Ballet v Basketball

I have a new job! Ask my kids would say: "Yay! Go me!"

While I am thrilled to be starting something new, I feel sad to be leaving the old job and especially the people on my team and my favorite stakeholders.

One of the biggest challenges of my current job is the leadership where I work does not believe in data. This is a problem because I am an analyst. They don't agree with the premise of my job, let alone how my job should be done. While this was frustrating, they are the leaders and they get to choose what is important and what is not. I also have a choice; hence, the new job. (Go me!)

I was talking to my soon-to-be-former manager this weekend, and we were doing some post-game analysis, wondering what could have be done differently to save the analyst role on our team. I will skip all of those details here, but today during my meditation, I had the thought: Ballet versus Basketball.

When I was growing up, my sport was dance. I had a teacher tell the class or group the steps and I would do them in order and to the music. In high school, I had a friend Julia who had twelve varsity letters. She played soccer, softball and basketball all four years of high school at the highest level. This was an amazing accomplishment. 

"I can't understand how you know what to do on the court," I said. "How do you know where to run, when to pass the ball? When to shoot?"

"I can't image what you do," Julia said. "How do you remember all of those steps? How do you keep them in order?"

As someone who had only one very short season that was way too long of rec league soccer, I couldn't fully imagine the spontaneity required to play any sport with a ball that requires making decisions on the fly. Those sports are fluid. All of this escapes my grasp.

Some job are like dance--they require specialized skills, but there is a precision, and a correct order and a way to do things. There are steps, there is a routine. Think a surgeon who repairs ACLs day in and day out, or a line cook who makes variations of scrambled eggs on Sunday for brunch. Think a math teacher who explains trig every October to juniors.

The work I am in is much more like basketball. We have projects where we create our own steps, but we don't know what those steps are until we figure them out. Sometimes we can follow the plan; other times we need to improvise when we hit blockers. It is a fluid, ever moving game. There is no one right way to do things, and no specific wrong way. We just have to hope that the movements were are making, individually and as a team, are leading us to our goal.

My current job imploded, and Anderson and I can try to figure out what happened, what went wrong, what we could have done differently to have kept the analyst positions in tact. We tried the best we could to prove our case, to make our point. We were fluid and flexible, but we didn't "win." Anderson is actually really good a navigating the politics of the organization. Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your skills are, the games are hard. Harvard Business Review recently had an article of how to "Persuade the Unpersuadable." While that is an interesting idea, it perhaps unfairly places the blame on the person who is trying to make the point if they don't succeed. Or maybe not. Maybe those people who can "persuade the unpersuadable" aren't playing metaphorical basketball. Maybe they are playing soccer, or climbing a mountain. Maybe they are performing a hybrid sport with part routine, part fluidity, like flying fishing. 

I am also learning that we always have other options. When we don't like the game we are playing, we have the option to move and chose a different game.

Interestingly, my friend Julia became a high school math teacher where she is a master of a single set of skills, whereas I became an analyst and a community leaders where I am required to think on my feet.