Sports: The last bastion of Inside-the-Box Innovation :( - Part I - the NFL!

Last Sunday we saw a wonderful, painful example of thinking inside the box. After possibly the most dramatic, exciting, incredible ending ever to an NFL play-off game, a game full of creative flair and innovative plays, the teams finished tied.

And then they flipped a coin, and the team the won the coin-flip advanced. It wasn’t quite that simple, but winning the coin-flip was a huge factor.

Now imagine an alternative scenario, more dramatic, more strategic and, most importantly, extremely fair:

After the game ends tied, the head-coaches each write down a number, put it in a sealed envelope and hand it to the referee. Then, at the centre of the field, under the eyes of the teams and the fans and the TV camera, the referee opens the two envelopes. Kansas City’s has the number 12. Buffalo’s has 16.

Kansas City have the lower number. So they get the ball … but they get the ball on their own 12-yard line. If they had written 20 instead, Buffalo would have got the ball, on their 16 yard line.

By writing 12, Kansas are saying “we believe our offence is so good right now, that we would rather take the ball on our 12-yard-line than let Buffalo have it.” By writing the number 16, Buffalo is saying: “we’d rather let Kansas have the ball within their 15-yard-line than take it ourselves on our 15-yard line.”

In other words, given that the ball is placed on the 12-yard-line, BOTH teams agree that they would prefer Kansas City to start with the ball. We don’t know who would have won under those circumstances, because Mahomes is not of this planet but the 12-yard-line is not a good place to start a drive … but neither team could argue afterwards that they were denied by the cruelty of a coin-flip.

And of course the analysts and Monday-morning quarterbacks would have a field day using their flawless 20/20 hindsight to criticise the strategic incompetence of whichever coach ended up losing – all part of the fun of a NFL play-off weekend!

I’m not saying that this particular idea is the best way to decide how to start overtime, but it is undeniably better than the way they currently do it.

So why don't the NFL adopt it?

You might naively imagine that it’s the way it is because they’ve always done it that way. Tradition and all that … but no. In 2010 they ran an extensive consultation process with all the teams and officials to try to find a fairer way. So what we saw on Sunday is the improved version !!

Statistically, under the new, improved, fairer rules, the team who wins the toss has been 41% more likely to win the game than the team who loses. In the playoffs it has been worse, with the team who wins the toss winning 10 times out of 11 since the new rules came into play.

And yes, it’s true that the old scheme was worse – previously the team that won the coin-toss had almost double the chance of winning (about 60% vs. 34%, with 5% ties), so reducing this 76% difference to a 41% difference feels like progress.

But why didn’t they just reduce it to 0%?

Well, because sports is one of the last bastions of inside-the-box thinking. Or more precisely, rules-committees are, because coaches and trainers are some of the greatest innovators in any field.

Sunday's game was almost (but not quite) as painful for innovators as it must have been for long-suffering Buffalo fans. It's a pity when a player or a team suffers as a result of something that cannot be prevented. But it's frustrating when their suffering could so easily have been avoided by just a little more open-mindedness, outside-the-box thinking.

Inside-the-box thinking occurs when we make unnecessary assumptions, put limits on our innovation that aren't really there. Imagine a marketing executive who built a marketing plan for a new product exclusively around TV-advertising. Or an engineer who assumed that the only way to make a product was to throw everything into a reactor and mix it. We've all worked with people like that, even if these are dramatic, unrealistic examples.

We innovators like to imagine that people who think like this don’t survive long in business, because their competition will innovate even if they don’t - unfortunately many find their way to positions of sufficient influence that they are difficult to dislodge.

How much innovation potential still goes to waste because our minds are blinkered, we’re so focused on what we’ve seen and done in the past that we don’t realise how many unnecessary limits we’re putting on our thinking?

So I find this particular example enlightening because it is so crystal clear ... everyone sees the problem, everyone agrees that we need a better solution - but still the problem goes un-addressed, year after year. Because we just cannot get outside that box!

In this case, perhaps the blinkered thinking comes from the word “kick-off”. At the start of each half of a football game, and at the start of overtime, one team kicks the ball to the other. Would it even be football if there were no kick-off? [Cynics may point out that the kick-off rule guarantees that there are at least two times per game when the ball is kicked, so fully justifying the name "football" :D]

Once you start with the (unspoken, perhaps even un-thought) assumption that there will be a kick-off for the overtime, you’ve effectively ruled out the chance to use the starting-point of the drive as a way to make it fairer. This is a very typical symptom of inside-the-box thinking - you don't even see the idea because you've already ruled it out through an earlier, ingoing assumption. So you don't even reject the innovative change, it literally doesn't arise at all.

The fact that they have even moved the point of the kick-off forward highlights this. They do realise that the receiving team has an unfair advantage. But no matter how far they move the kick-off point forward, they cannot fix this, since the receiving team can just let the kick go dead and re-start at their 25, giving them a very important advantage. This rule-change perfectly encapsulates inside-the-box thinking – they knew what they wanted to achieve, but they couldn’t achieve it because they just failed to envisage re-starting the game without a kick-off.

And, to be clear, it's not like I'm the first person ever to hit on this obvious idea of moving the point of re-start to make overtime fairer - the 2010 committee definitely heard variations of this idea, they just were so fixated on staying inside the box that they rejected them. They may not have used the term "inside-the-box" to justify their thinking - instead they may have used words like "tradition" or "confusing" or "controversial." Another facet of inside-the-box thinking is that you reject an embryonic version of an idea (that may indeed be flawed or imperfect) out of hand, rather than trying to optimise it. Meanwhile, for ideas that are inside the box, you bend over backwards trying to optimise them - so move the kick-off point, don't allow a team to win with a field-goal on the first possession, ...

I write this article as a frustrated Green Bay Packers fan, after yet another underwhelming play-off defeat following a league-best regular season. But I'm not bitter! Indeed, for all the undoubted problems the NFL faces - the concussions, the treatment of Colin Kapernick, ... - nobody can deny that they provide an extremely good "product" that keeps consumers coming back year after year. If anything, other sports have a lot to learn from them.

And, lest anyone think this is about a smug European looking down on American sports, my next post on this topic will look at real football (i.e. “soccer”) and some of the inside-the-box thinking there that makes the NFL look like Elon Musk in comparison. You've possibly heard of the ABBA ("the winner takes it all") adaptation of penalty-shoot-outs, but there are so many more examples to discuss - including a few where soccer could take a leaf from the NFL's rule-book.

(PS Apologies for breaking the cardinal rule of not using sports analogies and examples, but this example was just too perfect to pass up).