#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.