Over the past two days, I’ve been exploring the idea of developing a Concept of Operations (ConOps) for Adult Tennis. Friday’s post introduced the systems engineering concept, and yesterday I considered what such a document might encompass. I suggested organizing adult tennis engagement into six broad categories, each serving different wants and needs within the player community.
Today, I want to consider what happens when the people responsible for those activities make decisions largely independently of one another.
During my time serving on a USTA Texas committee, I had an opportunity to observe some of the organization’s internal workings. My experience was limited, and I certainly wouldn’t claim to have a comprehensive understanding of how decisions are made throughout the USTA. Still, one characteristic of the organization became fairly apparent. Much of its work is organized around individual programs, each with its own stakeholders, priorities, and measures of success.
That’s hardly unusual. Organizations divide responsibilities because specialization is necessary to manage complexity. The people responsible for League need to understand League. Adult Competitive, the current USTA name of the tournament committee, needs to understand tournaments. Recreational tennis programs have their own requirements and challenges. There are good reasons to have people concentrating on each of these areas.
The difficulty arises when those individual programs begin making decisions that affect other parts of the adult tennis ecosystem without being fully aware of or considering those side effects.
In systems engineering, we spend a considerable amount of time examining interactions among seemingly independent parts. A change that improves the performance of one subsystem doesn’t necessarily improve the performance of the system as a whole. Sometimes it does exactly the opposite.
I believe there are instances of that apparent in Adult tennis. One example is the unconstrained expansion of League programming. From the perspective of League administrators, offering additional seasons or formats may be an attractive way to increase participation. Players have more opportunities to compete, teams have more scheduling options, and the program can report increased activity.
But the same players may also participate in tournaments, recreational groups, or other organized tennis activities. Their available time and financial resources aren’t unlimited, and neither is court availability. A new League season may generate additional registrations without generating a corresponding increase in the number of adults actually playing tennis. Some of that activity may simply have been siphoned off from somewhere else.
Whether that tradeoff is worthwhile depends on what the different activities provide to the players who participate in them. That’s why yesterday’s discussion about the purpose of each engagement mechanism matters.
A player seeking the team experience of League may not find an age-group tournament particularly appealing. Someone pursuing individual competition and national rankings may feel exactly the opposite. If an organizational decision strengthens one opportunity while making another nonviable, we ought to understand what is being gained and what might be lost.
I’m not suggesting that League expansion is inherently undesirable, or that tournament participation should take precedence. The point is that evaluating either activity in isolation gives us an incomplete picture.
There is another problem with program-specific measures of success. They can encourage people to optimize whatever they happen to be responsible for, even when that optimization produces unintended consequences elsewhere.
Suppose a recreational tennis initiative attracts a large number of new participants. That’s an encouraging result, and the people responsible deserve credit for it. But if those participants struggle to find regular playing opportunities afterward, how much has the initiative accomplished toward sustaining adult participation? The introductory program may have performed exactly as intended, while the larger system failed to provide an effective continuation.
Conversely, a program experiencing declining participation may not be suffering from poor administration or a lack of interest in what it offers. Its participants may be getting pulled into other activities, or they may be encountering obstacles elsewhere in the system.
Without a common operational picture, those relationships can be difficult to recognize.
This is where I see considerable value in a ConOps. It would give the people responsible for individual programs a reference for understanding how their decisions affect the larger adult tennis experience. They could examine proposed changes against the needs those programs are intended to satisfy and consider the consequences for other engagement mechanisms.
That wouldn’t eliminate debate or disagreements. Different programs will sometimes have competing objectives, and reasonable people may reach different conclusions about which opportunities deserve priority. But at least the discussion would begin with a shared understanding of what the system is supposed to accomplish.
I also think it could change how we approach accountability. I’ve written previously about the importance of reviewing decisions after they’ve been implemented, particularly when the results aren’t what we expected. In adult tennis, we have plenty of opportunities to examine whether program changes produced their intended benefits and whether they created problems elsewhere.
A ConOps could provide a useful reference for those reviews. If we understand the player needs that an initiative was intended to satisfy, we can ask whether it actually accomplished that. We can also look for effects on other parts of the ecosystem that weren’t anticipated when the decision was made.
That seems more useful than evaluating success exclusively through registrations, participation counts, or the number of events offered.
There is an organizational implication here as well. A ConOps would not require the USTA to eliminate its specialized committees or reorganize every program under a single authority. Specialization remains necessary. What it could provide is a shared operational reference that helps those separate communities work toward unified objectives.
In my experience, the challenge with organizational silos isn’t necessarily that the people inside them are unwilling to cooperate. More often, they’re concentrating on the responsibilities they’ve been given, using the information available to them, and evaluating success against the objectives established for their particular part of the organization.
If no one is explicitly responsible for understanding how those pieces fit together, important relationships can fall through the cracks.
The USTA is also operating in an environment where it doesn’t control many of the activities that contribute to adult tennis participation. Clubs, municipal facilities, independent organizations, and informal groups all provide opportunities that matter to players. A shared operational concept could help the USTA understand where its programs complement those activities, where they compete with them, and where there may be opportunities for cooperation.
I don’t know whether the USTA already has a document that serves this purpose. As I mentioned Friday, it may exist under another name. If so, I would be interested in seeing how it describes the adult tennis ecosystem and how widely that understanding is shared among the people making program decisions.
If it doesn’t exist, I think developing one would be a worthwhile undertaking. The exercise would require people from different parts of the organization to articulate what their programs are intended to accomplish, identify the player needs they serve, and examine how their decisions affect other opportunities.
I suspect the conversations involved in developing that understanding would be every bit as valuable as the finished document.
My introduction to the F-35 Concept of Operations nearly 25 years ago gave me a way to understand a complicated system that I was encountering for the first time. I wasn’t responsible for developing that operational concept, but I benefited enormously from the work of the people who had.
Adult tennis is obviously a very different undertaking. Still, I think the underlying systems engineering principle applies. When multiple organizations and programs contribute to a common objective, it helps to have a shared understanding of how everything is supposed to work together.
And in the case of adult tennis, I would like that understanding to begin by focusing on the people picking up the racquets and playing the sport.
