The winning difference
5-Feb-2010

All things being equal in terms of physical readiness and skill, knowing the difference between ‘choking’ and ‘panicking’ could meanthe difference between winning and losing as Fiji marches into another round of the IRB Sevens in Wellington this weekend.

As journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, exposited in his brilliant essay, ‘The Art of Failure’ (2000/2009), both choking and panicking are reactions to stress and pressure, but choking is a reaction where one fails on the basis of being flooded with too much information, whereas panicking is a reaction where one does not use enough information.

As Gladwell puts it, ‘Choking is about thinking too much’ whereas ‘panic is about thinking too little’.

He observes, ‘Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart’.

To make his point about choking, Gladwell describes the case of tennis player, Jana Novotna, whose collapse on the edge winning the 1993 Wimbledon final against Steffi Graf is classic.

Novotna was leading 4-1 in the deciding set, only to see Graf apply pressure she was unable to respond to.

Gladwell recalls a parallel fate for golfer, Greg ‘The Shark’ Norman, who in 1996 was poised to win the Masters only to capitulate to rival Nick Faldo from a seemingly invincible lead at the 9th hole of the final round.

What Gladwell shows is that excellence in sport is a combination of what psychologists distinguish as ‘explicit learning’ and ‘implicit learning’. Or more simply, balancing learning with instinct. Learning is most evident in a game plan.

Coaches prepare them and winning strategies are based on sticking to them. Players visualise the game plan and rehearse its moves, alternatives, and options as they prepare for a match.

It is the game as mentally constructed and imagined in terms of its discrete components – each of which is thought through and memorized by players. This is explicit learning.

Implicit learning, by contrast, is instinctive. It is the game within, outside or beyond the game, the moves that come ‘naturally’ to the players and the team once the game plan has been learned by heart.

It is the ability to react to the game with fluidity and improvisatory skill because the structure of the game plan itself is now part of the instinctive ability of the player.

It is playing the game without having to think about it.

Riding a bicycle for instance begins with explicit learning – here are the pedals, here is the handle bar, the brake, one foot over the over and balancing and so on – but unless these strategies become implicit or instinctive, one never learns to ‘ride’ the bicycle’. That is, it has to be done or succeeds only when it is done without thinking (as it were). And the problem with choking, as Gladwell points out, is that ‘under conditions of stress, however, the explicit system sometimes takes over’; in sum, ‘that’s what it means to choke’.

In Novotna’s Wimbledon case, ‘she began thinking about her shots again. She lost her fluidity, her touch’.

As Gladwell notes, choking reduces the sports player to robotic deliberation; it takes them back to square one because that is what they think they need to do to respond to the pressure - when really what they need to do is to stop thinking about their game and get back to what comes naturally.

And we have seen it all too often with our national rugby team – as opposing teams apply the pressure, our flair dissipates and our play becomes mechanical and predictable. Hence, the game is thrown away from what seemed to be a winning score.

So what of panicking? As Gladwell points out, ‘panicking is the opposite of choking’.

Panicking is responding to stress by forgetting to do what is needed, by failing to use the game plan and the information and options at hand.

Panicking is the blindness of ignoring the training and what one has learned and rehearsed to get oneself out of difficulty in a time of difficulty.

It is a case of what psychologists call ‘perceptual narrowing’ – the mind goes blank, as it were, in times when, as Gladwell puts it, ‘stress wipes out short-term memory’.

But, as he observes, ‘people with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress reduces their short-term memory, they still have some residue of experience to draw on’.

Indeed, a well balanced rugby team is always a balance between players with fresh new energy and older players possessing the wisdom of experience.

In times of undue stress, it is to the experienced players we turn to calm the rising panic that creeps over younger players.

In the past, the experience of a Serevi, for instance, was an anchor worth its weight in gold when the chips looked down for the team’s winning prospects.

The experience factor too is found in winning coaches who can tell if his or her team is panicking or choking and how to apply the appropriate remedy.

As Gladwell implies, telling a choking team to go back to basics is exactly the wrong kind of advice because choking is itself a going back to basics under stress.

In Thorsetein Veblen’s terms, it is ‘trained incapacity’. Conversely, advising a panicking team to play with flair rather than to go back to what they have learned is also wrong medicine for the problem.

The answer to panicking, rather, is to remember the basic and to go back to them.

Whatever happens to Fiji’s Sevens team in Wellington, starting today, we trust our players and their team staff will neither choke nor panic when testing pressures are applied, but will rise to each occasion with the right strategy for the right measure at the right time. Go Fiji go!