Life and collaboration lessons from ESPN
When you live in San Francisco, and spend most of your time running in social justice and environmental circles, you don’t have many friends to share in, or support, your sports obsession.
I suspect it is this isolation that has contributed to a new guilty pleasure habit of mine: ESPN binging when work takes me out of my lefty bubble into greater America. I am here to admit that if you knocked on my hotel room at any point during work travel, there’s a 98% chance the TV would be tuned to ESPN (sorry MSNBC, PBS, and the book I never took out of my bag).
This fact is also likely why I’ve now taken to Medium to share my growing obsession with extrapolating life and work lessons from the over-crazed, over-hyped land of American professional sports. As zen-master Phil Jackson tells us in Sacred Hoops, “Inside the lines of the court, the mystery of life gets played out night after night.” Or in the case of the story at hand, the mystery of life gets played out night after night on a quirky, 22 minute ESPN program called Around the Horn.
For those who don’t spend all their spare time consuming talking head sports shows, Around the Horn is a fairly ridiculous one where panelists compete against each other for the most points as they debate the sports topic of the day. The catch is that similar to a Kangaroo Court, earning points, and ultimately winning, is seemingly arbitrary and up to the whims of the host.
During those long hours of work travel, this quirky show slowly wriggled its way into my heart, until I started to notice a concerning pattern. Jackie MacMullen and Kate Fagan, the two regular female contributors at the time I was watching, never, ever seemed to win. Curious, no?
Around the same time, my hometown (the previously mentioned liberal bastion of San Francisco) was struggling with the ugliness of explicit and implicit bias in all its forms, and particularly how implicit bias in Silicon Valley makes it really tough for women (amongst others) to compete in tech. It seemed like every day a new article was grabbing headlines with research proving:
- Yep! Implicit bias is real! Women are punished for the very behavior we claim they need to succeed, and reward in men! Oh, and by the way….
- Pointing out these implicit biases that cause us to punish women and block their leadership potential? That will actually make things worse for women. So have fun!
The issue with implicit bias can feel magnified in Silicon Valley because the predominant culture prides itself on meritocracy. Rewarding people on effort and merit is great in theory, but problematic in execution if we don’t examine the invisible rules and biases actually dictating who is rewarded. Men are rewarded for pointing out what they’ve accomplished. Women? Not so much; study after study shows that a woman will lose standing at work and with her peers for noting her own accomplishments. It’s not hard to imagine how this different standard might make it more challenging for a woman to advance in a system that supposedly functions as a blind meritocracy.
As I watched Kate and Jackie make great point after point on Around the Horn, a system of point allocation purportedly based on merit, but in reality dictated by the whims of what the white, male host valued, well I thought I’d found the perfect sports parallel example of the trappings of a blindly meritocratic system. After all, a quick perusal of reviews on TV.com reveals many other fans squabbling over the perceived bias and unfairness of the host’s point allocation system.
I had myself a new pet issue that overlapped with sports, my favorite guilty pleasure hobby, and I set about to do some research to prove bias at work. I assumed my other new hobby of tweeting into a large vacuous hole at large institutions to point out opportunities for improvement would soon follow.
Luckily I am not the only fan of Around the Horn; Wikipedia has a trove of data about the show (gotta love sports fans and their data).
And here is where the moral of this story shifts. As I scanned through the real data, looking to confirm implicit bias at work, I found that the two women in question had higher winning percentages then their male counterparts (note, Kate had a small sample size when I first did my research; her winning percentage, much to my chagrin, has since gone down). Despite me and many other casual observers on the Internet assuming there was a bias in favor of the lovable old white dude, Woody Paige, he actually has one of the lowest winning percentages on the show.
I was thrilled to be wrong on this point, and scanning the data opened my eyes to other truths about the show, such as the apparent reality that this mainstream show works hard to ensure they never have all white all male panels, or how regularly they provide a platform for outspoken panelists about important political and social issues, like the lovable Professor Blackistone. In fact, just last week they hit an amazing milestone of their first all-female show.
Both me, and Ruth, are proud of Around the Horn for breaking the invisible, all women panelists barrier in sports.
I believe there are a handful of delightful morals in this story, both for my work as a collaboration consultant trying to help diverse networks of people achieve more than they ever thought possible, and for me as a human just generally trying to enjoy sports and not be terrible in this world.
1. I went in thinking this was a story about implicit bias (for good reason, I might add. Data! It proves it!), but it turns out this was really a story about Confirmation bias and how I quite easily saw on Around the Horn what I was learning and experiencing elsewhere. Confirmation Bias is so, so real, and such a large barrier for us as humans trying to be better and function together in this world. I believe confirmation bias is the primary culprit when my uncle and I watch Trump speak and hear totally, totally, totally different things. Or to keep in the sports world, why none of us can have a rational conversation with Patriots fans about Tom Brady.
The stories we tell ourselves about the world matter, as we then go out and seek data that confirms those stories. This fact can be a strength of ours as humans — that we see patterns and make cognitive leaps — but it can be amongst our greatest downfalls if we’re not aware of it; no change was ever wrought in this world without openness and an active effort to find data that disproves what you already believe.
2. Which is what made it so, so valuable to have actual data to examine, and to have a decent sample size to boot. When we think about changing larger cultures and organizations of varying sizes, it’s really important to have data to check our confirmation bias, our subjective positions, and understand what is really going on. I can’t overstate just how illuminating the data on Around the Horn was for me, and how I wish we had this type of quality data to check our foundational assumptions when we embark on any change project.
3. Which brings me to my final point: changing your mind feels more awesome than you’d expect. The new data about wins gave me a new perspective on Around the Horn, and that new perspective was like lifting a veil. Now I see so much depth and charm in the panelists on the show; I’ve followed Professor Blackistone on twitter who has taken the time to introduce me to fascinating, important work at the intersection of sports and social justice. I realized that this quirky, happy national sports panel could be a place I have fun consuming sports with a new assumption (yet to be proven or disproven): that the host and the producers of the show are taking action to try and wring out their own biases and bring representation and equity to the often quite unequal world of sports.
In the social change sphere we talk a lot about the need for more experimentation, but we’re not necessarily great at practicing the foundational work of good experimentation: taking the time to surface your assumptions, test them for truth with good data, and then be open to what comes. In this instance, I’m giving myself and the whole experience of surfacing, and changing, my assumptions about the show a big thumbs up.
I’ve long looked for lessons from sports about life, teams, collaboration. This isn’t a new topic. But recently I’ve been enjoying sports and sports commentary as an extended outlet for my social justice and equity thinking as well. So I expect there may be more rambling attempts on my part in the near future to put little stories into the fabric of our consciousness, to help myself better understand how the things we consume for pleasure (um, sports) and our daily actions in work and life are all connected.
— Rebecca Petzel
@rapetzel
