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The former England rugby union coach, Sir Clive Woodward, once shared an anecdote about a diving competition being unexpectedly delayed after an interloper in fancy dress jumped into the pool.
Woodward described how some competitors became too anxious, poorly focused and disturbed, while others remained calm, continued their preparation and treated these changing circumstances as part of the challenge. Not surprisingly, the last few divers did much better when the competition resumed.
In a similar vein, Arsenal men’s football manager Mikel Arteta recently spoke about deliberately creating unexpected disruptions for his players as part of their preparation. The Spaniard, whose contract has just been extended by the Premier League champions, explained that he is doing this to promote more adaptability from his players when they have to perform at the highest level in fluctuating real-world circumstances.
Arteta’s tactics include unexpectedly delaying the players’ meals, changing their travel plans, making changing rooms warmer and reducing the number of massage beds. Another reported example was secretly placing professional packets at a team dinner to emphasize the importance of maintaining awareness against opponents known to steal benefits.
Arteta is not the first elite coach to use such management tactics. But is there evidence that they work? And should we adopt similar tactics in our own lives and organizations?
Legendary coaches have their players unstoppable
Many top sports coaches have found unusual ways to provoke players to try to increase their match readiness. The legendary American football coach Bill Belichick – whose favorite Sun Tzu quote is “every battle is won before it is fought” – would make the conditions as difficult as possible during training for his players, such as the condition of the balls. “Wet, sticky, cold, slippery – however bad we make them, I make them,” he bragged.
Across the Atlantic, Nottingham Forest’s all-conquering football manager Brian Clough would regularly unsettle players and opponents alike with his strategically unpredictable behaviour. On one occasion, he threw one of his players’ boots into the crowd, declaring that if he didn’t use them properly, someone else would. Complacency was rarely an issue with Clough’s teams.
But what seems to distinguish Arteta’s methods is an increased focus on the potential value of day-to-day operational disruption to player development. This mimics the research of US psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork on the effect of “desired difficulty” as a means of improving learning skills.
Their work found that introducing short-term, strenuous challenges into educational plans improved learning and retention. Discomfort could be beneficial if not seen as an obstacle, but a means to promote adaptability and development.
Canadian sports psychologist Nicola Hodges has also worked on desirable difficulties in high-performance sports, emphasizing the importance of incorporating challenge and difficulty into training for athletes to adapt. Their training regimen framework suggests that optimal learning often results from combat with appropriately challenging situations—but only if the level of combat is calibrated to the learner’s abilities.
The context of the challenge is also important. Hodges concludes that the difficulties should be meaningful – such as training when you are tired or with crowd noise – to promote useful transfer to situations that are likely to occur in the real world.
Locating the ‘Challenge Point’
The fact that Arteta has now spoken about this unusual training tactic is interesting. It came after the disruption to Arsenal’s Champions League travel plans, caused by a major UK air traffic control issue, took its toll on the team.
They still won at Italian giants Napoli, after which Arteta revealed that he deliberately made his team late for pre-season games to prepare them for such an eventuality. “I don’t want the players and the staff to panic,” he explained. “If that [disruption] happens, adapt – don’t use it as an excuse.
Having won the Premier League title for the first time as Arsenal manager last season, it may be that Arteta now feels more amenable to challenging players further and reducing the likelihood of complacency.
After a similarly successful season with Portuguese club Porto, incoming manager José Mourinho deliberately adopted a more challenging tactical model. He later explained that this was to force his players to be more rigorous, focused and “get them on a short leash”, rather than resting on their laurels.
Hodges writes about locating the “challenge point” for each player where adaptation is maximized without risk of demotivating or overpowering. Of course, this point is different for each player, depending on their physical and mental characteristics.
This is a consideration for Arteta going forward. As champions, how far should the bar be raised collectively to promote further improvement? And how much uncertainty and difficulty can each of his players tolerate? An unexpected bump in the road to another Championship title came recently with a defeat at Brighton where they faced incredibly unusual “pressing traps”.
Arteta’s approach parallels Stoic resilience training, in the notion that facing adversity in a controlled environment can boost performance later when uncertainty is encountered.
Stoic philosophy emphasizes that external circumstances are not under our control, but our reactions and choices are. Stoics carefully exposed themselves to small hardships such as cold baths to train their ability to maintain composure and adaptability.
The psychological principle underlying this, well supported by empirical evidence, is that exposure to manageable, planned stressors promotes adaptability, focus and resilience. For each of us in every walk of life, difficulty can actually be desirable at times.
