66. Remembering Frank Duckworth: Working it out from first principles
My former colleague achieved international renown in the cricketing world for his method of recalculating target scores. What was his superpower?
Welcome back to Steps To A Humanity of Organisation after our summer break. Following feedback that even enthusiastic readers are struggling to keep up with weekly articles, I am moving to posting every two weeks for a while.
News came through over the summer of the death of physicist and statistician Frank Duckworth MBE at the age of 84. Frank was a colleague of mine for a while in the early 1990s; we were both in the Strategic Planning Unit (SPU) at Nuclear Electric, the nuclear energy utility of the time. Indeed, he worked on the next desk to me for a period.
The SPU was a curious corner; a small group of a dozen or so folk who didn’t fit in easily elsewhere in the organisation. We were tasked with looking at the long term future of an organisation dominated by day-to-day operations. Perhaps they thought we couldn’t do much damage there 😊. Jenny Clarke also joined the SPU, which set us out on a lifetime relationship, so I have a great deal to thank whoever it was that set it up.
Frank’s background
Born in 1939, Frank studied physics at University in Liverpool. He, curiously, shared a house with John Lennon for a while lodging with Lennon’s mother Mimi. He joined the Central Electricity Generating Board, the nationalised power generation utility, working on examining irradiated fuel from nuclear reactors. This turned out to be more statistics then metallurgy, so he developed himself into a statistician, both his work and his hobby for the rest of his life
Frank loved sport and in particular the statistics associated with sport. He carried out an analysis of football league attendance figures in 1971 and joined the Royal Statistical Society (of which he was later made a Fellow).
Cricketing calculations
After taking early retirement in 1992 (at the same time as me!), Frank worked on a methodology for recalculating target scores in limited over cricket matches as early as 1988. He had heard commentator Christopher Martin Jenkins bemoaning the lack of a sold method for doing this, and started to ponder how it might be made to happen.
At that time more and more cricket matches were being played with ‘limited overs’. Whereas in the old days both teams played until everyone was out (or the time ran out), from the 1960s onwards folk realised that it would be more exciting to limit the number of overs (and therefore balls bowled) so that a result would be reached on the day. That’s fine as long as both teams have the same number of overs – but what happens if there is a delay for rain meaning one side has fewer overs than the other?
To start with, simple pro-rata methods were used. But that wasn’t satisfactory; knowing they have fewer overs, teams could score more freely. The situation came to a head in the 1992 World Cup semi-final where South Africa, needing a gettable 22 runs from 13 balls, came back onto the field after a short rain delay to be told they still required 22 runs to win – but only had one ball from which to score them! An impossible target and a ridiculous situation.
Frank had already been thinking about how to tackle the problem and teamed up with mathematician (and fellow cricket and beer enthusiast) Tony Lewis (1942-2020). Over weekly pints in a local pub, the pair honed their approach which took account not simply of runs and balls, but the total resources the team had available to them including batters remaining. By analysing the results from thousands of matches played, they came up with the Duckworth-Lewis method, effectively a table to calculate the target score in any situation. This came into operation in 1997 and was adopted worldwide.
The method, with updated statistics taking account of how the game is changing with batters being more aggressive and scoring more quickly, is still in operation all over the world, from top internationals down to village games. It was refined in 2015 by Dr Steven Stern of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and is now referred to as the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern (DLS) method. An app has replaced the original computer program. Frank’s name has ended up being known around the world, a fine tribute to his questioning spirit. Having spent a little time working alongside him, I think Frank’s key skill was his confidence to work things out from first principles.
Working things out from first principles
Frank took a delight in figuring out for himself how things worked. As a small example, I recall his delight at figuring out how Boddingtons ‘draft’ beer in a can was produced. In the early 1990s the Manchester brewery Boddington started to produce cans with a special mechanism, a ‘widget’, which reproduced the creamy mouth feel of their tap beer sold in pubs. We arrived in the office one day to be greeted by Frank with a disguised can (gaffer tape concealing the label). He opened and poured it and invited us (enthusiastically!) to taste it and guess what it was. He then cut the can in half, took out the widget (which mixed the beer and dispensed CO2 upon opening and showed us how it worked. Something similar happens in cans of ‘draught’ Guiness even today. Boddingtons became hugely popular at this time, partly due to a series of TV adverts calling it ‘The cream of Manchester’.
Frank was totally confident in his ability to work things out for himself. This wasn’t always a totally successful strategy. I recall him trying to invent economics from first principles; he wrote a paper on ‘Who would build the Taj Mahal today?’ which caused rolling of eyeballs from our chief economist as he ‘uncovered’ many well-known problems and paradoxes for himself.
However, the cricket conundrum was perfect for him. It was something for which a new approach was needed and Frank, with his statistics and sports fan background, competence, patience, self-belief along with time created by his leaving the electricity industry, was the man for the job. He was in the right place at the right time with the right idea, and his name lives on around the world wherever cricket is played or watched. Moreover, by creating an updateable methodology based on actual results and scores, Frank’s approach is unlikely to go out of favour. Â
There was even a band called The Duckworth Lewis Method formed in 2009 by Irish musicians Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy) and Thomas Walsh (Pugwash). They released two albums of quirky material with titles based on cricketing ideas.
Conclusion
I wonder how may people were aware of the crisis in cricket scoring in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Many thousands, perhaps millions. But who actually took up the challenge? Frank. He saw the issue, he had the skills to figure out how to do it, and (perhaps most importantly) he had the passion and self-belief to see it through. When we can find something like this that both fascinates us and draws us in – as I have with Solutions Focus and Host Leadership – then the sky’s the limit. Frank’s name will live on long after the rest of us in the office have become footnotes in our family history, legends in our own lunchtime. Chapeau, Frank.
Dates and mates
Quite a lot of dates coming up where I will be speaking and teaching:
Book launch: Tuesday 17th September 2024, the new third edition of The Solutions Focus is published internationally, along with a new audio book version. Order through
ASFA Conference, Baulkham Hills, Sydney: 12-15 September 2024. I will be presenting a pre-conference workshop, the keynote, a workshop on SF in large organisational change and an Open Space. Do join me if you’re in the region.
Host Leadership Gathering Australia: Tuesday 17 September 2024. St Andrew’s Cathedral School in central Sydney. I will be doing the keynote along with some great Australian host leaders. Â
Agora talk, University of Wollongong, Thursday 19 September 2024. An enactive view of ‘mental illness’, what it means and how it might be treated. UOW Wollongong Building 20 Room 4. 3.30-5pm, admission free.
Solution Focused Approach conference, SF Academy, Singapore: 26-27 September 2024. I am doing panels and a workshop. More details at https://sf-academy.com/solution-focused-approach-conference/.
And finally for now…
Sunday 27 October 2024: My flagship SF Business Professional course starts with the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. 16 weeks of learning, interacting, practicing, a project and the best possible grounding in SF work in organisations. Accessible everywhere in the world! Small group, lots of connection, a wonderful experience. I won’t be running many more of these so take the chance now. Discount for booking before 27 September 2024.