Cricket
What three days in Adelaide taught me about complexity and the flow of information
This past December, I realized the dream of a lifetime when I spent three days watching the cricket match between England and Australia in Adelaide. Or, rather, watching 60 percent of it—because it went on for five days.
Living as I do in America, I run into a fair number of people who understand that cricket is out there, somewhere, but don’t know much about it. And I’ve learned over the years that when I explain it to them, it’s not so much the batting that produces a reaction, or the bowling, or even the fact that the ball changes and the pitch changes and these all have subtle effects on the course of the game. No, what causes the incredulous reactions is the length.
The thought of doing anything for this amount of time is rare in sports. Baseball occupies three or four hours, soccer ninety minutes, a marathon a little more than two hours. Five days—the length of an international cricket Test match—is an outlier.
Extended length is rare in other parts of life, too. Movies last two hours, TV shows an hour, even a long podcast only a few. Compared to cricket, these are time minnows. The five days of a Test match occupy a full thirty hours, before you take into account breaks.
How, then, does this massively extended time frame change the experience?
Here’s what was going on in Adelaide. Firstly, England had already lost the first two Test matches in a five-match series, so defeat here would lose them the whole thing. There was no room for mistakes, and so mental endurance mattered.
Secondly, it was hot. For the first three days, temperatures were in the 90s and up—on the third day, the thermometer topped off at 106. And while cricket might look like a fairly sedate activity, the bowler runs in thirty yards or so to bowl and the batsmen run back and forth to score, and doing this for six hours a day in intense heat meant there was a physical endurance component, too.
And thirdly, cricket is one of the rare bat-and-ball sports where the way the ball bounces changes as the pitch wears, and as the weather conditions change. And the changing bounce makes the game harder or easier, sometimes in predictable ways and sometimes in unpredictable ways.
Which means that to watch a long cricket match is to watch a series of dramatic arcs rising and falling and then turning back on themselves and then intersecting, as mental and physical endurance, decision-making, and skill are put to the test of the ever-changing conditions. And because the whole thing unfolds over such an extended time frame, you can actually see these arcs develop—something that rarely happens at a smaller scale.
Over the first three days in Adelaide, first one side was up, then the other. England started strongly, then bowled some bad balls and dropped some catches. There was a controversy over the umpiring technology. There were partnerships—two batters accumulating runs together. At the close of the third day, when I had to leave, it was all over for England. And then it wasn’t. And then it was again. And then on the last day there was, for just one brief moment, a glimmer of hope that England could win the whole thing. Before they didn’t.
I will go to my grave arguing that there is no other sport that contains these multitudes. The point of Test cricket is to confront them and prevail—to pass the test, as it were. But in some deeper sense, it is also a mirror of life. In life it is often not clear what the arcs are, or whether they are rising or falling, or how they are intersecting, until long after the action is done. Navigating all this is certainly the content of life; some would argue it is the point of life.
Yet, in the world of work, our attitude to complexity is strangely simplistic—hostile, almost, or at least confused.
Now, this tendency to boil things down—into an executive summary, or a slide with no more than six bullets—comes from an understandable place. In an organization of any size, there is a huge amount of information swirling around, and whereas at a cricket match you can just sit there and experience it all, at work we funnel it, because of how we decide things. Up the org chart it goes, getting compressed and synthesized at every level, until someone senior makes a decision.
Information is compressed because we’ve decided that it has to be, if we are to make use of it.
But this has its problems—it leads to low-quality decisions, made at some distance from the action, or to frustration with leaders, who are felt to not really understand the issues, or to complaints that information is taking too long to find its way up and down—so we flatten the org chart. We make fewer, bigger teams in fewer layers, so that the information can move more quickly and more richly.
And this in turn creates yet another problem—the resulting large departments, and large spans of control, don’t support operational agility, a sense of belonging for employees, or many of the performance virtues that derive from small, tight-knit teams.
This is the conundrum of information at work. If you solve for information flow, you get an organization that doesn’t support human performance; if you solve for performance, you gum up your information flow.
The first person I know who successfully resolved this conundrum was General Stanley McChrystal, when he was commanding the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq in 2003. He needed to get information moving fast, but he also needed it to move in detail, because “the people we are looking for will be in a house in this village today,” is almost useless compared to “they are in this house, now.” So what McChrystal did was to institute a daily two-hour information-sharing call for his entire command, which numbered at the time around 2,000 people. Everyone shared what they knew; everyone heard what was being shared; no compression; no organizational layers in the way; real-time intelligence; and all the unfolding and intersecting arcs of warfare there for everyone to see and act upon.
What he did, in other words, was to liberate the flow of information from the structure of the organization. His reporting hierarchy remained the same—and was therefore able to support the execution of whatever plans were decided. But his information hierarchy was collapsed to a single layer.
I’ve suggested this approach to many leaders over the years, and the response is always the same: no-one feels they have the time to invest in a daily—or even weekly—all-hands call. And when they do have an all-hands, it’s often scripted in great detail, or closely supervised by the internal communications team, and seldom does it enable sharing of information laterally, from one team directly to another.
But I’ve done it myself, and it’s magical. For years I held a weekly call for everyone reporting to me, where I shared what was going on in as much detail as I could, and then my leadership team did the same, and anyone else who wanted to could share or ask a question. A very modest investment of time saved us much more in terms of alignment and agility.
We welcomed the complexity—that was the point. We rejected polish. In sharing detail, in real-time—watching our own arcs rising and falling—we empowered people to act.
And we achieved one other thing, which we hadn’t intended to but which we welcomed with open arms. In sharing what we knew, we defined, all together, who we were.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.
I love this insight. Do you have thoughts about open bargaining?