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Why Should We Break The Norms?
Construction Business Review | Friday, October 23, 2020
A few years ago, someone told me about a pitch process she was involved in.
She turned up to the first presentation from one of the candidate companies and was soon enthralled by a captivating tale of how the agency had learned a lesson from UK cycling. Dave Brailsford had transformed British cycling with the philosophy of ‘marginal gains’—the idea that by improving everything you did by a trivial 1 per cent, in aggregate you would have accomplished a massive step change versus the competition.
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The pitch team pledged that while they had no strategic magic wand, they would use marginal gains to help transform the client’s business. My friend told me that the client team left the first pitch with their imagination tingling.
They walked in to the next pitch and the lead presenter came out in lycra, pushing a bike.
Sure enough of the four presentations they saw that day, three talked about marginal gains. Everyone had stolen the idea. What was once a new idea quickly becomes a bit of a tired cliché. I was interested then to encounter the story of where British cycling went next in Owen Slot’s outstanding book ‘The Talent Code.’
Slot describes how more than just appropriating marginal gains the philosophy was to question every single assumption to see how it could be improved. They styled this as ‘challenging the tyranny of the normal’. At the Athens Olympics in 2004 the Australians had finished in the gold position with Team GB in second.However, the race was not even close. The Aussie team had set such a breathtaking pace that it feel like they would be untouchable for years.
The job of turning the team’s performance round was given to Matt Parker. Parker was not either a cycling coach or even a cyclist, but was a sports scientist. Working with Peter Keen, Director of Performance at UK Sport they set about catching the Australians.
Keen was someone who saw himself as an investment specialist rather than a sporting selector: “You’ve only got so much money, so if you’re trying to win as many medals as possible, where would you spend that money?”
This had previously led Keen to make apparently brutal decisions; Julie Paulding a 35-year-old cyclist had just had her best ever season, leaving her closest British rival significantly behind her. Yet Keen had chosen the young rival, Victoria Pendleton, to get funding as she represented a better future medal investment.
Keen says making decisions that prove wise in the long term meet resistance in the short-term: “Virtually every corner where I’ve turned, you encounter an ‘are you sure?’ resistance.”
Parker set about building his strategy certain that they would not permit ‘the tyranny of the normal’. They set a time goal for the next games. The Australians had clocked up 3min56.61sec for their world record in Athens. The British had barely ever broken four minutes. To win in Beijing Parker set the goal speed of 3min55.2sec. An improvement of seven seconds.
Challenging the Tyranny of the Normal.
What does that mean on bikes? Well, let us start at the basics. With the bike. World-class teams had almost always ridden on a 98 inch gear. That is the whole length of the chain across the wheel, pedals, and derailleur. Mechanics said that to get to the pace they wanted, they needed to go up to 102 inches.
Cyclists were deeply unhappy. A longer gear represented a harder ride. Parker’s point was clear, we have built our legacy on incremental changes but now we need to think differently. We have maxed out on increments of the same norm, now we need to challenge the norm.
Owen Slot’s wonderful book tells the unfolding story of how a series of challenges to the norms of the cycling team found step changes of improvement. In Beijing the team’s semi-final performance saw them hit their goal: 3min 55.02sec - A new world record. The best was still to come; in beating Denmark in the final, they clocked 3min 53.314sec; an extraordinary improvement in four years.
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