Striking out of your comfort zone

Jennie Finch is one heck of a softball pitcher.  She is a former collegiate All-American and Olympian (Team USA won the gold medal in softball at the 2004 Summer Olympics and the silver medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics), as well as a two-time professional softball All-Star.  Time magazine called her "the most famous softball player in history."  Her list of accomplishments is impressive, and she co-authored a book with Ann Killion, Throw Like a Girl: How to Dream Big and Believe in Yourself in 2011, which offers a collection of life lessons Finch learned through playing sports.

Finch played in a celebratory softball game (2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game) which featured several major league baseball players.  Finch struck out future Hall of Fame baseball players Albert Pujols and Mike Piazza, as well as two-time major league baseball All-Star, Brian Giles.  Giles said, "Her fastball was the fastest thing I've ever seen, from that distance.  It rises and cuts at the same time."

Major league slugger Barry Bonds watched all of this with amazement and challenged Finch to a pitching duel - "You faced all them little chumps...You gotta face the best."  Finch traveled to Arizona for spring training.  Bonds watched several pitches go by without even touching them, and it was only after she told him which pitches were coming that he even came close (here's a great video).  That same spring training season, she traveled to the Texas Rangers' spring training site to challenge slugger Alex Rodriguez, who was playing for the Rangers at that time.  He refused to swing at even one pitch saying, "No one's going to make a fool out of me."

During her professional softball career, Finch faced a number of major league baseball players as part of a regular segment on the television show, "This Week in Baseball."  Only two players, in fact, managed to hit one of her pitches during the segment's run - Scott Spiezio and Sean Casey.  Apparently, Finch faced Casey again 14 years later and struck him out.

Why was Finch so successful against these major league baseball players.  Her average pitch speed is about 65 mph.  The average major league baseball pitching speed is about 92 mph.  That seems pretty different until you factor in that the softball pitcher's mound is 43 feet away from home plate versus a distance of 60 feet 6 inches in baseball.  Based on that difference, Finch's pitches appear to be closer to 90 mph than the actual 65 mph, but that still doesn't explain why major leaguers couldn't even touch her pitches.

The answer may be found in a great book by the author, David Epstein, called The Sports Gene (on a side note, his more recent book, Range is perhaps the best book that I've read in the last year).  According to Epstein, it takes about 400 milliseconds from the point the baseball leaves the pitcher's hand for it to reach home plate.  Major league baseball players therefore have about 200 milliseconds to decide whether to swing at the pitch or not.  Two-hundred milliseconds is slightly less than the time it takes for you to blink an eye, so baseball players don't have very long to make their decision.  It seems impossible until you factor that hitters take into account other contextual factors (the pitch count definitely comes into play, but hitters also know what kinds of pitches the pitcher generally throws, both in general and in that specific pitch count scenario).  Hitters use this information (much of it learned via data analytics), as well as the pitcher's delivery motion to try to determine what kind of pitch is being thrown.

Therein lies the rub.  Major league pitchers have very little experience with fastpitch softball pitchers.  Most of them probably have never even faced a good fastpitch softball pitcher, let alone one of the greatest of all time.  As it turns out (and as Epstein explains in his book), most professional athletes use this kind of contextual information to make their decisions.  For example, top tennis players can predict whether a serve is going to their forehand or backhand based on the the movement of their opponent's torso (the research was conducted by Bruce Abernathy at the University of Queensland and was featured in a 2011 Sports Illustrated article, also by David Epstein).  Similarly, professional boxers can avoid their opponent's punches by watching for subtle movements of the other boxer.  How do they learn to do this?  Through thousands and thousands of hours of repetitive practice!

Context, as it turns out, is incredibly important.  No wonder individuals don't like to leave their comfort zones!  We know from a number of studies performed in a variety of different circumstances that the fear of failure, oftentimes combined with a fear of humiliation in front of one's peers, is a powerful impediment to trying something new.  Throw in the effects of loss aversion and the endowment effect (see "The only person who likes change is a wet baby") and suddenly you have a seemingly insurmountable barrier to change.  

So what can a leader do?  While there are a number of things a leader can and should do to create incentives for change (see for example, John Kotter's 8-step change model), perhaps the most important is creating psychological safety.  Simply put, leaders need to create a learning culture where failure is not only acceptable, it is encouraged.  Leaders need to embrace the concept that when teams fail, they learn.  And when teams learn, they improve.  The inventor Thomas Edison famously claimed to have tried over 10,000 different models for the light bulb.  When asked by a reporter how he felt about failing so many times, Edison replied, "I have not failed once.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

We may not need to fail 10,000 times on a task in order to ultimately find success.  But we shouldn't be afraid to fail.  If we embrace the learning that comes with failure, we will strike out beyond our comfort zone.  And we will grow and develop as a result.