Fiend at Court Unplugged
The news that the Director of Digital Application Development is now “TBD” generated spirited discussion last week in the Texas Section tournament discussion social media circles. There is a lot of frustration, anger, and resentment over how poorly the roll out of the new digital engagement platform for USTA tennis tournaments has gone so far.
It is really important to remember that no one other than the principals involved really know what is going on with the new platform. While it is tempting to vilify the former Director of Digital Application Development, I have been in bureaucracies where the voice of reason is overwhelmed by the forces around them. Maybe she was doing all the right things in an impossible situation. On the other hand, it sure looks like she bailed out of a burning dumpster fire that she very well may have started.
I keep returning to a statement made a little over a month ago in a USTA news release titled “USTA Update on the Competitive Pathway.”
We were not fully prepared for the challenges with the historical data housed in TennisLink, and that has led to complexities in the transfer and migration of information and data from the various events, formats, and regions into one centralized system.
USTA Update on the Competitive Pathway
Shortly after the USTA issued that statement, I pushed out my own external analysis of the likely root causes of the problem in “Harsh Realities Revealed in the USTA Digital Platform Update.” In the interim, I have been thinking about the culture that has contributed to things getting so out of hand with the digital platform transformation. It is apparent from examining current and past profiles of executive leadership at the USTA, that the organization places a premium on people who have either played tennis at a high competitive level or those that have an established history of enthusiasm for the sport.
On the surface, it makes sense that the largest non-profit organization in the world chartered with the promotion of tennis would look for people that are really into tennis. Unfortunately, that preference in hiring and selection for those positions seems to come at the expense of neglecting technical qualifications for actually doing the job. There are a couple of relevant cognitive biases in play for the USTA.
The first of these is the Ingroup Bias which is a tendency of people to favor their own group. The current colorful term for this is “inbred.” Essentially how this would play out at the USTA is an organizational belief that only tennis people know how to run tennis. However, an organization that already has a firm handle on the tennis aspects doesn’t benefit at all with yet another person that understands tennis… and little else. It is much easier to hire an accountant and teach them the ins and outs of tennis that it is to teach a tennis player how to be an accountant, especially when the organization is already weak in that domain. (To be clear, I have no reason to believe that the USTA is weak in accounting. I was just trying to sidestep other areas in which appear to have under-qualified people in key organizational roles.)
The other cognitive bias that seems to be in effect at the USTA is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. In essence, people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. Additionally, not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence, they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent.
I personally have absolutely no insight into the current psychological status of the USTA Digital Application development team. It is not even clear how many people at the USTA might actually be working directly on the application as opposed to interfacing with a 3rd party development firm. In the initial days of the new platform deployment, the party line was that all the issues would be fixed in the imminent future. Now that the USTA has admitted that the organization was not fully prepared for the challenges, what remains to be seen is how realistic the current self assessment of the status really is.
I am sure that this experience has been painful for everybody involved. The USTA doesn’t need a host of armchair quarterbacks second guessing every move. The one thing I can say with confidence is that if I found myself mired in a similar situation, I would actively seek out independent review of the project from people who have experience developing and deploying large scale data management digital platforms. Tennis knowledge and experience is not at all required for that assessment.
That is not some hypothetical statement. I have spend an entire career in technical project management. Not every effort that I have led or been involved with went down with flawless execution. I have both requested and had independent review panels foisted upon projects gone wrong. Sometimes that those panels have simply confirmed that we were already well on the path to recovery. At other times, they provided an external assessment that was sorely needed.
It is better to know. Hope is not a strategy.
- USTA Update on the Competitive Pathway, USTA National News Release, March 5, 2021.
- What Is the Ingroup Bias?, Kendra Cherry, Psychology Dictionary, August 30, 2016.
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect Shows Why Some People Think They’re Great Even When Their Work Is Terrible, Mark Murphy, Forbes.com, January 24, 2017.
