Learning what not to do from the New England Patriots football team

Before I came up with the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach ("Why can't the "Bilbao Effect" be reproduced? | Bilbao as an example of Transformational Projects Action Planning," 2017), earlier I came up with a method I called Action Planning, which incorporates design thinking and social marketing into the planning process, based on best practices I observed in Arlington County and the Tower Hamlets borough of London ("Social Marketing the Arlington (and Tower Hamlets and Baltimore) way," 2008, "All the talk of e-government, digital government, and open source government is really about employing the design method," 2012).  

From "Design Thinking," American Libraries, 2008

I used action planning concepts when I did a pedestrian and bicycle plan for Baltimore County ("Best practice bicycle planning for suburban settings using the "action planning" method," 2010).

Basically, I'm interested in continuous process improvement and iterative learning ("Incrementalism as a concept of iterative improvement in government project development no longer a legitimate public administration theory," 2023) applied to government and social program improvement.

I have a bunch of posts on this for government:

-- "Big data/Machine Learning/AI as a policy savior," 2022
-- "I get tired of all the talk about rewarding "failure" because it shows people are trying, and won't be penalized for it," 2017
-- "Creating the right program vs. the hype of big data," 2013
-- "Does the focus on big data mean we miss the opportunity for better use of "little data"," 2015
-- "For a lot of "urban problems" the issue isn't knowledge about what to do, but willingness to engage that knowledge," 2017
-- "Helping Government Learn," 2009
-- "Positive Deviance and DC Public Schools," 2007
-- "Positive Deviance in New York City (public schools)," 2009
-- "3 R's of Transforming the school system," 2007

Digging deeper to learn the right lesson.  Sometimes I tell the story of the first project I did at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a report on the presence of a potential carcinogen in alcoholic beverages.  We sold a fair number of copies through press mentions.  It happened that the chief author, editor of the newsletter, and I were eating lunch together in the basement lunchroom (it had a stove, a luxury for an office), and we ended up doing an after action analysis.

I was certain the report sold because of the policy comparisons between the US and Canada.  The newsletter editor said no, it was because of the list of test results included, and people wanted to check if what they drank was potentially tainted.  In short, it wasn't about policy it was about self-help.

It was an important lesson to me about not learning the wrong lesson from success.  But to dig deeper for the right lesson.

Learning from sports teams.  There are tons of "leadership books" and seminars and articles about leadership lessons from sports team coaches.  Then again, there's a lot written about abuse by coaches ("Beneath NCAA gymnastics’ glow, a familiar ‘toxic’ culture," Washington Post).

Because I went to the University of Michigan, a big sports school, I got turned off by large team sports. I don't watch sports on television for the most part.  I don't go to games.

It seemed futile to witness people getting in fights when Michigan lost.  I used to say "whether or not they win or lose, I still have to take my finals."  That being said, I hope they win, but I haven't watched four full quarters of football equivalent of the team over the past 40 years.

However, I find the business, politics, and societal aspects of professional sports interesting, and of course relevant to urban revitalization and policy.  And I have been reading sports stories a lot more in the past 12-18 months because the rest of the news--the US's slow but steady march to authoritarianism pushed forward by Trump ("Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term," Washington Post, "Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025," New York Times)--is so depressing.

(Rory Smith of the New York Times/The Athletic, who writes about European soccer, writes many interesting stories along these lines.)

Learning from the New England Patriots: it's easy to learn the wrong lessons.  In the same vein of my lesson from CSPI, there is a great column about the decline of the New England Patriots football team ("The fall of the Patriots: An obsession with ‘value’ has led to the lowest point in 30 years," Boston Globe).

Under the coach, Bill Bellichick, the team became famed for finding "value" players, e.g., a fifth round selection for half the cost of a name player, who performed just as well or better.  The coaches all thought their success was them, not fully acknowledging the role Tom Brady, the quarterback and a diamond in the rough late draft selection, played in pulling it all together.  Since Brady left, the team has languished, really badly.  From the article:

“To be good in the business of football today — and good to me is not being good one year, but try to sustain it year in and year out — you have to understand economics and you have to understand value,” Kraft said near the end of his team’s almost-magical 2007 season. “I think every discussion I had with Bill, he understood value.”

The concept of value helped the Patriots win six championships and dominate the NFL for 20 years. On the field and on the salary-cap ledger, the Patriots were better than any team at working the margins, identifying undervalued assets, and exploiting loopholes.

It worked brilliantly when Tom Brady was leading the franchise to unprecedented heights. But “value” has since become a negative in Foxborough. The Patriots’ obsession with finding value — constantly looking for ways to spend 50 cents on the dollar — is why they are 2-8 and at their lowest point since Kraft bought the franchise 30 seasons ago. That obsession has seeped into every crevice of Gillette Stadium, weakening the core of a once-dominant franchise.

The coaches and owner learned the wrong lesson.  Value mattered and matters, but it works in a certain set of circumstances, and to keep working, a great amount of flexibility and serendipity is required.  

“If you gave us any of the top 15 [quarterbacks], we could do it. I don’t think the coaches view Tom as special as everyone else in football does.”

They thought it was them, but they were just a piece of a whole that they didn't truly understand.

Failures in Design Thinking.  The Stanford Social Innovation Review has published articles over the years about application of design thinking to social enterprises and social issues.  The current issue has an article, "Design Thinking Misses the Mark," about the failures of the applications of design thinking.  That's what I've been writing about for years, obviously, as indicated by the text above.  From the article:

However, design thinking has not lived up to such promises. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review article, writer and designer Rebecca Ackerman argued that while “design thinking was supposed to fix the world,” organizations rarely implement the ideas generated during the design-thinking process. The failure to implement these ideas resulted from either an inadequate understanding of the problem and/or of the complexities of the institutional and cultural contexts. One of Ackerman’s examples is the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), which hired IDEO in 2013 to redesign the school district’s cafeterias. The five-month design-thinking process resulted in 10 recommendations, including creating a communal kitchen and using technology to reduce cafeteria lines. However, Angela McKee Brown, the consultant SFUSD hired to implement the recommendations, told Ackerman that IDEO failed to account for the operational and regulatory arrangements required for their implementation.

We reject design thinking as a singular tool kit prescribed to solve social problems. In what follows, we explain why design thinking as typically practiced has not been able to create impactful and sustainable solutions to complex social issues. Instead, we call for a critical stance on design, where critical means both discerning and important. We invite designers to adopt a continuously reflexive and questioning stance akin to what scholar and activist Angela Davis called “a way of thinking, a way of inhabiting the world, that asks us to be constantly critical, constantly conscious.”

... The social sector is inherently complex because it consists of a multitude of actors across different contexts, timelines, and political realities. Any approach that purports to easily solve for such complexity is more likely than not to be reductive and therefore ineffective. Design thinking tends toward oversimplification in at least three ways. 

Design thinking is formulaic

Design thinking is decontextualized

Design thinking is short-termist. 

The article goes on to provide recommendations on how to improve the approach.

Conclusion.  My form of design thinking, effectuated through the concepts of wider scopes for planning, action planning, and transformational projects action planning (also see "A wrinkle in thinking about the Transformational Projects Action Planning approach: Great public buildings aren't just about design, but what they do," 2022), aims to avoid those faults.

I really want to like Post columnist Charles Lane, but ...

Charles Lane was the editor of The New Republic Magazine when Stephen Glass fabricated stories for it.  There is a movie about this and Charles Lane was portrayed by actor Peter Sarsgaard, and I think Peter Sarsgaard is a great actor...  but still, TNR is a conservative, although somewhat centrist, publication so given my political proclivities, it's hard for me to believe that Lane's writings would appeal to me, even if I think that the guy who portrayed him in a movie is a great actor.

These days Lane writes a column for the Washington Post and today's column, "Common interest rarely wins the day," illustrates the point.  I've been meaning to write a not dissimilar piece but from a completely different foundation.  Lane argues that academic writings on "collective action" (citing the work of Mancur Olson) demonstrate that it's really really really really hard to get people to agree on a big scale which is why big government programs tend to fail.  (I would argue this problem actually derives from something else, bureaucracy and a way of looking at the world, and is better explained through the writings of people such as Max Weber, Robert Michels, John Friedmann, and James Scott.)

I would argue that some types of services within society, be it providing for national security and a military to protect the nation from other nations, overseeing the financial system, providing for an integrated road network, welfare, social services, and health care, etc. are best provided when organized and funded and delivered at a very large scale.  (There are other services too, that should be "national," ranging from railroad service, coordinating air travel, dealing with the airwaves, national parks, etc.)

You can call providing these services "collective" in order to scare up ideas of say the failed "collectivization" of agriculture in the Soviet Union, but the reality is that for example with social welfare, to me the economic and other problems that result aren't the "fault" of the locality where the people live, but are the responsibility really, of all of us.  That is the justification for not expecting only localities for having to fund and address resulting problems.

That doesn't mean that you should nationalize industries like the British did (such as with the coal industry) or own companies outright like British Petroleum or British Airways.

But it probably means that if you want to have a postal service serving every household or a health care system focused on outcomes rather than private sector profit, then organizing, funding, and delivering services at the national scale makes the most sense.

Similarly, rather than encouraging states and localities to sell off their assets to the private sector for cash today, it would make more sense to create a National Infrastructure Bank, not unlike how the Bank of North Dakota operates at the state level, so that more of the value of public assets is capured by the public as opposed to the private sector.

While Lane discusses how special interests or organized interests ("Small groups") are particularly good at acting collectively, I would argue that they aren't acting "collectively" so much (although Olson would have disagreed with me) as they are acting "selfishly" to best represent and to shape, in particularly favorable ways if they can, their interests.

While this explains the success of special interests and the failure to change what "government" does because often those organized interests interfere with doing the "right thing", Lane's column doesn't really address broader questions about scale and appropriateness and how best to deliver programs and services.

Basically the small group acting "collectively" to represent their own interests isn't analogous to the large group ("the people") acting collectively or on a national scale.

This is a different issue from whether or not "entitlement funding" (Social Security, Medicare) needs to be rightsized according to future demographics and funding realities.

Lane writes:

Obama was surely right to maintain that there is such a thing as a public good: infrastructure, social equality, national and global security. He was also right that government is better suited than markets to provide some of these — contrary to the most simplistic Republican rhetoric.

But the president’s paean to collective action lacked Olson’s realism. The question is not just how much more government we need or want, if any. It’s also how much more government we can afford, in light of its purposes and given the risks Olson identified — which have already materialized in the form of unsustainable but politically untouchable entitlement programs.

But I would argue that Lane isn't thinking broadly enough about what the "public good" and "infrastructure" mean in the context of the 21st Century rather than as expressed in the 18th Century writings of Adam Smith.

While Lane argues that realists oppose the "collective" because it won't work, I see instead special interests cloaked in "realism" organized to maintain their special privileges, access, control, and rewards.

Health care is a perfect example.  (Although I wouldn't argue that the legislation setting up what is pejoratively called "Obamacare" goes far enough, in large part because the legislation was designed to preserve the ability of the private sector to continue to profit from this system.)

Interestingly, the arguments about the collective today and the opposition doesn't appear to be very much different from the opposition to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, as painted by David Brinkley in the book When Washington Went To War.