Episode 106 · Craig Harrison · The Constraints Collective Podcast

Every coach would agree that failure is a key part of learning. Indeed, we would frame "failure" as discovering through exploration. If I say this out loud on a coaching course, I see a sea of nodding heads. However, when I ask what your goal is when working with youngsters, the answer is nearly always to help them develop the basics. When probed, this comes down to a single correct technique marked right or wrong against a checklist. When it comes to physical development, coaches typically go to three sets of ten on the machine. So why do coaches agree that mistakes are essential to learning, but work to try and ensure they don't happen? Perhaps it comes down to expectation when you charge children for coaching and training sessions. In our latest podcast, Craig Harrison discusses with us how he changed his approach in an LTAD programme in Auckland, and how one of the biggest challenges was parents - not the children.

Craig Harrison ran his programme for young people at AUT Millennium in Auckland for almost ten years, and has just written a book, Coach by Design, about closing that gap between what coaches say about failure and what their sessions actually allow.

Structure and Control, Not Structure or Freedom

Craig's book splits environment design into two separate levers rather than one sliding scale between drilled and unstructured. Structure is what the space allows a learner to choose and perceive. Control is the force a coach applies to direct decisions and behaviour on top of that. The two move independently - a coach can build a wide-open space and still talk a young athlete through every decision inside it, or hand over a narrow space and step right back.

That separation gave Craig and his team a genuine decision to make with every athlete, rather than a philosophy to defend. A child arriving with the coordination for a task but no confidence in it needs less structure removed and more control eased off. One with neither needs both dialled up until the foundation is there to build on.

"I define structure as what the environment allows that learner to choose and perceive, and control is the level of force that we apply as a coach in order to direct those decisions and behaviors." - Craig Harrison

Designing for Everyday Risk

The light bulb moment for Craig, described in his book, came watching children learning to skateboard at the skate park. Nobody designed it with a curriculum in mind, and nobody standing at the top of a ramp is thinking about failure. They are, as Craig puts it, just getting after it. Falling is built into the culture without ever being named as the point.

Part of what makes that culture work is age mixing. Craig points to the Maori concept of Tuakana Taina - older kids providing the example, kids of similar ability learning alongside each other, and everyone getting a turn teaching someone younger. At a skate park, that circulation happens on its own. Most built environments for young people remove it, sorting by age band and leaving nothing on show for a younger kid to aspire to. For us, this has so many parallels to backyard games, which sadly Craig - and others - see declining today.

Craig built the same logic into his own home, running a set of monkey bars down the hallway specifically to keep his children's shoulders exposed to overhead movement - the first thing lost, he says, once kids stop climbing at around age eight.

"We get after risk every day - not the type of risk that ends in fatality, but small moments of risk that build over time. And those things add up." - Craig Harrison

The Coffee Club

Craig's team moved away from repetitive three-times-ten drills once they noticed that children with confidence lit up in more exploratory sessions, whilst those who weren't needed more structure around their initial learning. The new approach was working really well, but the problem showed up on the sideline. Parents watching a programme they were paying for saw something that looked less orderly than what they expected training to look like, and started asking what exactly they were paying for.

Craig's answer wasn't a better explanation of the method. It was sitting down over a coffee with parents and narrating what they were watching in real time, turn by turn, until the learning taking place in front of them made sense on its own terms.

"The way that I got around that was a coffee club that we started - essentially parents and I drinking a lot of coffee, and I would narrate the experience." - Craig Harrison

Sometimes, when a key player in a programme leaves, the ideas die and everyone goes back to the old ways. At the Millennium Centre, the programme still runs today despite Craig leaving, under different coaches, using the same approach - partly, Craig thinks, because he built the reasoning behind it into a resource library rather than keeping it as something only he could explain.

A Continuum, Not a Switch

Individual need keeps moving, which means the structure-and-control dial has to move with it. Growth spurts were the clearest case: a young athlete who looked coordinated one month can lose it entirely the next, purely from a fast change in limb length, before it comes back together on its own. Craig's team would deliberately add structure and control back in during that window, not because the athlete had regressed as a person, but because the environment they had been coping with had just changed size under them. We discuss this issue in chapter three of our book, Motor Learning in Practice.

"What is it that they need right now? What's our job as an environment in order to move them forward?" - Craig Harrison

That question, asked fresh for every athlete on every day, is the actual job. Not choosing a side of a spectrum and defending it.

Partway through the conversation, Ian pointed out how closely this maps onto the paper Keith and he had just reviewed for this month's theory episode - Woods, Richard, Martin and Cairney's work on tightened and loosened space in cities, and the street corner that turned itself into a shared garden without anyone designing it to. Craig's structure and control are that same pair of dials, built independently at the scale of a training session rather than a city block. Neither paper nor programme argues for maximum looseness. Both land on the same job for the person doing the designing: decide, case by case, how much of the room to leave open.

This episode is available now on Buzzsprout and all major podcast platforms.