Things I learned sailing #6 - Don’t change it all at once…

Earlier this week I came across this article by Forbes and it got me thinking.

I particularly liked the quote “Sailing is going from point A to point B using the wind, a force we cannot control or see.” Later on the writer makes the same point about the tide, which anyone familiar with sailing or racing in the English Channel will be all too familiar with. These are inexorable forces that we cannot change or control - we can only adjust and move with them.

That got me to thinking about another lesson from my past sailing days:

Don’t change everything all at once!

In particular this applies in a long race, overnight or longer where you run a watch system so that everyone can get some rest from time to time. You normally run 4 or 6 hours on and off, so we all do 12 hours on-watch in 24, but there is a problem when the watch changes.

There is a strong human instinct to look at the situation when you first arrive on deck and to start ‘tweaking’ to make the boat go faster - tighten something here, let off there, steer a little up or down - especially if the situation isn’t quite what you expected; perhaps you’re off course or going slowly. This is a mistake; what you’ve forgotten is that the team who just went off-watch have spent the last 4 or 6 hours doing EXACTLY THAT.

The conditions (mostly) haven’t changed in the 5 minutes since you came on deck; the previous watch are your crew-mates and competent in their jobs; and you all want to win the race…. So VERY PROBABLY what the boat is doing just now is the best that can be done in the conditions - as the Forbes article also mentions, have a cuppa and think about it before you start messing about with things.

This is sometimes also known as “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but the key is in recognising that IT’S NOT BROKEN!

How does this apply to work, or business, well… If you’re coming into a situation cold; even if you’re being brought in because you have specific knowledge or experience, it’s worth taking a beat to think about what the team has done so far. Gratuitous incompetence is an actually pretty rare; so they’ve been doing their best and you should recognise that and look to build on what they’ve done rather than rushing to change everything in sight.

Understanding what’s going on and why, what people have done before and how they got there will help you make better and more impactful changes without losing the effort and investment that’s already been made.