MARGINAL GAINS

• MARGINAL GAINS FOR RADICAL BUSINESS ACCELERATION

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.

Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.

From cycling to education, car making to holidays, people are finding that 1% certainly makes a big difference. But why is it such an interesting?strategy for business?

It simply means focusing on small changes to everything in the business; 1% at a time.

Concentrate on making many?1% improvements?and you’ll find the compound effect is huge and you avoided a major upheaval.

The?theory of marginal gains?goes way back, but perhaps Beijing Olympics 2008 was a new start, with London 2012 becoming the tipping point.

British Cycling was in a mess. The now Sir Dave Brailsford arrived to head up and revive British cycling. He took the ailing British Cycling Federation from 2 bronze medals at the 1984 Atlanta Olympics to the fantastic medal haul of 8 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze at London 2012 and 6 gold, 4 silver and 1 bronze in Rio 2016. He rightly deserves all the credit.

Brailsford believed that if it was possible to make a 1% improvement in a whole host of areas, the cumulative gains would end up being hugely significant.

• Each weakness was not a threat, but an opportunity to make adaptations, and create marginal gains. Rapidly, they began to accumulate. They started to probe deeper into untested assumptions.
• This is the power of a questioning mindset and a commitment to continuous improvement.

How?

“1%” became the team mantra, all day every day. He understood that if you’re going to win you must have everything under control and working at its very best. ‘Very best’ only comes with?continuous improvement?(CI). All the time his concentration was on the?small improvements every day; everywhere and anywhere: 1% at a time. And it worked – brilliantly.

"The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of, that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.

"You have to be somewhere between exceptional and phenomenal”

?There is no arrogance at British Cycling; they know they can do better.

"There's fitness and conditioning, of course, but there are other things that might seem on the periphery, like sleeping in the right position, having the same pillow when you are away and training in different places”

"They're tiny things but if you clump them together it makes a big difference.”

Sir Dave Brailsford BBC 2012

“In the world of business, the smallest changes and tweaks to existing models and approaches can be substantially more effective than large, disruptive ones in increasing revenue, changing direction, and even choosing an initial path for a start-up.”??

James Duval?

MARGINAL GAINS FOR BUSINESS

Many of the most innovative companies are now using a marginal gains approach.

Google, for example, runs 12,000 data-driven experiments annually in order to discover small weaknesses and, thus, small improvements. One such experiment found that by tweaking the shade of the Google toolbar from a darker to a lighter blue, it increased the number of click-throughs. This marginal change increased revenue dramatically

Brailsford followed 5 key steps

1. Prioritise and decide what you want to win because you cant win everything

2. Figure out what it will take to win

3. Work back from what you want to win to where you are today

4. Create a plan to close the gap

5. Execute

"The crown comes off the head of the coach and it is put on the rider"

“The line between winning and losing, failure and success, good and great, dreaming and believing, convention and innovation, head and heart, is a fine line. It challenges everything we do and we ride it everyday”

C.O.R.E.

Commitment + Ownership + Responsibility = Excellence

Prioritise and decide what you want to win because you can’t win everything

• Leaders must be
• 1. Committed to being better
• 2. Think they can change
• 3. “Suffering” enough to engage with change

If the first two are in place, the third can be achieved by either consequence or reward. We have the knowledge of what to do but having the will to do it is something else. The medals are there to be won.

Are you up for the challenge?

Mostly big things that really matter to business can be achieved just by changing a few small things in the work process and strategies.

A much?better strategy?is to optimise a tweak rather than the game-changing ‘big idea’.

Finding that perfect tweak

?

Google?is a great example of a company that used small tweaks to existing ways of thinking and providing a service to become a business colossus. They’re now famous, and feared, algorithm updates are proof of their total focus on continuous improvement.

Apple are widely regarded to be one of the most innovative companies operating in the world today, and many of the company’s biggest hits are spectacular displays of the ‘tweak’ in action. The company has applied this mantra to everything it has done since. To paraphrase company CEO Tim Cook,

“Apple spend a lot of time making sure their great ideas are packaged inside other great ideas.”

Neither Apple nor Google reinvented the wheel. They just focused on improving it a little bit each time; tweaking existing systems to bring big benefits.

“making a series of small changes, consistently and over time, is the one, sure-fire, guaranteed way to insure your business makes you rich.” Paul Lemburg

There are no silver bullets in business. There is hardly ever just one thing that?improves your business.

Success is an aggregate of many small things and they extend to every nook and cranny of the business and its operations.

You shouldn’t exclude any part of the business when seeking out marginal gains – it must be accessing all areas.

Companies that adopt marginal gains;?1% improvements?as their?business model?and successfully drive this through see significant, positive, and?sustainable growth.

But, there’s no point dedicating time or effort to getting?marginal gains?if you don’t analyse and?resolve inefficiencies?within the team. Poor performance isn’t a consequence of one mistake but lots of small incorrect decisions over time. A bit like Chinese whispers….

CONCLUSION

You might think?1% is too small?a target for your business. You’ll be aiming much higher: 25% growth at least. But let me show you the magic that one cycling director uncovered to smash through their huge targets. 1+1+1= big improvements.

That’s why the most?successful businesses?are the ones that make the smallest changes??They ignore the premise that ‘big changes = big results’

James Clear- Atomic Habits

There is power in small improvements and slow gains. This is why?average speed yields above average results . This is why?the system is greater than the goal . This is why?mastering your habits ?is more important than achieving a certain outcome.

The Power of patience and inspiration

The hard part isn't the one percent. It is impatience and lack of immediate results that make otherwise smart, capable businesspeople give up on their goals.

?WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

It's all of it, the science, the training, the coaches, but most of all we point the mirror at ourselves and ask, 'how can we get better?'"

?Continual self-assessment and adjustments are necessary, it is a moving target and there is no mountain top to summit.

If you map each process, you’ll soon discover waste that can be eliminated, notably time which is our one non expandable asset. Also, how to compress more action into tighter time frames over a given period.

Big changes are so disruptive to daily operations –that’s why they usually fail. In a competitive market all?business owners?should be seeking out small, measured improvements and changes to their service and processes rather than decide on massive disruptive change.

Anyone can do this.

You can do this.

It’s not difficult; it just requires commitment.

You don’t have to be first; you just need to be better. Remember, it’s always the second mouse who gets the cheese.

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘change for changes sake’. It’s too easy to make change after change after change until everything has changed beyond recognition. STOP.

No knee jerk reactions should ever be allowed in your business. Think about it, work it out. Ask yourself ‘how can I make ‘x’ better, quicker, cheaper, easier, more reliable, less complicated… etc.

Make time to consider options and then?implement the right change. But don’t stop there; track the change, measure it, review it and stop or adjust it, if it isn’t working. It might only take one or two small changes to get your big difference instead of a big mess trying to make too many changes all at once.

As the entrepreneur, Jim Rohn says:

“Success is a few simple disciplines, practised every day; while failures are simply a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”

“…if you are a top quartile performer already, it’s the marginal gains that ‘put you to the top of your game.”

?

1.??Experiment.?

2.??Do a trial run.?

3.??Track the results.?

4.??Review the change.

5.??Keep learning.?

Essentially, we can only impact what happens in the future by what we do now