Winning in a day

24 hours ago we started a two day sprint, we took early in career and experienced in career to SailGP. We had 10 unique challenges from the 6 country teams to answer. How have we done?

Well like every business some you solve and some you do not. The difference with this challenge we are doing it in a day with a diverse team of experts.

The challenges we are wanting to resolve on Sunday afternoon before the team start the race is as follows:

·        Talk to the boat – This is the ability of a Fan, team to take live data off the boat real-time using any of the 1200 data points. We have used a Machine Learning Chat Bot to have a discussion.

·        Wind – Sailing is so complex, but 24 hours ago we did not know anything about sailing. Well we do now, using combination of decision processing and machine learning we are attempting to predict the wind on the course. This then will show the line to take against the most optimised VMG (Velocity Made Good). Sailboat cannot sail directly upwind, the angle against the wind indicates the best performance, but it changes all the time.

·        Knowledge – We are attempting to lower the bar to accelerate understanding of sailing. As we are all novice we have taken a day’s worth of discussions with the best in the world and made it simple for people to understand using voice interface.

So what have we learned that can be applied to business or sport?

1.      Know what you want to be famous for now and in the future, be clear on the mission

2.      Winning or losing in a day is possible. SailGP is unique as technology and data sharing is the same across all teams. The human takes the creative decision to find the winning formula. Business can achieve the same as SailGP

3.      Use vertical knowledge to impact across the horizontal through data that becomes wisdom. We have used so much data but never lost sight of the challenge, we found many needles in hay stacks over the last day.

4.      Be open on the problem, take everyone’s input. Everyone has a view, everyone has knowledge.

5.      Reflect always, spend equal time answering and reflecting. The reflecting on the progress against the goal is critical.

Will post what we concluded later today, but thank you SailGP and Oracle to allowing us to complete a world first. A full agile sprint in a day which we showed to customers in the evening.

On Sunday we carry on, but this time we are doing in front of the public at Cowes. We want to explain how you can work out the winning formula in a day.