David Leadbetter, golf instructor to the stars, was a guest on the radio on April 24th. He was there to talk about Tiger’s knee and such, but the conversation started with a question about whether he teaches a Method or Philosophy to his students.

Methods have come and gone and I feel like my thought process is I have a philosophy rather than a method. A method will work for certain players and certain people but we’re all different. No two of us are built the same, we don’t think the same, we don’t walk the same, our movements are different. So it’s very difficult to say ‘This is the method’. Just go look at every great player through history. Every player swung differently. Sure there is some similarities as far as the physics of the golf swing, and the geometry of the plane. We all look different. There is no way that two people could swing the same way. I remember, all the yars I was working with [Nick] Faldo, there were so many Faldo lookalikes, trying to mimic and copy his swing. It doesn’t work. So I’ve always felt that one has to tailor instruction to the individual. That’s why its difficult writing books and videos. Yes, people will get something out of them, but the fact remains that instruction has to be geared to each individual.

What a great blast of wisdom. Let’s apply it to testing.

  • A lot of the Great Debates that rage are largely around methods. And of course these methods are all used by most organizations but given greater weight or prominence depending on who is doing the arguing. The Green Bar is a method which helps embody the philosophy of having a set of constantly passing unit tests.
  • There is not a ‘the method’ for anything. There are a number of methods that may or may not be appropriate.
  • When someone has success, especially in a public forum, imitators appear out of the woodwork. What’s the old tagline? Often imitated, never duplicated?
  • Tailoring instruction is something I’ve been doing for awhile. I have a bunch of content I want to get through, and I recycle stories all the time between classes, but the overall delivery alters depending on the make-up of the class. Tech vs. non-tech, skilled vs. novice, etc..
  • Wrap what you want to communicate in a story. I’ve been told that the best part of my classes are the stories I use to illustrate what I want them to learn. Stories that involved me directly help establish my credibility with the audience and make the idea ‘real’ rather than ‘philosophical’. There is lots of information out there on using story telling; here is a recent interview with Karen Johnson about it and Brian Marick made a comment about it on Twitter a couple weeks ago as well.

After actually talking about Tiger and how his swing has evolved David brought it back to the original topic by saying

He [Tiger Woods] could probably make any method work if he believed strongly enough in it.

This brings up the notion of expert-ism and natural ability. Swap in any number of the rockstar testers for Tiger in the statement and it still rings true.

I don’t golf (time and money being the constraints rather than lack of desire), but I’ve already learned something from a golf pro. Not a bad trick.

Oh, and if you want to hear the whole interview, it is in the middle third of this mp3.