BirdsCommaAngry
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"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
This is one of the reoccurring themes of work dealing with the methods involved in what makes our minds tick when formulating ideas about the world. There are those with more singular beliefs and those with understandings that are diverse to the point where they may seem without certainty. I view this concept not so much as a direct classification but a spectrum where people can be both foxes and hedgehogs to different degrees. Nevertheless, it has some serious truth to it and we might just be witnessing it with our football team.
Pete Carroll is the consummate hedgehog. His singular belief above all else is competition. He's a competitor, his players will be competitors, his practices are competitive, and come game day, our players aren't so much playing a game as they are following their refined competitive instincts. He's conformed his idea to what should constitute the proper organization to support his teams. This is to have an entrusting owner, a general manager that if all else fails must abide by his decisions, and to place himself at the head of the table to instill his singular belief throughout the organization. This isn't to say PC is a man of few ideas. He's bounced around the league, gathered his own ideas, and even incorporated influences from the late great John Wooden. But these ideas have been honed under the scope of competition and "Win Forever". The man doesn't just speak or act in cliches formed of his own prerogatives and ideals, he is them.
John Schneider, on the other hand, is the consummate fox. "No stone unturned" is commonplace when describing his approach to obtaining players. CFL, character issues, too short, too long, or hasn't even played the position? I imagine he would shrug assuming he even cared enough with the various schools of conventional wisdom to begin with. However, checking every rock is a product of something occurring in his intellect. It's the realization that for him to best fulfill his role and his potential as a GM and FO figurehead, almost no idea will be dismissed (unless it's you, Tebow). He may be a product of Green Bay's remarkable FO where they hold the belief in building through the draft as singularly as PC believes in competition, but, as we've seen with his signings of Rice, Miller, and Harvin, he holds no loyalty to the GB method. His only loyalty is to the opportunities of the market and the multitude of ways he may use that for our franchise's benefit.
The potential of what happens when a fox like JS is teamed under the scope of a powerful singular belief like PC's is difficult to frame. Many of our poster's struggle calculating this very thing when attempting to predict what our future will hold with mulling over the products of this relationship. Bad ass defense + bad ass run game x possibly great QB + sick off-season acquisitions = many titles? #1 in DVOA + sick off-season acquisitions = #1 in DVOA with authority....? Homerism x homerism^homerism = EVERY TITLE TIL RW RETIRES??!?! But there is a theory in place that can map out a basis for why our current success has been cultivated so suddenly and what our future potential may be even beyond the current squad.
Enter Chaos Theory.
Chaos theory involves a definition of chaos not necessarily meaning destruction or the like. The severe range of possibilities of this theory is best described by the expression: "the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas". It's a concept about how even small and seemingly completely unrelated events early enough in a process can culminate and cultivate even drastic events if it is capable of and allowed to grow exponentially. Nate Silver features a story in his book, The Signal and the Noise, where a group of meteorologists discovered they had predicted both a sunny day and a storm with seemingly the same data. They discovered that someone had rounded the 4th decimal of a single, seemingly unimportant number up and that fraction of a fraction was the difference between sun and storm in this particular situation. That's what a 0.0001 difference in barometric pressure in a small section of the atmosphere can potentially do.
What I wish to hypothesize for the members of our forum is aspects of chaos theory, mainly those about dynamic environments and exponential growth, very much apply to the growth of an organization like our Seahawks. It's not just something that can happen but it may have been a phenomenon that has happened and may still be happening. Pete Carroll's singular belief of competition may seem like a minuscule, unequivocal concept when he's not using it to push out holdover veterans from a defunct regime. John Schneider's prudence in evaluating not just every player seemingly known to man but even his own methods of evaluation may occasionally seem like exercises in futility when he's looking at players with seemingly no chance of making our team let alone any team in the NFL. However, with chaos theory in mind, I ponder about how the "Always Compete" mantra and these revolving nobodies taking their only shot at making it to the big leagues may contribute to just a small increase in work ethic and output. I ponder about how this small increase, even as little as a 0.0001 increase, is just the sort of thing that culminates a bottom-feeder into one of the quickest and total rebuilds in the NFL - and possibly even a championship.
This is one of the reoccurring themes of work dealing with the methods involved in what makes our minds tick when formulating ideas about the world. There are those with more singular beliefs and those with understandings that are diverse to the point where they may seem without certainty. I view this concept not so much as a direct classification but a spectrum where people can be both foxes and hedgehogs to different degrees. Nevertheless, it has some serious truth to it and we might just be witnessing it with our football team.
Pete Carroll is the consummate hedgehog. His singular belief above all else is competition. He's a competitor, his players will be competitors, his practices are competitive, and come game day, our players aren't so much playing a game as they are following their refined competitive instincts. He's conformed his idea to what should constitute the proper organization to support his teams. This is to have an entrusting owner, a general manager that if all else fails must abide by his decisions, and to place himself at the head of the table to instill his singular belief throughout the organization. This isn't to say PC is a man of few ideas. He's bounced around the league, gathered his own ideas, and even incorporated influences from the late great John Wooden. But these ideas have been honed under the scope of competition and "Win Forever". The man doesn't just speak or act in cliches formed of his own prerogatives and ideals, he is them.
John Schneider, on the other hand, is the consummate fox. "No stone unturned" is commonplace when describing his approach to obtaining players. CFL, character issues, too short, too long, or hasn't even played the position? I imagine he would shrug assuming he even cared enough with the various schools of conventional wisdom to begin with. However, checking every rock is a product of something occurring in his intellect. It's the realization that for him to best fulfill his role and his potential as a GM and FO figurehead, almost no idea will be dismissed (unless it's you, Tebow). He may be a product of Green Bay's remarkable FO where they hold the belief in building through the draft as singularly as PC believes in competition, but, as we've seen with his signings of Rice, Miller, and Harvin, he holds no loyalty to the GB method. His only loyalty is to the opportunities of the market and the multitude of ways he may use that for our franchise's benefit.
The potential of what happens when a fox like JS is teamed under the scope of a powerful singular belief like PC's is difficult to frame. Many of our poster's struggle calculating this very thing when attempting to predict what our future will hold with mulling over the products of this relationship. Bad ass defense + bad ass run game x possibly great QB + sick off-season acquisitions = many titles? #1 in DVOA + sick off-season acquisitions = #1 in DVOA with authority....? Homerism x homerism^homerism = EVERY TITLE TIL RW RETIRES??!?! But there is a theory in place that can map out a basis for why our current success has been cultivated so suddenly and what our future potential may be even beyond the current squad.
Enter Chaos Theory.
Chaos theory involves a definition of chaos not necessarily meaning destruction or the like. The severe range of possibilities of this theory is best described by the expression: "the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas". It's a concept about how even small and seemingly completely unrelated events early enough in a process can culminate and cultivate even drastic events if it is capable of and allowed to grow exponentially. Nate Silver features a story in his book, The Signal and the Noise, where a group of meteorologists discovered they had predicted both a sunny day and a storm with seemingly the same data. They discovered that someone had rounded the 4th decimal of a single, seemingly unimportant number up and that fraction of a fraction was the difference between sun and storm in this particular situation. That's what a 0.0001 difference in barometric pressure in a small section of the atmosphere can potentially do.
What I wish to hypothesize for the members of our forum is aspects of chaos theory, mainly those about dynamic environments and exponential growth, very much apply to the growth of an organization like our Seahawks. It's not just something that can happen but it may have been a phenomenon that has happened and may still be happening. Pete Carroll's singular belief of competition may seem like a minuscule, unequivocal concept when he's not using it to push out holdover veterans from a defunct regime. John Schneider's prudence in evaluating not just every player seemingly known to man but even his own methods of evaluation may occasionally seem like exercises in futility when he's looking at players with seemingly no chance of making our team let alone any team in the NFL. However, with chaos theory in mind, I ponder about how the "Always Compete" mantra and these revolving nobodies taking their only shot at making it to the big leagues may contribute to just a small increase in work ethic and output. I ponder about how this small increase, even as little as a 0.0001 increase, is just the sort of thing that culminates a bottom-feeder into one of the quickest and total rebuilds in the NFL - and possibly even a championship.
