Yesterday, we opened November’s Tennis Glow-Up discussion of perspective by examining a rather unpleasant league match. Disputed line calls were the immediate source of conflict, but the players involved brought different assumptions and priorities to the court. Those differences influenced how we interpreted what was happening and how we responded. Recognizing the disconnect helped explain the argument, although it did not provide an obvious way to resolve it.
Today, I want to explore how the same problem manifests itself on a much larger scale. Anyone who has spent much time organizing and delivering tennis has probably encountered disagreements among various stakeholders. Sometimes those debates involve legitimate differences of opinion about policies or what should happen. Other times, the people involved appear to be completely talking past each other.
I strongly believe that a fair number of these disputes are rooted in differences of perspective that nobody has the presence of mind to explore.
My day job is in engineering. As a result, systems-oriented thinking is a reflexive instinct when I process complex problems. One of the first things engineers establish when evaluating a system is where to draw its boundaries and deciding what is in scope and what interactions are important. The problem we are trying to solve and what we are trying to accomplish is foundational. Additionally, we have to have some method and criteria to know if we have succeeded in the end.
Those considerations are just as relevant to tennis delivery as they are to engineering.
In a hypothetical rules situation, a local league rules committee or coordinator may decide to enact a new rule to prevent a perceived problem from a previous season from recurring. However, that rule may create a constraint that discourages some players from joining teams. That, in turn, can force captains to scramble to attract enough players to field a viable team. A highly competitive player who cares most about meaningful competition might be disappointed by a lack of variety among the remaining teams and players.
Everyone is interacting with the same league, but they are all experiencing it from different perspectives. As a result, they may not be evaluating the efficacy of the new rule against the same objectives. The trouble begins when someone treats the measure that matters most to them as though it were the only thing that is important.
This is where systems-oriented thinking can be particularly useful. A change intended to improve one part of a system can create problems elsewhere. Those consequences may not be immediately apparent, particularly when the people making the decision have limited visibility focused on a narrow set of objectives.
There is nothing inherently wrong with examining a problem from any particular perspective. However, it is a problem to assume that the boundaries of our own responsibilities and interests also define the boundaries of the problem. You can achieve a positive outcome in one part of the system that creates significant problems in another. The broader consequences become visible only when we consider how the different parts of the system interact.
This brings us back to the relationship between goals and perspective that I mentioned in passing yesterday. Our goals influence which outcomes we consider important. The outcomes we measure subsequently influence how we evaluate decisions. Over time, it becomes easy to mistake improvement in a preferred metric for improvement in the overall system.
There is another complication. Different stakeholders can have legitimate objectives that are difficult, or even impossible, to satisfy simultaneously. Recognizing those objectives helps explain the disagreement, but it does not eliminate the need to make trade-offs.
That is why I find it useful to do a little systems engineering when a tennis rule or regulation generates controversy. Blindly debating whether any decision was right or wrong misses the point. Instead, it is important to know what problem it was intended to solve, which consequences were considered, who was consulted, and how success will ultimately be evaluated.
Working productively within the tennis delivery system can be frustrating. I fundamentally believe that most people involved with the sport are genuinely trying to do good things. At the same time, tennis is an individual sport, so it is hardly surprising that we sometimes tend to overvalue our personal perspectives. I wish the organizations invested more time in understanding the diverse perspectives of all stakeholders as part of the decision-making process. If we could do that, the necessary follow-on step of evaluating the results of decisions would follow more naturally.
Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the discussion by examining the individual player. We may not have much influence over the perspectives that guide decisions elsewhere in the tennis system, but we do have opportunities to examine our own. Sometimes changing the frame through which we evaluate an experience changes what we learn from it and what we decide to do next.
