In most professions, practitioners can benefit from constructive oversight. For example, surgeon and author (Better, The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal) Atul Gawande engaged a senior surgeon to monitor his surgical technique. During medical training, we have intense observation from both peers and supervisors.
Consider professional sports, where there are hitting spray charts, "hot zones" examining the strike zone, tendency charts, and game films broken down in every way imaginable, from pitch-by-pitch, down and distance, after time out, et cetera. There's also common sense. Charles Barkley said of Zach Randolph that he's been putting up double doubles for ten years and he hasn't gone to his right once.
Businesses know their competition, and sometimes recognize their own online brand cannibalizes their brick-and-mortar operations.
During our careers, the focus often shifts to self-examination and self-regulation. For example, patients can draw inferences about doctors from Healthgrades.
But do we know where we succeed and struggle? In high school, over forty-five years ago, our coach used statistics and shot charts to analyze performance. I spoke with him about a year ago, and he said that he determined that rebounds and assists usually gave a good description of how games went. That corresponds to my possession (of the ball) and possessions (what did you do with the ball) theme.
What do we want to know? We can start with SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). Our 'strength' thus far has been reasonable defensive pressure. Our shooting woes offset that. Nobody succeeds without putting the ball in the basket. I can't control what happens in the off-season, but we spend about forty percent of practice on shooting. Our opportunity is seeing the game better. We spend a lot of time on 3-on-3 play, with emphasis on spacing and reading (chunking information) the defense. The biggest threats we have are discouragement and disillusionment as we face better competition.
Benchmarking can help us compare ourselves to external and internal standards. We can trend our field goal percentage, assists, and 'good possessions' (got a quality shot). At higher levels, more sophisticated analysis can examine performance by differing lineups and situations.
Earlier I wrote about the success of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Civil War professor turned general who explained his success, "I know how to learn." What can we learn? What is the cost of not learning?
