Should we expect more?

For a long time now I’ve been a supporter of Australia’s national Rugby Union team, the Wallabies. I watch every game, buy supporter gear and keep up to date with the team news.

As with any sporting team, they’ve had their ups and downs. The ups were stratospheric, when they won two world cups in the 1990s. The downs then followed… for twenty-seven years, bringing us to the current day.

There are plenty of good reasons for this decline. Some say the sport’s administrators became complacent, and didn’t change their approach as other countries were getting stronger. Then you have the four strong competing football codes in Australia, which take a lot of the talent away from Rugby Union – other countries generally have less competition.

I sometimes watch some of the lesser-known Rugby countries play. Their supporters show up and when their team is soundly beaten, they don’t really seem to mind. Their expectations are fairly low. When compared with Australian fans, it’s a stark contrast.

Unfortunately, many people in Australia have never forgotten how good Australia used to be. So now, when the Wallabies happen to lose against an excellent team like France or Ireland (both currently ranked among the best in the world, above Australia), a chorus of calls ring out for the coach to be sacked.

If you spend any time online, you’ll see tremendous anger and criticism coming from people who say they support the team. In one exchange, I noticed an online supporter saying that they “don’t enjoy losing every week”, and that they “expect more from the team”.

This piqued my interest. Should I be expecting more, and am I letting my favourite sporting team off the hook?

Great expectations.

It strikes me as strange to have expectations of a sporting team. We want them to do well, yell our support and feel disappointed when they lose… but to expect something from them seems a little odd to me.

If I buy supporter gear, purchase tickets to some games and pay for a streaming subscription so I can watch the team play, does that mean I’m entitled to expect better results from the team? I guess when you think about it, I am partially paying the salaries of these sporting stars. My payment of several hundred dollars per year entitles me to a portion of performance, doesn’t it? It’s a little like having a minor stake in a racehorse.

It is also true that if nobody ever watched sport, no athlete would ever be paid for what they do. There would be no advertising dollars or sponsorships, because no-one would be watching the coverage.

Perhaps a more reasonable expectation would be about effort, rather than results. When it comes to results, there are so many factors out of the players’ control. For one thing, if the other team is really good, that’s going to have a major impact on the outcome of any match.

So is it more reasonable for me to instead expect to see the players putting in the right amount of effort? If I see them training hard in a social media post, is that enough? I still don’t really get to learn much about their work ethic, whether they do extra drills at training or whether they are sticking to their diets.

What you might notice is that this is all subjective. What I believe is the right amount of effort may be entirely different from somebody else watching.

You could apply a similar line of thinking to politicians or government workers. As taxpayers, we are essentially funding their positions. As a result, some people may expect certain levels of performance from our public “servants”.

If we are put on hold for twenty minutes after calling the Australian Taxation Office, should we be entitled to claim that our tax dollars are not well spent, because such a call should only really take a minute? Or if our garbage is collected a day later than usual, should we claim that our local government workers aren’t working hard, efficiently or fast enough?

We actually don’t really know what’s going on.

Complaining about underperforming sports teams, government workers or anyone in the public eye is a common pastime for many. But the unfortunate reality for those that partake in this hobby is that we don’t really have enough information to rightfully complain.

For every occasion of inefficient service or perceived poor performance, there are thousands of potential confounding factors that influence what we see.

Perhaps there have been funding cuts or a spate of influenza which has impacted the productivity in a customer service team. Or maybe the system used to process local government transactions has recently been upgraded, causing unexpected performance issues. In the case of our sporting heroes, perhaps a scheduling snafu has seen the team needing to train at an unfamiliar facility with a harder pitch, increasing the likelihood of injury.

There are so many factors that we’re generally unaware of when it comes to passing judgement on people working within complex systems. It seems insensitive to ignore all of these potential complicating factors and to simply say that “we expect better” or “someone should have thought of that issue beforehand”.

Instinctively it feels to me like we are never really justified in critiquing performance from the outside in, because there is simply so much about the conditions that we can’t possibly be aware of. However, it also feels wrong to say that we can’t ever justifiably critique performance, because that would imply that there is never a problem that can be fixed or performance that can be improved.

If nobody offered critical comments or judgement and simply accepted that we cannot possibly know what led to the performance they were observing, the world would be one in which poor performance would be tolerated, and may even thrive.

Surely the judgement of critics is valuable in some way, even if it isn’t well-informed – if not to be able to hold anyone accountable directly – but at least to let everyone know that somebody is watching… and they’re not happy.

Everyone is doing their best.

We often hear people say that “they’re doing their best” in different situations. I’d actually argue that in any given scenario, nobody is doing their best.

When you finish work on a Monday afternoon, a little tired and sorrowful due to the passing of another weekend, can you honestly say that on that day, you put in your best effort – all day – without any slight dips in your performance? You didn’t take any little breaks to chat about the weekend with a colleague, or sip that coffee for a few extra minutes?

I doubt it. I certainly can’t say that I’m doing my best all the time.

In fact, this past Monday I had a relaxed morning where I took my dog for a walk for forty minutes, and then watched the world cup final highlights before even opening my email. I won’t argue that this is my very best.

Nobody is really doing their best, because everyone is dealing with something at some level – pressure, fatigue, sadness, stress. Even professional athletes aren’t really doing their best all the time. It’s just that often we don’t notice because even if they feel slightly tired that day, their performance is still really, really good.

When we say people are doing their best, we really mean that they are doing their best under the current circumstances. We don’t mean they’re smashing their previous record – we usually mean they are putting in the best effort with the energy and motivation that they currently have available.

So if nobody is really doing their very best, how can we feel justified in passing judgement on others, when we know that there are so many hidden factors that may influence performance on any given day?

What is the purpose of our judgement?

When passing judgement, it’s instructive to consider what we’re trying to achieve.

Are we commenting because we genuinely want to see an improvement in the way things are done? Or are we criticising because we feel hurt in some way, and it feels satisfying to discharge our emotions? Maybe we pass judgement because it feels good to share an opinion with others from the same tribe.

Criticism that genuinely helps to improve customer service, efficiency or performance seems useful and necessary to hold people accountable and strive for better outcomes.

But for the rest of it, I wonder whether it would be better resting on the cutting room floor.