THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING A HEDGEHOG

THE WORLD CHAMPION ALL BLACK RUGBY TEAM
ARE THE ULTIMATE FOX'S

In his bestselling book “The Signal and the Noise”, author Nate Silver tells of two types of mindsets, the Hedgehog and the Fox.

A Hedgehog mindset is the type of person who has formulated a theory, but when a situation arises that either can’t be explained by the theory or the theory doesn’t work for that particular situation, they call it a “one-off”, an anomaly and disregard the situation as being outside their control.

The world champion All Black rugby team were Hedgehogs. Being the best team in the world for over 100 years meant they were favourites every four years when the Rugby World Cup would come around. But after winning the inaugural World Cup in 1987, the All Blacks were beaten in each of the following World Cups for various reasons. Often, losses could be attributed to situations that were almost impossible to prepare for ahead of time, such as injury to key players and errors of human judgement at critical times.

The All Blacks disregarded those losses as anomalies and results that could not be avoided. Their mindset was probably something like, “Our current preparations for matches have us ranked number 1 in the world. How can we prepare for outside-the-box situations that occur infrequently and randomly”? This is classic Hedgehog thinking.

A Fox, however, looks at anomalies and the “one-off” situations differently. A Fox says, “If it happens, then I must prepare for it,” and they tweak their theories constantly whenever a loss outside the boundaries of their current knowledge occurs.

Several years ago, the All Blacks began to think like Foxes, looked at the “outside-the-box” situations that cost them the World Cup, and came up with several reasons for their losses.

The first was that sometimes wrong decisions were made in the dying moments of matches. If the decision maker in the team was on the wrong side of the field at the most important moment, decisions were being made by players who were not experienced at making those types of decisions. Chances to snatch victory in the last few moments were sometimes not taken because of poor decisions and a lack of leadership experience across the field.

The All Blacks now have 5 senior leaders or captains throughout the team who are empowered to make crucial decisions during matches.

Another anomaly was if the All Blacks were sometimes left to finish several matches of a World Cup campaign without their first-choice player in a particular position on the team due to injury. They would sometimes need their 3^rd choice players to play the most important matches near the end of the World Cup and those players were often in key positions within the team.

The All Blacks have worked hard over the past few years to have 3^rd and sometimes 4^th choice backup players who can fit in seamlessly in the most intense matches without the team momentum suffering.

The All Blacks have become perfect Foxes and have gone from being a very good team to an exceptional team. They are now winning matches in the dying minutes of a game and often with substitute 3^rd and 4^th choice players who don’t just make up the numbers but contribute immensely to the cause.

Tennis coaches and players need to adopt the Fox mentality. Look at your perceptions of the problems and weaknesses in your game and see if you are not overlooking these problems and weaknesses by saying they are outside the box and, therefore, occur so infrequently that it’s not worth the time and effort to work on them. Identify anything in your game that sometimes hurts your performance and see if it can’t be addressed in training and eradicated or strengthened.

An example would be to imagine that the problem is a faulty serve when under pressure in a match. Most of the time, you hit a great serve, and dominate your opponents who are lower-ranked, but inexplicably, the serve fails you in pressure situations against higher-ranked players. The Hedgehog says, “My serve is fine most of the time, and I just hope it goes well again today”, but the fox looks at why the serve fails at these infrequent but important times during the year and works on eliminating the problem. The Fox doesn’t care if this problem only comes once in 20 matches; a Fox wants to fix it! 

It could be that the serve gets tight during a match under the constant pressure of someone ranked higher. A Fox will go through all the possibilities until the problem has been solved, while the Hedgehog will continue looking at the wins and disregard the rare losses.

As players' rankings improve, they sometimes feel they have the full package to become great players. Many top players believe that winning is about executing their game at the right level, and the win will come. This is only partly true. This is a Hedgehog mentality.

It’s important for players and coaches alike to continually question themselves anytime they experience a loss because only in this way can the player and coach continue to improve.