John Maxwell says that leadership is influence. Nothing more and nothing less. Your leadership ability, then, is directly correlated to how well you can influence the behaviors and thoughts of those around you. It’s my belief that we have the ability to change any behavior. It’s just a matter of if you have enough time, resources, and are willing to put in the effort. Many times what we are missing is the proper information for what the behavior change requires. John B Watson once said the following:
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select — doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”
Agree or disagree, you cannot explain away the research that supports how powerful an environment is in influencing the behaviors that we all have. That is what this book is about. How you as a coach can learn to be an environmental architect by influencing behaviors through:
Changing and evaluating culture
Engaging in Narrative Warfare
Executing Tactical Deception
See below for a short snippet from the book:
Section 4: Narrative Warfare
“How to transform/ (Craft) the identity of your team.”
f(P/C, E) = B → P2 → P3(R)
“Narrative is a strategy towards an end; a tool for restructuring the way people feel, think, and respond to the world.”
In 2014, Urban Meyer was the coach of the Ohio State Buckeye Football Team and won the college football national championship. It was an intense year for them as they lost their first game of the season, had season-ending injuries for multiple starting players, and even had to deal with the death of a teammate. Throughout all of these obstacles, including having to start their third-string quarterback in the national championship, they were able to overcome it. How? Urban Meyer says one of their primary reasons is because of their focus on one message:
E + R = O
There are events (E) that happen to us, but those events do not solely shape the outcomes that we receive. No. It is those events and how we respond (R) to them that ultimately drive the results that we get. He called this acting “Above The Line”. If you get a bad call by a referee, it is how you respond to that bad call that will shape your outcome. If someone gives you a cheap shot, and you decide to hit them back, that penalty you receive will be due to your response, not the initial event that happened to you. This message pushed his entire team to perceive and act in alignment. He would repeat this message over and over again. They had classes about it. People were held accountable for breaking the theme of this message. This was a key component to helping craft the identity of their team and led them to perceive the experiences that happened to them in a different way which drove them to act or behave in manners more consistent with high-performance.
This is a great example of how intentionally crafting the right message can shape the behavior of your team to be more high-performing. Every coach should want the team to think, feel, and respond to their environment in a parallel fashion that is leading them all to a common goal. Messaging is only one component of how to do this well and falls under a broader category known as narrative, the focus of this chapter. I will provide a connection between military research and approach to narrative warfare and how these concepts can be used by you as the coach to improve your team.
f(P/C, E) = B → P → P(R)
In the last chapter, we focused on how to shape the environment to impact behavior. This chapter will focus on how narrative can be used to influence the personhood or identity of an individual or group and how to shape it to influence behavior so that you and your team can begin to enact the appropriate behaviors that drive the process which heightens your positioning and increases the probability that you will reach your results.
Most coaches actually go through this process without even realizing it. If you have developed a slogan for the year for your particular team, then you have participated in one aspect of narrative warfare, although probably not very well or with intention. One of my favorite examples is the Philadelphia 76ers team slogan of “Trust The Process”. What this did was provide a common frame or lens for all events and information to be centered around. When singular losses occurred or whole losing seasons, the team and fan base understood and perceived those hard times in alignment.
It drove a growth mindset not just within the players but the entire organization. Narratives help to align perception, processing, and the inference of causality or meaning which you will find helpful for three primary reasons: :
Alignment of effort around the same goals and hurdles keeping us from reaching them
Provides a similar purpose, reason, and motivation
Decreases the amount of conflict that arises over the course of your story together as a team
To do this well, I want to break down what we know to be true about narrative warfare and how PSYOP fits into this non-kinetic warfighting function. Once we show how PSYOP uses it, I will show you how those same principles can be applied to help benefit your team. This type of warfare is right at the heart of the 5th generation of warfare and we have learned a lot from our military experiences in leveraging this concept to win wars. When done effectively, narratives can award meaning to physical fights. When done poorly, they can eradicate even the hardest won territorial gains.
Narrative warfare is the use of information and communication tools to spread stories in an attempt to subvert an adversary’s identity and institutions. It is becoming the weapon of choice in an emerging domain of asymmetric warfare which aims its attack at the shared beliefs and values of culture by trying to sow complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. Some of its techniques and tools include info war like disinformation and misinformation campaigns, fake news, PSYACTS, and social media. It draws on new evidence in fields such as behavioral psychology, marketing, media, and neuroscience, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. A great example of its use is with our recent war in the Middle East after the the events of September 11th. Five days later, Geroge Bush first coined the phrase, “War on Terror” which became a beckoning call to support a narrative for the nation to defeat those who would seek to destroy us. Soon thereafter, the “War on Islam” phrase was coined by Islamist extremist organizations to support a different narrative shared by many Muslims. The objective of these mantras were to get others to perceive their messaging in a particular way to gain more support for their cause. With only a small percentage of resources as compared to their opponents, ISIS was able to recruit over 100,000 people from all over the world in a matter of months with this narrative.
Narratives are the past, current, and future of warfare. It is the high-ground from which all state actors and non-state actors are fighting. If you can command the narrative landscape, then you have control of the meaning of the information space and the identity of a particular group to which narrative warfare is directly linked to. As we go through experiences or consume information stimuli, we perceive that experience or information in a particular way. Over time, this is turned into a story that we tell about ourselves and the world around us and the narrative theory of identity says that we are the story that we tell about ourselves. This story shapes what we believe, what we value, our self-talk, singular actions, habits, and even our very character. It is my belief that the crux of identity, the cornerstone, lies in how we perceive. This is mostly due to the fact that perception frames the story we tell about ourselves and the world. It is in this perception that narrative plays a crucial role. Let’s start by walking through what some of the military and civilian experts have to say about narratives so that we can then connect this to your role as a coach.