Theory Paper – Ian Renshaw & Keith Davids – The Constraints Collective Podcast

Picture two sessions. In the first, cones mark the exact channel a player must dribble through, a serve has to land inside a taped box, and a checklist scores technique against a single model. In the second, a small-sided game runs with adaptable rules and scaled equipment, and there’s no one correct way to solve it. Most coaches move between those two poles in their practice sessions. Fewer could say why one pole produces “fundamentals” and the other produces adaptable players, or what happens to a programme that drifts too far toward either end without anyone noticing.

That’s the question a new paper puts directly to Ian and Keith this month, and it doesn’t mention sport once. It’s about park benches, glass building facades, and a street corner that turned itself into a bee hotel. The paper: Woods, Richard, Martin & Cairney (2026), “Loosening Tightened Logics: A Comment on the Role of Affordances,” New Ideas in Psychology, 83, 101289.

The Bee Hotel Nobody Designed

Carl Woods opens the paper with his nephew leading him to a city street corner that had, without anyone planning it, become a small, shared garden with flowers, spades, watering cans in a communal basket. Importantly, no one was “in charge” of the space and nobody had designed the corner to become that. It just held enough open room for it to happen.

Woods and colleagues borrow a distinction from Franck and Stevens’ 2007 essay Tying Down Loose Space: tight space prescribes its own use through clearly demarcated features, like a bench with armrests welded in to stop anyone lying down, or signage listing what’s forbidden. Loose space supports activity that unfolds in ways nobody specified in advance. Neither is a fixed property of a place. The same corner can be tightened or loosened depending on who shows up and what they do with it.

“Tight and loose are not pre-existing entities, instead unfolding with the actions of people attuned to the opportunities a space affords (or not).” – Woods, Richard, Martin & Cairney (2026), p.4

If you swap “urban space” for “training environment,” the paper stops being about city planning. The cone drill, the single technical model, the serve that must land in the box, that’s tight space. The adaptable small-sided game is loose space. The paper’s real argument isn’t that loose wins. It’s that most environments drift tight without anyone deciding it should happen.

Meaning Isn’t Attached, It’s Discovered

The paper’s theoretical spine is Gibson’s concept of affordance, a property of the environment scaled to what a given animal can do with it, not a label a person mentally sticks onto an object. Affordances carry an “invitational pull”, their “attractiveness” depending entirely on who’s there and what they’re doing. For example, a vertical surface affords climbing to one individual, kicking a ball against to another, or leaping over to a third.

The implication that matters for coaching is that meaning isn’t attached to a task from outside by a coach’s plan. It’s discovered by the athlete, amid exploration.

“Affordances breed behaviours, behaviours breed ideas, and ideas breed … design.” – Kaaronen (2019), quoted in Woods et al. (2026), p.5

Coaching sessions that are built on a focus on deliberate designing-in of specific affordances are therefore more than simply “letting players work it out,” a common misconception about CLA coaching. It says the environment itself is doing conceptual work, generating behaviours and ideas the coach didn’t script, simply by being loose enough to allow it.

The Principle of Spontaneity

Section three of the paper arrives at a design idea from Kaaronen and Rietveld (2021): the principle of spontaneity. Read through an ecological dynamics lens, this isn’t an absence of design at all – it’s a deliberate manipulation of task constraints to keep degrees of freedom in the system open, rather than collapsing them prematurely toward one prescribed solution. The designer holds enough “wiggle room” in the environment for behaviour to self-organise around whatever affordances the individual picks up, not the one the designer had in mind. It is the same logic that sits underneath a non-linear pedagogy: structure isn’t removed and left to chance, constraints are calibrated so that functional variability, movement solutions nobody explicitly coached, has room to emerge.

“[Spontaneity encourages] strategic design interventions [that] can also push people out of habitual ‘comfort zones’ … encouraging them to explore and reflect upon their entrenched habits.” – Kaaronen & Rietveld (2021), quoted in Woods et al. (2026), p.5–6

The paper’s case study, Reflective Dance, brings the idea to life. A University of Queensland building facade, one-way reflective glass, a wide concrete landing, an overhanging roof, was never designed for dancers. But its properties (free mirrors, sheltered space, room for multiple groups, sound carrying under the overhang) acted as an invitation for dance groups who found it, for free, better suited to their needs than a paid studio. Nobody designed that facade for dance. Its structure simply afforded it, and people attuned enough to notice, with the effectivities (Gibson, 1979) to act on what they saw, took it up.

That’s the crux tension worth sitting with: affordances designed in versus affordances that emerge on their own terms. A coach, or an urban designer, can deliberately hold a possibility space open wide enough for self-organisation to occur within it. But the moment you specify exactly which affordance you want detected, you’ve collapsed that space back down to one prescribed solution. Intent doesn’t save you here. You’ve tightened it again, just with better motives for doing so.

The same idea sits inside a task built only around a coach’s intentions. Such sessions risk failing learners, because they carry a standing potential to misalign, specifying a solution that doesn’t match the performer’s actual action capabilities. A basketball coach insisting a group of 12-year-olds shoot with “biomechanically correct” technique, without first scaling ball size and hoop height to their bodies and capabilities, is whistling in the wind.

Every Session Sits on a Tight-Loose Dial

This is where the paper stops being about cities. Over-tightened practice is the more common failure mode in coaching, drill-based sessions built around a single technical model, dressed up as “fundamentals.” The paper’s sanitisation critique of cities applies just as directly to a programme that has tightened without anyone deciding it should.

Looseness, importantly, isn’t the absence of constraint. It’s designed indeterminacy, which maps directly onto task constraint manipulation in a constraints-led approach. A coach doesn’t remove structure to loosen a session. They manipulate which affordances are available, and how many ways there are to actualise them.

“Strategically designed affordances can act to both regulate behaviour in routinised ways (supporting the logics of tightness), and hold open room for looseness.” – Woods et al. (2026), p.6

The Risk of Overcorrecting

None of this is an argument for stripping every session bare and hoping something emerges. The paper is explicit that tight logics still matter:

“Tightened logics serve an important role within urban settings, enabling a regularity that promotes reliability, safety, and an economy of movement.” – Woods et al. (2026), p.3

A programme with zero structure isn’t the goal any more than one with total, prescriptive structure. The paper argues for rebalancing, not for maximising looseness, the same caution that separates a well-designed constraints-led session from an unstructured free-for-all that happens to look similar on the surface.

The stairwell example the paper returns to late on makes the closing point cleanly: people become attuned to a space’s affording potential over time, through exposure, not instruction. That’s not a bad description of what a well-built training environment is supposed to do for an athlete, hold room open long enough, and specifically enough, for something to be discovered rather than delivered. The coach’s job, on that reading, isn’t to fill the room. It’s to decide, session by session, how much of it to leave open.

This episode is available now on Buzzsprout and all major podcast platforms. Listen at buzzsprout.com/2354827