The Marginal Gains
They say you can’t eat an elephant all at once. As I understand you’re meant to do it bite by bite.
In the same way in our lives it pays to break down our goals into small incremental steps. Choose a step every day and before you know it, you’re 365 steps along. In fact, you’re further than that because there is both a domino effect and a multiplying effect. According to ‘The 1% Rule1’, you’ll be 37x better by the end of the year if each step moves you forward by 1%. Of course, there is always a danger that the small decisions can actually make things worse, if they’re the wrong ones!
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This principle has been investigated in the last few years and though simple is proving very effective in sports, business, creative enterprises and education; hitting the headlines a few years ago, the head of British Cycling, Sir Dave Brailsford3, from 2002 led cycling to huge successes through the aggregation of marginal gains; the principle is similar to the Japanese ‘Kaizen’, or ‘change for the better’ advocates every employee has the power in making suggestions to improve team practice; continuous improvement is another term which is distinguished by a periodic review of Plan-Do-Check-Act; both found in core business education modules.
Small improvements every day, anywhere and everywhere, 1% at a time. Let’s take a granular approach to the analysis. What is the teacher’s 1% this week? Where does the teacher stand? What do they say? When? What is their demeanour, their register? Teachers make thousands of decisions in a day, for master teachers so much of this is automated. But for those who have not yet become fully proficient in their classrooms, they can experience cognitive overload and need a goal breaking down into granular steps.
Now sometimes 1% doesn’t seem enough. People want transformation right now. As a coach in schools, I am often pressured to place people on support plans (experienced as high stakes for those teachers) after only a few weeks coaching. It can literally take that long to identify which behaviour to help them change first. Sometimes the tweaks don’t pay off until you find the right lever. Sometimes bad habits or ineffective processes/systems need removing first. Remove the waste and the complexity. Simply less. Sometimes the tweak needs practising more, or with more direct instruction, or with better quality feedback. Simply more of it. Small wins, slow gains. Sustained growth.
Pearson in HRreiew4 suggested “the key to succeeding in business is no longer the grandiose and expensive changes, but rather it is the attention to and improvement of all the finite, day-to-day decisions that will create outstanding success”.
So often we’re not sure of the decisions we make or as a coach, the action step we set. As coaches we must have a clear vision of what mastery can look like. We must analyse carefully what we are observing and whether the tweak we are suggesting is valuable or a gimmick. Sir Dave Brailsford5 in talking about the initially unsuccessful application of marginal gains to the Tour de France team said,
“We tried so hard with all the bells and whistles of marginal gains that our focus was too much on the periphery and not on the core. You have to identify the critical success factors and ensure they are in place, and then focus your improvements around them.”
At every execution of an action step, we must evaluate the data- but let’s not be too trigger happy. The baby in the bathwater is important.
There is more we can adopt from the principle as coaches. 1% can impact all areas of one’s life and for a teacher that is not only in the classroom. Just as for Brailsford and the famous pillows from home for the cyclists, we can ask what else affects our teachers that a change would have an impact on. A 1% change. And another and so on. But that is a whole other elephant.
References
1 Baker T. (2018) The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love with the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
2 Clear J. (2018) This Coach Improved Every Tiny Thing by 1 Percent and Here’s What Happened.
Available at: https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains
3 Denyer D. (2013) 15 steps to peak performance. Management Focus, Autumn 2013, Issue 35, Pages 10-13.
Available at: https://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/8372
4 Pearson R. (2015) Marginal Gains: noticeable Results. HRreview.
Available at: https://www.hrreview.co.uk/analysis/analysis-hr-news/richard-pearson-marginal-gains-noticeable-results/54785
5 Harrell, E (2015) How 1% Performance Improvements Led to Olympic Gold. Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-to-olympic-gold
Further Reading
Clear J. (2018) Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. Penguin Random House USA.
Keller G. (2014) The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results: Achieve your goals with one of the world’s bestselling success books. John Murray Learning.
Olsen J. (2013) The Slight Edge. Gazelle.