Week 115: The adjustments you can make
Cautionary Tales, inherited books, and daily puzzle games and their parodies
This week, I was listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast as they retold the story of Twyla Tharp's retooling of her musical Movin' Out, which they tied into the story of how the Gossamer Condor won the Kremer prize. I was familiar with the first story, and remembered the second story from the morning news reports in 1976, and hadn't had those memories stimulated in quite a while.
The key point they wanted to get to in the podcast was basically that if you're in a failing project, with a limited time, you need to aim for fast practical fixes, and the quickest, simplest improvements. In the case of the Gossamer Condor, they were trying to do a human-powered flight, and their aircraft was easily redesignable on the fly. Their competitors were developing designs that when they failed, failed completely. When they crashed, they couldn't take the crashed plane and use most of it. The Gossamer Condor, when it crashed or failed, could mostly be reconstructed, and modified from the pieces. Essentially, it had a much quicker cycle from failure to improvement.
The podcast then attempted to infer the same lesson was applied to the opening of Movin' Out. I actually don't think the podcast sold the idea of the two being similar enough to note, because it omitted a key component of the story. The Gossamer Condor could be iteratively advanced faster because of the cycle being shorter. Movin' Out had catastrophic previews, but it was still going to be opening on Broadway within a week. It had a chance to iterate to a new version exactly once. This time certainty deadline is exactly similar to our situation.
From the decision to coach to our first practice is the big sweeping action, and if that action is a failure, we maybe have one chance to iterate and improve on the practice before performance. But they're right in saying that we don't have time for anything other than the quickest, simplest improvements.
For our purposes, there's only three situations where we can actually do a quick, simple improvement on the fly.
1. Change of availability
2. Swapping out a set of data
3. Rules Changes
Availability of your team members is something you're going to ask about at the first practice, and then find the situation has changed. This is the highest likelihood change you'll have to make. This is why I am emphatic in insisting you overrecruit, put alternate names on your team registration, and have alternates travel to the station with the team. Don't spend too much time on it, but always have the plan in the back of your mind who is your replacement in case each of your players is suddenly a no-show.
If you get to the end of the first practice, and you realize you're focussing on a piece of information that will never come up, you can and should drop the subject immediately. If instead you realize something is likely to come up, but you don't have the material to teach it, note it to the team, and figure out how to get that study material to them, either in the next practice, or by emailing them.
If you realize the implication of a rule changes how you've been teaching them to play the game, you have to address it as soon as you realize it. If that happens outside of practice, you should note it to your team in email, and then again at the beginning of the next practice.
All three of these key off of you as coach thinking about the problems you face as you practice, and responding to the situation. It means we have to have the big jump correct so that the adjustments we require are simple and achievable.
This week I spent some time harvesting books out of my aunt's house. As they ready the house for sale, all the relatives have been pulling things out, furniture, fixtures, and the like; now the time has come to go through the bookcases. I've been dreading this a little because I don't know what to do with most of these books. The libraries around here have given up on donations, the used book stores are not interested in 50-60 year old books that aren't classic editions, and travel guides, histories, and art museum guides from 1960's Asia are not really the types of things that sell in Western PA. Further, I have no interest in spending time organizing online sales of these.
I did take some of it, a few reference books which I'm using as confirmatory evidence for the book (She had a copy of the World Almanac of the USA, which was dated perfectly to confirm something I suspected but couldn't prove about a shift in reference books in the era prior to Wikipedia.) I grabbed an incomplete shelf of the Oxford World's Classics, because it's something that could be used for questions, or could be used as prizes for a tournament, and then a few of the histories for the same reason. I couldn't find a case to bring the art books with me, they seemed so specific to a niche that I knew I wouldn't find. If you have any ideas, or something you want me to look for, let me know.
I was contemplating a section this week examining my strategy with the daily online Redactle, but today I think I topped out at a point where a strategy can't be reproduced. Today's run was just luck, and even if "luck is the residue of design," you can't teach from a wildly successful or lucky example.
I solved today's Redactle (#49) in 4 guesses with an accuracy of 100.00%. Played at https://www.redactle.com/
Yeah, I'm not beating that, either for accuracy or golf score. (I will note my first word in Redactle is always "first", so I spotted something about this that was unique and I deviated from my methods with word 2, expanded the phrase on 3, discovering I hit one of the target words, and then closed it off on 4.)
In order to sort of show my strategies with this, and how that approach applies to quiz bowl, I'm going to need a much worse example to work with. So expect that in next week's newsletter.
Finally, I'll just note that the t-shirt for the HSNCT is finally up for sale.
While I would have liked this to have been available for sale at the tournament, we couldn't make it work during planning due to our original COVID restrictions, so this is the best we could do for this year. I am happy to see it given this was the third t-shirt design I've come up with for championships, and it's the one I've had to do the most work to get it moving. The original plan was going to be different versions (and logical solutions) for each of the championships, but that would have taken too much time to cycle.