadership and coaching, there may be advantages to gaining more holistic perspective. 
17. Intuition: “It’s a developed characteristic. You have to work to develop it.” Example: knowing the temperature of the locker room. “You’ve got to be sensitive enough to understand the room…”
18.  When you make a bad decision as a coach: “You’ve got to admit your fault. You have to be honest. If you’re not real with your group, you can lose them.”
19. Letting the team get beat as an act of growth: “It was like a notification, ‘Here, eat this. Feel this. Know what it feels like to be on this end of a game which you wanted to win badly but you just didn’t have the fortitude. Literally, the fortitude to stand up to a team and measure up to the strength of their character.’ As a coach, sometimes you have to let your team get beat to learn a lesson.”
20. Not calling time outs so quickly – having them play through it and figure things out for themselves. “I think this is one of those things that was unusual but also appropriate. ‘I’m not going to bail them out by letting them come over to the bench and avoid what’s going on out on the floor.’ They’ve got to eat it.”
21. Discernment. Closely tethered to decision-making. It involves deeper introspection, moral or ethical evaluation, and often a spiritual or philosophical dimension. Discernment gets beyond the “what” should I decide and probes to the “why?"
22. Should I coach? “What is your love of the game? … What is your relationship with the players? How good is the mood that you create with the team?...There are a number of things that you can see if you are really honest with yourself.”
23. “Does it distract my life? Can I coach and still have a life to live that’s full?”
24. Non-action. “Sometimes by allowing events to unfold, persons and situations reverse themselves.”
25. Helping players make difficult decisions in free agency. “How important is money as opposed to having a level of enjoyment in your life or succeeding? Is money the most important thing? “You have to have an idea of how to have someone move out the door if you want them to move on and how to keep them around if you want them in the fold…Discussing that is hard ground, but it’s honest behavior and I think it’s just.”
26. Dealing with outside influences, including parents. “You have to be impervious at some level…You have to be able to roll with that punch...”
27. Changes in college sports. Tony Bennett leaving coaching.