THE WHOLE IS SIMPLER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS

Coach the Essence of the Game to Avoid Over-complicating Things

My wife is a terrible cook. Actually she is pretty good if we are doing a dinner party and she has a recipe book in one hand and a couple of days to plan, forage and deliver meticulously. But if there is an ingredient unavailable or a piece of kitchen equipment required that we don’t have, it’s game over. For day-to-day cooking, when we get home of an evening, she will open the fridge and declare that there is nothing to eat. I will look into the same fridge and instantly knock up a risotto or a chilli or a curry from three sad looking carrots, half a lemon and a tin of chickpeas. It comes from the way I was taught to cook by my mum who had to feed a large family every night with little (if anything) in the store cupboard. And then there was her method. “How much flour should I put in this mum?” “A shake and a shoogle son” she’d reply in her broad Scottish accent “and just keep checkin’ that it’s no burnin”. We didn’t have recipe books at home, but we did have our senses to give us feedback about volumes, taste, texture and smell. We worked with what we had, we adapted and survived on a diet of necessity and creativity.

Where does good cooking or good coaching come from? Let me put the question another way. What comes first - problem solving or solutions? Now I’m not knocking instructions, they’re fine for putting together furniture from IKEA, they have a place. The point is that a recipe or an instruction manual is designed to give you a consistent solution by applying specific inputs and methods. This works really well in industrial and mechanical environments, less so in biological ones. A top chef might start with the in-season produce that is available, the essence of how the available ingredients might work together across an entire menu and works with the fundamentals of good chemistry. Good coaches are also tuned in to the essence of the game and can create the conditions for innovation and problem solving by immersing the fencer in the game dynamics.