Ryan Mc Cluskey

Kieran McKenna is a phenomenon. When a chairman or CEO takes a leap of faith on a first-time manager, this is the guy they dream about in their wildest fantasies. Because they all look like McKenna at the beginning. Career coaches. Guys who had no playing career for wharever reason and made the most of their 15-year headstart by dedicating themselves to deep study of the coaching and leadership craft. But once the preparation ends and the reality begins, the video footage around a man and his philosophy accumulates. Then the mystery fades and they nearly all turn out to be fairly ordinary. Group 10 managers together by any general criteria you like and probability dictates that 9 of them will be journeymen in the end. McKenna is the exception. He's extraordinary. Whatever the threshold for 'known quantity' is, 104 games surpasses it, and we’re still were patiently waiting for the slightest glimpse of any weakness to be exposed. Win ratio 60%. Indeed, rather than McKenna's returns diminishing, his success appears to be compounding. Ipswich moved up a division in the summer and they haven't just been competitive this season, they are setting a standard the Championship has never seen before. The Tractor Boys have 10 points more than Burnley had this time last year. 8 points more than Fulham the season before. A point more than Reading had in their record-breaking 2005/06 season. If they were throwing around parachute money, it would be fathomable. But this is predominantly a team that was recruited in League One. Individually, the names on the team sheet don’t put the frighteners up anyone. So what makes McKenna different? Well, for starters, there's a greater sense of destiny to his story than most others. Speak to those who know him best in Northern Ireland and McKenna was born a manager. He didn't become one. At the age of 14-15, he was forewarned by more than one established coach that he was pre-ordained to be one of them. Long before the chronic hip injury that ended his playing career and he turned up to his first coaching enrollment on crutches. Throughout his formative years, this quiet guy was forever handed the armband in any team he played. McKenna may have been the most talented player in many of those teams but there was an instinctive element to his captaincy roles. It wasn't just about his talent, it was more about his grasp of knowledge and the way he communicated it to his peers. The things he understood and the things he got other people to understand, sometimes regardless of their intelligence or maturity. McKenna didn't see it. He didn't get what was so special about something that came so natural to him. To spot a mistake or a flawed perspective in someone and immediately correct it. Not just tactfully but also unambiguously, with tremendous clarity. The one thing everyone seems to refer to is just how clever he is. They all talk about his IQ. That in itself doesn't make you a great coach. Lots of very intelligent people make a mess of their lives by lacking the humility to build meaningful connections, which in turn defines their life struggles. But McKenna is as humble as they come. So being super intelligent is a great advantage. Great for him at least. Not so much for the many aspiring coaches who will no doubt be studying his methods in the coming years and possibly failing to grasp what the big secret is. Study Usain Bolt and his training regime all you like. Just don’t expect to come through the other side sprinting as fast as Usain Bolt. Some things are just innate. Unless you happen to be a teenager with masculine Introverted Thinking as your dominant cognitive function, you'll always fall some way short of computing what McKenna can compute. If we unpack what we know about this flow state from the studies of thousands of others across many walks of life, there's 4 key points to understand about McKenna... 1) He has a natural thirst for logic and rationality, an appetite that cannot be sated. The pursuit of new knowledge doesn't just feel good to him, it's highly addictive. 2) He has the capacity to retain tons of information in his head, without needing tools or materials for storage. Most of us learn stuff and then forget it. McKenna, by comparison, hardly ever forgets anything. 3) His knowledge is random access. Meaning, he can recall whatever he needs in an instant. He doesn't have to engage in a process to pluck knowledge from somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind. (His brain works more like a search tool, rather than an archive of files and folders) 4) He can quickly process the relevance of any new knowledge in terms of its practical application, so he doesn't just accumulate knowledge for the sake of it. His ability to process the relative value of such knowledge is top notch. This is what the Introverted Thinking can do. But even in the realm of people blessed with this flow state, McKenna is probably somewhere near the top of the class in terms of attitude and appliction to one single cause. Some Ti drivers maybe excel at 1-2 of those characteristics but there's strong evidence to believe that McKenna consistently sharpens the knife on all four. All of which means, when he has something to say, not only is the emergent product consistently of the highest quality, it's clean sliced in such a way that it requires very little effort to digest. Then cram all of this accumulated knowledge into a philosophy that is both unique, adaptable and yet unwavering in its principles, the end result is there for all to see at Portman Road. By rights, emotional intelligence should be his weakness. But his logical communication skills are so good that he meets the emotional needs of his players without ever needing to go after the emotions. The biggest clue I could find of his opposite Extraverted Feeling demon is that his training ground banter is really dodgy. So unless the opposition can somehow force him to do a standup rotuine in the centre circle just before kick-off and make his players die of embarrassment, I'm not really sure how the rest of the Championship are going to stop this Ipswich juggernaut.