Image (c) Mindful Ambition
When Sir Dave Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success: British cycling had only won a single gold medal in its 76-year history. That quickly changed under Sir Dave’s leadership. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his squad won seven out of 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and they matched the achievement at the London Olympics four years later. Sir Dave now leads Britain’s first ever professional cycling team, which has won three of the last four Tour de France events.
One of the core principles that created this remarkable success became known as “Marginal Gains”, a philosophy of continuous improvement focussed on minor (as small as 1%) improvements across every facet of performance, then ultimately the aggregate improvement would be massive. British Cycling went from nowhere to world domination on the track within six years, and then took those learnings into road cycling and took only two years to win the Tour de France, building upon that to be the dominant force in that sport for years afterwards.
This week I met up with two young mentees who run a mobile car wash. They have just won a significant contract that involves providing a volume service to a car club company. They had just done their first day or two of this and found that they could not clean as many cars in a day as they anticipated. However, undeterred, they recognised that they could speed this up by making some simple adjustments in how they set things up inside their van so that they could trim a few seconds off each element of the process. They are energised to do this and to take time to improve, iteratively, so they can realise the potential of this major contract opportunity. It is a joy working with such energised, dedicated and driven young business owners!
This reminded me of both the British Cycling approach, as well as where it originated, in the Japanese business improvement approach called Kaizen (the word is literally Japanese for “improvement”), a concept that the head of British Cycling, Dave Brailsford, was fascinated by as he took the reins (as discussed in the HBR piece linked above).
I’ve long been a proponent of Kaizen and of Marginal Gains. As Warren Buffett famously said: “One of the easiest ways to get rich is to think longer term than the next person”, along with “get rich slowly”.
In business, I often encourage leaders seeking to make an even bigger impact to “slow down now to speed up later“, a maxim with many different applications, but broadly to take time to get clear on the Vision, then to build Strategy collectively and collaboratively, then to Communicate (listening more than talking) widely to build engagement, doing ALL of this before building an action plan.
Now, I titled this post: “Marginal Gains, Chemotherapy and Patience”, so let me flip now to a personal learning from recent days. As regular readers will know, I am sharing openly about my colon cancer journey as well as the learnings I am having along the way. The biggest part of the journey in terms of being cancer-free was the surgery back on March 31st that fully removed the early-stage tumour, after which the recovery journey felt a little slow to me, even though by six weeks later I was almost back to normal.
That said, today I am on day 8 of 14 of my first of 8 cycles of 21 days (14 days on, 7 days off to rest the body) of taking chemotherapy tablets, a therapy decided upon to “mop up” any remaining floating cancer cells from the surgery. For the first four days, I was most grateful that I cruised along, tolerating the drugs with no tangible impact on how I felt or operated. However, on day 5, though far less significant than many chemo patients face, I felt a shift. My guts felt far more fragile and I felt fatigued. The combination was not a good feeling, as towards the end of the day I felt both tired and queasy, leading me to feel somewhat down mentally, as my mind went to “I’m only on day 5, I have 112 days taking tablets that will run through late October, this is going to be tough!”.
Now, Monday was day 5 and was tough, yet when I got going on Tuesday, day 6, I felt a little better. Just a little, but enough for me to feel: “hey, perhaps this is simply my body adapting to the impact the medication is having on my system”, enough to help me shift my mindset to a more positive one. Day 7 was yesterday, Wednesday, and again there was a very small improvement. Tiny, incremental, but an improvement. Today, Day 8, the same again.
Dave Brailsford, in his strategy of “Marginal Gains”, talked often of 1% improvements. If you improve by 1% every day for a year, your performance will have improved by a factor of 37x (thanks to James Clear for that one), a quite stunning figure to consider as something that happens when you have the patience to stay the course of continuous improvement.
So, my “key learning” from recent days is not about the process of Kaizen, continuous improvement, or marginal gains, it is about the need to commit to the process, to have the resilience, the belief, to know that, no matter how tiny the improvement may be each day, that ultimately it will pay huge dividends in the long run.
For Warren Buffett his competitive advantage has been the willingness to: “get rich slowly” and his investment holding company has been the best performing US stock over the long term since its inception in the 1950s.
For Dave Brailsford, the result of that commitment was gold medals and winning the Tour de France and other major titles.
For me, the target ahead of me, and one I knew very clearly when choosing to undertake the chemotherapy treatment, was that I have roughly six months of this that, over time, will target any stray cancer cells remaining after my surgery so that these six months will set me up for the rest of my life to have a very high probability of being cancer-free. Quite the motivation target!
All I have to do is to be patient with these marginal gains, as well as to recognise that any setbacks that may come over the coming cycles are all part of the process too. Progress is not always a linear flow of 1% gains each day!
I am sharing and will continue to share learnings from my journey as they come to me, and, as I am so passionate about the topic, I will often, as I have done today, draw parallels to business leadership. I hope today’s lesson is clear to you as a leader, and particularly if you are in the process of transformative change or about to undertake it.
As always, I am energised by people and ideas and connecting the dots, so please do book a video call with me if something I write resonates and spurs thoughts and questions in you,