Time, players and analysts

There are no future facts, and there are no past possibilities.

In the wake of time

The passing of time leaves behind a trail of events, some fulfilling or significant, others disappointing or trivial. Amongst these events is what we can describe in composite terms as success. We value and admire success and, naturally, seek to explain it in order to draw lessons with the hope of repeating it elsewhere.

Analysts and players

What complicates this effort is that time has left us behind, bequeathing to us the certainty of facts on which we can securely tie our explanations. We inadvertently become analysts, focused on weaving the acts into a causal story. But in doing so, we fail to appreciate that those at the forefront of action before events transpired - the players, focused on fulfilling certain aspirations - had no such certainty. This creeps unnoticeably into the language we use to describe the making of success.

Task and achievement verbs

In his classic book The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle made a distinction between task and achievement verbs and their different logical forces. Task verbs (e.g., play, search) refer to some undertaking as an unfinished activity, an ongoing process. Achievement verbs (e.g. win, find) do not refer to different activities but simply report the success of the undertakings marked by the corresponding task verbs.

There are no performative differences between playing and winning. When we use an achievement rather than a task verb, we simply assert that something additional happened (beyond the performing of the task) and thus incorporate the additional facts delivered by the passing of time. This shuns the vantage point of the player, with the uncertainties and possibilities inherent to it. We fail to appreciate that a miss could have been successful or that a win could have been unsuccessful.

Football illustrations

The men's football World Cup competition in Qatar provides ready illustrations of the player and analyst perspectives. Consider Japan's winning second goal agains Germany, scored by Asano. This momentous event took only 8 seconds to transpire, but the video allows us to stop time at the moment Asano kicks the ball, as in the picture below. 

At this point, we do not know whether the ball will go in the goal. Asano's kick reflects the "goal" he intends to score.  He sees an "opportunity" and acts on it. If he did not take the shot, we could argue forever about whether he would have scored.

An instant later the ball goes in the net - we now have the goal that Asano scored. To explain this goal, we have to look beyond the fact that he took the kick and consider a number of other factors that collectively constituted the opportunity for the goal to be scored:

• The defender did not block the shot
• The goalkeeper did not raise his hands to block the shot (he seemed to be expecting a low shot)
• The ball did not hit the post (as it could have)

Asano's goal reminded me of a seminal moment in Bulgarian football history: the goal scored by Kostadinov in the 90th minute (on the dot) of Bulgaria's last qualifying game for the 1994 World Cup in the USA, against France in Paris on 17 November 1993. With the score 1:1 into the final seconds of the game, France was on the verge of qualifying. With Kostadinov's goal Bulgaria won 2:1 and qualified instead. They reached the semi-final of the World Cup and finished 4th in the tournament.

Here is another stopped moment, in which audiences in two countries were waiting with bated breath for time to settle the facts of history.

What about this stopped moment?

Pulisic's shot in USA's game against England was fantastic ... but it hit the crossbar.

Entrepreneurship

The first two football examples suggest is that if the shots were not taken history (as we now know it) would not have been made and success (for Japan and Bulgaria) would not have been achieved. But, in the light of the third example, they also clearly show that this success was not guaranteed and things could have happened otherwise.

Making the shots is about the players. They took their chances by kicking the ball, channeling into the shot their accumulated skill, the fervour of their desire to win, and their hope that the shot would go in, fuelled perhaps by a flashing image in the mind of the ball going into the net. This is what the stopped moments contain - the intensity of trying and the suspense of hoping and not knowing.

Entrepreneurs are players. They are guided by visions of a different world that they aim to make work. In this sense, they see a certain future, which becomes their "opportunity" and thus gives meaning to what they do. They operate at the edge of time, not knowing but trying, hoping, improving their skill.

Scoring the goals or winning the games is about the story that the analysts can tell us. It implicates the broader complexity and circumstances of the game. Analysts have the luxury of knowing the extra facts of what happened after the shots and this empowers them to use achievement verbs in their stories. They can speak about opportunities with the certainty of knowing that they make certain achievements possible.

Analyst stories that shun the player perspective can be confusing to the next generation of players and entrepreneurs for they lead to senseless questions such as, "how do I score a goal?", "how do we win a game?", "how do we create value?" or "how do we build a successful company?". These questions are senseless because they presume that an answer can be found outside of time and outside of the heat of the game with its twists and turns.

To be an entrepreneur is to be future oriented and take chances. It is to move with time, always standing at its edge and looking ahead.

#entrepreneurialmindset #entrepreneurship Kinetic Thinking Joseph Pistrui