Head Up, Feet Moving

I usually don’t like sports metaphors. Most of them flatten a highly nuanced field of improvisational human dynamics into reductive analogies or leadership tropes. And some are downright weaponized as business clichés.

Skate to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.

Ok. Thanks?

However, here’s where I disclose that I play ice hockey. And, because I love a good contradiction, I’ll also admit that I think quite a lot about how metaphorically generative the game of hockey really is (especially if you’re someone who also thinks a lot about complex human systems). Maybe it’s just ye olde apophenia, but I find so much about hockey echoes the very same dynamics we navigate in modern collaboration and decision making: uncertainty, adaptive capacity, distributed cognition, emergence.

It’s not just that hockey can stand in as metaphor for complexity (a worthy contender if you need to give jazz ensembles and starling murmurations a break). It’s that it’s one of the most vivid and embodied ways I’ve personally experienced it.

If you look past the leadership tips in airport bookstore memoirs, ice hockey (like many team sports) is unmistakably a complex adaptive system. And like any complex system, it can’t be effectively understood by stepping back and analyzing it from a distance. You come to understand it, and influence it, from within it: by participating, noticing, and adjusting, in real time, in as many contexts and combinations of interactions as possible.

So, I’m less interested in hockey as analogy, and more intrigued by hockey as an everyday site of emergence and entanglement. Even if you don’t play or watch the game, hockey offers a surprisingly relatable glimpse into interdependence and collective intelligence. These aren’t just abstract concepts; they’re realities every player experiences, moment by moment.

Skating on thin metaphors

If we look more seriously at that quote about skating to where the puck is going, it actually carries a deceptively simple assumption: that you can predict the puck’s future location by reading the current conditions and extrapolating accordingly. But in real-time play, it’s rarely about predicting a sequential outcome or executing predefined best practices. Instead, you position yourself to respond to a range of possibilities, most of which you can’t fully anticipate until they begin to unfold.

It’s not about asking where the puck will be; it’s about reading the spaces where it can and can’t be, sensing how that space is shifting, and making decisions that shape those dynamics. Your actions aren’t just a reaction to the current situation, you’re co-creating it and are shaped by it in turn. The relationship is entangled and reciprocal.

This is one reason why some of the most productive hockey players aren’t necessarily the fastest or strongest individually. They’re just highly attuned to the game, able to sense what’s emerging, rather than merely reacting to what’s already occurring. Years of play have honed their attention to subtle cues: the angle of a teammate’s stick, a shift in an opponent’s weight, a change in rhythm around the play. Their body recognizes and responds to familiar configurations before their brain has time to clock it. It’s not a conscious calculation, just an intuitive response shaped by years of experience and pattern recognition.

The best players, and teams for that matter, are able to anticipate without overcommitting, staying agile enough to pivot when the play takes an unexpected turn. And whether they realize it or not, they’re enacting a kind of complexity-informed practice, engaging with a dynamic system they can’t control holistically but can influence locally by staying responsive to what’s unfolding.

Which is why the puck metaphor, for all its familiarity, doesn’t really illuminate much. But even people who really know hockey — players, coaches, analysts — still reach for pithy quotes because they’re easier to convey than the messier reality: constant micro-adjustments, distributed sensing, making choices that don’t just respond to patterns but participate in creating them.

Take another common piece of hockey wisdom: “Keep your head up.” It sounds like generic motivational advice to stay positive, don’t get discouraged. But on the ice, it means something very different: rather than looking down at the puck to monitor your own stickhandling (a natural instinct, especially for newer players), you’re trained to keep your gaze up, to stay aware of the play developing around you so you can sense where pressure is coming from, read your teammates’ positions, and avoid getting blindsided. The phrase gestures toward situational awareness and weak signal detection, but like most sports shorthand, it can’t quite capture the embodied, relational practice it’s actually describing.

Then there’s “Keep your feet moving.” Again, it sounds trite. But on the ice it means don’t plant yourself and wait for the play to come to you. Keep skating, even if you don’t have the puck, even if you’re not sure where the play is headed yet. Stay light, stay ready. Not to be in constant motion for its own sake, but maintaining agility so you can pivot more easily. Going from stop to start takes more energy than redirecting movement that’s already happening. Static players get caught out of position. Moving players can adapt.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it should. The same habits that reduce hockey to “skate where the puck is going” are what reduce our understanding of complex systems into 2x2s and iceberg diagrams. These simplifications miss the point: you can’t engineer specific outcomes, but you can work with constraints and dispositions to influence what becomes possible.

No playbook, no problem

Some folks assume hockey works like football, with a literal playbook: pre-established formations, tightly scripted choreography, each player executing a defined role within a well-rehearsed plan. In some ways, it’s complicated, but ordered; you can break it down, assign parts, and rehearse accordingly. In football, you huddle, plan the next move, and try to execute it more or less as drawn up (until, of course, the defense, the weather, or plain old human instinct disrupt the play and force more improvisation).

But hockey doesn’t work that way. It’s less orchestrated and more fluid from the start. You train foundational skills and rehearse common patterns to build chemistry and muscle memory, but once the puck drops, you’re adapting. What structure does exist is context-responsive, essentially a shared fluency that allows for real-time coordination.

Football rewards executing the playbook, hockey rewards sensing the play. And that’s a much better analogy for how most complex human systems actually work.

You’ve probably seen this in your own collaboration: people looking for the playbook, the process map, grasping for the solid object in places where there’s only fluid dynamics to be found. There’s no harm in wanting clarity, but they‘re applying a complicated-systems approach to a complex-systems reality.

In hockey, the dynamics shift constantly across 60 minutes of play. Even strength play works differently than a power play. Penalty kill dynamics are different again. 3-on-3 overtime adds new constraints, and new possibilities. Even within the span of a single shift, your individual role flexes depending on who you’re on the ice with, what zone you’re in, what just happened, and what might happen next.

Even the language of hockey reflects this fluidity. While teams may practice a few set plays for specific scenarios like faceoffs and penality kills, they’re far more likely to talk about systems: A 1–2–2 forecheck, a neutral zone trap, the cycle down low. These aren’t scripted sequences but flexible scaffolding that enable real time decision making without dictating outcomes in advance.

The structure is there, but it’s not static; it’s an evolving set of relational patterns. Like much of our day to day lives, hockey is both complicated and complex. The complicated parts can be trained. The complex parts must be sensed.

Come for the beer league, stay for the epistemology

Much of this has been made clearer for me because I came to the game late. Though I watched hockey as a fan, I didn’t grow up playing. I started skating in my late 20s, which means I don’t have the same muscle memory as people who’ve been on skates since toddlerhood. My stickhandling won’t turn heads, and my shots don’t challenge most goalies. But I do possess a fluency for the dynamics of the game and I know how to respond to whatever scenario I find myself in. I can track the shape of a play, notice when the energy shifts, sense when to step up and when to hang back.

Even when I’m one of the slower, smaller skaters surrounded by faster, larger men, my anticipatory positioning keeps the puck out of dangerous places. Despite my unremarkable skating, passing, and shooting skills, when I turn off my goal-oriented pre-meditative brain and rely instead on a visceral connection to what’s happening around me, I can often hold my own with players that are objectively more skilled. (It doesn’t hurt that we’re talking recreational beer league hockey here, but the principles hold true across any type of dynamic human environment.)

I include this shameless humblebrag because it highlights something important: in complex systems, technical skill doesn’t always translate directly into impact. The most consequential contributions aren’t necessarily visible in a highlight reel or measurable in the post-game stats. It’s also in the positioning that prevented a scoring chance, the pass that set up the pass that set up the goal, the timely read that kept your team in the zone. The same holds true in your organization; it’s not just the features you ship or the updates that appear in a status dashboard. It’s the relational dynamics, the informal networks, the experience driven decisions about when to act or wait and see.

Line change, phase change

Good hockey doesn’t require a god’s-eye view of the system. In fact, if players skated with the omniscience of the broadcast booth, the game would suffer for it — less creative, less emergent, more like a video game than the real thing.

At ice level, you can’t see behind you without turning your head, but you can sense where players are, indirectly, based on the movement of others. When I’m skating, I don’t perceive everyone’s trajectories as literal vectors, but I do register them. The knowing is embodied and extended: distributed across my own positioning, my teammates’ actions, and the shared dynamics unfolding around us.

And the game does more than shift continuously, it reconfigures depending on context: spatial (which zone you’re in), temporal (first period vs. final exhausted minutes), or structural (full strength, power play, penalty kill). These phase shifts aren’t just a backdrop; they determine what’s possible and what’s required.

Roles, too, are context-dependent. Whether you’re “on offense” or “on defense” isn’t just about your formal position, it depends on puck possession, location, and timing. It’s more oblique than simply try to score or get the puck away from the other team. On offense, you’re working to increase degrees of freedom: opening space, expanding options, creating possibility. On defense, it’s the opposite: collapsing space, reducing angles, limiting what the other team can do.

Critically, these phase shifts aren’t governed by explicit criteria or concrete protocols. You’re always sensing and adjusting with incomplete information, in motion, under pressure. This is what Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown call whitewater decision-making: navigating conditions that are too dynamic to allow for detached analysis.

And sure, the individual skills matter, but only if applied at the right moment. A slick toe drag or powerful slapshot can change a game, but I’ve seen players with great hands struggle when things get physical or the typical structure dissolves. They might know how to execute a move they’ve drilled, but not how to navigate the chaos. Hockey punishes players who rely on ideal conditions, because ideal conditions are rare.

The game demands that you see what’s happening, not just what’s supposed to happen.

Statistical models don’t backcheck

In a fashion surely familiar to students of complexity science, different vantage points reveal different patterns — and obscure them too. Casual spectators without deeper understanding of the game’s dynamics tend to reduce what they see to something simpler and more linear than what’s actually unfolding.

Watch any live game and you’ll hear a chorus of frustrated fans yelling “just shoot!” whenever a team cycles the puck during a power play. They’re not wrong, eventually someone needs to shoot, but they don’t see how the team is working to create space and disrupt defensive patterns to better identify when a shot is likely to succeed. This is what happens when people converge on a solution before understanding the dispositional state of the system.

Then there are the folks who love the game through stats, but stats can privilege what’s measurable over what’s relevant. You can track zone entries, passing sequences, shot probabilities. You can review plays in slow motion, map heat zones, calculate expected goals. For players, advanced analytics can offer new perspectives, highlight patterns or anomalies worth exploring. But the stats aren’t the game, and they can tempt us toward misplaced certainty, mistaking correlation for causation, modeling for prediction, insight for control.

The game can’t be won through algorithmic precision. What matters is how players assess their reality on the ice and adapt accordingly. This gap between what can be measured and what must be sensed isn’t a failure of analysis; it’s a fundamental property of complex adaptive systems. And it’s a reminder that if you want to operate with greater adaptive capacity, at some point you have to move beyond analysis and start participating.

What’s in a game?

Something else happens as you play across contexts: the illusion of clean boundaries dissolves. Where do you end and your team begin? Where do two-minute shifts become the game? Where is the edge between part and whole?

Where’s the hockey? Is it in the puck? The players? The rules? The ice? The rivalries, the history, the daily practice, or annual draft?

It’s in all of them — and none of them.

Hockey emerges from the interactions, in the tension and timing and temporary configurations of elements that constrain and enable each other in context. A pass only means something in relation to who’s open, where the defense is positioned, what the score is. The same physical action in a different configuration creates entirely different possibilities. What each component is depends on its relation to everything else.

The answer is: it depends on context. It’s always: it emerges.

But don’t mistake the poetics of emergence for passivity. Recognizing that a system has emergent properties doesn’t absolve you of agency. As a player, you’re both of the system, and participant in it, simultaneously constrained by the dynamics around you and actively modulating those very constraints through your actions. You open up passing lanes or close them down. You create space or collapse it.

You don’t control outcomes, but you shape the conditions that give rise to them. And if you’re paying attention, you see that influence in complex systems isn’t about prediction or precision — it’s about positioning. Staying agile on your feet and ready to act on what’s becoming possible.

Emergence isn’t permission to do nothing. It’s an invitation to engage more skillfully.

Drop the gloves

In addition to being damn fun to play, hockey is a vivid illustration of the complexity I’ve spent much of my career navigating. It’s also a good reminder that complexity is not just abstract theory about interdependence on zoomed-out scales and long timelines. It shows up in the unexpected rebound, in the moment you thought you were helping but ended up screening your own goalie, in the nonverbal signals you and your linemates pick up and respond to without speaking.

The question this raises for any practice, whether you’re working in formal organizations or informal communities, is not “how do we see the whole system so we can fix it?” but “how do we develop the situated awareness and responsiveness to act wisely within it?”

And if you lead others, you’ll inevitably spend time in the analyst’s booth or behind the bench tracking stats, adjusting lines, making calls from above. But if you want teams to develop the adaptive capacity to effect desirable change, you have to create conditions where they can sense and respond for themselves, where they learn to work with affordances in real time rather than just follow a playbook.

We’re not talking innate gifts or inner work here. These capabilities develop through interaction and are distributed across networks more than centered in individuals. The implication for leadership is less about developing one’s ability to tolerate uncertainty or read a system holistically. It’s about creating environments where people have the necessary tools, information, and permission to experiment, the space to sense and adjust collaboratively, and the time to learn from what emerges, not just executing what’s prescribed.

You can (and should!) study complexity science. Learn the concepts, read the papers. But at some point, whether you’re a third line rookie, a player coach, or tenured GM, if you want to work effectively in complex systems, you have to engage with the system as it actually plays out. Coaches adjust lines mid-game. GMs make trades mid-season. And players on the ice take the hit, miss the pass, re-calibrate for the next shift. Whatever your role, the same advice applies:

Keep your head up. Keep your feet moving.