The Flawed Martial Arts Model, Part Two: The Solution - Our Tribe and Our School

 

In the first post, I outlined the historical roots of the modern martial arts schools in the United States, and how commercialization has caused a litany of problems. Read that post before diving into this one. In this post, I'll outline how our model solves these problems.

The Brief Summary of Our Model

Our gym offers two programs right now  -Brazilian jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts, which includes an adult program and a kids program. We have about six coaches and somewhere in the ballpark of 25 students. The model we're building will eventually expand beyond martial arts into teaching other classes, such as primitive survival skills (among others), which is how we will expand to generate greater revenue.As such, I will refer to the gym as "The School."

The School, instead of being run by a "Master" as we see in the typical martial arts school model, will be run by our Tribe. The Tribe will replace not only the Master, but also the Master's Disciples. While we haven't actually set up the framework yet, the Tribe itself will likely use a shared ownership model for the School. This diffuses the responsibility of running the School among a group of people, which allows us to leverage individual expertise to tackle the different roles needed to run a successful school. The School won't rely on a single Master acting as a jack-of-ass-trades, which will improve the health of the business. Got a Tribe member who's an exceptional salesperson? They recruit new students. How about a marketing expert? They sell the School to the community. Is there a Tribe member who's a financial geek? They handle the books. And so on.

The real advantage of the Tribe, however, comes from the diffusion of expertise. In the Old Commercial Model, the Master was THE expert. They were expected to know all the "secrets" of the martial art and slowly passed those secrets to their loyal, dedicated disciples. That model doesn't work when the entire operation is commercialized, which I discussed in Part One. The Tribe assumes this role, so expertise no longer resides within one person, but rather the collective. Different Tribe Members have their own areas of expertise, which can then be shared with other Tribe Members and, importantly, the School's paying Students. 

This is kind of like the typical MMA gym is organized, where different coaches teach their different disciplines. Our model differs in that the Tribe is a closely-bonded social group, which will allow for a far more collaborative approach. In essence, the Tribe will have a vested interest in making each other better, thus increasing the sharing of knowledge while simultaneously decreasing the intra-team conflict that can sometimes occur among coaches.

This model creates a clear divide between the Tribe and the Students, where the entire Tribe benefits from the financial success of the School and the Students pay tuition to learn from the School. This clear divide solves the litany of problems with the Old Commercial Model, which monetizes the Master/ Disciple relationship. 

Adopting the University Structure

In our model, the Tribe's collective knowledge is taught to Students in the form of classes offered through the school, but the classes offered would be limited to the knowledge base of the individual Members of the Tribe. This would limit the breadth and depth of classes offered to the collecting knowledge of the Tribe. We solve this limitation by also crating a group that would be analogous to university Professors. 

University professors generally serve two roles within the university setting- they teach classes and they do research to advance their field of expertise. In our School model, our "Professors" would teach any classes that would appeal to members of the Montrose community. If someone knows what they're talking about and there's a market to learn those skills, we provide the space to bring those "Professors" and Students together. Initially, we'll probably focus on primitive survival skills because they're in demand, we have people who can teach them, and they're tangentially-related to martial arts. 

Our school would also embrace the "research" role Professors fulfill by encouraging our Professors to collaborate with other Professors, conduct experiments, and develop their field of expertise. As an example, let's say we have two Professors who have knowledge about building shelter in survival situations, but have two differing philosophies. We would provide the physical space to give them the opportunity to collaborate to develop the best survival shelters possible. 

Another example - let's say we have three jiu jitsu coaches who each have very different philosophies on teaching jiu jitsu. They could collaborate and experiment with different teaching strategies to develop better methods of teaching jiu jitsu. Because this model is inherently collaborative in nature, we also eliminate a great deal of the ego-related issues typically found in the Old Commercial Model.

In this model, the Tribe and the School get qualified expert "Professors" for classes to deliver to our Students, the Tribe attracts more Students from a wider cross-section of our community (thus making more money), the "Professors" get an opportunity to develop their own expertise through collaboration and experimentation, and the "Professors" would make extra money teaching what they love. It's a great model for proving a mutually-beneficial environment for all parties involved AND will provide a clearinghouse of sorts for important knowledge within our wider community. In short, this will make Montrose a better place to live.

The Real Benefit to Our Tribe

This model creates a lot of benefits for a lot of people, but the most important benefit is it provides a safe, secure, well-equipped physical space for our Tribe to train and socialize. If we relied on the Old Commercial Model, as we have since we bought the gym, we're perpetually teetering on the brink of financial collapse. This is especially true given the realities of COVID. 

If we were to continue with the Old Commercial Model, we would have to spend a great deal of time and money marketing to an ever-shrinking pool of potential students just to pay the bills. This also forces us to accept students who may not be a good fit with our culture (we project kindness, open-minded acceptance, and compassion, but also love hard, smashing, violent training... and also dick jokes.) Or worse, it might force us to accept student who are a danger to our current Students, which is ethically, morally, and financially unacceptable. 

This model prevents this by giving us near-unlimited potential revenue streams, gives us the ability to really leverage cheap-but-effective word of mouth advertising, and allows our Tribe to make important connections with key members of our community who have specialized knowledge in a wide range of topics. And it allows us to maintain our physical facilities for training and socializing for the Tribe. 

Conclusion

This model is still in the development phase and is mostly a collection of theories and ideas. Ergo the somewhat fractured nature of this post. :-) In the coming days and weeks, our Tribe's Founding Members will begin discussing the ins and outs of this model with the goal of officially launching it by the beginning of March. As the ideas evolve, I will continue to post the details as they evolve.

If you want to learn more about the structure of the school, check out this post. And this post about the underlying theory. 

If you dig this project and are interested in helping develop the ideas, consider joining our Think Tank Facebook group, which can be found here.

~Jason

 

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How We Use Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to Curate the Tribe

A few days back, we were discussing this post on how we vet new members of the Tribe. Ken, a long-time Facebook friend for whom I respect, asked why we used Brazilian jiu jitsu as part of the process. More specifically, wouldn't that unnecessarily rule out otherwise great candidtes?

Yes. Yes it would. 

But. At the early stages of this project, It's more important to assure new members are a great fit than letting potential great members fall through the cracks. And there's no greater filer for our Tribe than jiu jitsu. Simply put, jits reveals a whole lot about a person in an incredibly short time.

And yes, tolerance of calling the sport "jits" is one of the tests. 

For the uninitiated, if you don't know what "BJJ" is, it's basically a sport where we practice breaking limbs and murdering while wearing sweaty pajamas with a lot of weird patches. Here's a more detailed explanation.

The Mats Don't Lie

A popular idiom states "Martial arts doesn't build character. It reveals character. This is certainly true in jiu jitsu. Here's a rundown of the characteristics I'm looking for in students. Note this is what I look for in potential Tribe members. Just regular students don't need all of these characteristics, though the more they possess, the more intrinsic enjoyment they'll likely receive from training at our gym.

• How do they interact with our team in a stressful environment? Starting jiu jitsu is kinda scary. From the very onset in their first class, we can see how a new student interacts with the collection of diverse personalities that make up our team.
  
• Do they have a tendency to do harm? Do they have psychopathic tendencies? This sport attracts people who want to learn or have an opportunity to hurt people. This is a dangerous sport where NOT harming each other takes effort. The folks who seem to get joy from harming weaker people are revealed almost immediately. And we DO get these people regularly. They're either actively or passively dismissed from the gym depending on their veracity and the degree of danger thy represent.
  
• Are they curious? We're more interested in the curious than most gyms, mostly because we create a culture where learning is an extremely high priority. Curious people thrive in our environment. And I've found curiosity to be an excellent predictor of all kinds of other wonderful traits.
  
• Do they have anger issues? When you start jiu jitsu, you lose. A lot. It's simply the nature of the sport - it's designed to use techniques and leverage to defeat strength and athleticism. As such, experience matters. No matter how big and strong a new student might be, they're going to get tapped by our higher belts. And quite often, even our kids. If you have anger issues, this ALWAYS reveals it.
  
• Do they have a huge ego? This is related to the last point, but specifically determines if the new student possesses humility. Can they accept being at the bottom of the hierarchy, and can they accept being there for months and months?
  
• Do they have a capacity to teach and learn? We use a collaborative learning model where everyone is encouraged to be both teacher and learner, which helps support our development beyond what our coaches teach. We use this model in part because we have a lot of diverse, applicable experiences among members, but it also supports the "School" part of this plan.
  
• How they related to women and kids? This is a specific test for our new male students. As soon as a new student proves conclusively that they have enough emotional control and physical restraint, we have them roll (what we call live almost full-intensity sparring) with our older kids. Since most men generally don't like kids and get kinda weird about rolling with women, it gives us the ability to observe how tolerant they will be in relating to other Tribe members who are different than them. This is a subtle but important thing.
  
• How do they handle adversity? As I mentioned before, new students lose. A lot. If a new student sticks around for six months in this sport, they usually have the drive and determination to tackle damn near anything. We like tough people.
  
• What capacity do they have for leadership? This isn't a deal-breaker (bad leaders still play important roles in our Tribe), but we're always searching for people who possess the raw materials that would allow them to become great leaders. Personally, I habitually surround myself with leaders and generally avoid those who can only follow. My operational definition of leadership is basically what is described in "Extreme Ownership" and "Linchpin."
  
• Cooperativeness versus competitiveness. We're insanely competitive. But we're competitive because we understand it's how we make all of us better, so the potential toxicity of competitiveness is balanced with strong cooperative tendencies. Off the mats, this is exceptionally hard to test. On the mats? It's evident almost immediately.
  
• Do they have a capacity for violence? One of the hallmarks of our gym is a readily apparent culture of kindness and openness. We try to be genuinely good people who are helpful and supportive. But this culture is built on a foundation of most of our members being willing and able to use violence when necessary. This usually manifests when new people mistake our kindness for weakness, and we have to given them a brief glimpse behind the curtain. "If you do anything to harm the team or an individual member of the team, we'll fuck ya up a bit." Violence is always the foundation of civility, whether we're talking about our Tribe, our jiu jitsu team, or society.
  
• Do they understand honor? "Honor" is one of Jack Donovan's Four Tactical Virtues of Masculinity as described in his excellent book "The Way of Men." Basically, "honor" is the process of earning the respect of other men in your Tribe. Given jiu jitsu is a decidedly masculine endeavor (masculine, not male... women do just fine in the sport, but they, too, must understand "honor"), it is an excellent test of a person's capacity for honor. One of the simplest things a student can do to disqualify themselves as a potential Tribe member is to do something that dishonors themselves in the eyes of the rest of our team.
  
• Do they understand male hierarchies? This is closely-related to the last item. Do new students understand how men organize themselves socially, and do they act accordingly? Jiu jitsu is interesting in that belt rank is a pretty decent visual indicator of the hierarchy in the gym context. 
• Do women relate to other women? This one is specifically for the ladies. Our culture is kinda unique in that the women in our gym adopt a bit of the masculine hierarchy structure, but still maintain the dynamics of femininity. In the simplest sense, can women successfully navigate the fickle nature of female kinship in a way that doesn't harm the Tribe or the Team? While understanding women is a stupidly-complex topic that requires a small dissertation to explain, jiu jitsu is a pretty decent way to determine if women can relate to each other.
  
• Do they have the ability to work as part of a team? Jiu jitsu is a sport where you really need solid teamwork chops because we need to trust each other a great deal to avoid injuries as much as possible. As such, students who are not team players wash out quickly, which is super-useful because Tribes, by definition, require teamwork. 
  
• Do they have a sense of humor? We like to laugh, and serious people are a drag. If people don't like to laugh, or oftentimes-crude humor usually drives them away pretty quickly.
• Do they like to have fun? Along the same vein, we really like to have fun. "Play" is one of the foundations of not only our gym culture, but how we approach life. We take our art seriously, but we don't take ourselves seriously. Again, our gym culture weeds out the "chronically-unfun" quickly. 
  
• Are they selfish? Does a student only seem to think of themselves, or do they demonstrate selflessness? Selfish people who are only training for themselves are fine as students, but this is a deal-breaker for Tribe members. Jiu jitsu usually reveals this pretty quickly. 
• Are they passive-aggressive or otherwise emotionally immature? Given jiu jitsu is a combat sport, conflict between members is bound to arise. How people deal with that conflict is an excellent indicator of their emotional maturity, especially when it comes to using passive-aggressiveness. Like selfishness, this is a deal-breaker. 
• Can they pass shit tests? A "shit test" is a test that determines a few different things about a person. The basic framework involves men teasing each other. To pass the test, you tease them back. If you get pissy, defensive, or have any other sort of similar response, you fail. Usually, it's in the context of women assessing the value of men. But in this case, it's assessing whether or not men are tough enough to have each others' backs in dangerous situations. A "fitness test" of sorts. Men (or women) who fail this type of shit test cannot be part of the Tribe. This idea is tied to the reason we teach boys not to cry, why men "bully" other men (and why women bully other women. Spoiler alert... it's because they're viscous), and why modern fourth-wave feminism kinda sucks. 
  
• How resilient are they? Jiu jitsu is a frustrating, difficult sport. You're served up a regular serving of failure and disappointment. People who aren't resilient wash out quickly, usually after only a few weeks. 
• How willing are they to follow and/or police intra-tribal rules and norms? We have rules of conduct, both explicit and implicit. The rules are in place to keep each other safe and to maintain our desired culture. Are students following these rules? And do they show an aptitude for understanding the nuances and motivations behind our rules? And in some cases, are they good at policing the rules in others? The first two are prerequisites for Tribal members. The last one is an added bonus. 
• How willingly do they accept challenges, and how do they approach said challenges? If we give students what amounts to an impossible challenge (like tapping out a higher belt who is clearly better than they are), how do they respond? Do they express self-doubt? Do they accept the challenge, but have reservations? Or do they take a "Hell yeah, I'll do my best!" approach? That latter one is what we're looking for in Tribe members.
• Do they have "gameness"? Gameness is a term used to describe a willingness to keep fighting. Literally and figuratively. It's best measured by a student's willingness to keep trying to accomplish something (like the impossible challenges mentioned in the last point.) Jiu jitsu itself is a sport that demands gameness because, no matter how long you do it, you will fail A LOT. 
• Do they understand the true nature of masculinity and femininity? Even if they can't articulate it, do they have an intuitive sense that these constructs exist and that they're complimentary? While covering this topic in detail would cover several blog posts, the gist has to do with the hypothesis that is the foundation of the Tribe - we need ideological diversity, which starts with having both gender roles represented in adequate numbers. 

 Conclusion

 

So there's the list of all the things we can discern about someone who trains with us. It's a long-ass list, but the sport reveals a lot about people. We could use all kinds of different tools, but this one works exceptionally well for us. As an added bonus, it's also our primary form of recreation. Just training assures we maintain close contact with each other, which is often one of the biggest struggles of curating a Tribe of friends. 

There are countless activities that probably serve the same purpose for anyone interested in this Tribe idea. Many roads lead to Rome. This road just happens to work for us.

~Jason

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The Flawed Martial Arts School Model: Part One - The Historical Root of the Problem

 

The business model we use for martial arts instruction in the United States, today, royally sucks. Since taking over ownership of a Brazilian jiu jitsu gym in September of '19, I’ve been fully immersed in the joys and pains of the industry. And the typical model we use has a lot more pains than joys.

After a good deal of research, experimentation, and synthesizing of past experiences and new ideas, I’ve come to the conclusion that a great deal of the pain caused by gym ownership is a direct result of the business model almost all of us use in some capacity. In short, martial arts businesses, including jiu jitsu gyms, use a model that attempts to marry the traditions and structures of ancient Eastern martial arts with modern American business practices.

And it’s not a happy marriage.

Every gym owner I know struggles with the same issues, which I’ll detail later. But these problems inevitably cause gym owners to experience significant burn-out, lose friendships, lose interest in the art they love, and in many cases, lose money.

So what’s the cause of these problems? To fully understand WHY the system we use causes so many problems, we have to do a bit of digging into history.

How Martial Arts Used to Be Taught

Martial arts used to be taught for war (ergo the “martial” part.) It was training that would help you beat your opponent on the battlefield. As such, martial arts instructors and their training was subsidized by the military or government. If you were a soldier in the military, you’d receive martial arts training as part of the overall military training.

Martial arts would also sometimes be taught to civilians for self-defense purposes. In this case, the “business model” was somewhat similar to that which we use today in the US. You’d have an expert (a “master”) who had a long-standing, strong reputation within their communities. This may have been because their families had passed the art from generation to generation, or it may have been based on their particular culture. Because each culture only had one or a very small number of different “arts”, masters were rare.

The generic situation under this model worked something like this. If you wanted to learn a martial art, you would get instruction from a local master for a period of time. If you were really good OR had interest in learning the art to the point where you yourself would become a master some day, you’d petition your master to accept you as a “disciple.” If your master accepted you as a disciple, you’d enter into a special long-term relationship defined by trust, loyalty, and mutual obligation.

The nature of this relationship was much more involved than that of a teacher/ student relationship. It became much more like a parent/ child relationship. The master would guide and teach their disciple (or disciples) in every aspect of the art, and the disciple would in turn help take care of the master and support them by providing things like food, housing, etc. This was generally a lifelong commitment. THIS is the model that American martial arts businesses attempt to replicate.

A critically-important key to this model - the MASTER holds the power in the relationship, not the DISCIPLE. The disciple must seek and earn the approval of the master to reach disciple status and must continue to earn the approval of the master to continue their journey. The goal of this process is to essentially assure the art is only taught to individuals who have the character to use the art for noble, virtuous purposes. You don’t want to teach serial killers how to get better at killing.

So Where Did This Model Go Wrong?

When martial arts started exploding in the United States in the late 60’s and early 70’s (due to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the explosion of martial arts TV and movies), there was a sudden, powerful demand by the American consumer to learn these martial arts. So the earliest instructors (“masters”) to open schools in the United States had to adopt a particular business model that would solve a critical problem - since there is no familial or cultural knowledge of martial arts in general or instructors in particular that gave the instructors a positive reputation, these early instructors had to create their own reputations.

To accomplish that, they had to sell themselves to their prospective students. Martial arts transitioned from a cultural staple rooted in a culture’s historical warrior class passed down through deeply-connected master/ disciple relationships to a commercialized service industry. This shift, which seems rather trivial, was critically important in explaining our current problems because it shifted the power dynamic.

Instead of the well-known, well-respected master granting qualified, motivated individuals to become loyal disciples, now unknown “masters” had to sell themselves to prospective students who were free to pick and choose any instructor they wanted in any art available at any time.

Capitalism 101.

Normally this is a good thing. Competition leads to improvement as service providers battle to provide the best service value for their students. Unfortunately for the martial arts industry, the very nature of martial arts included all kinds of customs and concepts that were mostly incompatible with a system where the student controlled the power dynamic of the relationship. So this new hybrid model produced all kinds of problems.

How This Hybrid Model Brought About the McDojo Problem

The early martial arts masters in the US were selling a recreational service that competed with every other recreational service business in their area. They had to sell themselves to prospective students, then provide quality service in a way that retained the students as long as possible. For every student lost, a new one would need to be recruited. All to pay the bills.

It didn’t take long for the martial arts masters to realize the commercialization of martial arts causes all kinds of problems. The master/ disciple relationship had changed because the master was no longer the power broker. In the old system, disciples were essentially bonded to their master through good and bad through cultural tradition. Under the American commercialized system, the disciples were free to leave at any time for another master, another art, or even a completely different recreational activity. They were, after all, paying customers.

In the old system, the martial arts masters were irreplaceable cultural icons to be revered and respected. In the United States, teachers of any kind are viewed as replaceable cogs in a big machine. Even martial arts masters.

Under the threat of constantly losing paying customers, martial art school owners had to start generating revenue through other streams, like requiring specific uniforms purchased from the school owner, testing fees for belts and the creation of more belts, a lowering of standards of the art, and, because it became important to recruit as many new students as possible, deceptive advertising. This also led to the proliferation of echo chambers where really stupid ideas flourish (like “death touch” techniques.) Essentially, this commercialization of the martial arts model forced owners to make compromises that are not in the students’ best interests in order to pay the bills. 

Despite the obvious problems this hybrid business model creates, the commercialized recreational martial art model has been used for pretty much every martial art that has been brought to the United States. Including Brazilian jiu jitsu.

How BJJ Adopted the Model

Back in the late 70’s, Rorion Gracie was primarily responsible for bringing a commercialized version of Brazilian jiu jitsu to the United States. It’s an interesting story, including the back story to the development of the modern day UFC mixed martial arts promotion. His primary goal was simple - bring the art here to America to make cash. Which he did.

In the process, Rorion set the tone that would shape the development of BJJ here in the US, which was the same tone other martial arts had previously followed - Jiu jitsu businesses became commercial recreational martial arts businesses.

Today, we see the effects of this on almost every jiu jitsu school in the country. There will be one “master” (usually a black belt) who is responsible for disseminating information to the rest of the school, which is often made up of students ranging from first-day noobs to gristled veterans. Dissent is discouraged; the master is assumed to have all the answers. Authority is not questioned. Collaboration with others outside the school (or lineage) is strongly discouraged and oftentimes punished. Loyalty to the master and the school is a must; people who show disloyalty are branded a “creonte” and socially-shunned. Innovation is limited to the degree of open-mindedness of the master. When students reach a certain degree of proficiency, they’re often expected to assume an instructor role. And so on.

This system creates all kinds of issues like intra- and inter-school drama, ego issues, high turnover, and the problem of students leaving to start their own schools and taking students in the process. It forces owners to spend a disproportionate amount of time generating and following up on leads for new students, teaching a re-teaching the same boring basics to the constant flow of new students coming through the door, teaching too many classes at inconvenient times, constantly having to chase students down to collect payments, and a host of other problems that make school ownership pretty shitty.

The real problem, though, is this commercialized recreational service model is poorly-designed to maximize the potential of the information age. The old master/ disciple model worked in part because the knowledge the master held was incredibly rare. Given we have the Internet, this is no longer the case. There are approximately 275,000 videos available on the Internet about arm bars alone, and many of these videos feature knowledge from the very best competitors and instructors in the sport.

Like pretty much any knowledge today, knowledge about jiu jitsu is abundant and free. KNOWING the information is now virtually worthless. The real value is being able to FILTER the information to determine what is useful and worthless. The real value is being able to synthesize the information. The real value is being able to teach this synthesized information. Anybody can now access WHAT to teach. What we need today are people who know HOW to teach. And our business model is terrible at that. Severely impedes it, even.

The Solution

Our School/ Tribe model was partially designed to remedy this entire issue. Our jiu jitsu classes (and to a lesser extent, our mma classes) are sacred in that we really need them to survive. The physical and mental benefits our team derives from those classes is one of the more important parts of our lives. As such, this was among the highest priorities in designing the framework of this plan- WE NEED A PLACE TO TRAIN.

The gist - the Tribe will essentially run the program, replacing the "Master" and "Disciples." This diffuses the weird power gradient that simply doesn't play well as a business model. Because the Tribe is already, by design, a closely-connected unit, there's no weird "loyalty" crap. The Tribe is free to use expertise from any and all sources because the entire operation clearly, explicitly benefits both the Tribe and the Students.

Psychologically, this simple distinction of "Tribe" and "Student" creates much clearer roles, and should eliminate a lot of the common problems we see in the current models. In future posts, I'll go into great detail on HOW this could be implemented.

~Jason

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