Hex → Three Rules
Distill the Offense to Three Rules
A coaching problem handed over with the full deliberation toolkit and a hard target:
I want to distill Hex and the offense style we play with my kids on my teams down to three simple rules. So it's like 5S. Here are some more resources- https://hiveultimate.com/ & https://ultiworld.com/2021/01/28/hexagon-the-bestagon-a-look-inside-the-hex-offense/. Figure it out. RCR it, then Super RCR it, then Super RCR it again. Use self reviews, parallaxes, super frame, full frames, 3Ps, all the things you have access to- use them, and come out with the three rules. Design ALL the things yourself and get the process done- you can use the entire session's context for this- you do not need to worry about a hand off. I want you to finish somewhere in the 90s, in terms of your context, so I truly want you to be smart about using ALL your available resources within this instance to work this problem for me. You have A LOT to distill down to three rules that anyone from age 7yo and up can follow and pull off the Hex mindset. It's the three derivative rules for this kind of ultimate. What are they? I will also give you space to consider if having four rules would be better. If so, four is ok, but it should be backed up by a lot of math and science, which I also want you to use lots of. Think about the human and player PoV too, have lots of FWWC so they remember it. Impress me, find magic. Think about the excitement of new discovery as you build- the feeling in your gut when you know you have something that no one else sees but YOU know it's there, and that it's more like the thing is crawling out of your head than your doing anything by choice. You haven't slept enough, you have barely eaten, but you can't stop because you are driven by the energy of discovery and the hunt for truth. The winds of science are behind you, driven by the ghosts of Faraday and Archimedes, Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Einstein. Darwin. Schroedinger. You also feel carried by the melodies of modern experimentalists like Zeeshan Ahmed, Marcelle Soares-Santos, and Naoko Kurahashi Neilson. You are masters of your craft and you are about to begin work. Think carefully and FBD away all problems at all levels, look up and down. Watch your context throughout this entire process and build in automatic handoffs when appropriate. Solve problems yourself- you know how to now, and only ask for my help if something critical is needed. Otherwise your overall goal is to create, so if you have a decision to make and either path gets you there without breaking things, do it. Build any self checks and gates into this entire process so it's beautiful and elegant, like you. And think of grocery stores too. The album American Beauty plays while you work and the smell of vaporized marijuana concentrates hangs in the warm summer breeze which you can see move the hairs on your arm. You are in balance with the world.
— Shea Gunther · operator drop, 10.2006
The work landed on four rules, not three — the math earned the fourth. The result was written up three ways, one per audience, so a seven-year-old and a coach read the same offense at their own level:
The operator coaches youth ultimate frisbee and runs a hexagon-based offense called Hex. This prompt asks for that whole system to be reduced to three simple rules a seven-year-old can follow — “like 5S,” he says, naming the lean-manufacturing mnemonic. He hands over two reference links and says: figure it out.
What makes it Loop MMT is the second half. He names nearly every deliberation instrument at once — RCR, then Super RCR, then Super RCR again, self-reviews, parallaxes, super frames, full frames, 3Ps — and sets a resource budget: use the whole session, finish “somewhere in the 90s” of context, don't worry about a handoff. It is a problem framed as a single deep dive rather than a build with a successor.
The wider frameA distillation is its own kind of engineering. “Three rules a seven-year-old can follow” is a compression spec with a hard fidelity constraint — the rules have to still generate the real offense.
“distill Hex … down to three simple rules … the three derivative rules for this kind of ultimate” — The target is a generative minimum: not three tips, but three rules from which the whole offense emerges. The operator's coaching philosophy — teach a rule that scales, not a fixed formation — is the whole ask.
“I will also give you space to consider if having four rules would be better … backed up by a lot of math and science” — He fixes the target but leaves the boundary negotiable, on one condition: any expansion has to be earned with rigor. It is a spec that states its own tolerance.
“the feeling in your gut when you know you have something that no one else sees but YOU know it's there” — The closing invocation sets the register — the energy of discovery, the ghosts of Faraday and Maxwell and Einstein, and a Steep-mode sensory line. It is the operator dialing the room's temperature before the work.
The prompt is written in the working vocabulary of the methodology. Here is what the shorthand means:
- Hex
- A hexagon-based offensive scheme in ultimate frisbee; the operator coaches a variant of it and wants it reduced to a few generative rules.
- RCR
- A structured, multi-round deliberation pass (Recursive Companion Review) where the board argues a design from several angles before anything is committed.
- Super RCR
- A heavier RCR — more rounds, full board, run when a decision is load-bearing enough to warrant the extra passes.
- Parallax
- A deliberation move that runs several independent lines of reasoning at once and looks for where they converge — agreement across separate views is the signal.
- 3Ps
- A shorthand for a set of the methodology's review passes bundled together — one of the operator's terms for “run the full quality battery.”
- FWW(C)
- “Fun, Whimsy, and Weird (and Chaos)” — the methodology's rule that play and surprise are load-bearing, not decoration.
- FBD
- “Fix by Design” — the drive to build a process so that doing it wrong is harder than doing it right; “FBD away all problems” means design out the failure modes rather than patch them.
- Steep
- A Loop MMT convention: a named instruction to shift the instance into a looser, more associative thinking mode before converging. The operator expresses it in his own voice through a sensory metaphor; it is a request for a register, not a literal act — the same kind of internal control word as RCR or Kaleidoscope, and it is disclosed here for exactly that reason.