How Soccer Teams Use Agile Concepts to Achieve Success

soccer team

I was watching a Sunday morning Soccer match. One of the announcers said something that sparked my agile brain into pulling out the notebook.

Paraphrasing here, “They are playing well, but it is the outcome that matters”.

Now I started watching with an agile critical lens. Soccer, along with all other sports, is about the outcome. The output of the team is important in reaching the desired outcome. Although, luck sometimes plays a part, the focus is about the importance of inspection and adaptation to achieve a desired outcome.

A soccer team is always going to have initial output in ways that follow the gameplan. But if things are not going in a way that shows a high possibility of achieving the outcome of winning, then adjustments are made.

Throughout the match, the team adapts. A lot of small feedback loops are happening. Small adjustments are made, sometime bigger adjustments made such as player substitutions. But the team continuously adapts to their own improvements as well as to what the competition is doing.

At halftime, there might be a large change in the gameplan as the entire team communicates at once. Then the small feedback loops and adjustments begin again.

This is a competition. Each team wants the same outcome for their team. Sometimes only one of them will succeed, sometimes they will walk away achieving only part of the desired outcome, tying the competition, and sometimes they will lose. But being able to inspect and adapt the output to achieve the desired outcome is a critical part of the game.

In business, this concept is in a larger scope than 90 minutes to garnish points. And sometimes with much higher stakes. But the need to focus on the desired outcomes, to constantly inspect and adapt is a key component in achieving success.