Sport Sparks: Supporting Creative Thinking by

Professional Coaches

James Lockerbie

, Neil Maiden

, Alex Wolf

and Konstantinos Zachos

Bayes Business School, City, University of London, London, U.K.

Alex Wolf, Liberating Brilliance Ltd., London, U.K.

Keywords: Creativity, Structured Creative Thinking Techniques, Prototype Digital Support, Elite Coaching.

Abstract: This short paper reports a new digital tool that supports creative idea generation about possible solutions to

these challenges. Exploratory design research resulted in a new digital tool that was designed for use by the

coaches of elite athletes, to discover creative ideas with which to remove, overcome and mitigate the effects

of concrete athlete under-performance. Furthermore, initial feedback from 22 professional sports practitioners

revealed that use of the tool led to most of them understanding the challenge from new perspectives, exploring

alternative options to solve the challenge, and influenced their decision-making about the challenge.

1 STRUCTURED CREATIVE

THINKING IN ELITE SPORTS

Coaching elite athletes often requires these coaches

to solve complex coaching problems. Examples of

these coaching problems include overcoming

recurring injuries, motivating athletes, and

maximizing their performance at the right time.

Solving these problems is rarely perceived to involve

creative thinking, even though many of these

problems might be perceived to be wicked and ill-

structured, and benefiting from creative thinking.

Creativity has been the subject of extensive

research. It can be defined as the ability to produce

work that is novel and original, as well as appropriate

and useful (Sternberg 1999). According to Maher &

Fisher (2011, p46), most definitions of creativity

include novelty as a criterion in creativity assessment,

often expressed as a new description or new value of

an outcome. Kaufman & Beghetto (2009) define 4

different forms of novelty that distinguish between

big-C creativity that is an eminent contribution to

society, and little-c creativity that is an everyday but

novel outcome not often perceived to be creative in

society. Opportunities for big-C creative outcomes in

sports coaching are few. One example might be the

members of a professional football team sitting down

to write a book together, as undertaken by Swedish

team Östersund. Opportunities for little-c outcomes

in elite coaching are much more common. These

outcomes might be novel to the elite athlete and

coaches who generate them, but perhaps not to others.

Reported examples of little-c coaching outcomes

include changing an athlete’s home diet, replaying

set-piece training on large screens next to the pitch,

and using different clothing when training. In this

paper we argue that reframing some elite athlete

coaching as everyday creative thinking to generate

little-c outcomes has the potential to solve athlete

challenges more effectively, and as a consequence,

contribute to athlete performance.

Numerous structured creative thinking processes

and techniques are now available to guide individuals

and teams to generate little-c creative outcomes.

Many of these processes and techniques can be traced

back to the new creative solving processes reported

by Osborn (1953) and Green (1960). During the

1960s and 1970s leaders such as Edward De Bono

(2007) developed lateral thinking and Genrich

Altshuller evolved the TRIZ method for structured

creative problem solving (Altshuller 1999). These

foundations have resulted in a large number of

structured creative thinking techniques that can be

applied to solve problems. However, so far, there

have been few reports of uses of these techniques to

coach elite athletes. One of the exceptions was the

rollout of CPS, a structured creative thinking process

and techniques (Isaksen et al. 2011) for use by

strength-and-conditioning coaches at the English

Institute of Sport, after the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Up to 45 coaches were trained to use it to resolve day-

Lockerbie, J., Maiden, N., Wolf, A. and Zachos, K.

Sport Sparks: Supporting Creative Thinking by Professional Coaches.

DOI: 10.5220/0010621700003059

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support (icSPORTS 2021), pages 79-86

ISBN: 978-989-758-539-5; ISSN: 2184-3201

to-day coaching challenges. However, published data

about the effectiveness of the rollout is still lacking.

What is more, there have been no reports of digital

creativity support tools being used to coach elite

athletes. Digital creativity support tools are a breed of

tool that help people engage more creatively with the

world. People use them to, e.g., discover new content,

synthesize novel content from existing material, or

direct their thinking to generate new ideas. Most

reports of successful uses of these tools are in creative

industries such as broadcasting (Bartingdale et al.

2013), theatre (Schofield et al. 2013) and journalism

(Maiden et al. 2020). A smaller number have been

reported in other industries, e.g., manufacturing

(Maiden et al. 2019), but none in professional sports.

Therefore, this paper reports exploratory design

research to evaluate a new digital creativity support

tool called Sport Sparks to support elite coaches.

2 RELATED WORK

This section reports related work on creative thinking

in sports and digital creativity support tools.

2.1 Creative Thinking in Elite Sports

The need for creativity in elite athlete performance

has been established. For example, increased team

creativity was associated with goal scoring and

progressing to later rounds of elite football

tournaments (Kempf & Memmert 2018), and

developing more creative coaches and players was

central to a vision for the future of English football

(Football Association 2013). Some research has

sought to foster the creative capabilities in athletes.

For example, Memmert (2007) proposed method

principles for tactical creativity approaches for team

sports – principles such as deliberate practice,

deliberate memory and diversification. He argued for

the use of these method principles to train divergent

thinking abilities, tactical creativity and creative

thinking to children and young people who were

engaged in sports (Memmert 2015). Evidence of the

effectiveness of the use of these principles in studies

revealed that, e.g., training in attention-broadening

techniques over 6 months facilitated greater

improvements in creative performance in complex

team sports tasks than in simple tasks (Memmert

2007) In a similar vein, Ludvig et al. (2019)

conceptualized creativity as a developmental

resource in sport training activities. Creativity was

framed as the exploratory and playful processes of

discovering, exploiting, and originating unusual

action possibilities, which led the authors to argue for

the stimulation of creative actions during training.

Some attempts to introduce creative thinking into

coaching methods have been reported. One exception

was the UK Sport’s search for novel ideas to have a

positive impact on medals for the Great Britain and

Northern Ireland team at the 2012 Olympic/

Paralympic Games (Hunter 2010). The adoption of

creative thinking methods based on rapid trial-and-

error of ideas was effective, even though it conflicted

with the established values of evidence-based science

from clinical practices that underpinned elite sports

coaching. Nonetheless, the UK teams finished high in

the two medals tables, suggesting a possible effect

from the use of these methods. However, there are

few other reports of the systematic use of creative

thinking techniques, skills or digital tools by elite

athlete coaches to resolve the problems that these

athletes encounter in more novel and useful ways.

2.2 Digital Creativity Support Tools

Digital creativity support tools have been the subject

of research and development for 30 years, and have

been applied in different forms to diverse artistic,

scientific and professional domains. Most of these

tools have been interactive, and combine automated

reasoning capabilities with new forms of interaction

(e.g., visualizations) to help people engage more

creatively with activities. One early system was

Dynamic HomeFinder, a prototype for real-estate

agents that used dynamic queries that allow users to

adjust the cost, number of bedrooms, and locations to

explore available house locations on a map more

creatively than with traditional queries (Williamson

& Shneiderman 1992). CombinFormation was a

mixed-initiative system that integrated searching,

browsing and exploring information, was developed

to support exploratory and combinational creativity

with information retrieved by Internet search engines

(Kerne et al. 2008). TweetBubble was a browser

extension to Twitter that enabled the expansion of

social media associations in usernames and hash-tags

in-context, and supported exploratory browsing on

top of metadata type system with new presentation

semantics (Jain et al. 2015). Some of the tools were

developed to support creative thinking in science and

engineering, e.g., new tabletop visualizations to

support biological discoveries (Wu et al. 2011) and

social media to support collaborative creativity in

education (Aragon et al. 2009).

Moreover, the development of digital tools to support

the creative thinking of people in professional roles

has been growing. Some have been implemented for

use by professionals in the creative industries, from

icSPORTS 2021 - 9th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support

the performing arts and music to film, television and

journalism. Examples include StoryCrate, a

collaborative editing tool developed to drive users’

creative workflows within a location-based television

production environment (Bartingdale et al. 2013),

Trigger Shift, which appropriated information

technologies into performance art in theatre (Honauer

& Hornecker 2015) and INJECT, which supported

journalists to discover new angles on news stories

(Maiden et al. 2018). Digital tools have also been

developed to support collaborative creative tasks

during early design ideas (e.g., Andolina et al. 2017,

Schnädelbach et al. 2016). Other tools included Risk

Hunting, which supported creative thinking to resolve

health-and-safety risks in manufacturing (Maiden et

al. 2017), and Carer, a smartphone app that supported

professional care workers to think creatively about

how to manage the challenging behaviours of older

people with dementia (Zachos et al. 2013). However,

in spite of the range of tools and positive lessons

learned from their application, the researchers were

unaware of direct applications in professional sports.

Research in the sport sciences has developed new

analytic capabilities based on the collection of large

datasets using, e.g., invasive and tracking sensor

technologies. Examples applied to elite athlete

coaching included force-time curve analysis of

athletic movements such as countermovement jumps,

isometric joint position holds and sidestep changes of

direction (Millett et al. 2018), and GPS tracking of

athletes in training and competition to profile running

intensities, accelerations and decelerations. Although

numerous algorithms to support sense making from

this data have been developed (e.g., De Silva et al.

2018), few of them support explicit creative thinking

have been reported. One exception is self-tracking

data as art to offer an alternative view on the concept

of the quantified self (O’Neil 2019), and builds on a

four-stage model of artistic creativity (Mace and

Ward 2019) that was demonstrated using artworks

constructed from self-data during cycling.

To conclude, this review revealed only occasional

uses of structured creative thinking in elite sports, and

none applied to support the problem solving by

coaches of elite athletes. Furthermore, no previous

uses of digital creativity support tools in elite athlete

coaching have been reported, to use the large datasets

now available in the sector. Research can introduce

new forms of systematic creative thinking into elite

athlete coaching for the first time.

3 CO-DESIGN METHOD

A collaborative co-design method was used to

introduce new forms of systematic creative thinking

into elite athlete coaching. Researchers worked with

a national sports body that was seeking to empower

its strength-and-conditioning coaches of elite athletes

with new form of digital support that leveraged its

expertise and digital resources. The focus of this

digital support was strength-and-conditioning, i.e.,

the physical and physiological development of

athletes for elite sport performance, for use by less-

experienced strength-and-conditioning coaches, most

of whom were recent graduates in sports science.

3.1 Creative Thinking Techniques

The researchers engaged strength-and-conditioning

coaches in some simple activities to understand the

scope and nature of creative problem solving about

athlete challenges. The researchers explored the

extent to which existing creative thinking techniques

could contribute to resolving athlete challenges. In

one exercise, the coaches explored the potential of

creative thinking heuristics extracted from the TRIZ

method (Altshuller 1999), and presented on a deck of

cards. Examples of these heuristics included evening

out different forces, and making things more flexible.

After being invited to select cards that had the

potential to stimulate creative ideas for athlete

strength-and-conditioning, the coaches agreed a set of

63 heuristics. The heuristics were also codified for

manipulation by the Sport Sparks prototype’s

algorithms to generate directed guidance for coaches.

3.2 Expert Knowledge

The researchers ran a workshop with two of the most

senior strength-and-conditioning coaches, each with

over a decade of experience of coaching elite athletes,

to surface meta-processing knowledge used to

discover ideas to resolve strength-and-conditioning

challenges. The SCAMPER creative thinking

technique (Michalko 2006) was used to surface the

coaches’ wide-ranging practices for resolving athlete

challenges.

A post-workshop analysis by the

researchers of all of the reported practices then led to

the development of the fishbone diagram depicted

graphically on the right of Figure 1. The diagram

depicts different causes extending to the left from the

athlete challenge as fishbones, with ribs branching off

the backbone for major causes, with sub-branches for

root-causes. It revealed that many of the contributing

Sport Sparks: Supporting Creative Thinking by Professional Coaches

types of cause for non-optimal performance in

training and competitions were not directly sports-

related. These cause types related to the personal

motivations of the athlete (e.g., income to provide for

family over competition success), the coaching

environment (e.g., personality differences with the

coach or other team members), home life (e.g., life

styles and priorities) and locations of competitions

(e.g., preferred climates, cultures and distances to

travel). These types were used to frame and select

different types of creative guidance manipulated by

the Sport Sparks prototype’s algorithms.

Figure 1: Different cause types for elite athlete challenges

identified by senior strength-and-conditioning coaches.

This analysis also led to a consolidated set of

practices reported to be effective for resolving

athletes’ problems. Using data from the workshops,

the researchers associated these practices to the cause

types described in the fishbone diagram. Practices

associated to the personal motivation of the athlete

included assessing the emotional state of the athlete,

and practices associated to the team environment

included considering relevance of the athlete’s

personal values. These practices were also codified in

the Sport Sparks prototype algorithms.

3.3 A User-centred Design Process

A user-centred design of the Sport Sparks prototype

took place with the less-experienced coaches from the

national sports body. These coaches trained

international athletes in sports such as rugby, field

hockey and rowing. After interviews with the coaches

to understand their work processes and uses of

existing digital tools, a decision was made to

implement Sport Sparks as a responsive web

application for use on the different types of desktop

computer, tablet and smartphone used by the coaches.

Subsequent design tasks were concentrated into a

series of workshops. The first workshops

demonstrated existing digital creativity support tools

developed for other domains and allowed the coaches

to experiment with different structured but paper-

based creativity techniques such as constraint

removal and TRIZ (Altshuller 1999). Feedback on the

potential value of and preferences for each technique

and tool was then interpreted to design a first Sport

Sparks prototype. During subsequent workshops, the

research team presented more complete and robust

versions of the prototype. Key changes made between

the workshops included tighter integration with the

causal analysis technique, better language processing

algorithms to generate more natural more readable

text outputs, and incremental refinements of the

algorithms that generated candidate creative ideas.

Once a robust and usable version of Sport Sparks

had been implemented, it was hosted online and made

available with user help and a discussion forum to the

same strength-and-conditioning coaches. This result

is described in the next section.

4 FIRST VERSION OF THE

SPORT SPARKS PROTOTYPE

A first version of the Sport Sparks prototype was built

to assist less-experienced strength-and-conditioning

coaches to solve problems experienced by athletes.

The prototype was designed so that an individual

coach would interact with it in 4 steps, and could

return to previous steps at any time. The steps were:

1) describe the athlete’s challenge; 2) explore ideas

about the challenge; 3) re-explore your ideas, and; 4)

generate the ideas guide to take forward. In this

section each interaction is demonstrated using an

example of a field hockey player struggling to

maintain fitness levels through an 80-minute match.

4.1 Describing the Athlete’s Challenge

Sport Sparks was designed so that the coach could

describe each challenge using natural language

phrases and one challenge type selected from a set of

predefined types. This type was required for Sport

Sparks to generate creative guidance specific to the

entered challenge. In our example, the page for

describing the athlete’s challenge is depicted in

Figure 2. The coach enters the challenge the hockey

player struggles to maintain fitness throughout the

match, tags it with the challenge type physical

wellbeing, then explores the generated guidance

defined by clicking the EXPLORE NEW IDEAS

button to the right of the challenge.

icSPORTS 2021 - 9th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support

Figure 2: Describing the athlete’s challenge using the Sport

Sparks prototype.

4.2 Exploring Ideas about Challenges

and Possible Solutions

In response Sport Sparks algorithms generate

candidate ideas with which to overcome, avoid or

mitigate the effects of the challenge, based on the

entered description and selected type. The prototype

generates 5 ideas about actors, objects and activities

extracted from the challenge description, another 5

ideas about possible solutions to the challenge, and 3

constraints to open up the space of possible ideas.

Examples of these ideas and constraints are shown in

Figure 3. Generated ideas and constraints were

presented as natural language sentences that were

easier to read, compared to graphical representations.

The presentation of each candidate idea was designed

to encourage the coach to think more creatively about

the described actors (e.g., the hockey player), objects

(e.g., stamina) or activities (e.g., completing the

game). Example ideas related to the example

challenge included Think about the athlete’s culture

and background impact on the diet. Example ideas

about possible solutions include Think about the

impact of balancing the diet with something else.

Generated constraints included Consider the analysis

software. Imagine that it is not a constraint. What

other ideas for training would be possible? Space in

this short paper precludes algorithm definition.

At any time, the coach could mark each idea or

constraint for further use by clicking on the light bulb

next to the idea – each remained lit until the light bulb

was clicked again. She can also add new ideas of her

own using freeform textboxes. After the coach has

selected enough ideas and constraints to consider in

more depth, she could progress to the third step, to re-

explore the ideas.

4.3 Reexploring Generated Ideas

During this step, Sport Sparks encourages the coach

to explore selected ideas from alternative

perspectives, to encourage more creative ideation.

The select alternative perspective pulldown menu

encourages the coach to explore each selected idea

one idea that can solve a different type of challenge.

The coach could, for example, reframe the selected

idea Revise the training schedule to allow more

warm-up and preparation time before matches from

the perspectives of nutrition or location, then click the

EXPLORE THIS PERSPECTIVE button to generate

further ideas based on new type is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 3: Use of the Sport Sparks prototype to explore

candidate ideas to solve the hockey player’s challenge.

Figure 4: Re-exploring generated ideas from a different

perspective using the Sport Sparks prototype.

4.4 Viewing the Ideas Guide

At the end of each session, Sport Sparks allowed the

coach to print a meeting guide as a PDF document.

5 A FIRST EVALUATION

To elicit first formative feedback, the described Sport

Sparks prototype was made available to professional

sports practitioners who were working with elite

athletes. Each was sent the link to Sport Spark web

application, a second link to a website describing the

Sport Sparks: Supporting Creative Thinking by Professional Coaches

purpose of the prototype, and requested to use the

prototype to solve challenges that one or their athletes

might be facing. During this period, the researchers

provided no hands-on support to the practitioners.

A total of 22 professional sports practitioners each

used the Sport Sparks prototype to seek to resolve at

least one athlete challenge. The practitioners were

responsible for strength-and-conditioning in diverse

sports – football, skiing, athletics, rowing, rugby and

lawn tennis – as well as across combinations of these

and other sports. They were employed in different

types of organizations, from national sports bodies

and universities to Premier League football clubs.

And their titles included not only strength-and-

conditioning coaches and performance coaches, but

also physiotherapists and academic heads of sports

sciences. After using the prototype, each received a

questionnaire with 4 questions and spaces for them to

comment more generally on the prototype. All 22 of

the practitioners responded to this questionnaire.

The first question asked the practitioners whether

each had adopted, in part or fully, an option provided

by the Sport Sparks prototype to address the athlete’s

challenge. Although no practitioner replied yes fully,

19 of the 22 replied yes in part, and only 3 replied no.

This first result was more positive than expected in

light of the crude nature of the prototype, especially

as some of the practitioners had reported that the auto-

generated guidance was sometimes incoherent, e.g.,

“some of the sentences were incoherent relating to

possible solutions”. Nonetheless, answers indicated

that Sport Sparks had the potential to be a tool that

coaches might use to resolve athlete challenges.

The remaining 3 questions elicited answers about

the extent to which Sport Sparks was perceived to

support creative thinking about athlete challenges.

Answers are summarized in Table 1. Their results

revealed that even the 3 practitioners who did not use

any Sport Sparks support to solve the athlete

challenge in the first question did not reject its impact

on their thinking about the challenge.

In response to the second question – how certain

are you that Sport Sparks offered an alternative view

to your performance question? – 14 of the 22 of the

sports practitioners who responded were very certain

or extremely certain, and another 3 were somewhat

certain. One comment revealed the value of support

for creative thinking from different perspectives,

“Having time to go through a process such as this

allows other perspectives to be explored and time to

think about the problem(s) through a different lens.

As a relatively less experienced coach, this allows me

to have more options on the table that I would not

have even considered before”. Other comments

revealed that Sport Sparks encouraged the athlete

perspective , e .g ., “This exercise allowed me to

Table 1: Responses from 22 professional coaches reporting

the certainty that each perceived about Sport Sparks support

for different creative thinking activities.

How certain are you?

Extre

mely

Very Some

wha

Not

all

Sport Sparks

offered an

alternative view

to your

performance

question?

2 12 3 5 0

Sport Sparks

provided an

alternative

option to

consider for

performance

questions?

2 8 7 5 0

Sport Sparks

influenced your

decision-

making around

answering

performance

questions

0 8 12 2 0

stop and reflect on the possible problem and I was

able to begin to articulate what was really important

to for the athlete and skinned away any noise…. The

tool made me aware of the other factors that may also

play important roles in the puzzle and I now have

more clarity around how I can navigate to a

subsequent solution”. Another reported “I had not

previously considered the athletes perspective of the

situation. Nor did I consider the history of the athlete

with other members of the organization which could

massively impact the buy in required. The tool has

allowed me to approach the problem with more

empathy and realization that a shift in motivation/

behaviour won't happen instantaneously and that it is

in itself a process. From the use of the tool, I will

speak in person with the athlete to get a better

understanding of their perspective and where their

motivation truly lies”. And another reported “Sport

Sparks has allowed me to gain alternative

perspectives on the challenge. Considering the

approach of the whole MDT (multi-disciplinary team)

allows the process to be aligned and athlete centre”.

Some coaches were also positive about the generated

constraints and their support for exploring the athlete

challenges from more diverse views, e.g., “I found the

removal of constraints section especially useful”.

In response to the third question – how certain are

you that Sport Sparks provided an alternative option

to consider for performance questions? – most of the

practitioners were either very certain (8) or somewhat

icSPORTS 2021 - 9th International Conference on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support

certain (7), indicating that Sport Sparks was

perceived to be effective, although less effective for

providing alternative options than it was for

providing alternative views. Some of them reported

creative idea generation with Sport Sparks, e.g., “One

of the ideas forced me to think and immediately gave

me an idea to attempt to tackle the problem in a

different way”. By contrast, others answered that use

of the prototype did not change their solution to their

current coaching problem, e.g., “After having entered

the performance problem into sports spark, my

solution to the problem has not changed from own

decision-making process”. Another commented that

the scope to change coaching practices in some sports

is limited, e.g., “Based on the constraints of the sport

and the culture the athlete has been around for such

a long period of time, being able to change a small

aspect of their current training (training during a

competition week) is a challenging process”. That

said, the same practitioner then added “The tool

allowed me to consider the impact of doing this on

their mental well-being (lifting maximally more

frequently per week). The implications will be to trial

during training before dosing into a competition

week”. Moreover, solutions generated by Sport

Sparks also encouraged at least one practitioner to

rethink the origins of the current coaching challenge

“Even though some of the ideas were not clear it did

force me to think about the idea across many different

domains. Switching between the different headlines

pushed me to think about the origins of the problem

from many different perspectives”.

Responses to the fourth question revealed that

most practitioners were either very certain (8) or

somewhat certain (12) that Sport Sparks influenced

their decision-making around answering

performance questions. One commented on the

structure of the prototype’s support “I believe I had

the solution to hand. So, it didn't offer an alternative

solution. It provided me with more rigor in

questioning to be more certain that the option I had

in my head, was most likely to be the best option”.

Another reported the advantages of the structured

approach “This allowed me to be very specific and

clear in my prescription and delivery”. And a third

reported that some learning was needed to use the

support, e.g., “Second time with this question. I’m

getting more used to the structure of the questions”.

To conclude, the questionnaire responses were

more positive than expected, given that Sport Sparks

was a first prototype with limited functionality and

user testing, no prior training, and no support to use.

The results had implications for the next stage of the

design research.

6 CONCLUSIONS, NEXT STEPS

This short paper reports the results of a design science

approach to explore the feasibility and performance

of a designed artefact – the Sport Sparks prototype –

with the explicit intention of improving the functional

performance of that artefact. Although this co-

designed first prototype was simple – some of the

algorithms generated incoherent content, and the

coaches were unable to save or return to athlete

challenges between sessions – 22 coaches working in

at least 6 different sports reported potential benefits

of the digital support for their professional coaching

work. The authors are currently engaged in the next

steps, which to redesign and reimplement the Sport

Sparks prototype for longer-term evaluations. A new,

more complete version is being developed with more

refined algorithms. The authors plan to evaluate this

new version in a professional football club in 2021.

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