Fans of American college football recognize the Brigham Young University (BYU) Cougars, consistently one of top programs in the country. It was not always so. One player described the team prior to 1972 as the college football equivalent of flying standby. In 47 years the cougars had 31 losing seasons, only one conference championship and had never been to a bowl game. What happened? What turned that team around?
What happened was a coach named Lavell Edwards. By 1994 his BYU teams had 16 conference championships, had played in 19 bowl games and had won a national championship. He had only one losing season in 23 years. How did Edwards create such a remarkable turn-around? More importantly, what can we learn from how he did it?
Of course there was no single magic bullet, Edwards did a lot of things that made a difference (many described in the book, Lavell, Airing it Out). However one of the biggest actions was that he changed expectations. Without that, none of his other improvements would have been very effective.
Prior to the Edwards era, BYU did not expect a winning football team. The school just faced too many disadvantages. It was a religious school, committed to ideas like turning the other cheek. The team lacked money for recruiting and could not hire as many coaches as other schools had. School rules against drinking, smoking, non-marital sex etc. kept many good athletes away. Perhaps most importantly, many players would take two years off to serve a church mission. The coaches thought that those missionaries would lose their competitive fire. Opposing coaches felt sorry for BYU because those players were off preaching instead of playing football.
Coaching meetings often turned into gripe sessions, dwelling on all the reasons they couldn't win. The results were predictable.
Then Edwards became head coach and decided that he had to make some changes. He encouraged players on missions to return and play – and they did not lose their scholarships for going on missions. He believed that religion and football were compatible, and he diffused that belief through his staff.
Lavell Edwards shifted the focus of BYU football from what they could not do to what they could do. He wanted to win and he found a way to do it. He convinced coaches and players that they were expected to win – and they did.
He was also wise in just what expectations he encouraged. At the time, all the top teams had great running backs and emphasized a ground game. It was unrealistic to think that BYU would be recruiting those “blue-chip” players; they wanted to play on teams with winning records. However it was realistic to try a different emphasis. Edwards went to a passing offense. He recruited passing quarterbacks, along with good receivers, and linemen who could block for the pass. He hired assistants who could coach a passing game. He soon drove opponents crazy with his offense.
The result was a big turn-around in both attitude and games won. Recruiting became easier. BYU players regularly made all-conference and even all-American teams. One even won the Heisman Trophy, symbolic of the best college football player in the country. Significantly that trophy winner was a quarterback, the Cougars still weren't attracting top running backs.
Opposing coaches began to complain that returned missionaries gave BYU an unfair advantage.
Coach Edwards' method of changing expectations is instructive.
He looked at what was possible, not what he would have liked. Knowing he could not get the top athletes other teams had, he found a way to work around that.
He never said nor implied that it would be easy. In fact he let everybody know that there would be a lot of work and uncertainty involved.
His message was that improvement was possible and he expected everybody involved to do his part.
This approach applies elsewhere as well. In school, students should be expected to meet difficult but realistic goals. It would be unrealistic to expect a middle school student to do a problem in calculus of variations. However that middle school student should be challenged to do middle school math – and expected to meet the challenge.
In business, employees should be expected to contribute to the profitability of the company. Not every important assignment will be challenging, but when a difficult task needs doing, those assigned to it should be expected to get the job done. There should be no excuses. Nor should there be excuses for sloppy performance in routine but necessary tasks.
In public affairs, we should expect everybody to earn his own way except for those who have serious handicaps. Expecting people to remain on the dole becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It discourages independence and interferes with the development of their full human potential. Every normal human has the capacity for growth and for earning his own way. We must not provide excuses that encourage dependence. Race, poverty, unhappy childhoods, all can be overcome, but only if expectations motivate the effort to overcome them.
We must set challenging but realistic expectations whenever the opportunity arises, then hold people accountable to meet those expectations. Truck drivers should be expected to drive safely and on schedule. Company presidents should be expected to make profitable and honorable decisions. School teachers should be expected to teach their subjects and students to learn those subjects. Politicians should be expected to live up to their promises and fired by the voters if the don’t.
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Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label challenge. Show all posts
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
A Stress-free World
Wouldn't it be nice? What if we could eliminate all disease causing microbes from the planet, along with all war, accidents and other causes of illness, injury, and premature death? What if we could even provide good living conditions, food and clothing for everyone without the need for work? Would you like to live in such a world? Not for long I'm betting.
The fact is that our make-up requires a challenge. Without that we tend to wither away, physically, emotionally and intellectually. We may gripe and complain about the obstacles in our lives, but they are good for us. Just as our muscles atrophy without exercise, so do the other parts of our being. We need opposition. That is why some people not only climb mountains but seek difficult routes on those mountains. Once life gets too easy we tend to seek out our favorite form of excitement to spice it up.
Nor is this limited to humans. Years ago New Mexico did an experiment in which they put a herd of deer in a fully protected environment. All predators were carefully excluded and no hunting was allowed. They had plenty to eat. In short it was a deer paradise. The result? The deer slowly died off without reproducing. Without the danger to keep them alert and alive they just withered away.
Even those nasty germs that cause disease seem to be important to us. It now appears that children insufficiently exposed to pathogens tend to be more susceptible to allergies. An allergy is nothing more than the body's immune system overreacting. It starts cranking up its defenses against harmless things like pollen instead of just against pathogenic microbes. Without real enemies the immune system apparently goes looking for trouble, and finds it in innocuous stuff. The result can be respiratory congestion similar to that of a bad cold.
And what about risk? What would happen if we could eliminate risk from the world? Some experiments give hints and have given rise to the concept of “risk homeostasis.” That is the controversial theory that each person has some preferred risk level. If risk is reduced the person will increase his risky behavior and bring the total risk back to what he perceives as a comfortable level. For example some taxi drivers in Munich had their cabs equipped with anti-lock brakes. Their accident rate was the same as that for drivers with regular brakes. They seem to have increased the risks they took, bringing their total risk back to what it was before. It would appear that we need risk as much as we need microbes and exercise.
This is something to think about next time some politician promises to remove all the difficulties from our lives. In the first place, this world is so constructed that he can't do it. If he removes one problem another will crop up in its place, maybe more than one. In the second place, we need those difficulties. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, such trying is a way to exercise our abilities. However we should be wise in how we try to eliminate problems. Remember, those problems are ours, for our benefit. If we hand them off to someone else we will lose the advantages they can bring us.
“God...gave each of [his children] a very carefully selected package of problems. These, He promised, are yours alone. No one else may have the blessings these problems will bring you... These problems that I give you are a symbol of [my love for you].” (From “The Monument,” the introductory poem to the novel Charlie’s Monument by Blaine M. Yorgason. The complete poem can be found at
http://tiny.cc/ChMonu.)
Most of us want someone else to take care of our problems, that is a natural human tendency. However that can be dangerous. Such benefactors tend to want to take control of our lives and are likely to create new problems for us. In addition, we will miss the growth and self-satisfaction of overcoming them ourselves.
Of course the biggest temptation is to hand off our problems to government. Too many today expect government (read taxpayers) to bail them out of any trouble, pay for their medical treatment and otherwise take over their problems. That is a temptation we must fight. When government assumes our risk or the cost of our decisions, it removes from our lives some of the very things that make it worth living. Not only that, it replaces those problems with a one-size-fits-all rule from on high, something incompatible with our happiness and growth.
If you like my blog, please tell others.
If you don’t like it, please tell me.
The fact is that our make-up requires a challenge. Without that we tend to wither away, physically, emotionally and intellectually. We may gripe and complain about the obstacles in our lives, but they are good for us. Just as our muscles atrophy without exercise, so do the other parts of our being. We need opposition. That is why some people not only climb mountains but seek difficult routes on those mountains. Once life gets too easy we tend to seek out our favorite form of excitement to spice it up.
Nor is this limited to humans. Years ago New Mexico did an experiment in which they put a herd of deer in a fully protected environment. All predators were carefully excluded and no hunting was allowed. They had plenty to eat. In short it was a deer paradise. The result? The deer slowly died off without reproducing. Without the danger to keep them alert and alive they just withered away.
Even those nasty germs that cause disease seem to be important to us. It now appears that children insufficiently exposed to pathogens tend to be more susceptible to allergies. An allergy is nothing more than the body's immune system overreacting. It starts cranking up its defenses against harmless things like pollen instead of just against pathogenic microbes. Without real enemies the immune system apparently goes looking for trouble, and finds it in innocuous stuff. The result can be respiratory congestion similar to that of a bad cold.
And what about risk? What would happen if we could eliminate risk from the world? Some experiments give hints and have given rise to the concept of “risk homeostasis.” That is the controversial theory that each person has some preferred risk level. If risk is reduced the person will increase his risky behavior and bring the total risk back to what he perceives as a comfortable level. For example some taxi drivers in Munich had their cabs equipped with anti-lock brakes. Their accident rate was the same as that for drivers with regular brakes. They seem to have increased the risks they took, bringing their total risk back to what it was before. It would appear that we need risk as much as we need microbes and exercise.
This is something to think about next time some politician promises to remove all the difficulties from our lives. In the first place, this world is so constructed that he can't do it. If he removes one problem another will crop up in its place, maybe more than one. In the second place, we need those difficulties. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, such trying is a way to exercise our abilities. However we should be wise in how we try to eliminate problems. Remember, those problems are ours, for our benefit. If we hand them off to someone else we will lose the advantages they can bring us.
“God...gave each of [his children] a very carefully selected package of problems. These, He promised, are yours alone. No one else may have the blessings these problems will bring you... These problems that I give you are a symbol of [my love for you].” (From “The Monument,” the introductory poem to the novel Charlie’s Monument by Blaine M. Yorgason. The complete poem can be found at
http://tiny.cc/ChMonu.)
Most of us want someone else to take care of our problems, that is a natural human tendency. However that can be dangerous. Such benefactors tend to want to take control of our lives and are likely to create new problems for us. In addition, we will miss the growth and self-satisfaction of overcoming them ourselves.
Of course the biggest temptation is to hand off our problems to government. Too many today expect government (read taxpayers) to bail them out of any trouble, pay for their medical treatment and otherwise take over their problems. That is a temptation we must fight. When government assumes our risk or the cost of our decisions, it removes from our lives some of the very things that make it worth living. Not only that, it replaces those problems with a one-size-fits-all rule from on high, something incompatible with our happiness and growth.
If you like my blog, please tell others.
If you don’t like it, please tell me.
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