Projected action sequencing

Malcolm Gladwell has a new article out in the New Yorker about predicting who is most likely to succeed in certain particular professions. Of interest, he mentions the lack of predictive ability of which college football quarterbacks will succeed in the NFL. His analysis is that while quarterbacking in the respective levels of football at this position should be fairly comparable, they are not. The offensive philosophy in which the star quarterbacks play in college do not resemble those in the NFL. When the freshly graduated QB enters the NFL, the defenses are much faster and powerful, and he does not find his receivers nearly as open to catch passes. The skills required in college are athleticism, passing accuracy, and good talent to surround you on offense. In the NFL, you need these things at a minimum. You also need the ability to see the defense as it forms, in real time, and a predictive ability to know where your receiver will be open, a few seconds into the future. Occupational therapists call this Projected Action Sequencing. (I've written about this on another post in this blog, comparing NFL quarterbacking skills to playing the violin.)
Interestingly, Gladwell writes about another profession that vexes talent locators: Teachers.
In his piece, Gladwell describes an excellent teacher as someone who can read the body language of 30 individual and collective children, and intuitively engage each and all in dialog about the present subject on the docket. This teacher keeps the room focused on the dialog of learning while picking up on errant attention spans, and general hokum before the room gets out of control. Gladwell's first point is that fancy and multiple degrees in education are not indicators of this skill. His second point is the obvious question of why we don't spend more resources as a nation to find people with these skills and pay them to educate our children. Gladwell illustrates this by describing the resources poured into developing financial planners and laments that our society prioritizes our financial assets over our children.
He missed a beautiful analogy between the NFL quarterback and the teachers. The successful teacher is accessing their alertness (and projected action sequencing) to watch over the fluid dynamics of 30 children in a classroom, the same way a successful NFL quarterback is watching over the fearsome defense. The successful QB pays attention to the subtle cues of his opponent to project where he will be, and where to direct the football. The successful teacher directs the flow of teaching material to engage their students. If we test each of these type of prospects for fluency in these skills, we will find the talent we've been looking for. About devising that test...

The balance of coffee and bagels

Christoph Niemanan provides some important thinking on the balance of bagels with his coffee obsession. His napkin art is not to be missed.
Here's one frame that graphs his love for different varieties, and admitting his mistake for his fling with blueberry bagels.


Neimann's key to the graph:

Here’s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.

For good measure I have added my bagel preferences over the same period. (1) Drip coffee, (2) Starbucks, (3) blueberry bagels, (4) sesame bagels, (5) poppy-seed bagels, (6) everything bagels

Please don’t hold my brief affair with blueberry bagels against me. I cured myself of this aberration.

Conditions for government building

David Brooks writes in his column in the New York Times about government building:

"The U.S. and its allies will use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations."

This reminds me of Richard Hackman's idea for increasing the likelihood of teamwork being sucessful, by asserting a number of interrelated conditions on the team. This concept is absent from the idea that freedom loving people crave democracies, and will naturally form these kind of governments if given the chance. Certain conditions need to be present for the "likelihood of successful" democratic governments surviving, where none existed previously. Brooks asserts that Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Robert Gates are on the same page about this.