It's Fourth and Long. Go For It. The Numbers Are In Your Favor.
It's the playoffs in the NFL and I'm bummed. One of the teams I had as my favorite to go far in the tournament went out with barely a fight. It's not so much that they lost. It's just that they left a lot of money on the table. There were opportunities for them to take a chance and go for it on fourth down, and the coach decided that the "winning" strategy was to kick it away to the opposing team. That got me thinking --- whose idea was it anyway to believe that kicking the ball away on fourth down makes sense when a you're playing in a one-and-done playoff series? Isn't this the time to roll the dice and take creative chances and gather exceptional courage?
I've spent the past 10 years teaching homeless people a new method that expanded their capacity so that they could arrive at new solutions to old problems. We call this new approach The Window Effect. It incorporates the teaching of Quantum Physics to people who've probably never been exposed to those ideas before. It also incorporates philosophy, political discourse and visioning. It should be noted that I never teach down to these students. I always encourage them to come up to the level of information I provide. This pushes the student beyond their comfort zone, but asks them to go further. From all of my work over the years doing this course, one thing I know for sure: - you can't teach courage, but you can create an atmosphere for people to get it for themselves. Courage requires people to think beyond their normal reasoning. In order for my students to wrap their heads around models of thinking beyond the normal, I decided to break courage down in terms of sports, namely football and the infamous fourth down decision.
Anyone who watches American-style football with any regularity knows that teams often punt the ball or kick a field goal on fourth down. The conventional wisdom is that you play to not lose the game by tying it with a field goal or you punt the ball so far away, the other team has less of a chance of scoring, thus increasing the odds that your team will win. According to an emerging number of statisticians and economists, going for a first down or touchdown instead of kicking the ball is a better bet. One guy from this new school of thought is David Berri, a sports economist and professor of applied economics at Southern Utah University. He comes flat out and says teams punt much more frequently than they should. "You don't want to punt when you have the ball in the area of your opponent's 30- to 40-yard line," he says. "The cost-benefit study indicates you should go for it. If you punt, they're probably going to get the ball on the 20 anyway, which isn't much of a gain, and it's a long field goal. The value of going for it increases dramatically in that area of the field. "
I started talking to the students with these facts just to let them know that the odds are often in their favor when they decide to take chances where contemporary conventional wisdom tells them to play it safe.
We started describing fourth-down scenarios in their lives where they were asked to either go for it or punt. Most of the time (not all), we realized that when they punted (using the analogy) the situation didn't get better. In many cases, it got worse. Going for it on fourth down is not necessarily the best idea all of the time, but making it part of the discussion instead of going for the punt immediately increased the student's courage ratio and possibilities for success. The numbers bear it out. Go for it.
Chet W. Sisk
Chet W. Sisk is a thought leader in Sustainable Society Leadership and the author of the new book "Think This, Not That: It's Time To Update Your Conventional Wisdom".
