Playing To Win
The Importance of Strategic Tension
The Cautionary Case of Alejandro Tabilo
Today, the two premier Canadian tennis tournaments are wrapping up: the women’s National Bank Open in Toronto; and the men’s Omnium Banque National in Montreal. The latter tournament has me feeling a bit wistful. So, I have dedicated this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insight (PTW/PI) piece to explaining why: The Importance of Strategic Tension: The Cautionary Case of Alejandro Tabilo. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.
A Little Background on Tennis Canada
The two tournaments are put on by Canada’s national tennis federation, Tennis Canada, and are part of the second tier of global tennis tournaments (ten and nine per year for the women and men, respectively), next in importance to the four Grand Slams (Wimbledon, Roland Garros, US Open and Australian Open).
As of 2005, Canadian tennis was an also-ran, certainly not in the top 25 nations in the world for tennis. But in 2006, Tennis Canada embarked on a bold and decisive strategy that has transformed it into a leading tennis nation, with its first Grand Slam singles champion (Bianca Andreescu at the 2019 US Open), its first Davis Cup championship (2022) and its first Billie Jean King Cup (formerly Federation Cup) championship (2023) — all considered beyond any reasonable expectation as of 2006. I have previously written about the transformation in a strategy journal and in this series, about Andreescu’s triumph in a newspaper editorial, and as an example of the need to stay commited to a strategy in this series.
I won’t rehash those aspects of story but rather add a new element that I haven’t previously discussed publicly. But first, a few thoughts on the importance of strategic tension…
The Importance of Strategic Tension
As you recall, my test of whether you have made a real strategic choice is if the opposite is stupid on its face. If the opposite isn’t stupid, it is a strategic choice. If the opposite is stupid, it is an operating imperative. It is an operating imperative to listen to customers. It is an operating imperative to control costs. It is an operating imperative to value your talent. If you don’t do these things, you are stupid and deserve to and probably will go out of business.
The nice thing about operating imperatives is that they are easy to reach agreement on. It is hard to defend being stupid. And the decision can be easily supported by pointing out the fact that every competitor is already doing it. If you have conflicting points of view on an operating imperative, it is problematic and unhelpful — you don’t want to have to fight to be non-stupid.
However, when the opposite isn’t stupid on its face and when one or more competitors are succeeding by doing the opposite, there should be debate on the choice. You need have productive strategic tension with opposing possibilities duking it out in the arena of ideas in order to determine the strategic choice with the best chance for success. Without strategic tension, there won’t be great strategic choices.
Strategic Tension at Tennis Canada
I haven’t mentioned this or written about it before, but I think it is important and maybe I should have talked about it more at the time. Sigh, 20–20 hindsight.
When we decided to get serious about becoming a leading tennis nation, we needed to upgrade our coaching dramatically. We hired Louis Borfiga, who was then the Director of the Junior program of the French Federation of Tennis (FFT), as Vice-President of High Performance. He had played a key role in the development of great French players including Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gael Monfils, Richard Gasquet, and Gilles Simon, all of whom reached a rank in the world top ten. But we also hired as our High-Performance Consultant Australian Bob Brett (who tragically passed away of cancer in 2021 at the age of 67), who was famous for developing Grand Slam winners including Boris Becker, Goran Ivanisevic, Mats Wilander, and Marin Cilic.
And with that combination, we got plenty of strategic tension. The FFT, in which Borfiga developed his approach, is the most doctrinaire and structured in the world. There is a way of doing it and if you are a young player who fits and complies, great. Otherwise, you are out! Quantitative measurement is important. While extremely demanding, Brett was much more nuanced and flexible — reflected in his relationship with us. He had a uniquely customized work life, in which we got one third of his time while his tennis academy just outside Monte Carlo and coaching top player Marin Cilic split the other two-thirds. He had coached players with widely varying styles and personalities. He focused as much on developing their mental ability to express their strengths on court as on specific measurable physical skills.
Arguably he was as validity-oriented as Borfiga was reliability-centered. One approach is not superior to the other, but I recognized and valued the strategic tension between the two. For example, the Borfiga position was that at a certain age (different for boys versus girls), every player needed to live and train at the National Tennis Center (NTC) in Montreal. Brett’s position was that some are ready to leave home at that age and others are not and flexibility is key. This kind of tension arose on numerous issues.
As Chair of the Tennis Development Committee for the first six years of the new strategy and then as Chair of whole board for next three years, I took on the job of managing the strategic tension between the two — without telling anyone that I had taken on that task. I just did it. I supported both, each in different ways. I never expressed anger at either — even when they annoyed me with their bickering. I engaged in shuttle diplomacy and worked to keep the tensions at a workable level.
At the end of my mandated term as Chair of the Board, I was succeeded by a businessman from Montreal. Within months, the CEO phoned me to let me know that ‘Montreal’ had insisted that Brett be fired. Clearly the strategic tension wasn’t valued in Montreal and I was no longer in a position to protect it. And I know it wasn’t the CEO’s preferred decision because he left soon thereafter to take a bigger job as CEO of the Lawn Tennis Association in the UK — and immediately hired Brett. This leads us to the cautionary case of Alejandro Tabilo…
The Tabilo Case
Alejandro Tabilo came into this year’s tournament ranked 21st in the world. Of top 25 players in the world, Tabilo is the fastest rising by far — up 104 ranking places in the past twelve months (American Ben Shelton is next fastest, rising 27 places). Earlier this year, he notched a victory in his first career match with #1 Novak Djokovic — joining only 11 other current or retired players with a winning record against Djokovic. At age 27, he is entering the prime of his career.
Tabilo was born and raised in Toronto by his Chilean immigrant parents. He played extensively in the Tennis Canada junior system and was ranked #1 at various junior age levels. But he moved to Chile and started playing for Chile rather than Canada, starting as an 18-year-old.
Why did he make that shift? He explains in his own words: “I was a very chubby kid. I never really looked like I was going to be climbing up in the rankings. But I was №1 in all the (junior) categories there, and I never received a wild card for Rogers Cup or anything. So I never really felt the support.”
To explain, a number of tournaments around the world — including, for example the Australian Open and the National Bank (new sponsor replacing Rogers) — are owned by the country’s national tennis federation. For top tier tournaments, a player needs to have a high ranking to get into the ‘main draw’ of the tournament — i.e., don’t have to go through qualifying rounds. For the National Bank, that ranking needs to be in the top 50 globally. Younger players who are favored by their tennis federation are given a ‘wild card’ for tournaments such as this, which helps them gain valuable experience plus ranking points that come from participation. (For example, this year three Canadian men, ranked 106, 141, and 610, respectively, received wild cards.)
But there was never one for a younger Tabilo when he would have needed one. Why? The above article provides an explanation: “The Canadian brain trust thought he was too heavy.”
But that is not entirely true. It wasn’t the whole brain trust. Indeed, he didn’t meet the body fat standards enforced by the Montreal NTC portion of the brain trust. But Brett, with whom I played tennis at 6 am before I went to work and he went to hit with kids in the program, shared with me on multiple occasions his chagrin with the Tennis Canada stance on Tabilo. He had seen this kind of thing before in his long and illustrious career. He pointed out that kids (and Tabilo was probably 13 or 14 years old at the time of these discussions) develop physically in very different ways, and some take longer to drop their baby fat.
Well guess what? He is 6’2” and 165 pounds — not exactly in the ‘chubby’ range (as illustrated in the photo above). In fact, he is extremely close to the build of Djokovic (6’2” 170 pounds), who is considered to have the perfect physique for tennis — a physique that has helped him win the most men’s Grand Slam singles championships in tennis history. It is bad enough now that Tabilo is now playing his first National Bank Open — as a Chilean! But even worse, the reason has been proven with the passage of time to have been entirely spurious.
And what if his rise continues and he becomes the best Canadian-born male player in the country’s history? He will be the player that his country federation (in effect) told: Take a hike, fatty!
That is the kind of thing that happens when the strategic tension disappears.
Practitioner Insight
If you want to do real strategy, that is, make choices where the opposite is not stupid on its face but rather what others are doing, then you better embrace strategic tension not exterminate it. You need to consider multiple possibilities and have robust discussions to be able to consistently pick the most compelling one.
Strategic tension may well be irritating — as I am sure Brett was to the Montreal crowd. They probably felt he wasn’t sufficiently supportive of policies, was inclined to pick at things, undermined authority — and they probably had a case.
There is surely a downside to strategic tension. As in the military, unit cohesion matters to mission success. But it depends on how that cohesion is realized. If it is achieved after diverse views are encouraged, embraced and thoroughly considered, then the resulting cohesion is a great thing and will make success more likely. But if it is achieved by discouraging and, if diverse points of view show up anyway, exterminating them, then good luck to you!
In this case, what I believe was productive strategic tension was eradicated by ejecting the challenging point of view. And we lost a budding star — already the fourth best Canadian-born male tennis player in our entire history (for Canadian tennis aficionados, Felix Auger-Aliassime and Denis Shapovalov both have reached the top ten, as did Greg Rusedski who like Tabilo chose to play for another country (UK), and Milos Raonic isn’t on this list because he was born in Montenegro — and we were lucky to have inherited him by way of immigration).
It didn’t have to be that way. And it doesn’t have to for you in your endeavors — but only if you nurture strategic tension.
