Stephen Billing’s Blog

Have I found a sports analogy I agree with?

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project.

When I heard Margaret Moth’s statement, I was immediately transported to a tennis interclub doubles match I played the other day, and one of the serves I returned from a very good player (currently top 40 in NZ). He served it wide to my forehand, I was slow to read it and I just managed to get my racquet onto it, hitting it late. It hurtled down the line, past the outstretched racquet of his partner and landed just inside the line for a clean winner. That wasn’t where I was aiming it at all, but I liked the result. Perhaps the fact that it was a return from such a good player made it memorable for me too.

Then I remembered another serve in my subsequent singles match in which the serve came pretty much straight to me, quite fast and I dumped the return into the net. Seeing it was match point, I lost the match.

In both of these situations, the ball was served to me, I reacted as best I could, but with quite different results in each case. I had a choice, and my choice was to hit the ball back, preferably for a winner or at least a difficult shot for the other player.

My execution however was not entirely under my control. In the first situation, objectively speaking, the serve was very good and could easily have been an ace – it was a lucky return that went in – it could equally have gone out – but I was not in much control at all. In the second, it was a much more straightforward serve that I just didn’t return well. In both situations though, I had to react to the speed, direction and spin on the ball. Also there was the pressure of the match situation – the psychology of the game and how I responded in that situation. Another factor was the choice made by the server in the context of the match, to go wide or to serve straight at me, how hard to serve, what spin to put on, what he thought I might be expecting, what he thought my weaknesses were.

But the choices made by the other player and by me are not made independently of each other. They are part of a pattern that has built up over the course of the match, and from other matches we’d played before in different circumstances. 

So it is in change situations. You introduce change, and although you don’t control people’s reactions, they seem to fit familiar-seeming patterns. These patterns are specific to your circumstances, but are recognisable as the result of interdependent interactions, nevertheless. Some authors have categorised these patterns, for example as stages in a grief cycle. But even though the patterns are familiar (ball goes in, ball goes out), you cannot predict in any particular circumstance, what the result will be.

Will you hit a winner, or will you dump it in the net? It’s not entirely up to you.