Thirty years ago a magazine sent a writer to Chicago to find out what was wrong with the coach of the best basketball team anyone had ever seen.
That is not how the piece was framed, but it is what it was. Richard Hoffer’s 1996 profile of Phil Jackson for Sports Illustrated is a careful, funny, faintly bewildered document. It catalogues the sage, the meditation, the books handed out to players, the day at practice when nobody was allowed to speak, the bus that got diverted to a ferry past the Statue of Liberty for reasons the players never learned. It quotes Jackson explaining that his offense runs on a Taoist principle. The writer keeps waiting for the wink. It never comes.
And running underneath the whole thing is a question the writer is too good to ask outright: is this man serious, or is this an act that happens to be winning?
I have been thinking about that piece all week, because it is the clearest account I know of a person doing my work, in the highest-pressure organization available to him, in front of a press corps that had no category for it.
Seventy-two and ten
Here are the facts of that season. The 1995–96 Chicago Bulls won seventy-two regular-season games and lost ten. No team had ever won that many. They went through the first two rounds of the playoffs losing once. Jackson, who already had three championships, was finally named Coach of the Year.
And they were the oldest team in the league. On paper they were not the most talented roster ever assembled — they had the best player alive and the best second man alive, and after that a collection of role players and one of the most volatile figures in American sport. A team like that is supposed to be good. It is not supposed to be the best there has ever been.
Something was producing a difference, and it was not the roster.
Everyone needs an angle, Jackson told the writer. His angle was meaning.
What he was actually doing
Strip away the incense and the reporting and what Jackson built was a container — a shared space that was about something other than the task, so that the task had somewhere to sit.
He said it plainly himself, and it is the least mystical sentence in the whole profile. What does a Catholic service do with all that incense, he asked. It makes mystery. Part of life is getting pulled into something alongside other people. What we try to do, he said, is breathe together and share the same space and find something outside just playing basketball on the court.
That is not a sports idea. That is the oldest organizational technology on earth, and every people I have ever studied had a version of it. You do not build a group by aligning incentives. You build it by putting people through something together that is bigger than the thing you need from them.
Four moves that travel
One. Regulate before you execute.
Jackson taught meditation. He brought in someone to teach breathing. He ran a practice in silence.
In 1996 this read as eccentricity. We now know what he was doing. A body in a threat state cannot read a room, cannot hold a pattern, cannot tell the difference between pressure and danger. It defaults. It grabs. It shoots the ball it has already decided to shoot.
Everything I teach about performance begins here, and the reason is not spiritual, it is sequential: you cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system, and a dysregulated group makes dysregulated decisions and then defends them. Clear first. Act second. My great-grandmother had us outside before sunrise doing exactly this and never once called it a practice. She called it how you start the day.
Jackson arrived at the same sequence by a different road. That is worth noticing. When two traditions with no contact reach the same answer, you are usually looking at something true rather than something cultural.
Two. The circle instead of the star.
The triangle offense — which Jackson did not invent; his assistant Tex Winter did — has no set plays. Players read what the defense gives and move the ball to the open space. Everyone touches it. Nobody is the designated answer.
Michael Jordan did not want it. He was being asked to give up shots to men who might not make them. Jackson’s argument was not that Jordan should be less; it was that the thing Jordan actually wanted — to win, repeatedly, at the highest level — was not available through Jordan alone.
This is the move most leaders get wrong. They treat a strong ego as an obstacle to manage. Jackson treated it as an engine to point. He did not ask his best man to shrink. He showed him a bigger thing to be great inside of.
“The me becomes the servant of the we.”
That is Jackson’s line, from Sacred Hoops. It is also, almost word for word, what the old people meant by the circle: not that you are small, but that your gift has a place to go.
Three. A place for the one who walks backward.
The hardest personnel decision of that era was Dennis Rodman — a rebounder of genuine brilliance and a man who broke every convention the league had, on purpose, continuously.
Most organizations do one of two things with that person. They try to sand him down, and lose the thing that made him valuable. Or they tolerate him at arm’s length and let the group organize itself around avoiding him.
Jackson did a third thing. He reached for the Lakota heyoka — the one who walks backward, dresses wrong, does everything in reverse — and said, roughly, this man is that. He was respected, Jackson said of the role, because he brought a reality change.
I want to be careful here. Heyoka is a Lakota word for a Lakota role, held inside a Lakota ceremonial life, and it is not mine to teach and it was not Jackson’s. But I understand exactly why he reached for it, and the reason is the argument of this whole article: the language he had been given for running an organization contained no word for the person whose function is to break the pattern. He needed the word. He went and found one.
Every tradition I know kept a version of that role, protected, on purpose, because a group that has organized itself perfectly around its own assumptions is a group that has stopped being able to see. The one who breaks the pattern keeps the pattern alive. He is not a tolerance problem. He is a position.
Four. Something shared that is not the work.
Jackson gave each player a book chosen for that player. Some read them. Several admitted later that they did not, and one could not recall the title.
It worked anyway, and this is the part people miss. The book was not a curriculum. It was a demonstration that the coach had spent time thinking about that man as a person rather than as a position. You cannot fake that at scale and you do not need everyone to receive it. You need it to be true of the ones it reaches.
If the only thing a group shares is the work, you have a staff. Something else has to be held in common before you have anything I would call a team.
The part I have to say plainly
Phil Jackson was a Pentecostal preacher’s son from North Dakota. He was given a Lakota name after running a basketball clinic on a reservation with Bill Bradley. He hung Lakota objects in a team room in Chicago. He was, in the most literal sense, borrowing.
I could write the easy paragraph about that. I am not going to, because I think the honest reading is more interesting and it is the reason this article is on my site at all.
Jackson reached across the world for tools his own line had set down. Not lost — set down. His people had fire, and silence, and story, and a shared table, and elders, and a way of putting a man through something before handing him responsibility. Every people did. The Baltic side of my family carried theirs through a ban. What happened to most of the industrial world is that those tools stopped being transmitted, and within about three generations nobody could name what was missing — only that something was.
So a man ends up running the best basketball team in history and finds he needs a word for the sacred clown, and there is no such word waiting for him in the management literature, so he goes and borrows one.
That is not an indictment of him. It is a description of the condition almost every leader I work with is in. And it is the single strongest piece of evidence I have for the thing I keep saying: these were never one culture’s techniques. They were the human operating system, and they are recoverable, and people reach for them the moment the pressure gets high enough.
The tools were never lost. They were set down.
And the part leaders skip
There is a line in Hoffer’s profile that I would put on the wall of every retreat I run. B.J. Armstrong, who played six seasons for Jackson, says that winning covers a multitude of sins — and that once you are winning, then you get to search for the bigger meaning.
He is right, and any honest version of this argument has to sit with it. Jackson had room to run silence days because his teams won. Had the Bulls won fifteen games, the sage would have been evidence in the case against him.
I take two things from that, and they pull in opposite directions, which is usually the sign you have found the real problem.
The first: results buy the permission. If you want to change how your organization holds itself, the fastest route is almost never to announce a culture initiative. It is to deliver something undeniable and spend the credit on the change.
The second, and I think the deeper one: Armstrong has the causation backwards, and the profile quietly shows it. Jackson was not winning and therefore permitted to be strange. He was doing something that made a group of aging role players into the best team of all time, and the winning was the evidence. He had run those practices in the CBA, in front of nobody, for no money, years before anyone thought to call him a master of anything.
Which is the test I would apply to any of this. A practice that only works once you are already winning is a decoration. A practice that can be run in the worst year you have is a tool.
What I take into a room
When I sit down with a leadership team now, four questions come from this, and none of them require anyone to believe anything.
Does this group have a way to settle before it decides? Not a check-in round. An actual practice, done every time, that moves the room out of threat before it does the work that matters.
Where does the ball go when the pressure comes? If the honest answer is one person, you do not have a team; you have a star and a support structure, and you are one injury or one resignation from finding out.
Who here breaks the pattern, and have you given that a position or a problem? Someone in the room is already doing it. The only question is whether it is a role or a complaint.
What do these people share that is not the work? If there is no answer, that is the first thing to build, and it will look like a waste of time right up until the week it is the only reason the group holds.
Thirty years ago a sportswriter went to Chicago looking for the wink and did not get one. The team he was writing about won seventy-two games. We have had three decades to decide what that means, and mostly we have filed it under “eccentric genius,” which is the most comfortable possible conclusion because it requires nothing of us.
I think the plainer reading is the correct one. A man put ceremony, silence, story and a circle into a modern organization under maximum pressure, and it produced the best season anyone has ever had. He had to go looking for the pieces because his own were set down. Ours are recoverable, and most of them are older and closer to hand than people think.
You do not need to be a Zen master. You need a circle, a practice, a role for the one who walks backward, and something held in common that is not the job. That is the whole architecture. Everything else is application.
Where this is carried further
The twenty-two tools this comes out of are carried as story in Stone Breath, the first novel in The Ancestral Watch, now in worldwide distribution. The working version for leaders — the practices without the novel around them — is Living as a Far Messenger.
And if you want the argument about organizations specifically — what a people actually builds, and how authority moves — that is The Council Fire, and the Local Governance Act history is the real-world model underneath it.
Tony Skrelūnas writes The Ancestral Watch — Stone Breath, By Lamplight, The Council Fire and The Far Messengers — and the working reader, Living as a Far Messenger. He is a PhD candidate; his dissertation looks at human and organisational performance through three ancestral lenses: Diné, Lithuanian and Japanese. He holds a faculty appointment at 1440 Multiversity, where teaching is the centre of the work now. He runs at dawn and hikes with a corgi named Roper.
Last reviewed September 2026.