What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About Innovation In Sport

A conceptual guide for implementing innovations in sport science

By Dr Carl Woods

Innovation is more than just implementing an idea or using a fancy bit of tech. While it may include both of these things, true innovation is better understood as a continually evolving process that progressively instils ways of doing that are uniquely different from those attempted before. However, despite being praised in sport by the media, governing organisations, and scientific journals, there is a general lack of support to guide those interested in actually instilling innovative ‘ways of doing’.

So then, where do innovations in sport science actually come from? How do researchers and practitioners collectively explore the dynamic landscape of inquiry, problem, solution, and application? How do they learn to skilfully navigate from current place and practice toward the next idea located beyond their current vantagepoint?

Recently, we set out to address some of these questions in a paper published in Sports Medicine – Open. This paper introduced a Hunter-Gatherer Model of human behaviour based on wayfinding (Figure 1), situating it as a conceptual guide for implementing innovations in sport science. As suggested by its name, wayfinding can be understood as a process in which an individual learns to navigate through an environment by directly experiencing and detecting information (like the signs that guide you along a bushwalk). These signs are what ultimately helps you ‘find your way’.

Now, applied to sport, wayfinding offers a cool metaphor to help us understand how we can learn to grow our knowledge and solve new problems without being explicitly told how to do so by a coach, teacher, or bit of fancy tech! So, in our behavioural model of innovation, we contend that to hunt ‘big ideas’ and gather ‘new knowledge’, sport researchers and practitioners must learn to wayfind through new and uncharted knowledge regions located beyond the horizon. Specifically, by breaking the shackles of sub-disciplinarity and setting sail into the unknown, they are likely to grow knowledge, gain experiences, and learn as they go. Ultimately, they’ll take these insights ‘home’ and use them to enrich and evolve their current ‘ways of doing’. It’s important to note that we did not classify ‘hunters’ and ‘gatherers’ in sport science in this model. Instead, we suggested that both were required for innovation to unfold in accord with this model – the hunting instincts drive pragmatic search and exploration, while the gathering instincts enable the discerning of how ‘new’ knowledge can be used.

To help bring life to this model, we introduced three principles common to successful hunting and gathering.

Principle 1 – Avoid hunting and gathering alone

Our ancestors knew there was power in numbers, but just not too many! A successful hunting-gathering party consists of a small group of individuals who share diverse knowledge, but are bound by a common goal. For example, an expert tracker, a tool maker and a gatherer may come together for an expedition, sharing their varied expertise and knowledge in the collective goal of catching their prey.

Translate that to a sports organisation, and it could look like a coach, a performance analyst, a high-performance manager, and a skill acquisition specialist, working together to design practice tasks for football. Each brings complementary but unique skills that can be blended to help achieve a common goal:

• The coach and high-performance manager could gather experiential and empirical knowledge to hunt the specific features of the game underpinning the practice tasks,

• The skill acquisition specialist could hunt and gather different ways to effectively design the practice tasks,

• The performance analyst could hunt different ways of capturing the practice tasks and gather this knowledge to support its ongoing redesign.

 The hunt has begun!

Principle 2 – Don’t go home too early

Hunter-gatherers often embark upon long expeditions, exploring different regions within a landscape along the way. Importantly, not all regions afford the same richness of information to support wayfinding. Blizzards, seemingly desolate deserts, and windless oceans offer reduce information available, but rather than simply abandoning the expedition, hunter-gatherer parties adapt and persist.

As the hunting and gathering party from our hypothetical sports organisation use their wayfinding skills to search out new ways of designing practice tasks, they’ll face similar challenges. Instead of a blizzard, engrained socio-cultural constraints may be what hampers their capability to detect rich information. For example, the new way of designing practice tasks may directly challenge the more traditional, coach-centred way the organisation is used to. However, rather than succumbing to this ‘norm’, they persist toward this new way, adapting their behaviours accordingly. In the spirit of the model, the party are following the shared ethos of ‘knowing as we go’, reflecting on the gathered knowledge after each hunt to continually find their way. It’s this persistence that could lead to a ‘way’ of practice design that exceeds what has been experienced by the sports organisation before.

The ‘prey’ has been identified!

Principle 3 – Inhabit and integrate

A strategy Inuit hunter-gatherers often use to indicate a region in a landscape had been inhabited was to create rock formations that were rich in meaning. This information was then used to support future expeditions through these regions. Thus, to integrate a new hunting region into a landscape and deepen their knowledge of the prey within the area, a party would have to inhabit it.

By this stage, our hypothetical hunting-gathering party in the sports organisation now have an innovative way of designing and monitoring practice tasks that exceeds what they’ve done before. This new, innovative way has emerged through the hunting of new practice designs, and the gathering of knowledge to determine how well they guided athlete learning. Moreover, they overcame and adapted to engrained sociocultural norms that challenged to derail them. Simply, the old way of designing practice ceases to exist, as the party are now inhabiting and integrating the ‘new’, emergent, way of practice design.

This is not the ‘destination’ though. By this stage of the expedition, the hunting and gathering party have sharpened their instincts, basing ‘ways of doing’ around a new outlook, one which has search, discover and exploit at its core, with a knowing as we go ethos cascading into the next expedition.

Onto the next ‘prey’!

Paper citation

Woods CT, Robertson S, Rudd J, Araújo D, Davids K. ‘Knowing as we go’: A hunter-gatherer behavioural model to guide innovation in sport science. Sports Medicine – Open. 2020, 6(52): https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-020-00281-8