When I was a teenager, I had a part time job at Pizza Hut. For a teenage boy, I’ve got to say, there can’t have been many jobs better than that. On the top of the list of things that made that job great, I had:

1.      What seemed like a never-ending supply of Meatlovers Pizza

2.      Unlimited access to the deep fryer, and a boss who let us deep fry anything

3.      Working with two other good mates at the same time

On one sleepy Monday evening, while kneading dough and cutting pizzas, one of my mates and I decided to come up with a new ‘word’ that we could get to catch on, that we could get to go ‘viral’. We wanted a new word to describe something being cool. The word we decided on was ‘acidic’. As in “bro, have you heard the new Killers song. It’s acidic man!”

As you know, acidic hasn’t caught on, much to our disappointment. From memory, we gave it a good month of pushing it before giving up the ghost.

The MAYA principle stands for “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”, and it’s a design theory created by the industrial designer Raymond Loewy. It means giving users the most advanced design possible, but keeping it close enough to what they already know so they can accept and embrace it. (thanks to Ross Pinder for introducing me to this idea).

For close to two decades, I have been haunted by why ‘acidic’ didn’t catch on. Thanks to Loewy, I can now see that ‘acidic’ was just too advanced for people. It was beyond their comprehension or understanding. We hadn’t understood and adhered to the MAYA principle! (that’s definitely it by the way. It’s definitely NOT down to the fact that acidic was a terrible word and was never, ever going to catch on).

Loewy’s underpinning belief, that drove him to create the MAYA principle, was “consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new.” As a result, people are drawn to things that are bold, but at the same time instantly recognisable. I think the MAYA principle can help coaches, because that tension that Loewy describes can be seen in other aspects of life, not just consumers and sales. Players feel the same pull between curiosity (I’ve seen this new skill I want to try) and fear (If I’m the only one trying it, I might look like an idiot though). While Loewy developed MAYA as a design principle, I believe it crosses over as a behaviour change principle too.

As Sam and I have written about consistently on this newsletter over the past couple of years, central to what we think great coaching is, is growth. Both your own growth, and how effectively you can help your players grow. Central to the idea of growth is change. It’s movement from where I was, to where I want to be. And often times, when we’re driving change as coaches, we’re selling something to our players, e.g. “this is going to help us with where we are going”. This is where an understanding of MAYA can help us.

I do want to stress, I don’t particularly like using the word ‘sell’ here, because I have negative connotations around selling, and sales and that whole world. But, I’m going to keep using it because I think it creates a nice tension for us. I don’t think the vast majority of coaches think of themselves as needing ‘sales’ skills, but if you can think of sales and selling as trying to change someone’s behaviour to make a decision, it is actually central to our role. Sales = behaviour change.

I’d like you to take a couple of minutes after you read this, and make a list of everything you are potentially selling someone in your team, or your staff on, at the moment. In my role with NZ Cricket, leading our High Performance Coaching system, I came up with the following list of things I’m selling people on:

·       Better training design aligned to skill learning principles

·       Asking for more feedback from their playing group

·       Creating better reflection habits

·       Having more conversations and reflections as a coaching group

·       Using their sport psych more consistently during practice

·       Carving out time for their own development during the season

·       Practising how they have difficult conversations

This is not an exhaustive list, but in doing this little reflective exercise, I pretty quickly came up with multiple concepts that I am trying to sell to our coaches.

Once you have your list of things you’re trying to sell in your environment, you can then start to apply the MAYA principle to those things. What is the most advanced ‘design’ of that thing right now, but that is also close enough to what they already know. Let’s play this out in an example:

Looking at this through MAYA, what could some options be:

Iteration 1: You could split the team into groups of three, and the first conversation they have in the debrief is with that group. Each group could have a senior player or leader, someone more confident in speaking to the whole team, and they feed back to the wider group what the smaller group discussed. That might be all you do at this point, because anything more than that is getting close to being too different, and thus negating MAYA. But the stretch here, the ‘most advanced’ part is that everyone is actually speaking.

A few weeks of that, then:

Iteration 2: You change who reports back to the whole group, so it’s no longer just the role of the senior players. The ‘most advanced’ of this iteration is there is no longer the security blanket of team leaders speaking.

A few weeks of that, then:

Iteration 3: As a coaching staff, you don’t come into the room until the team have debriefed performance. When you come into the room, the team reports back on what they discussed and what they think the key points are from their performance. The ‘most advanced’ of this iteration is the players are driving the direction and focus of the debrief. It’s shifted from coach led to player led, which was the goal all along.

You may read through that example, and have a different idea of how the MAYA principle could work. That’s the point. In some ways, you’re running an experiment to see what might shift the behaviour you want to change. But I don’t want this to be misconstrued as “change things gradually”. MAYA isn’t about going slow, for slow’s sake. The coaching skill is understanding where the edge of acceptable is for your athlete or team, and pitching the change at that point. Each iteration makes the new thing familiar, so the ‘edge of acceptable’ moves outwards. That’s why Iteration 3 is possible when it wouldn’t have been in week one.

As I said above, I’d encourage you to take some time after you read this to create a list of things you’re ‘selling’. Then, take the next step. Brainstorm how you can apply the MAYA principle to a couple of those things. What does the most advanced yet acceptable version of those look like? If you can then implement some of those changes, just think about how acidic that would be.

“To sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.”

Raymond Loewy

Derek Thompson, an author and podcast host I really enjoy, delves into this idea in his Ted Talk below. Check it out:

If this has got you curious, get in touch. Email us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!

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