Total soccer

Reading an article about DayJet, a new air-taxi service, I was struck by this description of total soccer. I'm a huge soccer fan and have known about the legendary Dutch teams of the 1970's for many years, but I'd never seen total soccer described so eloquently, let alone in a non-soccer context.

Herriot offers another sports metaphor: "Total soccer," popularized by the Dutch in the 1970s, replaced brute-force attacks to the goal with continuous ball movement. "Moving straight to the goal is an excellent way to score, except for one slight problem--the other team," Herriot says. "They're a human version of Murphy's Law. In total soccer, you continually place the ball in a position with not the straightest but the greatest number of ways to reach the goal, the richest set of pathways."

"Each individual pathway may have a lower possibility of reaching the goal than a straight shot," Sawhill chimes in, "but the combinatorial multiplicity overwhelms the other team." The Dutch discovered that a better strategy was a series of good, seamlessly connected solutions rather than a single brittle one.

"The Dutch won a lot of games that way," Herriot adds. "It also created a different kind of player, a more agile, intelligent one. In some sense, we're teaching DayJet how to play total soccer."

In complexity lingo, a chart of all the pathways those Dutch teams exploited would be called a "fitness landscape," a sort of topographical map of every theoretical solution in which the best are visualized as peaks and the worst as deep valleys. "We're dealing with a problem where the problem specification itself is changing as you go along," Sawhill says. "You no longer want to find the best solution--you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you're still there." Fluidity is the greater goal than perfection.

I mean, obviously they are describing a "possession game" but the image of the soccer pitch as a topographical map is a very interesting one.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-flight-plan.html