Why You Cannot Build What You Do Not Understand
By Justin Hall
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
THE CURRICULUM SERIES ยท PART TEN
Why You Cannot Build What You Do Not Understand
Nine pieces in, and this series has not told you how to build anything. That was the point. This is the piece that says why, what happens when a coach builds without it, and what the second half is going to do.
Justin Hall / Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Nine articles into a series about curriculum, nothing has been built. Not a lesson plan, not a system, not a single curriculum. If you came here to be told how to structure your academy's teaching, you have been reading a long time without getting it, and you would be within your rights to ask why. This is the piece that answers. It sits at the center of the series, between the half that understands and the half that builds, and its whole job is to explain why there are two halves, why they run in opposite directions, and why the order could not have been the other way around.
The short version is the title. You cannot build what you do not understand. Not should not. Cannot. You can produce something, and a majority of academies have, but what gets produced without understanding is not the thing you meant to build. It is whatever the pieces happened to settle into. The rest of this piece is about the difference.
The short version
Every hour you teach sits inside a curriculum, a system, a teaching method and a set of drills, whether you chose them or not. The first nine pieces named those layers so you can see them in any hour in any room. Build one layer without understanding the one above it and you get something that looks right and was not chosen, which means it cannot be repeated, fixed or handed to anyone. The second half of the series teaches you to build, starting with one hour, because that is the piece you can finish first. Once you can build all of it you will start at the top, the way everyone who knows how does.
Why the series ran in the order it did
The first nine pieces went in a particular order: what is taught first, how it is taught second, and then the one hour where the two meet. Curriculum, then the system inside it, then the map. Then the constraints-led approach, the nine methods, the dials, and the decision about how many methods to use. Then the lesson. That order was not a style choice. You cannot judge how to deliver a technique until you know why that technique, in that order, so what had to come before how. And you cannot see what an hour holds until you know both what goes into it and how it gets in, so the lesson had to come last.
Think of a house. The architect decides the whole house before a wall goes up, because every room only makes sense inside the plan for the building. That is what the first half did. It started with the plan for the whole thing, the curriculum, and worked inward, so that by the time it reached a single hour on the mat, the hour had a reason to exist.
Start anywhere else and you are explaining a part without the whole it belongs to, which is how a coach ends up with a precise vocabulary for drilling and no idea what the drilling is in service of.
How the layers sit inside each other. A lesson is an hour, so the methods and the drilling happen inside it, and every technique a student ever learns sits at the center, whether or not anyone made the decisions around it.
What building without understanding produces
The test the series ran on the constraints-led approach ended on a claim that has quietly become the spine of everything since: structure produces deliberate outcomes, and the absence of structure produces randomized ones. It is worth being exact about what randomized means, because it does not mean bad. A randomized outcome is one nobody chose. It might be excellent. It might be a disaster. What it cannot be is repeated, because nobody knows which part of it caused the result, and it cannot be handed to anyone else, because there is nothing to hand over. The coach who got a good outcome by default has a good outcome and no idea why, which is the same position as the coach who got a bad one.
Now watch what happens when each layer gets built without the one above it understood. These are not hypotheticals. None of them is rare.
A curriculum built without understanding systems. This is the structure we see more than any other, and it looks like a curriculum. Techniques, in an order, on a schedule, written down. What it lacks is the connective logic, because the person who built it did not know there was supposed to be one. The result is the thing the first piece in this series named: a list. An ordered list is better than no list, and it is still not a curriculum, because nothing in it points to anything else. The student learns the armbar in week three and the triangle in week nine and nobody, including the coach, can say what they have to do with each other. The order was deliberate. The outcome, what the student actually ends up with in their head, was randomized, because the thing that would have made it one thing was never built.
A system built without understanding what a map is for. A coach who understands systems but not maps either never draws one, in which case the system lives only in their head and leaves with them, or draws one the size of everything they know and hands it to a white belt, who learns nothing from it and stops looking. The mapping piece spent its length on sizing and transfer for exactly this reason. A system without a map that fits its purpose is a system that cannot be taught by anyone but its author, which is to say, not a system yet.
A lesson plan built without understanding the methods. This is where a large share of the hours in the sport come from. The coach has a slot in the hour marked instruction and fills it the way they were taught, because that is the only way they know. The method was not chosen. It was inherited. The blending piece covered what that costs, but the point here is narrower: a lesson plan built by someone who does not know there are nine ways to deliver a technique is a plan with one of its most important decisions made by accident. The structure is there on paper. The delivery inside it is whatever the coach's own training happened to leave behind.
Practice design without understanding why the dials exist. Twenty reps, same version, full correction, every class, forever. Not because the coach decided a beginner needed blocked practice, but because that is what drilling looks like. The dials never move because nobody knows they are dials. And the room keeps rewarding it, because blocked drilling looks clean in the hour and the cost only shows up in the roll, where nobody traces it back.
Blending without understanding the boundary. A coach who hears that variety reaches more students and has not understood where variety belongs will vary the wrong layer. New curriculum every quarter. A different organizing idea every month. The blending piece put the boundary in one sentence, vary the how and never the what, and a coach who blends the what has built something that looks adaptive and is actually just unstable. The students are not reached more. They are reached by a different random structure each time.
In every one of those cases the coach built something. In every one, what got built was not the thing they thought they were building, and the gap between the two was invisible from the inside, because the rep in the middle looked the same either way.
The same rep, surrounded by decisions on the left and by defaults on the right. From the mat, the two are indistinguishable. From the next week, and from the next coach, they are not.
Deliberate and default are the only two options
There is a reasonable objection to all of this, and it should be met head-on. Plenty of good coaches have never thought about any of these layers and run excellent rooms. That is true. It is also exactly what the argument predicts. A coach with twenty years on the mat has absorbed a system without naming it, built a curriculum by feel, settled into a delivery that works for a lot of people, and set the dials by instinct. The structure is there. It was built by experience instead of by understanding, and for that coach, in that room, it works.
Here is what it cannot do. It cannot be explained, so it cannot be taught to an assistant instructor, so the day that coach is not in the room the structure is not in the room either. It cannot be examined, so when it stops working for a student or a group of students, there is nothing to adjust, only a shrug. And it cannot be moved. It does not survive a second location, a new head coach, or a sale. The structure built by experience is real and it is locked inside one person. The series called this out in the systems piece, that the point of a system is that it can replace you, and the whole reason to build with understanding rather than by feel is that understanding is the only version that can be written down.
So the choice is never between structure and no structure. There is always structure. The rep is always sitting inside a curriculum, a system, a method, and a set of dials, whether anyone put them there or not. The choice is between structure that was decided and structure that was defaulted into, and the only way to decide it is to understand what the layers are before you touch them. That is the whole case for the first half of the series, and it is why there was no shortcut through it.
Why the build half runs the other way
The first half understood the whole thing from the top. The second half builds from the bottom, and the reversal is not symmetry for its own sake. It is the difference between how a person learns to build and how a person who already knows how builds.
Back to the house. The architect starts at the top. A coach who already understands all of this does the same: he decides what the academy is supposed to produce, picks the curriculum type that produces it, decides the system that runs through it, draws the map, and only then writes the lessons, because by then he knows what a lesson inside that curriculum has to look like. A week of lessons in a positional curriculum and a week in a rotating one are different documents, and the difference comes from a decision made above them. Decisions flow down. The work fills in. Nobody who knows how writes a hundred and fifty lesson plans and then looks for the curriculum they add up to.
But nobody learns the trade as an architect. A carpenter learns by building one wall. Hand a coach who has never built anything the instruction to pick a curriculum type and he either freezes or picks one with no idea what he just committed to below it. Hand him one hour to build on purpose and he can finish it this week, run it, and see what happened. Now he has material, and the next layer up is a real question instead of an abstraction. So the second half starts with the smallest thing a coach can build and judge in one sitting, the lesson, and adds a layer at a time. A few lesson plans. Different methods inside them. Then the system that would make them one thing. Then the map. Then, with every part in hand, the curriculum, the decision that was always going to be made at the top but could not be made well until the parts under it had been built.
That is the practice design piece applied to coaches: start with the part a learner can own, add the next, assemble. And it explains why the second half has eight pieces and not nine. Methods and dials are not built. They are chosen, inside a lesson, every time one is planned, so the delivery layer gets no build article of its own. It gets built inside every lesson.
So the two halves describe two different people. The first is for the coach who needs to see the whole building before any of it makes sense. The second is for the coach who needs to build the walls before the building is a decision he can make. By the end of it he is the first kind of coach, and the order he learned in will not be the order he builds in again.
There is a practical reason too. A coach who finishes the first half and immediately tries to build a curriculum will produce the first item on the list above: an ordered set of techniques with no through-line, because he has not yet built the thing that provides one. Starting small protects against that. Build one lesson that answers the four questions from the last piece: why this, today; where does it sit; how is it being delivered, and was that decided; did it land, and how do you know. Then build the system that explains why that lesson sits where it does. Then draw it. Then decide which of the four curriculum types the whole thing belongs in, and go back to the top and build it properly.
The shape of the series. Nine pieces understanding: structure, then delivery, then the hour where they meet. The hinge. Then eight learning to build, from the hour back out to the curriculum. The finished coach builds from the top down; the learning runs the other way.
What is coming
The second half mirrors the first. What was understood last is built first.
It starts with the lesson, in two pieces, because the lesson is where the series has kept its sharpest distinction and it would be a mistake to blur it now. How to Build a Lesson Plan is the container: how to carve an hour, how long each part runs, how parts sequence, and how one hour fits the week and the curriculum above it, because a lesson plan inside a positional curriculum is not the same document as one inside a rotating curriculum and the piece has to show both. It will show real lesson plans, as actual documents, because the fastest way to learn what a plan looks like is to see a few that look nothing alike and all work. How to Deliver a Lesson is what happens inside the container: every method from the delivery layer applied on the mat, in a full class, with the dials moving, so that the methodologies survey stops being a list and becomes something you have watched run for an hour.
Then the system, also in two pieces. How to Build Your System is the one I expect to be the hardest in the whole series, and the reason is that it is the most abstract. Everything else in the build half is concrete: a technique, an hour, an order of techniques, a drawing. A system is made of what a coach believes is true in every position, what the whole game organizes around, and the reasons that connect one technique to another, and beliefs are harder to write down than techniques and far easier to disagree about. The piece is about doing that anyway: naming the principles, choosing the center, and turning the techniques you already teach into one thing by connecting them out loud. It will also cover the sharpest tool for generating those connections, the dilemma, the principle that wins whichever way the opponent goes, and how to find the ones already present in a position. How to Build Your Map follows, and makes good on what the mapping piece promised: sizing a map to its purpose, getting it into a student one node at a time, and what to do when the system grows.
Then the curriculum, last, built in the order the four types were introduced. Linear, the one-student-at-a-time structure that private lessons run on. Rotating, the modular structure a majority of academies already use some version of. Flow. And positional, last, because it is the one that asks the most of everything underneath it and pays back the most when everything underneath it is there.
Every one of those articles assumes the first nine. Nothing new is going to be introduced on the way up; the concepts were all put down on the way in, and the build half picks them up in reverse. If a piece in the second half uses a word you do not recognize, the piece that defined it is above the hinge, and it is worth going back for.
The turn
The descent is over. It took the whole of how an academy teaches, what is taught, how it is delivered, and the hour where the two meet, and put a name and a shape on every layer, so that a coach can look at any hour in any room and read what is there and what is missing. That reading is the skill the first half built. It is also the skill the second half requires, because you cannot build a layer you cannot see.
From here the series starts building, and it starts small, with one hour, planned on purpose, because that is the piece a coach can learn to build first. The whole is decided at the top. It is learned from the bottom.
Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source.