This month saw a spectacularly brilliant Manchester City football team win the English Premiership. The seeds of that victory were laid in the 1970s in Dutch Club Ajax and can tell us a great deal about building an agile, adaptive technical team.
This same thinking we used in forming the Learning Through Play technical team at the LEGO Foundation, and is a highly effective thinking tool for forming your organisational technical teams - whether that is a global insights team in a large educational iNGO or an instructional team in school.
Game theory is usually associated with rather dry mathematical statistical models of how to respond to recursive scenarios in which not only your choices, but your opponent’s choices are interdependent. For a very humourous version of this, the Princess Bride illustrates the point (and it is always good to have an excuse to watch the Princess Bride).
For a more conventional introduction, you might try this. And yes, it does have mathematical statistical tables. It is a fascinating read.
So how does that get us to Pep Guardiola winning five of the last six premier league titles with Manchester City FC and what has that to do with the LEGO Foundation?
The answer is Total Football, probably the most important game theory strategy in the beautiful game.
Total Football is a system of play where any outfield player, can take the role of any other player if they move out of position. (See this video for an illustration). This allows players to instantly adapt and respond to what is unfolding in front of them, without leaving gaps behind as they move. Whilst the team members have notional positions, they learn to occupy any space on the field. The demands of this style of football are very high - it takes intelligent, flexible, technically brilliant players who have the imagination to see how their movement can shape the game. But if you have these players, there is no better way to deploy them. For the opposition it is dazzling to try to keep track of how your opponent will move, or keep track of all the different spaces opening up around you.
Johan Cruyff is the historical figurehead of this style of football, having unprecedented success at Ajax and in the Dutch national team in the 1970s under the banner of playing ‘Total Football’, before moving to Barcelona, where he trained a young Pep Guardiola. In their very first encounter, Cruyff moved Pep into a defensive midfield position, recognising his ability to read and shape the game. After a distinguished playing career, Pep became initially the second team, then the first team coach at Barcelona, where using the same fundamental ideas of total football he won an unprecedented number of titles in the Spanish league. Total football it turned out, was not just an Ajax phenomenon, but a game theory phenomenon.
When Pep moved to Manchester City, the consensus view, was that the technical, intelligent, possession-based game just would not work in the more physical English game. Needless to say, this prejudice was wildly misplaced. Intelligent, agile, flexible teams will work in every context.
When forming a technical team, such as the Learning Through Play technical team at the LEGO Foundation from August 2022, the basic needs make the same strategy high applicable. You need technically good team members who are good at their position - be that early childhood education, policy, research methodologies or pedagogy. You need them to move freely so they rapidly build up experience across a given area. We called ourselves the ‘Bee Team’ both as an inside joke (not the A team, but the second best B team, because if you are the underdog you fight harder), and because like Bees, by going to pollinate flowers, you both cross pollinate ideas across the organisation, and you collect honey (the knowledge that gathers in the hive). But if teammates can only play one position, every time they move out of position you are left with a gap. For example if your Early Childhood specialist takes on a lot of projects, or is ill, then suddenly a big request comes in, you are left completely open and vulnerable. On the other hand, if everyone does ‘anything’ you are missing the concentration of expertise that comes with repeated exposure.
To create the technical team equivalent of total football, we mapped all our work (our evolving positions on the pitch) both on a visual map, and on weekly updates from all team members. We collectively discussed and allocated the flow of requests coming in each week, and ensured that we deliberately both built expertise in specific areas, and also deliberately blurred boundaries. For example, pairing up a positional player with someone out-of-position, or encouraging team members solidly in position to stretch to one new project out-of-position. This means when a team member is over-committed, or fully stretched out-of-position, other team members can seamlessly move into the space left open, and the formation flows into a new shape with no friction. This dynamic movement in and out of position is thrilling in the feeling of perfectly balancing the need for consistency and expertise, with innovation and pathfinding whilst maintaining a strong overall formation.
I have long admired total football as an incredibly powerful idea. I strongly recommend considering it when you form technical teams in your organisation. I would very much like to thank Juliette, Patricia, Tanvi, Ole, Eve, Kathryn, Elisabeth and Cat for being an exceptional team as we did that work together - the strategy only works if you have intelligent, curious and flexible teammates - and that is exactly what they were.
And despite supporting Manchester United, I have to also congratulate Pep on achieving something both highly effective and very beautiful.
