The Power Of Continuous Marginal Improvements

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We all tend to improve in a fairly haphazard fashion, which is strange when you think how highly we regard improvement. We get the urge to improve in some way and we go at it, really fired up, and for a while it makes a noticeable difference. Then it tends to tail off and we more or less forget about it and drift on until, eventually, we get the urge again, and then off we go all over again. And it all seems perfectly normal.

But maybe it’s not the best way to go about improving things. And it seems like a better way has been highlighted by Dave Brailsford, the coach of Britain’s Olympic cycling team.

Brailsford ushered in a new era of marginal improvements

Dave BrailsfordWhen he took over the position of coach, British cycling didn’t have an amazing history of excellence. It had such a sad reputation that one of Europe’s top bike manufacturers refused to deal with the team because they were afraid that it would hurt their sales as a result. In fact the team had only won a single gold medal in its entire 76-year history.

Dave Brailsford had a few ideas how that could be changed, and he set about putting them into action. His main idea, in a nutshell, was to see if it were possible to make small gains here and there, even 1% improvements, in the hope that the combination of all the tiny gains would be worthwhile. As he said in an interview recently: “It struck me that we should think small, not big, and adopt a philosophy of continuous improvement through the aggregation of marginal gains.” It did proved to be worthwhile, as it turned out. Very worthwhile!

At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the squad won seven out of a possible 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and they achieved the same remarkable feat at the London Olympics four years later.

Teamwork makes for team success

He was careful to encourage each and every member of the team to participate in the search for possible way to improve, as he thought that if some were reluctant to take part it might not work very well. Once the process started, improvements were pretty apparent in all areas and everyone became convinced of the value of the experiment and started to enthusiastically look for more and more ways to take tiny changes and improvements.

Brailsford’s approach involved all areas, from the large and fairly obvious ones to even the smallest and apparently unimportant ones. One of the first was to do wind tunnel experiments. He had an idea that the bikes they used weren’t as aerodynamic as they could be and thought it worth seeing if that could be improved. Turned out it could! So he went to work seeing that the aerodynamic improvements were taken care of.


GB cycling teamThen it was noticed that the team truck wasn’t as clean and tidy as it might be. He noticed that dust gathered on the floor here and there and suspected that it might be undermining bike maintenance. Mmm … what to do? Simple! He had the floor of the truck painted a bright, gleaming white. Now there was nowhere for dust to hide! The truck became almost clinically clean overnight due to that one simple innovation.