Super Bowl Collaboration Lessons: Data, Preparation, and Accountability

The New England Patriots won its fourth Super Bowl last night, beating the Seattle Seahawks 28-24 in a thrilling contest and a crazy finish. I normally root against all Boston sports teams, but I made an exception this year, because Tom Brady is of my generation, and I can’t be mad when an old guy wins.

(If you’re not interested in football, skip ahead to my takeaways.)

For those of you who didn’t see the game, the ending was exciting and… surprising. New England was up by four points with about two minutes left, when Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson, threw a long pass to unheralded receiver Jermaine Kearse. The Patriots undrafted, rookie cornerback, Malcolm Butler, made an unbelievable play on the ball that should have effectively ended the game.

Except that miraculously, the ball hit Kearse’s leg as he was falling on the ground, and Kearse somehow managed to catch the ball on his back. The Seahawks had a first down five yards away from the end zone, and, with the best power running back in the game, Marshawn Lynch, they seemed destined to steal this game from the Patriots. Sure enough, Lynch got the ball on the next play and rumbled his way to the one-yard line with a minute to spare.

To understand what happened next, you have to understand how clock management works in the NFL. The Seahawks had one minute and three chances to move the ball one yard and win the game. The clock would run down continuously unless one of two things happened: the Seahawks threw an incomplete pass or one of the teams called a timeout. (Technically, they could also stop the clock by running out of bounds, but that was unlikely scenario given their field position.) The Seahawks only had one timeout remaining, meaning that they could stop the clock with it once. The only other way it could stop the clock was to throw an incomplete pass.

At the same time, the Patriots had a very hard decision to make. If the Seahawks scored, then the Patriots would need enough time to score as well. With a minute left, they had a chance. Any less, and they were as good as done.

To summarize, the Seahawks top priority was to score. It’s second priority was to do so with as little time as possible left on the clock, so that the Patriots didn’t have a chance to answer. The Patriots either had to try to stop the Seahawks from scoring, or — if they believed that the odds of that happening were unlikely — they needed to let the Seahawks score as quickly as possible, so that they had a chance to answer.

That was the complicated version of the situation, at least. The joy of football is that it is both wildly complex and brutally simple. The simple version of the situation was this: One yard, three chances. Give ball to big, strong man known affectionately as “Beast mode.” Watch him rumble into end zone. Celebrate victory.

That was the version that most people — myself included — saw, so when the Seahawks decided to try to pass the ball, most everybody was shocked. The reason you don’t pass in that situation is that you risk throwing an interception. That’s exactly what happened. Malcolm Butler, the unlucky victim of Kearse’s lucky catch two plays before, anticipated the play, intercepted the ball, and preserved the Patriots victory.

The media — both regular and social — predictably erupted. How could they throw the ball on that play?!

(Okay, takeaways start here.)

I took three things away from watching the game and that play in particular.

First, I had assumed — like most of America — that Pete Carroll, Seattle’s head coach, had made a bungling error. But when he explained his reasoning afterward, there seemed to be at least an ounce of good sense behind his call.

With about 30 seconds remaining, in the worst case scenario, Carroll needed to stop the clock at least twice to give his team three chances to score. They only had one timeout. So, they would try a pass play first. If they scored, then they would very likely win the game, because the Patriots would not have enough time to score. If they threw an incomplete pass, the clock would stop, and the Seahawks would have two more chances to try to score, both times likely on the ground.

Still, it seemed like a net bad decision. It still seemed like handing the ball off the Lynch was a lower risk move with a higher probability of success in that situation.

It turns out that when you look at the actual numbers, it’s not clear that this is the case. (Hat tip to Bob Blakley for the pointer to the article.) In fact, the data suggests that Patriots head coach, Bill Belichik, made the more egregious error in not calling a timeout and stopping the clock. It may have even behooved him to let the Seahawks score, a strategy he employed in the Super Bowl four years earlier. Or, maybe by not calling timeout, Belichik was demonstrating a mastery of game theory.

The bottom line is that the actual data did not support most people’s intuitions. Both coaches — two of the best in the game — had clearly done their homework, regardless of whether or not their decisions were right or wrong.

Second, regardless of whether or not the decision was good or bad, I loved how multiple people on the Seahawks — Carroll, Wilson, and offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell — insisted that they were solely responsible for the decision. There was no finger pointing, just a lot of leaders holding themselves accountable. Clearly, there is a very healthy team dynamic on the Seahawks.

Third, I loved Malcolm Butler’s post-game interview, not just for the raw emotion he displayed, but for what he actually said. He made an unbelievable play, which he attributed to his preparation. He recognized the formation from his film study, and he executed. All too often, we see remarkable plays like Butler’s, and we attribute it to incredible athleticism or talent, when in reality, practice and preparation are responsible.

Turning Mistakes Into Opportunities

Ben Davis recently wrote about technical difficulties with The Bay Lights art exhibit on the Bay Bridge. He started by sharing an anecdote about how, when he worked as a waiter at a restaurant, he used to turn botched orders into “opportunities to forge deeper connections with customers”:

I learned a few powerful lessons:

1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Take responsibility for the solution
3. Apologize sincerely
4. Address the issue
5. Offer something extra special—on the house

By staying calm, positive, solution-oriented and generous, I found that upset diners often became loyal regulars, even personal friends. A moment of dissatisfaction, respectfully and graciously handled, bonded us more deeply than had no issue occurred. We all hate it when things go wrong, yet hearts are won when someone truly works hard to make things right again.

This is a beautiful description of how and why to be accountable.

Having Each Other’s Back

Lawrence Taylor and Bill Parcells

When I’m leading new teams, I start by having a conversation about ground rules. I want my teammates to be explicit about what they need to be successful and how they want to work together. One of the ground rules I always introduce is to “have each other’s back.” It’s a sports aphorism for protecting your teammate’s backside, so that others can’t stab it while your teammate isn’t looking.

It’s one of the things I look for when I’m assessing the health of a team, and it’s a quality I seek when recruiting my own teammates. It’s an individual trait, but it’s also very much about team culture, about whether or not each individual feels accountable for group success, not just his or her own. I’ve seen the same person act very differently on different teams.

The other thing I try to encourage my teammates to do is to speak up, especially when they disagree. For my more conflict-averse colleagues, this can be challenging, and so I often have to be extra sensitive about how to encourage it. Furthermore, striking the balance between speaking up while also having your teammate’s back is challenging when you don’t actually agree with what your teammate is doing.

How do you have someone’s back when you forcefully disagree with that person?

First, you have to be very honest with yourself. You have to ask yourself whether it’s possible to go along with a decision or a certain type of behavior given your strong feelings. If your answer is no, you need to opt-out.

Second, once you make the decision to stay in, you have to do everything in your power to contribute to success. You are as accountable as everyone else to the team. If things go south, take responsibility, don’t just blame the other person. If you can’t do this, you will subtly undermine the team, whether or not that is your intention.

Hall of Fame coach, Bill Parcells, was widely known for his ability to turn around the culture of any football team he inherited. Here’s a story he recently shared about the greatest player who ever played for him (and there were many), Hall of Fame linebacker, Lawrence Taylor:

Here’s the best thing about Lawrence. And this goes for that team too. I could be not talking to that son of a bitch for three weeks. You know, we would have those times where… contentiousness was not the right word to describe it. It was worse. But no matter how bad it was, no matter how pissed I was at him, no matter how pissed he was at me: Sunday, 1 o’clock, he’s standing right next to me when they’re playing that anthem before the game. Every single time. And you know what that meant? Well, “You might be an a–hole, but I’m with you right now.” That’s really what it meant. I loved him. He was a special kid.

AP Photo / Ray Stubblebine

David Chang on Integrity

I’ve never met David Chang, the hotshot chef/owner of the Momofuku restaurants in New York, nor have I ever tasted his food. From the various profiles I’ve read of the dude, he seems like the kind of guy I’d either be best friends with or wouldn’t be able to stand.

My all-time favorite story about him comes from this 2008 New Yorker profile:

At Noodle Bar, a junior line cook had been cooking chicken for family meal—lunch for the staff—and although he had to cook something like seventy-five chicken pieces and the stoves were mostly empty, he’d been cooking them in only two pans, which meant that he was wasting time he could have spent helping to prep for dinner. Also, he was cooking with tongs, which was bad technique, it ripped the food apart, it was how you cooked at T.G.I. Friday’s—he should have been using a spoon or a spatula. Cooking with tongs showed disrespect for the chicken, disrespect for family meal, and, by extension, disrespect for the entire restaurant. But the guy cooking family meal was just the beginning of it. Walking down the line, Chang had spotted another cook cutting fish cake into slices that were totally uneven and looked like hell. Someone else was handling ice-cream cones with her bare hands, touching the end that wasn’t covered in paper. None of these mistakes was egregious in itself, but all of them together made Chang feel that Noodle Bar’s kitchen was degenerating into decadence and anarchy. He had screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later.

The following afternoon, Chang called an emergency meeting for the staff. Something was rotten in Noodle Bar, and he meant to cut it out and destroy it before it was too late.

“I haven’t been spending that much time in this restaurant because of all the shit that’s been going on,” he began, “but the past two days I’ve had aneurisms because I’ve been so upset at the kitchen. On the cooks’ end, I question your integrity. Are you willing to fucking sacrifice yourself for the food? Yesterday, we had an incident with fish cakes: they weren’t properly cut. Does it really matter in the bowl of ramen? No. But for personal integrity as a cook, this is what we do, and I don’t think you guys fucking care enough. It takes those little things, the properly cut scallions, to set us apart from Uno’s and McDonald’s. If we don’t step up our game, we’re headed toward the middle, and I don’t want to fucking work there.

“We’re not the best cooks, we’re not the best restaurant—if you were a really good cook you wouldn’t be working here, because really good cooks are assholes. But we’re gonna try our best, and that’s as a team. Recently, over at Ssäm Bar, a sous-chef closed improperly, there were a lot of mistakes, and I was livid and I let this guy have it. About a week later, I found out that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t even at the restaurant that night. But what he said was ‘I’m sorry, it will never happen again.’ And you know what? I felt like an asshole for yelling at him, but, more important, I felt like, Wow, this is what we want to build our company around: guys that have this level of integrity. Just because we’re not Per Se, just because we’re not Daniel, just because we’re not a four-star restaurant, why can’t we have the same fucking standards? If we start being accountable not only for our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome shit.”

Fuck yeah. Fires me up every time I read it.