Mindset
Risk vs Reward
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.“
– George Bernard Shaw
Living in the world of human performance at the highest levels for most of my career has given me a front-row seat to the human psyche. At our core, we are creatures of habit. We like to feel safe. We like to feel in control.
That instinct is not learned. It is wired into us from birth. It governs our primitive reflexes, informs how our brain filters information, and shapes how we respond under pressure. Safety first. Performance second.
While this wiring can be overridden by our thinking mind, by reflection, reasoning, and deliberate choice, that capacity has limits. The more time pressure, urgency, and consequence involved in a decision, the more we default to reflex and bias rather than thoughtful analysis. When the stakes rise and the clock shrinks, instinct takes the wheel.
On the surface, high performance sport, whether professional or Olympic, appears to be a laboratory for innovation. From the outside looking in, it feels like a space where pushing boundaries, exploring the unknown, and shaping what has never been done before should be the norm.
In reality, it is the exception.
Far more often, what you see in so-called high performance environments is the same behavior, recycled year after year, under the banner of best practice. Same ideas. Same language. Same solutions. Different day.
There are reasons for this, and most of them trace back to survival.
Innovation requires risk. To do something differently is to accept that it may fail more often than it succeeds. Anyone who has spent time in entrepreneurship understands this reality. Failure is not a flaw in the process. It is part of the cost of admission. Many people avoid entrepreneurship altogether because they are unwilling to accept that trade-off.
High performance sport adds another layer of constraint.
There is only so much room at the top. Each sport has its own culture, its own hierarchy, and its own narrow funnel of opportunity. There are 32 teams in the NFL and NHL, 30 in the NBA and MLB. That means roughly 30 head coaching jobs, 30 general manager roles, and a limited number of senior performance positions in each league. In some sports there are more total roles, but many come with significant travel, instability, or personal sacrifice.
As you climb that ladder, opportunities become fewer and competition becomes fiercer. Movement between sports is not nearly as fluid as it appears from the outside. A practitioner seasoned in hockey does not simply walk into a baseball clubhouse and apply the same understanding without earning trust and navigating a steep learning curve. Meanwhile, there are many capable people already embedded in that sport, waiting patiently for their chance to move up.
This reality shapes behavior.
Once someone reaches a coveted role, something subtle begins to shift. Without consciously deciding to, they become more protective. Less experimental. Less willing to risk what they have earned. The goal quietly moves from exploration to preservation.
True innovation becomes dangerous.
When someone does take that risk and it works, when success follows, which in sport is defined almost exclusively by winning, another phenomenon emerges. Copying.
Sometimes others see the innovation and think, this is possible, it works, maybe we should try it too. Occasionally that spreads an idea. More often, it dilutes it. What worked in one environment worked because of the person implementing it, their constraints, their intuition, their context. When stripped of that and applied elsewhere, the outcome rarely survives.
The other pathway is through what people like to call a coaching tree. Those who learned under the innovator carry the process forward, often faithfully, often rigidly. What began as a creative act slowly hardens into doctrine. The innovation becomes institutionalized. Same process. Same language. Same day.
Job protection, safety, and survival are the true rate limiters of innovation.
Those who genuinely innovate are not driven by success, nor are they paralyzed by failure. They are possessed by curiosity and an almost unreasonable desire to explore what might be possible. George Bernard Shaw captured this perfectly when he wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Reasonableness is safe. It breeds sameness.
Unreasonableness, however, comes at a cost. Swimming against the current is exhausting. Innovation is not for those seeking comfort or certainty. It demands that you risk what you have accumulated in service of something that may never materialize.
And yet, every meaningful leap our species has made has come from those willing to accept that bargain.
That is the great paradox.
Without innovation, we preserve nothing of consequence. With it, we risk everything we hold dear.
So the question remains.
Who is up for the ride?
