Total Football for Nonprofits
I am convinced that agility will be the hallmark of future successful nonprofits.
In five years, successful ministries will look like the Dutch soccer teams of the 1970’s, playing Total Football to the delight of their constituents and the benefit of human-kind.
A programming note, from here on out when you see football, I’m talking about the sport the rest of the world calls football, what we American’s call soccer.
Total Football is a concept created by Rinus Michels and first really put into practice by the Dutch Ajax team in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Generally in football you have a particular formation, such as the 4-4-2 the U.S. team often plays. That is four defenders, four midfielders and two attackers (football formations always start at the back).
The goal is to keep this “shape” throughout the game. Teams often get into trouble when they loose their shape and holes open up.
In Total Football there is a starting formation (4-2-4), but players swap roles on the fly as the game progresses.
It’s easier to understand if you watch the first 20 seconds or so of this video (excuse the cheesy music).
Right about 18 seconds you can count all ten Dutch players in the frame. This is a big no-no in general, but was part of the Total Football philosophy.
This system requires each player to constantly access the current state of the game and the space around them to flow to where the team needs him. It creates huge match-up problems for defenders and leads to an improvisational type of play that is hard to coach against.
As you would expect people who are better attackers than defenders play that role more often. And of course the goalie stayed in goal, that role never got swapped around. To be sure this took a special group of players and when Ajax traded their star player away they had trouble replicating their early success.
A nonprofit will always have folks who are stronger in some aspects than others.
And will always have team members who’s role shouldn’t be shared (CFO comes to mind).
The more a nonprofit’s employees look up from their particular task and take a larger view to understand what is needed right now to be successful the more successful you will be.
By itself this is nothing but blue-sky solutioneering, I have a few specific ideas I’ll be publishing here over the next few days, so stay tuned.
