IN-GAME DECISION MAKING OF AFL COACHES (STUDY)

                                          

These notes come a recently released study titled "A Framework to Explain the In-Game Decision Making of Elite Australian Football Coaches."

• Coaches relied on subjective/objective sources of information and consulted with assistant coaches, performance analysts and sports scientists
• Coaches regularly make complex decisions pertaining to training, strategic game-play decisions, athlete management, team selection and recruitment
• They consult a broad range of knowledge sources and use that information to process their decisions whilst also considering the consequences of them
• This process, known as reasoning, rarely leads the decision maker to an optimal decision but rather one that is instead only satisfactory
• An extension of rational choice (boundary rationality) more suitable describes the coaches decision making process
• Within boundary rationality, coaches intend to make the optimal rationale decision, the outcome of their decision is dependent on the interaction between the available information (objective data/information from others), their own cognitive information processing capacities and the time in which they have to act
• Given the same problem this explains how different coaches come up with diff solutions which they believe to be correct
• For professional coaches, boundary rationale highlights the benefit of having access to the best possible information/environment, together with masterful capabilities (perception/knowledge/metacognition) when making decisions
• Decision making during competition is made via a combination of intuitive thinking (doing what feels right based on experience) and objectively measured data (KPI’s) to form decisions
• The naturalistic decision making framework (NDM) explains that in time-constrained decision making environments, expert coaches will scan for and attend to key attractors or recognise patterns in a continuously unfolding environment, framing a decision problem if a mental threshold is reached
• This leads to speedy situational assessment and matching of a potential solution to the problem based on tacit knowledge, and experiences stored as mental models without explicit reasoning
• A prominent model within decision making, recognition primed decision making (RPD) builds on this framework, proposing decision making in some cases involving a blend of intuition/analysis and according to RPD, key attractors immediately lead expert decision makers to a simply matched solution in most cases (known as variation 1 of RPD), as they search for additional cues to diagnose the problem if an immediate solution is not recognised (variation 2 of RPD)
• In some cases a stored memory may not match the present problem leading to mental stimulation’s of potential modifications to solutions (from previous experiences) to evaluate their applicability to the present problem (variation 3 of RPD)
• This highlights the presence of some reasoning in unseen, perhaps more complex decision problems
• NDM/RPD suitable accounts for time-constrained decision making and in high performance competition contexts, NDM suitably fits the decision making of coaches in this time-constrained environment
• Although NDM/RPD reflect decision making in time-constrained environments, they still focus primarily on intuition and expertise
• When observing players/umpires, the time constraints on decisions are far greater then those on coaches so it's reasonable to assume coaches may engage in more critical reasoning
• While coaches utilise intuition/expertise during competition, which aligns with NDM/RPD, they also have access to several objective resources (video replay, GPS etc) along with support staff
• Boundary rationality has been used to understand time-constrained decision making in the business world and has been used to explain the differences between coach decision making outcomes in sports with differing levels of information quality available to coaches
• Invasion sport coaches must make time-constrained decisions during matches but with limited opportunities to provide feedback to players outside of scheduled breaks but in AFL they have a runner that can relay individual messages to players in-game and also between quarters which provides AFL coaches the unique opportunity to have their in-match decision making supported by applying research to practice
• From a boundary rationale perspective, this study asked AFL coaches what actions/processes constitute the decision making of AFL coaches during matches, how do AFL coaches interact with their environment when making decisions during matches and what information do AFL coaches rely upon to make decisions during matches
• The framework assumes a boundary rationale perspective in the decision making of AFL coaches meaning they intend to act rationally but are bound to solutions that are only satisfactory within their constraints
• This study identified the 6 stages of decision making of AFL coaches during matches while highlighting how they use their own intuition/experience which leads to boundary rationale decisions which influence the feedback they ultimately give to players and also demonstrating that they trust their own assessment of the match but also believe in interaction with support staff
• The 6 stage framework of decision making of AFL coaches during matches is opportunity trigger, understand the opportunity, determine the need or action, explore options, take action and evaluate the decision