Success is Simple

This article was co-authored with La’Roi Glover. La’Roi completed a thirteen-year career as a Defensive Tackle in the NFL, where he appeared in six Pro-Bowls, was a four-time All-Pro selection, and was the 2001 NFC Defensive Player of the Year. After he hung up his NFL uniform, La’Roi earned his MBA and began a new role leading the players in their professional development as the Los Angeles Rams Director of Player Engagement.

“How did you do it?” I asked La'Roi as we sat down to a meal in downtown Los Angeles. “How did you consistently excel for thirteen seasons in the NFL?”

Glover is a beast of a man – a head taller than everyone else in the cigar bar we were sitting in and his shoulders were as broad as the nearest doorframe. But I had just spent the day with the entire Los Angeles Rams team, and he was about the same size as their average player.

“You had 17 sacks in one season, the second most ever for a Defensive Tackle in the NFL. How’d you do it?” I asked.

“It was simple,” he said. I certainly hadn’t expected that response.

“Simple? You dominated the best competitors in American professional football and it was simple? How’s that work?”

He laughed and grabbed three glasses at our table and aligned them in a row. “Here’s how it works. This row of glasses is the offensive line.” He grabbed the salt shaker and put it in front of the glasses, “And this is me. When they wanted to double team me, what do you think they yelled out to each other?”

“Uhhhh. I have no idea.”

“They would yell, ‘Double, Double, Double!’ When I’m going to be double teamed, I know that my chances to get to the Quarterback are slim going against both of them. When they are double teaming another player, I know that will be my opportunity to sack the QB. I’m going all out on that play.”

He pushed the salt shaker through the O-line of glasses towards the imaginary QB. “See?” he smiled. “Simple.”

La’Roi had done more than just sack a ridiculous number of quarterbacks. In his own way, he had identified a universal secret of success. But it wasn’t the fact that he had broken the verbal code the offensive line used when they planned on double teaming him. Listen to what he didn’t say. He didn’t say, “When the offensive line gets into position, first ensure that you are lined up slightly off center between them. Look at the defensive coordinator for any last minute signals. Check and see if the quarterback is lined up in the shotgun position or right behind the center.” He probably did all of those things, but he was able to distill his most important lesson learned into a very simple approach.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

There’s an old fighter pilot adage that the best lessons you could ever receive were written on the back of a bar napkin. Some simple epiphany, some new way of taking the utterly complex scenario of manned flight at supersonic airspeeds and simplifying it into one new rule of thumb.

When I learned how to follow a fighter plane through a 9-G descending turn at 600 mph, my instructor didn’t tell me the following: “Look at the vertical stabilators of the aircraft – when they deflect the aircraft is about to turn. An aircraft that is executing a particularly aggressive turn will produce a vapor trail or “contrails” behind his aircraft. When you see the planform of his aircraft stop rotating and the line of sight increase, that’s when you need to begin your turn.” All those things are true, but those directions are way too complicated for me to remember, let alone apply in an airplane traveling a mile every six seconds.

Here’s the simple version that my instructors actually used:

“When the plane looks like it is moving away from you very quickly with a rapid burst of movement, that’s when you need to turn and follow him.” It couldn’t really be that simple. But it was. Then again, the most innovative ideas are often simple ones.

Think of a famous business movement from the past fifty years and I’m willing to bet that it came down to a simple concept. Take Warren Buffet, the legendary Oracle of Omaha, who correctly predicted stock moves better than anyone in the history of our financial system. He relied on a simple “free cash flow” metric that he had devised to calculate stock value. The manufacturing boom of the 70s and 80s was fueled by a simple emphasis on quality – an emphasis that would cascade positive impacts on cost, production and even employee turnover. Last, look at Net Promoter Score, or NPS as it has come to be known. This simple metric has completely revolutionized the corporate approach to building a loyal customer base and companies like Rackspace and Zappos have built their entire corporate strategy around it.

But how do you know which simple principles or rules of thumb to follow? After all, the simple strategy that focuses on the wrong elements in your environment can be just as destructive as the strategy that is too complex.

Use the Past to Map out your Future

In order to determine which simple principles to advance over the others to achieve the greatest impact, you have to have a deep understanding of the system in which you operate. To develop this deep understanding, we need to extract the causal factors of success or failure from the event. These only come from experience, and not just any experience – experience that is critically analyzed to discover the root causes of success to replicate in the future and the root causes of failure to never repeat again. Armed with this deep understanding of our past, we can identify and focus our efforts on the most influential “levers” to pull to create the greatest impact in the future.

As fighter pilots, we based our simple rules of thumb on the Lessons Learned garnered from the Debrief. After every flight, we would gather as a team to Debrief and discuss what worked and what didn’t during our airborne engagements. Our Debriefs continued until we determined the root causes of success or failure. The root cause could be used to form a “Lesson Learned” – a simple, actionable rule of thumb that would be implemented immediately to scale success or stomp out mistakes in our next flight together.

La’Roi did the same thing as an NFL player. After every Sunday game, the team would spend hours on Monday reviewing tapes of the previous game to identify root causes of success or failure and turn those into actionable Lessons Learned for the next week. That’s how an elite team iteratively improves, that’s how an elite team dominates using simple rules of thumb, and that’s the culture that creates a learning organization.

This is one of our core beliefs at Afterburner: develop Lessons Learned and keep things simple. Simplicity beats complexity every time.

1.     Analyze the past to understand the root causes of success or failure.

2.     Create simple lessons learned to be more effective in the future.

3.     Iterate and adapt your simple approach as the environment changes.

Always capture and share your lessons learned -- after every flight, every game and after every project to stay agile and proactive in an ever-changing environment. La’Roi would agree: “Peyton Manning changed everything. He used counter calls and changed the communication. I had to come up with other ways to dominate.” La’Roi had to come up with new lessons learned. But you can bet they were simple.

Whether you’re a high-performance athlete or a high performing employee in a dynamic work environment, identify and clearly articulate a simple strategy to succeed as a team.

Success is simple. But never easy. It requires vision, discipline and a simple strategy to maximize impact.