Have you ever wondered how an elite baseball player can track a 95-mile-per-hour fastball and actually connect? Or how a Premier League footballer can deliver a perfect pass over half the pitch to a moving teammate? The way elite athletes develop their attributes and build skills has big lessons for how we need to think about talent and hiring in the workplace.
We’ve been discussing skills-based hiring and skills-based organizations for a while now. As the need for skills agility grows, we must deepen our understanding of the attributes, skills, and potential to make better hiring decisions.
One area that uses cutting-edge science to do this is elite sport. My guest this week is Dr. Daniel Laby, a Sports Vision Ophthalmologist who works with elite athletes and top baseball teams, including the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox.
This is a really fascinating discussion with some important lessons for HR and Talent Acquisition, for example, why we should emphasize future potential over past performance, the importance of recognizing that sometimes there is a specific order in which skills need to be developed, and why average can sometimes be mistaken for best in skills assessment.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How do you improve elite performance?
• Working with Red Bull and Trent Alexander-Arnold
• A common misconception about vision
• The importance of specific attributes in specific sports
• Nature, nurture and brain plasticity
• The skills pyramid
• How small changes make a big difference
• The role of technology
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:05]:
Have you ever wondered how an elite baseball player can track a 95 mile an hour fastball and actually connect? Or how a Premier League footballer can deliver a perfect pass over half the pitch to a moving teammate? The way elite athletes develop their attributes and build skills has big lessons for how we need to think about talent and hiring in the workplace. Keep listening to find out just what those lessons are. Support for this podcast is provided by isims. Isims is the hiring platform that you’ll never outgrow. I’ve got to tell you, some of their customers have some really cool stories about how they’re hiring and businesses have changed with iSims. Like Eagle View, a tech company that saved $2 million on their recruitment marketing and now hires twice as fast. There’s Benefit Cosmetics, a popular brand that saves 20 minutes per candidate during their screening process. And of course, Kingfisher, the home improvement company that will be very familiar to European listeners. Kingfisher increased their job offer acceptance rate threefold. These are just a few examples. For the last 25 years, ISIMS has helped thousands of the world’s largest and fastest growing brands hire the talent they need, often in challenging and competitive markets. Names like Microsoft, Petsmart, Children’s National Hospital, Greyhound Lines, and The Cheesecake Factory. ISIM’s comprehensive hiring platform helps enterprise organizations hire by employing AI where and how you need it. To learn more, visit isims.com that’s icims.com.
Dr Daniel Laby [00:01:50]:
There’S been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine in all the ages of history.
Matt Alder [00:02:05]:
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 671 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. We’ve been discussing skills based hiring and skills based organizations for a while now. As the need for skills agility grows, we have to deepen our understanding around attributes, skills and potential to make better hiring decisions. One area that’s using cutting edge science to do this is elite sport. My guest this week is Dr. Daniel Leiby, a sports vision ophthalmologist who works with elite athletes and top baseball teams including the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox. This is a really fascinating discussion with some important lessons for HR and talent acquisition. For example, why should we emphasize future potential over past performance? The importance of recognizing that sometimes there’s a specific order in which skills need to be developed and why average can sometimes be mistaken for best in skills assessment. Hi Dan, and welcome to the podcast.
Dr Daniel Laby [00:03:11]:
Hey Matt, thank you. Glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:13]:
Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:03:20]:
Absolutely. I’m a rare breed of physician. I’m a sports vision ophthalmologist. So I’m a medical doctor who specializes in sports vision or sports and performance vision, as we’ll probably talk about. And basically that’s the optimizing visual function. What people see, how they react to what they see, how they decide what they see for athletes and in fact for everybody.
Matt Alder [00:03:43]:
Fantastic. And it is really quite unique what you do. I mean, just to give people a kind of. A bit more of insight into it, what type of people do you work with and what is it that you help them do?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:03:55]:
Well, it’s predominantly athletes and actually predominantly elite athletes, professional athletes, Olympic athletes that spend a lot of time, money, effort in training and perfecting their. Their physical abilities in their sport, but often haven’t thought about the role vision plays in performance of that sport. Vision. You know, there aren’t any sports that I can think of that people play with their eyes closed. And so vision plays some role in every sport now. It plays different roles, different sports, and maybe we’ll get into that a little bit later. But what we want to do is optimize how people take in visual information. And that has to do with how the eye works. We want to optimize what the brain does with that visual information in terms of decisions. If you think about just a simple go or no go type of situation, excuse me, where the athlete has to make a decision to act or not to act. And then if there’s a decision to act, they have to have their eyes guide their motor, which is their hands or their feet, depending on what sport. Again, to make a precisely timed and perfectly executed movement to intercept the ball or to react to something that they see in front of them to perform better in their sport. And so my job is to make sure all those things are optimized for every athlete so their investment in their physical training can be fully maximized into their performance.
Matt Alder [00:05:12]:
And you mainly work with baseball teams, don’t you?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:05:15]:
It’s mainly baseball here in the United States. I’ve been doing it for 33 years, I think so far. This is my 33rd season. But it’s not limited to that. We also take care of Olympic athletes most of the Beijing Games with the USA team. We have a team in Tokyo at the recent Games. I work with elite college teams here as well. And I’ve been fortunate to work with teams across the globe, actually. And one of the most interesting work I did was with some of your neck of the woods in Liverpool, the player for Liverpool Football Club, the right back, Trent Alexander Arnold.
Matt Alder [00:05:52]:
Yeah, absolutely. And you made a film with Red Bull about him, didn’t he?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:05:55]:
Yeah, they actually filmed the documentary. It’s a 40, 40 to 45 minute documentary about the entire process of how we evaluated his vision and how we analyze the results and then how we created a training program that we actually performed remotely. I was here in the United States during spring training with the baseball teams. We’d get on zoom calls with Trent. We’d go through work together. He had some homework to do on the side. We did that for a period and then we retested him in Liverpool and noticed incredible improvements in his performance.
Matt Alder [00:06:26]:
And how, I suppose just to dig into that as an example, what was it about his performance that actually improved? What, what aspect of it was how his eyes were working or how he was responding to what he was seeing. How did that kind of translate to his game?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:06:41]:
Yeah, there were several different areas. Some of the, the areas, you know, that we tested him, he did very well in. He kind of came in thinking he was going to do well on everything because, you know, he’s an elite footballer. It’s sort of, you expect that. But then I don’t think he was expecting quite the level of testing we were, we were using and I think you’ll see in the film afterwards, he felt that the test was hard, but he passed quite a few of the things. But there were a couple areas that he did have trouble with. We trained those areas and at the end of the project, what we did is put him through a drill that was very similar to what he had to do on the, on the pitch in terms of handling the ball and doing. One of the things he’s known for is making, you know, very, very accurate passes or the crosses or passes to create plays. And so what we had him do was to put a ball through a series of rings that were moving left and right and only for a short time where all those openings of those rings lined up where you’d be able to pass the ball through all of the rings that we had. And so that took a bit of work. He had to anticipate the movement of the rings. He had to plan ahead of time where he was going to put the ball and when he was going to actually kick the ball and that it wasn’t the first time. It took a couple, couple tries, but it’s something that’s incredibly difficult and he was actually able to Perform it, which is really a, a sign of his skill, his improvement in his kind of hand, not hand, but foot, eye anticipation, coordination, his reaction, his ability to take information, failing the first few times and adjust what he’s doing to, to make the perfect play later on.
Matt Alder [00:08:15]:
Fantastic. So before we recorded this podcast, we, we, we had a couple of conversations and you said something about vision that completely blew my 2020 vision. Tell us a bit about that. And also, you know, what are some of the common misconceptions that people have about vision?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:08:32]:
Absolutely. Unfortunately, lots of people, you know, go to the eye doctor and they get their eyes checked and they’re told, oh, you’re fine, you’re 2020. Or in, in metric terms, that’d be six, six. And you’re told you’re fine. And you go, go home and you think, oh, I have great vision, I’m fine. That’s the misconception. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem because 2020 or 66 is purely an average vision. Now, if you ask most athletes, they’re not going to be too thrilled about being just average. They want to be the best. 2020 is simply average. And so the best vision humanly possible is actually 20 over 8. Now, what does that mean? If we think about 20 over 8, we’re talking really about a fraction where 20 is on the top. We have a line and we have an 8 in the bottom for the denominator. That means that a person, if you have 20 over 8 vision, you’re able to see from 20ft what the normal person, the average person, can see from 8ft. In other words, you can be 12ft further away and still see it. So your vision is sharper, you’re more acute, you’re able to, to discern that, that from a greater distance. 2020, on the other hand, basically just puts you from 20ft. You can see what the average person sees from 20ft. Therefore, you’re just average. So the bottom number is higher than the top number you’re not seeing. And if the bottom number is lower than the top number, you’re seeing better than that average, with 20 over 8 being the norm. Well, it’s important because in sports, and depending again on the sport, most athletes need at least 2015 vision or better. In other words, they have to be able to see from 20ft, with the average person only sees from 15ft. And that’s the average for elite athletes. In fact, in baseball, which is often termed one of the hardest things to hardest tasks in sports, to hit a ball that’s moving at 90, 95 miles an hour towards you. You need vision. The average vision for those athletes is actually 20 over 12. That’s the average. Now you can get away with 2016, but not 20 over 12, but not 2020.
Matt Alder [00:10:22]:
Yeah. Now that’s kind of really fascinating stuff. And it just kind of shows how something kind of gets into our collective consciousness and, you know, we don’t question it or we don’t, we don’t think about it. I want to ask you a little bit about attributes and then a little bit about performance because I think that’s particularly relevant to people who are, who are listening. You mentioned that kind of baseball. You mentioned the kind of, the level of vision that you kind of have to have. Is everyone kind of born with sort of distinct visual attributes that might make all of us suited to kind of one sport over another?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:10:53]:
Well, I think this is the old nature versus nurture discussion. And the fact of the matter is, as is true for most everything, the answer isn’t black or white. It’s somewhere gray in the middle. And I think that’s true in this discussion as well. We know that babies, when they’re born, are born with very poor vision. If you think about a baby, all they need to do is be able to find food, which means mom, and they have to poop. That’s about all babies really do is eat and poop. And you don’t need very sharp vision to do that. And so we know from studies that vision of babies is poor, but it improves pretty rapidly and often is thought not to be normal or fully developed until about seven years of age. So if you have a three or four year old, you don’t expect them to be 2020. That’s probably more in the age around seven. And we know that also if there are things that interfere with that process of growth of development, that their end result, vision, won’t be 2020. We call that lazy eye or amblyopia. And that’s where people sometimes use an eye patch, for example. So there is a certain amount of influence you could exert on the development of vision by optimizing things early in life as vision develops. That’s on the one side of things. The other side of things. We know that the brain is an incredibly plastic, not the material so much, but the ability to change organ, you know, every day. In fact, people listening to our discussion today are having neuroplasticity occur within their brains. They’re learning new information, they’re hearing something new, and they’re going to remember something, hopefully, from this discussion. And that means their brain has changed. And so it is possible to change the function of the brain when you’re older, past the childhood years. And so I think there’s a combination of you’re born with certain abilities. For example, if you’re born in a family that has very high prescriptions, everyone in the family is very nearsighted. There’s a very good chance you’re going to be very nearsighted as well. And people that are very nearsighted tend not to have this acute level of vision. It’s not impossible, but they tend not to. On the flip side, if your genetics and your structure is such that things are working pretty well, you might be able to get a little bit better by doing some things later on to nurture that vision and to improve it more.
Matt Alder [00:13:13]:
So you kind of got the basic tools, as it were. You’ve got your vision in whatever, whatever state that vision is. And what we’re talking about here is a kind of really, I suppose, training people in that kind of connection between their vision and their brain, if I got that right.
Dr Daniel Laby [00:13:28]:
Yeah, absolutely. You got the first piece right and then another piece after that. So what we talk about is something called the sports vision pyramid or performance pyramid. And if we think about a pyramid, just like in Egypt or in South America, these are structures that are very, very stable. They last a long time, as we’ve seen, and they last a long time because they have a wide base and they taper slowly to a apex, a point up on top. And if we think about the visual system here in sports and performance, it’s a similar type of thing. We want the base to be good, and the base is basic vision that 2020 we talked about, along with a couple other things. And that’s kind of in each eye by itself. So you want each eye to be optimized. Then the next level up is how you use both eyes together. That creates our sense of fine stereoscopic 3D depth. If that’s working well, the next step then is what does the brain do with that visual. Visual information to make a decision that go, no go decision. And the next level above that then is how do you direct the hands or the feet to make an action? And if all that is optimized, the very top of the pyramid will mean you’re performing at your best. And so even if you’re not born with ideal hand, eye coordination or reaction time, you can train that as long as the levels below that are all functioning well. And so for example, unfortunately, a lot of athletes will train their hand eye coordination without thinking about the bottom of the pyramid, identifying the target. And you can imagine if you can’t see what you have to react to, then your speed of reaction or your coordination is not going to be that important. And so you sort of want to build from the bottom up. And those are things that are somewhat inherent. You know, there are people that are naturally faster, but many of that, many of those things can be trained and many of those things can be improved to the level necessary to perform well.
Matt Alder [00:15:13]:
That’s kind of fascinating to me because I think there is such a comparison here to skills that people learn in other types of workplace and their kind of their attributes and their basic abilities and all that sort of stuff. How much improvement can people, can athletes make? Is this a kind of a marginal gains thing where improving by a very, very small amount kind of sets them apart, or are there kind of big shifts that people can make?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:15:36]:
Yeah, I think there’s two ways to think about it. And when talking about the elite athletes, you know, these are people that have pretty much picked all the low hanging fruit. You know, they, they’ve been training, they’ve been getting expert advice on what to do, they’ve had a lot of experience in their sport the last couple percentage points. We can make a difference by working on the vision. And there are many case studies in the press that we’ve worked with people that we’ve made small changes in the vision, we’ve created training programs and they’ve really taken it up a notch because everything else is functioning at full steam. But that’s the elite athlete. And the fact of the matter is the majority of people that, that here on the planet that are listening to this are not elite athletes. But that doesn’t mean that this approach isn’t valuable because first of all called performance vision, not because it’s not sports vision, it’s performance vision because it’s true for driving a car. For example, if you’re driving on a street and someone jumps out of the street, you want to be able to react quickly to avoid hitting that person. You want to react quickly to avoid an accident with another vehicle potentially. And those are skills that can be trained and you don’t have to be an elite athlete to be able to improve that. In fact, I had complete opposite end of the spectrum. I took care of a patient, we wrote a paper about this and published it, that has an eye disease that leads to progressive blindness. In fact, her disease leads to progressive deafness. As well. It’s called Usher syndrome. And she was finding that when she was crossing the streets here in Manhattan, in New York City, that often she had very close calls with cars turning, crossing the, the crosswalk, and sometimes she was actually even hit by that. And what we wanted to do was to improve her, her perception, her reaction to peripheral vision, because her central vision was quite affected by the disease. The periphery was affected, but less so. And we were able to train her reaction time, improve it, make it faster, so that she would perceive these movements of cars coming from her periphery and was able to then avoid being hit. And we saw not only an improvement in her ability to recognize that, but actually from her discussion later, a reduction in her close calls, if you will, with cars in the crosswalk. So this is an approach that has use not only for athletes, not only for people who have significant visual disabilities, but for anybody, as I say, drivers, military, police, weekend people who just play sports on the weekend. We can, you know, we’re not going to make anyone, not going to make everybody an Olympic gold medal athlete, but I think if we optimize these functions, we can improve everyone’s performance.
Matt Alder [00:18:15]:
When I watched the Red Bull film, what struck me was the kind of sheer amount of like, technology and gear and kit that you were using to kind of help turn Alexander Arnold. And it’s like, what type of technology do you use? Because, you know, I’m presuming that that kind of kit isn’t the same thing that you used with the person that you just talked about.
Dr Daniel Laby [00:18:34]:
Yes, Trent. Well, Red Bull was very generous in supporting, supporting the work, and we were able to develop, we developed system software that isn’t commercially available that is quite unique and I think cutting edge in terms of what can be done. And what’s interesting to see is now, a couple years later, we’re seeing some companies actually starting to move in that direction. But what we were able to do with, with Trent because of technology was create game situations using a virtual reality type of headset game situations, and for him to react to those situations in real time with a real ball, actually receiving a ball and kicking the ball to actual plays that he had participated in previously in the years prior. So we basically recreated his experience from what he did before and wanted to see if we could get the same reaction, the same pass that he made, if there were things we could use to distract him, to make that decision of what to do more difficult and change the decision. And that was all supported by Red Bull very generously, which was a fascinating project. And a fascinating experience to go through, but we don’t need that to take care of, you know, others, if you will. We mostly use off the shelf technology. Things have moved so fast in the, in the space and the, you know, 30 years I’ve been doing this that we began by changing little EEPROM chips on computer boards and trying to get everything to work to do the testing to. Now we buy a package off the shelf and we do the testing. The key is to understand how to analyze the results of the test and how to then create a plan to correct anything that you see or improve or optimize anything that you see in that testing. And so technology has evolved quite a bit to make our lives much easier. We’ve developed vision tests that is patented. That’s a very specific vision test for performance. That’s a much more accurate test than the regular eye chart that people use. We’ve shown how that result of that test correlates to performance actually in game because it’s a much more sensitive test compared to the eye chart, which is important, but doesn’t show that connection to in game performance. So technology has improved, but it’s not something that’s out of the reach of everybody. I often have people in training purchase systems that they just take their Meta Quest headset, they put it on, they download an app and that app from a commercial third party is able to walk them through training the areas that we need to improve their performance. And so it’s very available to everybody. It’s just a matter of knowing what and how to use it.
Matt Alder [00:21:10]:
Of course, of course. And I suppose, last question then. What does that make the future look like? Is this an area that the AI is playing a part in, that it might play a part in the future? How do you think it’s going to pan out?
Dr Daniel Laby [00:21:20]:
Well, if we take my last 30 something years of experience and we kind of look at that, that growth in technology and use of technology and sports performance, it’s not a straight line linear curve, it’s more of a logarithmic curve. It’s kind of shooting up. And I think we’re going to see that and I think we’re starting to see that to some extent. With AI with the ability to look at incredible amounts of data that humanly we can’t get our arms around, but large models can absorb lots of those, lots of those points and find trends and find areas of potential exploitation where we can then design programs to improve. So I think not the AI in the terms of like chat, gbt where people type in something and get some answers, which is useful because if you type in sports vision, you’ll learn a lot more than you did, you know, 20 years ago. But in terms of what I’m doing, to be able to analyze extremely large sets of data that have subtle subtleties that are otherwise not apparent is where these AI systems can become very useful.
Matt Alder [00:22:24]:
Dan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dr Daniel Laby [00:22:26]:
Oh, my pleasure, Matt. I love, as you can tell, I love talking about sports vision and I love working with the athletes. And nothing better than seeing someone who you work with perform at their best, see them, you know, excited and become a winner. And to some extent, that can rub off on me as well.
Matt Alder [00:22:42]:
My thanks to Dan. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
